Free Will

Free Will

     I remember thinking years ago, 

before all of this fell upon my heart, 

before the end 

and

before this unwanted beginning,

that free will seems a lot like natural selection to me.

 Natural Selection, that strangely 

Tricky and perplexing endowment

of our loving God.

Bringing order to chaos and chaos to order in equal measure.

He uses the math

To bring destruction, diversity and hope to diminishing

Lines of life.

Ian,

William Blake found his way back into my brain lately; his strange and haunting words, his belief that God is really just us in our purest form, before we decided we were separate; before differences in translation and silly pride fractured the Whole. God who now elects to draw us all back together by the paradox of free will. Natural selection of the soul?

If natural selection can give, over the vastness of seemingly infinite time, a moth such exquisite camouflage as to trick the eye of the hungry other; give her one more chance to breath another day, than.....

What 

Does 

Free Will do?

In the shortness of my limited, broken and bruised mind, all free will seems to do is hurt. It drives a refusal to do thing in ways that generally work pretty well; ways that make sense. Instead of listening to reason, we leap as our heart tells us to leap. We cheat, we lie, we envy, stray, drink, lash out at those we love and generally wander all over the fucking place instead of sticking with the whisperings of our Source....

Free will is ultimately what sent your mind in such a wild and ungovernable direction, baby. It took you toward such a terrible plunge. Free will was your final act as a human being on this good Earth. 

Free will took you away from me.

And free will is at the core of every seemingly stupid and destructive thing I have ever done, too, Ian. Every mistake, every single one.  And here is the rub. Every human inhales and exhales according to uncountable small and large acts of free will. Pure rebellion and pandemonium  if you look at it from the ant's view, in each moment. 

But if I zoom back out the the owl's eye view, far above the ant hill, then William Blake's words begin to stir something else. Our Source, Poetic Genius (as he calls God), seems to have bestowed a measure of chaos, of free will, upon our minds and the minds of every human ever born. As essential to our walk as our eyes and ears and our beating hearts. Free will bestowed on me and also given to you, my precious boy.

We are the moths, slowly over the vastness of many incarnations, gradually changing color to synchronize ourselves with some universal rhythm...some plan. Our God perhaps uses this seeming curse to pump newness through our veins, save us when we reach the end...Infinite choice and variance, colors always changing. In a crazy way, His love allowing us to make the next choice for better or worse.

  As for me, my changing is different from yours. I have become a recluse. Though I long to be in a loving tribe, in a family, I pull away according to the quite whisperings of my own free will.  I cry and wander in my own solitary way. I wonder if this self imposed exile is, too, fueled by God? I, like you, resist doing the things that would make my life much easier. I resist taking that road. It is hard and lonely, and sometimes oddly satisfying. It does not serve logic very well, or my loved ones, I suspect. It drives a wedge between me and this life that I have come to not even know anymore.

Damn I hope 

I am the first rabbit pup

Born white

As an ice age is unfolding

And not a sad abomination.

Different

From my tribe

For reasons I don't know.

Only God knows.

And what about you? Well, I don't get to know where your free will took you or why it  moved you to go. My heart says that you simply and suddenly raised your hands high in the sky; a  tall, blonde and beautiful young conductor with baton in hand, and motioned the beginning of your final song.

It was not in the grip of madness, I say no to that..... so would William Blake, and so you have told me. You were not mad or insane. I think you were heeding some inner math, some deeply knit instinct God given and God-permitted, and final.

Some quiet thing within you, perhaps unknown even to you, that moved you to change colors and proceed down a different path that any of us wanted you to go. I guess we must all learn to find our way on this spiritual walk, on this lonely  and inexplicably confusing walk.

I wish I knew why.

I wish I had had more time to learn the grand  and infinite workings of you, Ian. All I hope, as W. Blake suggests,  is that our God is a good God; that He means us good, and each step we take in variance and wondrous free will is moving us back home.... toward Love.

I love you,

Momma