Tastes Great, Less Filling

I used to work too much.  I still do every chance I get but I try to spread the chances out a bit more.  It’s an opportunity I’m taking advantage of since my 1.7 decade contracting business augured into the ground like a giant run-a-way drill bit drilling holes for pole building posts.  Why work hard when you can live off the benefits of investing your life in the system of entrepreneurial business ownership?  I’m not sure a question mark is appropriate at the end of a rhetorical, sarcastic comment. 

And there really are no benefits to live off.  Employees get them.  Employers get the debt and the angry people the debts are owed to. 

Since the hole was dug, I got a BS degree.  I believe I was BS qualified by life experience prior to the actual degree but I digress.  In order to qualify for said official BS degree, I had to take some electives to round out my course work.  Being really poor means you can get a Pell grant and go to college for free.  Again, since the opportunity presented itself, I elected to study poetry, fiction writing, art and jazz.  In what seemed initially an unrelated choice, I also studied astronomy, biology and algebra. 

I re-discovered an interesting phenomenon during this studying.  In art and jazz particularly, I found that many artists and jazz musicians went nuts.  They reached mythical status by stretching the boundaries of their art and then fubarred their lives with drugs, sex and a multitude of really bad, self-destructive behaviors.  My theory is that once these exceptional people have interacted musically or artistically with the most glory they are capable of experiencing, everything else pales by comparison.  Their yearning for a taste of eternity has been briefly satiated.  It is impossible once this happens to forget or ignore the desire.  Since they cannot replicated this taste satisfactorily, they search in the wrong places.  Because…

A refinement of taste does not reduce hunger.

My life cannot be lived skin deep, on the surface.  It must be lived in the deep places of my heart where life is deposited and fed.  It is dramatic, powerful, emotion filled, emotion impacting and a difficult place to access.  It is just as hard to remain connected to my heart but I find it possible to respond to the invitation/challenge in only two ways – succumb or deny.  I have to choose every moment.  If I give in, I will accept my desire and it will be desperate and insatiable.  It will lead to healing, wholeness and more life.  If I deny, it will bring death to desire, bitterness and it will prolong my ultimate choice.  Both are a form of insanity, a sacrifice of self. 

The refinement of my taste gives reason for hunger.  Desire is, in it’s most powerful and poignant expression, the voice of my heart.  The refinement of taste in coordination with the mature expression of desire is the confluence that leads to the eternal.  Expression of truth and perspective in artistic form invites and challenges the discoverer to respond to life.  In the moment of that awakening, a response is required.  If the hunger is accounted to the wrong source, it will sour and eat away at life like Tum’s-proof acid.  But the invitation cannot be obvious.   It has to be personal, secret and safe from those who are not ready.  The mystery of the poetic invites, challenges and excludes.  It can only be understood truly in the realm of the awakening heart.

The world offers false invitations - imitations that are one or two degrees off center.  They look right early on.  But if they are sung or painted or written as truth and believed long enough, they will lead to a shallow place where death lives. 

If I rest, if I be still – I can tell the difference between true and false invitations.  If I am not busy and my eyes and ears are not over stimulated, I can see and hear.  So, I try to find the balance between work and rest.  It’s a struggle.

I pray that you and I will have the discernment to see truth and the courage to follow it with all our hearts.  I pray for life full and with abandonment to all that holds us back.