Whatever may be the abilities or instincts of great whites or blue whales, I apparently weigh loneliness much like the many dieters who are befuddled and depressed at how their efforts aren’t giving them the results they would like. And I’m also aware that health experts tell those same dieters that measuring health in terms of body weight is a misleading if not entirely harmful. Weight is rarely a clear indicator of progress unless our only goal is to reach a number that we have determined is good and all other numbers are bad. It is at best an ancillary sign of progress.

I’m a connector, bridge-builder, a guess-what-we-can-see-here-maker. Words are my beams, arches, girders, piers, piles, and abutments that connect the disconnected and enable people to enjoy, do business with, and learn from others. I erect pathways, strengthen them by increasing their load, and bolster them with tension. I’m a bridge-builder.

Let’s rage.

Surprises. New, expanding experiences. Like ripples spreading from the disturbance to the bank. We find ways to take up the spaces we occupy and some of us the ones we can dream. Perhaps Mandela is correct in saying that “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” I wonder. Not at the truth of his statement but at when or how I’ll see this play out. What happens if our strength fails? Is that the only obstacle preventing us from seeing our immeasurable power?

The passion I want to live my life with is violent, forceful, but not for the subjugation of any one people. I hope to write violently for their liberation. I want to use my education, my demographic constellation to liberate, to celebrate and support the magnificence that humans—especially those who come from less stellar positions of power in our society—are capable of. It’s the awe of human potential for good that I want to go for with full force, violently.

A woman passed by me in the woods, kept her head down, and got out of my presence as fast as she could. Had I been small child, a woman, a puppy, the mood would have been drastically different. Less hurry in the steps, less hiding in her hoodie, less eye-contact avoidance. As it is, I am male, and I am (perceived as) dangerous. She behaved as though she knew the code, which “identifies male difference as being always and only about the superior rights of males to dominate . . . by any means necessary” (hooks 114). In that moment I saw a little more clearly how unfortunate it is that a human should feel afraid of another human on a walk near a creek in the woods in arguably the most beautiful season of the year.

Fuck patriarchal masculinity.

I call it an invitation for this reason: feeling uncomfortable, out of place, and—in some cases—not invited to share my opinion are good things because they have been the experience of minority groups forever. It’s good for me to feel what they have felt—feel, excuse me—because at the very least it makes me more aware of what it feels like to be disregarded, excluded, and perhaps even discriminated against.

Wanderlust doesn’t need to wait until I’ve punched a passport.

Life on earth is a tangle of intersecting lives with imbalanced outcomes. We have feelings about these outcomes. It seems that some are fair, others unfair. How many intersecting lives create joy! And yet, some inspire sadness, perceived losses. So, it’s not the fairness of these intersections that I wonder about as much as perhaps the impact of seeing life as a series of intersecting lives that interests me. How terrible that a car and a opossum intersected last night at approximately 9.47pm on the very same spot of asphalt. Each were going about their business as cars and opossums are want to do and tried to occupy the same patch of ground at the same time. Yes, some intersections in life result in pain and sadness.

I think Odysseus would have quoted Kevin Kling’s poem “Tickled Pink”:

We pay for our laughter.

We pay to weep.

Knowledge is not cheap.

I’d rather people hate me for who I am than love me for who I am not. Even my own children. Sure, being hated for the person you aren’t sucks, but nothing healthy and good and lovely comes from protecting a lie. And you cannot lie when you have nothing to hide.

If you’ve ever stood on the very edge of a cliff or leaned over the railing of a very high building, you may have felt the dizzying rush of realizing how powerful you are, the power within you to live or fly. Your life is within your grasp. That’s what I felt when I broke down. I sensed what was coming.

Here is a threshold of thought I can cross, seeing that my perception is likely one shared by every human. We are alone in this world ultimately. And ultimately that is our gift from the universe because we have the chance to enter into constellations of humans.

When we feel uncertain, we believe that we have made a mistake. I’m not here to explain why it equates uncertainty and error any more than I’m willing to attempt an explanation of string theory. My guess is that the Great Equivocation stems from our superpower of adapting to new environments: uncertainty keeps us alert, and it fades when we become familiar with our spaces and uncertainty fades.

I turned 46 three weeks ago. What’s not going to happen is for me to get to 92 and realize that I have taken the privilege and potential that Source has invested in me and hid it in the hole of making a living, vegging out, and avoiding the questions that have been given to me to wrestle. Life’s too damn short. I will hear at the end of my life, “Well done, my good and faithful servant. You’ve managed my investment in you superbly.”

Moving into the second half of life has been similar to looking up at the night sky in town and then looking up into the night sky in the country. In the same way that a night sky in town appears less starry, two-dimensional, with fewer points of light, so does the first half of life. It’s simplicity can let you feel that you’ve got life figured out—at least, most of it.

I’ve chosen constellationing to describe a process or skill–I’m not sure which is more accurate–that I’ve received. I connect ideas, people, and other wandering points of light within the human experience and in doing so map what is external so that I can navigate the internal.

I’m psycho-mapping.

Rohr talks about necessary suffering, the kind needed to pry our egocentric youth from our hands. To use another metaphor, a tragedy strong enough to crack the eggshell of a container we’ve created in our first half of life. And truth be told, I’m not physically in danger. I know my basic needs are met, for which I’m deeply grateful. But acknowledging this reality does not exempt me from distractions: will we be alright? How are their hearts–the hearts of my hetairai? Are they sad? How are they doing?

The fifth line of Homer’s Odyssey reads, “trying to secure his life and the return home of his comrades.” This line can and should be read in the most parabolic way possible because when we have grown tired of our quest for glory we find we’re already on the way home trying—like the famed Odysseus—to recover our lives and the lives of those we love.