Leaves rattle on the trees today, but the sky is bright with broken clouds like a white quilt we've pulled over our heads.  I have this sense lately that there is a lot I am missing.  My friend Cheryl gave me a brochure a couple months ago.  When I finally got around to looking at it two weeks ago, I found in it a description of a wonderful-sounding retreat weekend in Rowe, MA.  Titled, "Loving When It's Tough: A Workshop for Gay and Bi men," it seemed a little scary and full of hope, and so appropriate for me I even considered going to it.  It had begun the day before I discovered it.

I think I am in love with feeling left out; I create the condition in my life a lot.  And there is such a delicious sorrow that goes with watching the world go by unencountered, a succulent lament accompanies living life uninvolved.  I imagine most people either don't isolate that way, or of those who do evade living, I imagine most of them are kind to themselves by staying unconscious of it.  

I am in love with feeling left out, and I have, in the past, pretended the cure is to be in love with a person, instead.  Oh, those poor guys.  I suppose they had their reasons too, but somehow I knew that jumping into bed with them--which usually included a full-blown realtionship as well--was really just a substitute for the life I'm not living.  My unlived life follows a swift track which my meandering stagger has crossed sometimes, and I struggle to imagine how I might someday ride that train.  It is good to have trouble with vision, though, for what we are unable to envision for ourselves we are bound by the universe to learn through experience.