In my professional practice I am privileged to go with people as they grapple with the unknown parts of them.  When the noise and motion of life wears thin.  When the same old same old finally gets old.  When the same patterns of mistake and pain become tired and begin to loose their grip.  Souls turn in toward the unknown, toward the Silence.  Similarly our culture gets lost in the noise and motion of living and neglects that which is hidden.  As with the individual so to is the culture.  Careening toward destruction with stupid smiles on our fat bloated faces.  Fighting over the cure for symptoms while neglecting the root causes.  Soul’s authority surrendered to some pseudo-savior, whether it wears the masks of State or Religion, it is a false hope.  We each bear responsibility for the darkness in our world as well as the light.  The Silence unaddressed grows like a cancer.  But Our job is not the World but rather it is ourselves.  And we can manage that.

I am thinking/feeling about the concept of the Fringe, or perhaps the Edge. But the word Fringe seems to taste better in the context of my musings. It is used in several ways but the main idea is one of the place and the space where creativity and redemption and the new occurs. By the time one figures out what is happening, or hip, or where it’s at, the It has already passed. For once It is a “Thing” the Center, the mainstream, integrates it into itself. The Fringe forever remains what it is and separate from the center. It is there that new life happens. It is the place/space of growth, creativity, and sometimes danger. Tiny hairlike fingers seek out moisture and nutrients and feed the structure of the plant. That tiny boundary is where the miraculous exchange occurs. Without the fringe no life is possible. Whether in a culture or a Soul. The fringe places sometimes seem strange or weird or even frightening because we are unused to them. But it is there that new life is at work even now. One will encounter God in the places where there is poverty, blindness, captivity, or oppression. That is the domain of the Creator’s activity. Our individual path will always lead into our personal poverty or blindness or captivity or oppression, not in the avoidance of those places. That is our Fringe. That is the place of new life and creativity. That is the holy sacred space of conversion from one thing to another. To change the world, to battle these things in culture, one must face them on the dark edges of their own soul. This is the only Change one needs to believe in.

Specters in the Dark

A cry, a soundless wail in the distance

Calls, seeking relief, redress

Images, memories emerge, awaken

Wanting to enter

Wraith at the horizon, the boundary of vision

Treads, leaving no prints except those familiar pathways in my soul

I grieve the dead

I mourn the now cold life that was

Ought is now not and haunts me still

But what have I do to with specters in the dark

Except, breathless, trembling I turn

Knowing the wraith is me

Weeping alone there in the shadows