Night 10 — The Volunteer

Here’s the answer, and it’s going to sound insufferable. You leave because it’s good. That’s the whole catch of the thing. When you’ve got it — when you’re up there in the gold where the love runs the place — you can see the other worlds from up there. The ones still down in it. Still in the dark, still knifing each other, still dead certain they’re alone. And the love you’re made of by then doesn’t just sit around being comfortable. It leans. It wants to go where it’s needed, and where it’s needed is exactly where it’s hardest.

So you volunteer. You put your hand up. There’s no draft, nobody makes you — that’s the entire point. You choose to go down into the worst of it, on purpose, carrying a little light, to help.

And they tell you the risk before you go. They’re very straight about it, I’ll give them that. They tell you you’ll forget — that the curtain comes down on everybody, no exceptions, even the volunteers. And they tell you the real danger, the one that isn’t about getting hurt. They tell you that you might forget your mission. That you might go all the way down there to lift the place up, and instead get pulled in — get tangled, get angry, start keeping score — until you’re not a helper anymore, you’re just one more soul stuck in the same mud you came to drain. Swept into the very flood you came to stop.

And they told me one thing more about this particular errand — that the little system I was diving into runs a deeper veil than most. The being that made this place, for reasons of its own, had hung a thicker curtain here between a soul and the truth of itself: easier to get lost behind, harder to wake up from. I heard the warning. I waved it off. Of course I did.

And you know what I did, standing there in all that gold, getting warned? I figured it wouldn’t happen to me. Of course I did. I was made of love and I was going to go be the hero. You can practically hear it, can’t you. The sound of a guy about to find out.

I went. God help me, I couldn’t wait to go.