Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Episodes in the Smoke-Filled Coffee Shop: Your Stake was not Worth It

Yes, life is about stakes. The problem? Stakes are made to pierce--to open--to violently cross erected boundaries. We pound stakes into the ground in order to setup a temporary dwellings--to make homes, always temporary, in order to work, sleep, and rest.

Stakes open.

Stakes violate one border in order to make it possible for there to be a place--a temporary home. We make tents all day everyday.

Life is about this--this piercing, wounding, transgressing opening--crossing borders in order to erect the kinds of places--spaces--in which we want to dwell.

Yes, life is about stakes. Life is about deciding where and when to hammer--to break a boundary in order to try to make a home; to destroy a border in order to make a space; to try--through violence--to make something new, special, unique, different.

How could it not hurt when the stakes are divested--when the home collapses--the space evaporates--the trying is no more?

Of course it hurts. Piercing is one thing, but dealing with the trauma of a breached boundary--with the fact that someone's stake has crossed your border and then for one reason or another been taken out again--this hurts. This stings.

Life is about stakes. Most times, at least it seems for now, the borders we cross--the places we dig and let dig into us--are not worth it. Most times, they are overwhelmingly disappointing. The soil, the foundation, the consistency of the place you stake--the dull, indescribable pain of a stake being pulled from layer after layer of the space beneath your breached border--well, it hurts. It hurts because you are closing a wound. It hurts worse if the wound involves disappointment--not being rejected, but realizing the place you staked--the place you stuck yourself--was never worth it in the beginning.

No comments: