Life, Art, & the Smile of a Beautiful Woman

If only I could relearn how to let go, how to let things happen. Not really sure I'm even aware that I'm holding on but that has to be it. Things are turned so upside down but then again they always are. I'm so comfortable with the chaos and uncertainty of my own mind. I'm a big thinker, a dreamer. Big ideas. Hard to stick the follow-through, much less the landing. I see some women that I would love to love. It hurts. It's actually physically painful. I have no idea why I'm still single and have been all these years. I forget that I'm choosing it. Sometimes with the things we don't like in our lives we try to convince ourselves that those things are being forced upon us from the outside rather than being created from the inside. We try to convince ourselves that we aren't responsible. But we are. I am. I'm choosing to be single. I'm choosing to be celibate. I want the one. I refuse to settle. It gets lonely. I get lonely. I've lost any game I might have once had. It's true. I know so much less now than I used to. I feel around in the dark. It can be exciting but it can also be exhausting. I used to be so certain about some things. I feel like I used to have answers. It was probably an illusion. So many illusions. So many delusions. Just when you think you've lost them more pop up and say, "Hey! Remember me?" Losing illusions is often a painful process but a worthwhile one. It's like an arc, a rising up of confidence and self-assuredness and then a peak and then a descending. It feels that way sometimes. It feels just like that. I meet some people that seem so sure of their lives, of their path. I've never understood this. I've rarely felt this way. I felt this way in my mid-twenties when I started to become a chef, when I got my very first sous chef position. Now? Not so sure. Take things day by day. I want to live intentionally. It's easier to go with the flow of things, to be tossed around by life. Well, it seems easier anyway. Making a decision to leave my life in South Carolina and move up here to the middle of nowhere has been a sea change for me. It's on the order of "putting your money where your mouth is" or whatever that saying is. I knew the details would present challenges. I want I want I want. A restless spirit, a wanderer. What do I want above all? LOVE. I want to meet and fall in love with an amazing woman who will become my partner in life. It seems insane that a man like me with so much love to give should be lacking in a woman to be the recipient of that love and affection. I dream of her. I lay awake nights and muse about feeling her next to me, the touch of her hair, the feeling of her fingers against my skin, the sound of her voice. Her scent! I've been in love with women all my life..ever since I was a young boy. I understand that some men are born to be attracted to other men. I get it but in many ways I don't get it. I know some men are made that way but I cannot imagine myself loving another man in that way. Women are just truly amazing to me, everything about them. I never tire of thinking of them. I never cease being filled with desire for woman. I'm up here now alone in this place and one of the reasons I am here is to build a home for her, to make a home for us. I don't even know who she is but I trust that God is preparing me for her and her for me. I can't imagine that I would be given all these feelings and emotions and desires for no reason. That would be cruel and the God that I believe in and pray to is not cruel. He is all loving and all knowing. I must not be ready. She must not be ready. One day we'll look back and be able to make sense of this separation, of this wait, of this limbo. But now it doesn't make any sense to me. Now I struggle with loneliness, depression, low self-esteem and low self-confidence (hardly the stuff that the attracts a quality mate.) But I don't give myself enough credit and never have. At times I dwell on the deficiencies in my character rather than the positive traits that I have. If I could share in words or images the dreams I have for my future, for our future...Christ it is so beautiful...it is so amazing...but it all starts right here, right now, in these moments that are the present. The details, Matt, the details...you must put up or shut up. You must get these things done. You must start living. My father's death earlier this year had a profound effect on me. It changed my life irrevocably. I'm not the same person I was when he was alive. It's impossible for me to describe or state the weight of these changes that are taking place within me. Before I got sober I was a man-boy. When I started to recover I began becoming a man. Now I am a man. I have a very strong and clear realization of my own mortality and the ephemeral and fleeting nature of this life. I feel a sense of urgency regarding my dreams and my life. I've been living the myth, writing it as I go along. But this chapter is different. This is what I've been waiting for and wanting my entire life. It's "all in." I'm showing my hand and pushing all my chips to the center of the table. It's terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time. I'm naked, exposed. This is me. This is who I am. The arc has been a covering up and an uncovering, a hiding and a revelation. I have no idea if it makes any sense to you but it makes sense to me. It makes sense to me because it is formed of the very DNA that I am formed of. It's not just an expression of me anymore..it is me. Naked and exposed. Naked and exposed. And the reason behind it all? The reason is to not just create art, but to live art, to be art...to reveal to others that they are art too. We are creators. Every single one of us. Whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. I want to be intentional about what I am creating. I want beauty. There are days when I feel like if I pulled open my chest...just lifted apart my rib cage golden light would come flying out. I honestly feel that way sometimes. And I want that. I'm like, "Yes! More of THAT please!" Other days I become dark, sullen, brooding...this is because the world doesn't seem to reflect the purity and beauty that I feel like it should reflect. Then I realize that it doesn't reflect it because at that particular moment on that particular day I'm not shining it...I'm not giving it off...thus no reflection...but then the kindness or generosity of a stranger or friend will reveal it again to me and I will shine again. And no one...absolutely no one...gives off that light the way a woman does. A smile from a beautiful woman can heal the world.

I was coming down the mountain

I was coming down the mountain. Through clouds of fog, through sprawling meadows in the night, around hillsides of clover, through canyons of rock and stone, over gravel and mud, splashing through creeks....water gushing and spraying onto the hood of the truck, light reflecting the droplets cascading off of the paint. The motor hot and purring.

I was coming down the mountain, vapor like phantasms floating, ears of deer perked in mystery, past incarnations of my soul winking from the field, winking from the meadow, brush and weeds laid down beside me, tree trunks pale, illuminated from the headlamps of the truck, spindly sticks drawing out of the forest floor, shiny eyes of critters in the darkness.

I was coming down the mountain, past images of my grandfather hewn into granite, my father beginning to appear in the rock next to him, silent, holy, restful, at peace. The mud moves softly under tire and engine, ravines rise and fall and the truck crawls down, down, down. Comes to rest at the bottom where a cabin sits. I kill the engine, extinguish the headlamps, the stereo dies.

I was coming down the mountain and now I have arrived. I open the door of the truck, the capsule of steel that carried me. The seething void comes rushing in. The inky darkness, blacker than black. My eyes aren't quick to adjust. I feel my way along the soft earth. As my pupils contract and expand the scene develops. 500 trillion fireflies flash like Appalachian paparazzi. Bullfrogs moan my arrival, crickets cree and cicadas sing. The pine showers its branches over me. I can see the cliffs and mountain ranges form a circle around me. A chorus of river waters, swollen from days of rain, sings along in harmony to the critters in the night.

I was coming down the mountain and now I am here. Pulsing fireflies and shattering nothingness. The yawning divide, the terrifying purity of the mountain earth. You can look outside of yourself but all you'll see is yourself reflected back. There's no artifice here, no steel and glass mirror to reflect the you you think you are. This prism screams the truth. This prism shouts reality. Your breath slows and your heart swells. The day dies off, the holy night has fallen.

Home

It's so strange how just a couple of weeks can change things. Right now I'm back at my apartment in Columbia, SC. I catered a luncheon this morning and have a big wedding reception to cater on Saturday. Sunday I'll be moving the rest of my belongings out of my apartment and handing the keys back to my landlord. I miss the fireflies. I miss the mountains. I miss the smell of freshly cut grasses and open meadows. I miss my 4-wheeler. I miss my job. I miss my old run-down cabin in the woods. I miss home.

In just 2 short weeks the farm in West Virginia has become my home. In many ways it's been my home for a very long time but now it really IS my home. It feels like home, like where I'm supposed to be. For the past two weeks I've been full of energy. I've been waking up around 8am and staying awake until around midnight when I get into bed and go right to sleep. As soon as I hit the ground back in Columbia yesterday the lethargy set in. It's fucking 9,000 degrees outside and not much cooler inside my apartment even with the a/c blowing full blast. I've pulled all the curtains closed but that doesn't help either. I have a ton to do but I don't want to do anything. This place saps my energy and leaves me completely unmotivated. I cannot WAIT to leave here. I cannot wait to get back home.

I still have fondness in my heart for my hometown of Columbia and always will. But as much as it is my hometown I've never felt at home here. I've made my peace with this place after so many years of leaving/coming back leaving/coming back ad infinitum. I've made my peace but I can honestly say that I fucking HATE the summer here. Christ, it's godawful. 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity. I just die. I wilt and die.

Give me the mountains. Give me the grey skies and pouring rain. Give me the Blue Ridge mountains, the rushing creeks and rivers, the winding roads, the mysterious fields spotted with deer and millions of other critters swooping, slithering, galloping, hopping along. Give me the star-struck night. Give me the inky darkness. Give me the moonlight and the bull-frog serenade. Give me the washed out roads, the mud, the rocks and boulders. Give me the holy silence of the Appalachian Void. Give me the scream of chainsaws, the violent pop of shotguns, the growl of atvs. Give me the valleys cloaked in cool morning fog. Give me the butterflies in fields of timothy grass. Give me the simple country folk gossiping in the old country store. Give me the ruined family graveyard high on the hillside. The mountain man with no teeth on the farm next door. Give me the solitude of the rugged range of wise, worn mountains.

Sing of the valleys and peaks of my childhood. The eyes of my kin. The cadence and accent of my hillbilly brethren. Sing the Hank Williams Bridge, the Bluestone swelled by Spring rain, the Gauley and the New Rivers pushing rocks through gorges and canyons. Sing the star-speckled midnight, the distant hum Interstate 77, the swooping roller coaster of Highway 19, the tiny towns that garnish my now with sweet and tender memory, the dancing songstress Highway 19, holding her microphone with her asphalt hips swaying around knolls of rhododendron and hollows of poplar and oak. Sing the lush fern crevasses, the moist, succulent earth, ancient and holy as the motor of the truck hums and carries me through space and time. Sing the scarred rock faces, the Indian chiefs, the Native warriors set in stone winking at me from cliffs string along the roadside leading to the place of my birth. Sing the avenues of my childhood neighborhood, Woodlawn Avenue and Woodlawn Cliffs, the tiny house on King Street and my best friends' houses on Springdale and Bishop. Sing Granville Avenue where I once rode my Huffy all the way down with no hands. Sing the snow-covered lawns I used to sled. Sing the wooden floors of the old stone and brick schoolhouse. Sing the convenience store where I purchased my very first can of tobacco, my first high, ten years old, head spinning and listening to rock and roll on my boom box. Sing the buildings of Beckley, the Negro streets of East Beckley, the white columns of the church where I was baptized into the faith of the Christ. Sing the 7-eleven where my father used to buy me Slurpee's and Big League Chew, where we used to stop after my little league games and get baseball cards and candy. Sing the giant pine at the bottom of our yard, five feet around and mighty. Sing Whitestick Creek and the trains rumbling past laden with coal and lumber. Sing the neighbor girls' house across the street, the pale green paint and the upstairs window that used to glow blue from their parents' television set. Sing watching the Boy in the Plastic Bubble with my sisters and Lee Ann and Melissa. Sing the Apple Tree in the back yard and the big rock with cavities that used to fill with water and then become dressed with apple blossoms, the petals white in the pockets of rain water, the sky and branches reflecting the sky of my youth. Sing the taste of onion grass, the shape of hemlock pine cones, the lash of willow branches, the spinning, whirling winds blowing globes of dandelion cotton balls across empty lots at the top of our street. Sing the garages of the retired couple next door, the WWII vet, his wife and son, the knick-knacks, the smell of pine tar and the crumpled wooden floor stained with oil and sand. Sing all of it. Sing every last bit. Every last tiny detail. Every iota and dot of existence and memory. Every treasure yet to be discovered. Every jewel left to be unearthed.