I was about to post this, in the digital dark, and I ws notified that there’s four of you now, subscribers – I am honored and grateful and now self-conscious – but I hope these semi-private prayer journalings give you some benefit. I hope over time they become more genuinely of use. I do plan on posting nightly, or near there, so I won’t be insulted if you need to unsubscirbe, or perhaps filter me into some folder where I won’t cause too much trouble – I know we are all pelted with notices, and I can’t at all promise these will be worth your time or attention. Like I said, though, I’m convicted the best is yet to come, so it may be wise to come along and see for yourself.

Coming back around, spiraling down. Pledge: a promise to myself, made on His request, 9 -10 pm until indefinite, I write. It’s not going to be pretty – but the flow must go on. I’ve been straining against this declaration of mission for my work, wanting to keep it D/L, but the main one I’m trying to conceal from is this author. The fact is that I am on a mission from G-d, like Jake and Elwood, minus the Dodge (pause to verify), and the smokes.

It’s not about doing much, just abiding here biding time, staying touched, and watching the insipid future unfurl like some demonic orchid I once thought unspeakably gorgeous. My neurons are achy, can I get this thing on dark mode? Night shift will have to work. So, He says, don’t leave me. He wants me to write what He’s saying so that I’ll actually listen. He wants me to use these words for his purposes, to reach into the dark, to find what awaits. And I’m pushing back, hard – I tell Him it’s been years, decades even – all I know how to do is get lost, and stay there. What good is that? Why do you need me at the keyboard? Who do you expect me to reach?

I don’t get answers to these questions. I only get answers when they are questions He’s asking me to ask, which isn’t fair, if you ask me, and you aren’t asking, are you? So the questions he’s asking me to ask have something to do with obedience – such as, is it enough just to listen and abide? To wait out this interminable standing still?

I read this morning about h5982 עַמּוּד , ammûd, in Exodus 14, which means to stand, also pillar, and how often G-d stands, is the One who stands still. still stands.And how consuming fire, the flame that leads us, can suddenly be hot on our tail. Here I am, the fighter of fires, such as they are, such as I am, the hot mess, getting ready to stop fighting, just to hold on. I mean isn’t there a change, in the way Jacob fights in Genesis 32, where it’s no longer for victory, or even advantage, but just to get blessed? Just to have the struggle yield some kind of benediction? At some point, he’s not fighting to win, he just can’t let go .I know that feeling.I just want to get there – I know the fight won’t end.

She died a few weeks ago, my Aunt Clarissa, my dad’s sister. one of the final few of a diminishing line, the one who could smile through an endless cascade of tragedies, betrayals, abandonments, and disappointments. When she spoke with me, which was often, she was somehow always surprised at me, somehow, that I was who I was, that I was somehow still here, htat I could be my father’s son, the negligent nephew that I am, but she would just be amazed sometimes, that I was me.

Which was an amazing thing to experience, and says so much more about her than me. Maybe that’s the beginning of something I could say, the funeral in a hundred hours, the formal recognition of an inexorable passing that part of me still feels, quite adamantly, that should not have come to pass. I know I need to write about Aunt C, her and my other disappeared, those who closed this final door to a disappeared world, closed forever – or, at least until we get there.

So, for you readers, if you find this, and it finds you, and you keep holding on, looking for something I’m not at all sure I can deliver, This won’t be an easy ride, raw as it is, this recalcitrant concession to His command. Maybe some of you can relate, the way He gives us everything and then takes it all back, and asks us to say Thanks, and not take it back.

Different, though, if perhaps He’s taking it forward, and perhaps that’s what the Thanks is for, the hope of what awaits, that it’s a hope big enough to live in, ever enlarged as it is by the just astounding failures of this world to be anything close to what it can, should, and will be. I am often waiting, sometimes for close to a minute, for what I typed to appear before me, ever exceeding some unseen buffer, the system awaiting confirmation that these words have been transmitted, received and auto-saved.

The world was a much more responsive place when our words were so much more precarious, written on flammable, meltable, soakable, tearable, dried fiber mash. Not that these slight polarity shifts in the cloud, and whatever momentary medium they find themselves upon are any more secure. .But it’s here now, and will grow, in some form, taking root in whatever soil it finds.