What kinds! Here in the windy gap between birthday and new year, I'm conjuring all kinds of low-key resolutions in a coffee shop. It's a sort of slip-in-time, a no-man's zone, these 6 days I have before the new year comes & knocks, and says its time to go. It's not yet.
How shall I resolve? Plan ahead, & know your enemy, that other self. Know him through compassion. Forgive the past. Gather up your many creaturely guests, & love them unabashedly.
I've been resolved at the smaller end of my twenties -- the twenties are a cone, taking you in, minimizing, stabilizing, simplifying. The sheep has been shorn. The sheep has been taken to Sacrificial Hill, and nearly killed -- but at the last moment, spared! Left alone on the killing block, naked and trembling. Alive. Glad for it. Confused. Whose whole purpose was to die, and now? Now, what kinds of resolutions!
You're not dead, Alice. Look in the mirror and see that mad-cap other world; Dorian, and see what you've become. Medusa.
Narcissus, lift your pallid mug up from the lake, and look! The wide world, the real world. The world of your thirties: smaller, dryer. Smaller and dryer than the will.
Which, in this case, is a word of hope. That you ought to have died, and did not die, and now your will is that of any creature: enough to fuel movement, outwardly.
By the law of the quiet room, the quieted heart, stand then upright in the world of wind & light.
So: Narcissus, the door. If "I is another" as Rimbaud says, then leave him to his juvenile lake-lapping, and go find a sunlit clearing, a lovely wood-nymph, something else! Something. Else.
All that awaits those who overstay their welcome in the land of self-reflection is convention or worse.
What kinds of resolutions, then? To leave this coffee shop. To never come back.
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