manifesto.

So, friends, every day do something
that wont compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Wendell Berry, I apologize to you. I, no farmer at all (let alone a mad one), steal regularly from your manifesto. I remember giving it away - one of my favorites - for someone else to read one night. She hurled it at us, all breathy and urgent. Her first poetry reading. And it is a manifesto, worthy of impassioned expression. But our dear angst-ridden reader missed the wild, joyful abandonment the poem is really all about. This is no deathbed epilogue. It's a revolution against what we think is happiness; it catapults us forward into heady, unpredictable, savagely beautiful mystery.

This mystery is my point. My reason. I've learned more or less how to survive living by now; I can get through what comes. And although that's no simple feat, there is more and I want it. I seek out what's hard work, what's ridiculous and maybe impossible. I wondered with a friend recently whether our generation is too tired for conventional beauty, for coherent themes and familiar patterns. Instead we seek out a harsher version of loveliness - jarring, dissonant, strange beauty that leaves us with more questions than answers. I want the meanings which explode out of absurdity, truth which reveals itself all the more vibrantly because it arises from the incomprehensible.

Conventional wisdom still applies: often what seems nonsensical or unfeasible really is. But I'm a fervently optimistic realist. I'm not sorry when I don't succeed - or even terribly surprised - and I'm not sad when the nights are long. I've let go of life the way I expected it, finding the tenacity instead to live life as it's given, without answers. I'm striving still for the best it could be, although it would be easier to secede and self-protect. But, if you can find a way to hang on - you're sometimes gifted with the strangest, most unexpected loveliness. One you wouldn't have foreseen, one completely absurd, but which is entirely worthwhile.