I used to have a blog that had around 12,000 subscribers.

I suppose this was an accomplishment. I have been told from some folks that it was a really useful and meaningful resource to them.

It started innocently enough. I just wanted to communicate with my friends. But it grew to something larger over time, at least for me. It turned into an ongoing public journal of a young man striving for proficiency in the art-form of swordplay, and the harder discipline of creating some form of meaning out of a chaotic, and sometimes very painful life. 

I tried very hard to keep the pain out of my writings. Sometimes I was successful… mostly I communicated my own journey regarding my martial practice, and the changes and challenges that wrought  in me. Certainly there were some profound changes, I learned who I was, how much pain I was capable of handling and moving forward in a metaphorical sense, and that gave me the courage or at least the stubbornness to move through the real pain in my life that wasn’t written about. 

After my heart was broken with the corruption and disillusionment associated with the ACL, I was unable to continue writing and sharing. 

That, coupled with the fact that aspects of my personal struggles had bled into my SCA life created an atmosphere inside my heart that I didn’t want to share anymore because sharing meant exposing very painful and personal struggles and heartaches. 

Then, my Brothers Brad and Mark facilitated the opportunity to work on the oil pipeline. It was a fantastic, super difficult, lucrative, and rewarding experience that isolated me from my personal struggles. It was something to latch onto.

Then Monica opened the door for my current employment opportunity. This unique place created a way for me to almost literally disappear into an existence where I could isolate myself almost completely. It felt good.. 

But the painful things that I had and have to deal with simply waited. In the dark at the end of the day, they came back and ate at me.

I stopped caring for myself some ways. But I also found immense joy and fulfillment in the people I work with, and the ones I have come to love that were not a part of past personal nightmares. 

These things are easy to focus on to the exclusion of dealing with past wounds. 

I feel like the past two years has been exactly that… yes, my Brothers helped me stay alive by caring for me when I didn’t answer them, for continuing to want my companionship even when it was frustrating, and profound love did effuse my life.

But these problems remain, and they continue to isolate me from those things that I love in an unconscious way.

As in Battle, the only way to win through is to be painfully  honest with one’s self regarding past mistakes, current landscapes, and what tools you actually have rather than what you think you have, or what you used to have.

I suppose that is what this is for me. No, I’m not going to share a litany or pity party crap from the past, but I cannot move forward without acknowledging them, and I cannot re-e communities that mean so much to me without the probability of old ghosts and embarrassments poking their ugly head out of the swamp,

But that’s what a Knight does. I have trained the majority of my life to be one of those people, and that is the battlefield upon which I find myself. 

I’m not sure if any of this makes sense from an external perspective, but perhaps it doesn’t have to. Opening a dialog requires communication and honesty, and perhaps this is what I am trying to convey. I need to be honest with the world to be able to say the things I need to say; to be able to make the impact that I am supposed to make. Life is so very precious, and I have learned so many things; been given so many opportunities and been invested in by so many amazing people that it is cowardly to not share the voice I have been given because I am afraid of having to deal with past pain. 

Living an artful life is, ultimately,  all about vulnerability and honesty. We are put on this plane of existance to add our thread to the eternal tapestry of the universe, and if we are so afraid of the color our our thread that we stop weaving it with others, we are unworthy of the opportunity. 

I want to honor those who love and invest in me, and so to do that I have to be vulnerable and honest.

I am sorry that I have been missing. I think I have been mourning things that I cannot verbalize and I have not shared. That’s ok. It’s ok to mourn. But I’m not dead yet, and I have things to say. 

So it is time for another kind of courage. It is time to open my heart and splatter my paint on the canvas again regardless of what the critics say, or if I spill paint on the walls while I’m doing it. 

If I don’t, the inevitable outcome is that the Divine will cut off my thread, and I will fade in the memories of those who mean the most to me. 

I can’t go quietly into the dark because I’m afraid.