Mind Dump of the Day

(I apologize if this doesn't seem to make sense - it's a mind dump. It's all I can do.)

So life hasn't been kind the past couple of years. It's been like a slow process of peeling off a band aid. Not done quickly, but slowly with each hair follicle pulling just enough to bring forth the pain receptors before slowly releasing. Expectation by expectation peeled away.

Career. Calling. Relationships. Community. 

I'm not complaining. I find solace in the existential realities that life is filled with not only joy but suffering. Pain, betrayal, hurt are just as clearly markers of a life actually lived than joy, exhilaration, and love.  At least I have not sat back and just allowed life in front of a screen to numb me into a delusional state of consumerism...neither fully alive nor despairing. Rather, I have loved. Loved enough to realize that I not only theoretically believed in love, but truly existentially lived it out. A love that understands vulnerability and loss in the pain of rejection. Yet a love that does genuinely, deep down, defy condition. Even if it unilateral. 

To have communities reject you because of non-linear life experience while at the same time respecting that experience enough to use for gain, just not for full-time work. To be respected at a distance but not embraced in the inner circle of a common mission or goal. To have belief and learning reduced to litmus tests that reject the learning as steps away from 'faith' which in reality is nothing more than toeing the party line of a particular, conditional statement of so-called essential beliefs. Yet when pressed, these constructs can be broken down. But asking the question, disagreeing with the premise due to knowing in part (of all parties), extends a forearm to the chest like a running back deflecting a safety.

I desire community that includes simply because people are beloved, yet to see group after group place self-limiting restraints on just this idea because of practical, fundamental, or ideological constraints. Self-interest striking again to the core of each and every community...the need to survive in this Darwinian culture we call the free-market. After all, the bills have to be paid. 

I want to keep the idea alive that there is another way than selling our souls for a paycheck and ten-hour days hunched over a keyboard in the illuminated hell of cubicles. After all, they tell you that you have to get by. Those closest telling you to settle, to just get a job, to stop being such an idealist. Just get a job and work hard. Only to finally do so in hopes of moving forward and then to be told that love isn't enough. That people and goals change. 

Now left to drift through the ether between arbitrary communities, each staking conditional claims of identity.

Always conditions: Politics, ideology, theology, dogma, or lifestyle, God forbid there be any community to be found which transcends these boundaries of affinity. Always self-interested, they each create a sour taste which being an outsider, I cannot faithfully choose to swallow.

Which leaves me where, exactly?

Alone, for one. Without feeling like I can express my ideas, my thoughts, clearly or openly in the knowledge that doing so will only further sever the ties with a prior way of thinking which is way too prevalent. Where is the dialogue, the community around which ideas are discussed, exchanged, sharpened, and collaborated for the common good. The community which can accept each and every person, each story, as sacred. 

America currently cuts off, divides, and casts aside those that cannot further growth. Just want to take care of each other, bear their burdens, and listen - you can forget about it.

I want to belong with the rest who do not belong. I am not cool, hip, in. I don't want to be. I want to be who I am, and let others be who they are. I want to continue to love, letting this unconditional love guide my actions and embracing each and every person who comes to see the margins, the loss of status, as the beginning of genuine life. I still believe there is another way, and it does not need to establish its existence financially first in order to create boundaries of in or out. If you want to belong, you belong. That's it.

How does my personal life start with being cast aside and end in desiring a group of unconditional love? 

Because I want to tell my story and to hear others' stories. I want to love each person and their unique, sacred story.

I want to live authentically. So I'm in the margins, but I'm looking for those who are also wanting someone who will listen. Someone who will help another person move, without it being an inconvenience to their precious time. People who will grab coffee with to discuss a book, movie, or current event. Even more importantly, those who will discuss their real, gritty life.  Those who recognize the lie of earning worthiness that our culture pervades, and give, generously and lovingly, without precondition. In fact, people who actually take unconditional love seriously as an idea and want to live it out.

This is all I have left. Truly, everything else has been stripped away. But it isn't a downer, it is a realization that unconditional love exists but it is a hard step for any of us to take...when the numbing effects of security, safety, money, or majority keep us glued to seats, to screens, and to a fear of death which prevents vulnerability or the ability to fully live.