The Impossibility of Knowing

I embrace my elusive nature.

There are times when I have felt understood and helped others feel understood. But these moments are impermanent, and flit away quickly under fingertips. To be known is a gift, but to really know someone is to see their eternally changing nature. To watch them move and shift with the light, and accept that for what it is. Them for what they are, and are not in any given moment.

I have been guilty of seeking to define and see clearly with a direct gaze. By staring, I have hoped to illuminate the truths I so desperately sought. In myself and in others. But the eyes play tricks, and these days I need reading glasses. I am finding that it is only by looking away that knowing comes to me, lands in the depth of my gut as a moving, breathing arrival.

As human beings we like contracts, structures. The scribing of paperwork and a hammer and nail help us believe that there is something still and unchanging in this world. Helps us cling to the river washed stones of security and certainty. We try to write ourselves into each other's stories, tack ourselves to the living tree of someone else's existence. We also do it to ourselves; pinning ourselves up against some previously held reality. If we succeed, we are killers, crushing the life out of the magical element of what we are. More often than not though we come to see that the real person has left, leaving only an earthly husk, dust in our hands.

I aspire to look away more often, let my hands fall from your shoulders and mine. Breathe out. It is hard to look away from such beauty, but truthfully we can only have what we let go of. And that is a sometimes painful process of unhooking and unhinging ourselves from objectivity and guarantees. From promises that could not be kept. Again and again, over a lifetime.
Hold me, but not still.