Examen

I’m of where I’m from, and it’s still hard for me to find anything much more movingly beautiful than simply being together and along with a girl — a woman, a barely-other kind of human person who just simply cares and innocently loves, and with whom I could also (and cannot often help but) simply care and innocently love, together smallishly striving, en-goodening life, working on a path to joy that could perhaps overflow and exceed both of us.

For perhaps why it is so beautiful to me: In these moments together-alone, there’s no (ugly) anxious preoccupation with needing to be understood or trying to understand. It’s a release from that, born instead of a kind of courageous humility such that it both may be and preferably remains simple. There is such security within the very innocence of our becoming together — that what will hurt will hurt us (not transactionally), and that we are so much more capable together than alone.

Real oppositions to this — e.g. (a) withholding, (b) suspicion, (c) insecurity, etc. — often strike me foremost as ugly, even if I smallishly (in their throes, merely verbally) remind myself that they are ‘in part motivated by good things,’ like aspirations to rationality and self-preservation. It is because there is a magnetic/gravitating difficulty in bringing myself toward envisioning/presencing the relationship between these ugly-seeming phenomena and the corresponding (and more real) beautiful phenomena that cultivate the more fertile ground that affords even deeper connection: (a) the independence that makes more meaningful the convergence; (b) the testing/problematizing that deepens confident trustworthiness and reliability (or reveals illusions of beauty; and although this is the true driver of my repulsion, true revelation is not without beauty); (c) the vulnerability that enables true transformation, erodes uninvolved dissociation, erodes foolish/inauthentic self-deception, erodes the failure to make inner-outer contact, brings innermost parts of one’s self to bask and bear; (d, e, f, …).

The relationship between ugliness and beauty always resolves for me as a matter of settling this sort of inner-conflict: between that which moves/motivates me and that which, in paradoxically uninvolved involvement, affords the greatest kind of clarity. Co-herence, as a matter of harmonious mutual presence between parts of me, brings me to where I need to go: between me and what is still other than me (and not merely as a quest of overtaking that which is other than me, just as parts of me do not, in justice, tyrannize/cannibalize each other).