Remind Yourself of Yourself.

I am, on the whole, a person confident in her array of capacities. Not much ever happens to shake my certainty that I dwell in the proper place, surrounded by those I am meant to flourish amongst, and in whom I am meant to encourage a flourishing of their own.

But even an imperceptive individual would be hard-pressed to overlook the frequency with which a great many people find themselves in positions of doubt. My girlfriend Ariel doubts her intelligence. Our mutual girlfriend Elle doubts (more and more occasionally, these last few years) whether the expression of softness befits her -- whether vulnerability is within her capability to show and still remain safe.

Our boyfriend doubts and doubts and doubts. It's charming, in its own way, owing to the earnest depths of sincerity with which he dismays of ever being truly sufficient.

With my own confidence, and my absolute fervor for the nourishment of souls in whom I have invested my affections, I'm forever stepping up to salve these worries and neuroses that dog the heels of my beloveds. I'm good at it, and have learned the mystique of the right look, or touch, or word parceled out with optimal timing. Yet my ability to give succor to those suffering anxieties can never rise to a level genuinely curative -- I am a talented balm, not a persistent, perpetuating solution.

And so the help I most try to give is to be for them a mirror: to hold up before them a perception of themselves that is real and unalloyed with self-censure. Then, once with this glass I get them to see what I see within them, I deliver the most important morsel of aid that I can.

"Remember to see this in yourself," I tell them -- as I tell you now. "Take note of your perfections, not merely your flaws. And daily, before you find yourself at sea in a sargasso of uncertainty, take the time to recall these things that make you worth my while, and worth the world's while."

(I use rather a bit more casual language about the house when doing this, obviously. But indulging in flights of fluency here is one of the manners in which I practice this advice for myself.)

Mortification

I delight in words, as you obviously must know if you've read with any depth the spill of language that is this blog. And so I've acquired the sporadic habit of snatching from some convolution of my grey matter a fanciful example of my vocabulary, musing upon it from a number of angles, and then lofting it into place as a post title to inspire me to write.

It's worked decently enough, a number of times. I'm particularly happy with "Atavism," a few entries past.

But oh, tonight, how I have stained the clean page of my anticipation with embarrassment.

A word, I thought. A word, a word, a word. But which?

And there bubbled into my sensorium this: causistry.

And I typed it. And the stinging red lash of the automated spell-checker denied me. What? Can this be? But ...

A right-click confirmed it. The word is casuistry. I have held it in my brain with the amorphous hints of a definition attached for years upon years, but all this time, I have mentally mis-spelled it.

Why am I so humiliated by this failure, yet shameless to admit I didn't have more than a vaporous phantasm of its meaning? Honestly, I can't quite say.

And given the output of my Google search to grasp its full and formal denotative identity, I plainly cannot stoop to rationalizing these emotions.

Thus, my new title above.

The Trivial and the Exalted

Small snips of sensuality can, in their way, exceed beyond reason the measure of their moment. A fingertip along one's jawline. The brush of lips to the back of a hand. A just-voiced breath arriving on the delicate involutions of an ear.

That which is simple, and small -- but perfect -- can linger, and linger, and linger. Not fading, but engorging itself heatedly in our memory.

A precious, fleeting touch immortalizes the instant of its tenure, deranging every sense of proportion and recalling itself to the forefront of conscious thought until another, larger, longer, encompassing contact can blot it out with ecstasy.

When Day Breaks Upon Us Together

This morning, in his arms, I felt so exquisitely chosen and cherished. Through blinds drawn closed against whatever unmindful accidental eyes might stray our way from a neighbor's second-story window, a twilight pre-dawn glow filtered in and then suffused the room, the bed, our forms colluding in intimacy beneath tangled sheets and the thick, hot, blanketing weight of our duvet. Darkness and the lovely, precious press of flesh resolved with steady tempo into shaded shapes and passionscapes, until sight joined sound and touch in delivering to each of us the fullest apprehension of our connectedness.

A dawn so sweet and charged with delight arrives but rarely ... and today it was ours in which to revel.

Anomalous

I thought to myself, "For a change, why not try writing something minimalist instead of extravagant." From there, I had want of a title -- one word would have to do, but which? The entry would be uncharacteristic of me, but "uncharacteristic" ... ? What a dully utilitarian word. I reached for my thesaurus. "Uncharacteristic" got me to "atypical." "Atypical" got me to "anomalous." But on the same page with "anomalous" ...

Heteroclite.

Could I ask for anything more appropriate?

Inconclusive

I've yet to come fully down on one side or the other of my delightful girlfriend Claire's scheme to get us all to rotate through a blogging roster day by day by day. There's an allure to pleasing someone you care for as deeply as I do that sassy and grandly encouraging woman. But it's also a long-held goal of mine to drift on the currents of contemplation until they coax me around that bend where the rapids or falls of creativity await.

In truth, though, I suppose there's no binary here awaiting resolution into a single path forward. Why should I choose either to bow out and write on my own terms, or to leap in with both feet and swim downstream until I tide out to sea in an ocean of kindly cajoled prolificacy?

There is so much beauty in being asked to help found a new family tradition -- particularly when the family in question abounds as this one does with kind-heartedness, appreciation, and warmth.

So when my turn rolls round again, I may well use it to limn the universe's contours with constellations of starrily gleaming expressiveness. Or I may find some desultory way of hitching together a dozen or two celebratory words about the boundless life of affection I have managed, somehow, to get myself caught up in.

No conflict exists between taking this challenge seriously and making of it a ridiculous and casual diversion. It is, after all, impossible that my contributions might disappoint anyone, except (and even then only mildly) in the case of their evaporating entirely from the mix.

Let us see, then, where the coming weeks might take us.

There Are No Words

We can try, those of us inclined to fits of textual ambition, to capture in the coils of syntax that most potent and refined essence of the heartfelt. Emotions, though, derive from the instants of our experiences, do they not? They can linger on to become moods -- yet they hit us not in the writhing strikes of blue-white lightning or the rumbling dissolution of thunder, but in the crack that joins the two as the sky is split.

All of this is to say: fate bestowed upon me a hug, this morning. A soft and enduring embrace that carried me in and out of languidly erratic slumber -- and that, with each surfacing and submersion, filled my very being with contentment, exaltation, and incredulity.

And having expended so many quarrels of phrasing and vocabulary, the best I can hope for is that you have felt this same thing, and that my volleys of poetic declamation here have recalled it to you. Nothing within my verbal capacity can hope to bring real understanding of my morning's blissful entwinement to readers who have not already lived such moments of their own.

I can express, but I cannot enlighten anyone to the sun-warmed stones of those emotions, so hot and solid and unyielding in their reliability.

When you hold someone you love, only that connection itself is sufficient to communicate its blissful merits.