Adam's Complaint

Running alone out of my road beneath the new leaves that surprisingly have grown wide and deep green since I came home this spring. There is shade at midday, despite clinging humidity, and a sun that burns through the haze.

Run because you remember that at another time in life, when you had finally accepted the frame of things and learned to want what you already had, you were running every morning.

My life shifts and changes and I begin to go back, to retrace, the times and places I was most happy. I read my journals from other summers and try to pick out the fragments that composed other glad summers, then I try to reenact them to regain them. The last summer that I threw off uncertainties and drove away my apathy and denied my bitterness and forgave my enemies and found God, I was running every morning.

I've been running again, even though I would rather walk slowly.

Life is composed of pieces, books and songs, individuals and institutions, moments and moods, inconstant and fluctuating.

You were born insatiable. This is how it has always been, you find the thing that makes you feel alive and you kill it with your overzealousness. You choose an idea or a person and you strain them beyond their potential, you make them your entire world. You are so eager to taste the fruit of the earth that you forget and choke on the seeds.

Without a center I will seek to find a center. Without perfection I will seek to name something perfect. And so I am flung, dissatisfied, from passion to passion, forever a youth in my never-stilled appetite.

Connect the most hungry part of yourself with the single Immortal Constant. Moderation is impossible without God. All the pieces of life must be fluid, turning on the Unmoved Mover. All your love must really be given away, with no expectation of return. The love you receive must be accepted as it is, not demanded again, recognized as a gift.

You have to understand that you have always been loved enough, and that while you didn't deserve that in the first place, it is all you need. Any love beyond that Love is lavished abundance.

Some people,
no matter what you give them,
still want the moon.

The bread, the salt,
white meat and dark,
still hungry.

The marriage bed
and the cradle,
still empty arms.

You give them land,
their own earth under their feet,
still they take to the roads.

And water: dig them the deepest well,
still it's not deep enough
to drink the moon from.

Denise Levertov