I awoke one night, a shrouded moon of Doubt, Fear & Loathing waxing and waning once more within me. In my dreams I had been a wolf, howling and thrashing, as another upsetting of gravity within my mammalian self played itself out both from within and without. Yet knowing my cycles like the wolf knows those of the moon, I gave into them every time, knowing full well that there was no point in resistance. For I knew that I would always be mastered by them, despite my attempts to deny this to myself, until the wolf was no longer mastered by his instinctual full moon urges. Until then, there was to be, no quarter. And this is why everyone needs a secret kept hidden from the rest of the world. For the autonomous Eye sees not only of its own, although it very well may try to force a solipsistic astigmatism and myopia upon itself. Yet this soon becomes a demented focus, perhaps lending 20/20 vision to depth introspection, but blinding that of any essential clarity of extrospection.

     Yet the chalice, therein containing the blood, sweat, tear and trembling tendon of Mortalkind's encumbrance, however acrid or pungent it might taste, can offer up many medicinal properties. For it is a cup runneth over, under, over, asunder, as questions fume at a point of unfathomable degrees, and the incendiary yet undying passion of Love-Hate helter-skelter toils on, and the leagues of the one-nation-under-God-indivisible-minded march militantly on. And soon, it all becomes a blur, we all become One, as is proven that whatsoever is deaf, dumb and blind has reached the infinity of finity, thus enabling fulfillment of the prophesy of divine potentiation within every mortal soul. Yet it often seemed that only I carried the weight of this knowledge within myself, and I felt so alone. Yet were others really estranged or was it just myself? And then, would I hear a collective sigh of commiseration respired from the fecund womb of the world's lament, thus making me feel both overly complicated and overly simplified by selfish Pride.

     Yet still, the core human Essence, so in need of the amoralistic redemption of unadulterated Desire & Fulfillment, opens itself with quivering austerity, afraid that if what it takes in is not the gentle emanations and offerings of the homely beauty of Hope, that it will ever open unto anything again. The wind whispered my name. Sometimes I still hear it on the shabby outskirts of recollection. My dreams scream the voice of some unknown girl and I am jolted from this disorienting somnolence into the dense, stale air of wakeful consciousness. And the intangibles of the purely mnemonic, and perhaps merely imaginary flash before the mind in panoramic splendour, a variant ensemble of images gyrating with cunning allure to the irrhythmic doubt-beat of Reality vs. Fabrication. And the mind, trembling with confusion, longs for the saving grace of Logic, while its Father, Reason stands militant guard at the door of a strange, irridescently grey room, lit by filaments always on the verge of eternal sleep.

     It is a windy day. I walk through a dead grass field, hearing nothing but that of the echo of my own footsteps stalking me. I glance back to see if anyone else is there, but it is just me and my shadow, which turns whenever I do, stops whenever I do, raises its fists to the sky whenever I do, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum. Although I cannot tell if it blinks out tears, or if it cries or laughs or speaks when I do. It seems to imitate me, but does it inhabit me? The sounds around me echo within my head as if I am in some vacuum of complete desolation and isolation. And sometimes, upon seeing myself in a mirror's reflection, I declare that it must be lying, for I can so clearly see the exact anatomy and genetic structure of an actual individual human form. Yet the outside world seems to acknowledge this form merely when it is agreeing with them on the state of the nation, or on the weather, or on some other seemingly superficial artifice of dialectic. Up until today, this was okay-it did not bother me. Yet as I walk through this dead grass field today, it begins to pierce through, and Melancholia begins to take hold once more.

     And as I walk, just me and my shadow, I realize how odd it is that this facsimile, or splitting of self never seems to occur in the total absence of light. Yet the darkness, however freeing and integrating it might be or feel, must not be completely surrendered to. For refraction and reflection are the only means by which our sins might be fully revealed, and in this exposure, find true repentance and absolution. And if I failed to do this, someday even my own shadow would abandon me in its flattering mockery. Yet I wondered exactly how much light one must let into themselves before one could see enough to be blind? But where the light shines brightest, oh how those shadows do loiter about with even more nagging persistence, traipsing at our heels like starving, stray orphans we have neglected and abandoned, until we succumb to some benign yet compelling sense of Shame for daring to put Resignation before Strivance, Joy before Despair, Living before Dying. For truly, what is the cure for the human condition? There is none and this is the remedy.

     After my meeting with the substitute clergy with whom I was to work while Father Ralph was away on his missions trip, I threw myself diligently into sermon editing and schoolwork. I had never felt so free and yet, all at once, afflicted with so much conflict. How could I, a murderer, rapist, thief and all-around apostate be comfortable with such blessings as I had been granted by the hand of The Divine? Was it right for me to expect and accept from God, that which I had never given of sufficiently myself? Yet oftentimes, the human need for love and deeper understanding supercedes our grasp of the common wisdom that one must first give if they are to rightfully receive. And so was my soul pertrified and my outward countenance I would imagine, even harder still. For although I may have mastered the art of disingenuity and incongruency during my darker days enough to present a reverent, even pious image to the parishioners, I always felt on the verge of being found out. For no doubt after all these years of naturalistic living, I had collected enough seed for the sowing of boundlessly self-perpetuating groves of oleander, whose flora might indeed be exquisite to the eye, but whose tonic was lethal to the system.

      And oftentimes I wondered why our Creator did not just go back to the sculpting of landscapes with his fabled clay. Yet deep down, I knew that there had to be something in myself worth loving and even, worth forgiving. And I thought that surely there must hide a saint in disguise within each and every self-professed devil, as there must hide a devil in disguise within each and every self-professed saint. There was, all in all, hope, however that I would be restored to my true glory. Yet in the beginning, I became that wild animal that never bites, even when cornered. And for the first time in my life, I had managed to become tamed by the fear of my own destructive potential. Yet I remained held captive by Freedom, in a jungle where survival always came before thrivance, hence the ways of evolution also being arrested in their dynamism. Thus, for my kind, my newfound "civility" became somewhat of a liability and I was perpetually endangered, without the benefit, however, of extinction. As a matter of fact, I felt most visible in this state, completely uncamouflaged by propriety. For I was learning to live in opposition to all that was first nature to me. I followed the harshest path, though always coming out clean on the other side, much like when I lived lawlessly.

     And so it came to evidence that I had, indeed, fallen pray to my fellow man and his obsession with law and order. I had allowed myself to bow to the temptations of convenience and common impulse and thus felt, albeit more acknowledged by others, more estranged from myself. For conformity had indeed bred within me all that I had always known it would, which was why I had avoided it so diligenly and so craftily in the first place. For it seemed to breed only more contempt, confusion, doubt, self-loathing and even corruption within me than I had ever previously wrestled with. Before all of this, I had lived only for the higher causes of Truth, Freedom &  Authenticity. For I believed that it was Unity first within the Self which brought true honour and was the only righteous and effective solution for the ills of any society. For my deeds may not have been morally sound, but at least, I figured, they were honest in their coarseness of naturality. And I had always intuited that Truth should exist for its own sake, even within the individual. For I did not wish to exist merely for causes which had already been won, to have to then also answer to Death and to God of my meager, ignoble triumphs and inutile redundancies. For the ultimate challenge of mortal human life for me was not in winning the battles, but in maintaining that canonical counsel which I had managed to salvage from their ruins.

     For true Victory lies in surrender to what is and cannot be altered. I never saw wildness as an inciting or an invocation of any sort of applied will. I knew it for its purest nature and essence, and that it required a giving in to more than an . I believed that it was a denial of the so-called inner "savage" which turned men, women and children into savages, not a shunning of so-called "socialization" or "acculturization", or any of the fancy phraseology we invent to lend credence to half-baked idealogies. For when we point the finger instead at those crude methodologies of communal refinement and cosmopolitan acculturization as the cause of humankind's deepest afflictions and evils, then have we become enlightened. Fanatical homogeneity, I was raised to believe, was at the root of all human ills. Yet most still to this day, project these "evils" upon some inferior yet benign "pre-historic" entity. For although they might do this out of a seemingly reasonable motive to preserve society and its efficiency and sufficiency, they are castigating the wrong enemy, and merely succeed at donning the facade of civility while still no less, prostrating themselves before the shrine of their primordial leanings. And this perverts things thus further, for now, whenever that archaic, esoteric, occult entity which they have fabricated, cries out and manages to surface from its dank, dark depths, oh how they must go to even sicker lengths to silence it.

     But they fail to see that even the Darkness is born of the Light, and they have nothing to fear. And, if they manage to do this, they will be brought into a world of experience which shines with a special light all its own. And once they have surrendered to this Light, will they crave nothing more than to remain a part of it. For the lights beneath which contemporary man gleans his esteem are not only harsh, glaring and superficial, but are, in the end, extremely unflattering to his true visage and figure. And while man basks in the sickly glow of this light, how he always transports with him, a mirror into which he can gaze with smug conceit, upon his so-called "superior" self. Yet when the light of The Shadow shines down upon him, revealing the true form which he has unknowingly all of this time, reflected to others, God and even himself, he feels a fool. And in his embarassment, he forgets that he still must make a choice, every moment of every precious day, between the two images of himself. For if he continues to pummel his fists upon the glass, attempting to murder the image of the "other" self, he will merely end up with injurious shards of glass embedded in his third eye, and no doubt, seven years of bad luck to boot.

     Yet this cycle of sleep and awakening has played itself out since humankind's first earthen birth. Yet I had always been mindful to choose both The Shadow and The Light and thus was I Whole, thus did I feel substantial, real. As the weeks and months progressed I would struggle however, to come to terms with the newer, less familiar roles I had taken on. For I feared that they might engulf my other self to the point of annihilation. The next few years of my life would be fruitful in different ways than I had previously become accustomed, but they would also go by in somewhat of a blur. I existed in a kind of existential haze, and I would soon be unable to recall them at all. Yet, despite this fact, one thing I would remember is the day that I would have to make the hardest decision of my life.