So many of us seem incapable of stepping back from their preferred meme and see that truth. here is something I penned last Sunday morning in lieu of my usual meditation:
coffee, cigarettes and ruminations on a gray sunday morning, 9/11/11
What a dysfunctional bunch we are. We organize ourselves into competing groups, fighting over land, food, water, trinkets, ideas. We horde our wealth and lock our doors. We crave sensation and intoxication and occasionally we experience transcendent bliss. We make plans. We delude ourselves with self-importance. We distrust each other, we cling to each other, we mercilessly manipulate each other, while in the end we share an inescapable common fate-to have our lifeless carcasses buried, burned or left to rot and be recycled for food or rejoin the relentless carbon cycle.
We know hunger, thirst and crave companionship. We are at times kind or cruel. The sun rises and sets in an endless cycle and we spend the time in between devouring, one way or another, all that we see, including sometimes our fellow inhabitants. Shit happens.
We dream of a better life for our children. We try to smooth their path, pass on what we think we’ve managed to learn that will help them. Cursed with cleverness, judged by memory, while wrestling with mortality, we amble onwards. We make love, we make war, we make music, we tell each other stories, we sleep. We laugh and cry-sometimes at the same time- we bind our wounds and remember our dead.
Nothing seems to change much, generation upon generation rising and falling like the relentless, rhythmic crashing of the ocean’s tide. We don’t know where we came from or where to go, but we want to; so we keep trudging along, fighting, consuming, reproducing and waiting, hoping, aspiring…for what?
We have happy dreams and heart-pounding nightmares. We smoke, drink, overeat, we diet and exercise. We chew gum and scratch itches. Our most excruciating burden seems to be our inability to sit still and tolerate our intolerable condition. We squirm, we explore, we lash out at others, we consume, and then we rest and do it some more. We must, it seems.
But something in us clamors for answers, for an escape, for an inner peace and certainty that all is not in vain. Our wise men say we are but shadows on a cave wall, ignoring the light behind us all. Our prophets speak of a glorious future, but warn us to take heed of consequences. Are we the ‘hollow men, heads filled with straw’, occasionally startled in the night by the distant sound of thunder or the tinkling of “rats’ feet over broken glass in a dry cellar?”
We are like a restless flame thirsty for fuel, and the more that is consumed, the more the search for fuel is kindled.
But below and beyond it all, we are one, and sometimes in another’s pain we recognize our own and we are naked in that moment, and for that moment…
We are One.
