Life.

Life Limbo is the kind of place you only survive with ample amounts of faith and hope. That I knew. It's a precarious pile of rocks that can tumble down into disaster, or find a fragile, fascinating balance with a million different facets, edges, shadows, and light.

What I didn't know is how magnificent it is to have friends who understand, implicitly, the prismed angle on life that has captured and obsessed my inner eye. Friends who send messages that say, Life lived on the edge of life can heighten the sense of living. It's just the same as writing a book, or starting a business, or playing a sport. It is your life, your self-communication to the wide and wondrous world.

I wish to be in the thrall of something authentic.

The mona lisa, she smiles just like she knows me. You said she's a woman with nothing to lose. She gathers a crowd around her and she flirts with perfect strangers. But she will never take a lover in the Louvre.

- Ellis Paul, Paris in a Day

Do you think Mona Lisa ever longed to abandon her post, to throw off her black garb and run wild through the landscape behind her, escaping the lines and masses of the tourist views, running away from the magnitude of the art around her, to live, just for a moment, in the fleshy, breathing, gorgeous reality of life?

St. Augustine said something to the effect of: "We cannot hope to stifle desire, only to orient it properly." So which lens do you use to focus your desire? And how do you know when you've picked the right one?

Is life a fantastic trial-and-error process, seeking that which makes you vastly aware of who you are in relation to the grand human family? in relation to the world, in all it's gloriosity? Is the purpose to, as another friend wrote and urged me, make some memories to tell the grandkids; live your wild and precious life.

I wish to make the most of my wild and precious life.

photos: 1)GloriosityLCT, BoulderCO 2009 2) GloriosityLCT, BoulderCO 2009 3)unsourced, from vi.sualize.us 4)Oleg Breslavtsev, via vi.sualize.us 5) GloriosityLCT, BoulderCO 2009 6) mediatumblr image via vi.sualize.us