I am compromised in all I did and do, except for my next generous act.

I used to mistake the sensation of being compromised for failure, for not watching out, for original sin.

Turns out it's the beehive I am in, that's all. This busy and knockabout flurry to Get There, wherein none of us know enough, have done enough, to make truly Good choices. Impeccable actions are impossible.

Naw. That's not quite it.

It is perhaps this plum of a body I have, all juice and bruise. I thought I would be forever ripening, bursting, ever-flowering. But I am merely a few sweet bites, then brown rot, then leathery remains. My heart is a cracktooth kernel, beloved only in transit, hardening as I go. I will be discarded. I fall, you fall, we all fall, to the impervious forest floor. Irrelevant.

Except for our next generous act.

Consider: In a coulee at great height, where the air is scrubbed and perfect, in  skull-cleansing spruce a mile wide and infinitely deep, stirring in the salmon-y last light, where bright rays strike blue ice, itself a cold presence hanging on the clattery wall of scree, a boy rises up from the ferns at lake's edge. Cross-hatched with the very last moments of brilliant sun, his hunt successful, his belly full, ringed by paradise, wombed and safe. Do you see him?

Because he is human, he plots inchoate revenge. He lives in the heart of beauty itself, but because he is alone he has no generous acts in him, he cannot find the place inside, the need, to unclench. To unclench is to die, he foolishly believes.

I was that boy.

Consider: at an ordinary table, on a stained leatherette cushion, wincing from a torn, striated, and strictured ureter, still bristling with surgical crust and bracelets and tape, straining to forget the stent, the artifact in him, the thing scheduled to be pulled from him in a week's time, out thru an imperfectly numbed penis, an event he cannot stop expecting, a man remains silent about these details for his teenage daughter's sakes. He sits with them, and does not complain. Impossible, this: he lays aside his pain and horror and fear and offers up the small rind of ordinary goodness, fakes comfort for his children's benefit. His only good moments all day, his only gift to give, to pretend, to glow some, mustered for the vain birds who chirp about This and That. Is he visible?

He has a breech in him, mortality is irrefutable, pain is myriad and cracked glass in intimate parts we are not meant to perceive, and there is no hope for change. Yet still he plans nothing, lives in the moment, gives away every reserved comfort, all of the shrugging goodness and attentive encouragement in him. Even knowing, as he does, that he is compromised, that this might harm them, not help them, this selfish selflessness, that he is simply, faithfully, and foolishly trusting in the redemptive power of his next generous act.

I am that man.

Every day, every part of every day, I Know only this: nothing, not my nobly sacrificed home, not my discarded vengeance, not my insight into my unremarkable blindness, not sweetness to my beloved, not my banal and unschooled buddhist philosophy, not my unclenching, not my appreciation, none of it, is a Sure Thing.

I am compromised, all of us are compromised, in all we did or do. Except for our next generous act.

In that small rind I hold out to another, to You, that small sweet taste, offered, I am momentarily un-compromised, if only for the duration of the gift, for the exquisite Now of the giving of an irreplaceable last part, the fraudulent evocation of don't-worry, I'm-OK-tell-me-about-YOUR-day, the go-ahead-you-first. The willing suspension of my dis-ease, the casual dis-regard of my years of toil and denial.

For the sake of others, deserving or not, beholden or not, attentive to the sacrifice or not. To my Beloveds. Because dying is mundane, pain is inescapable, but hope has smooth limbs.

In our generosity we are perfect, and complete, for pathetic human milliseconds, and can pretend a salvatory power.

The last bite, saved, for You.