I write to make sense of the chaos surrounding me in ordinary time.
The theft of time by those who purport to serve, not just me but us, who attack with negatives imperiously prejudging us guilty. Ask me for a shirt and I’ve give you mine plus pants shoes and socks. Steal them and it is a different matter.
Throughout these events, both the treat of being homeless and the ravishing attack by the IRS I came to wonder not ‘why me’ but what is this happening for? And eventually what can I learn from them--the event and players; to game the system? I don’t think so.
In freewill, skewed by love versus fear, it is encumbent upon us individually to adapt, improvise and prevail. If not triumphant to survive with dignity and respect for our personal souls. And at that I remember the Jew who mooned his executioners in contempt for their presumption to kill him, his family, his community for being Jews. How alike we’ve become in our export of greed and terrorism imperially self-righteous; not democracy since in reality we have none but the illusion.
Yet this applies equally to religion, governance, science all of which are mirror mazes experienced by our expectations in which experience proves the reflections to be distorted, the mirrors untrue, one small, the other fat, another invisible with no way out.save the faux Messiah purporting to give us reprieve and succor should only we consume this or that remedy in blind belief. Justice? There is none! Save within the kernel of God inherent in all life. And ‘it’ is in essence TRUTH transparent not sequestered for the few who grow fat in conceit that they alone know it.
I judge myself as harshly as those who have led us to become terrorist to the world. I could name names but it is pointless to irk the ire of the unjust lest I be buried in sand alive or buried in red tape. Suffocated either way.
I am not now nor have I ever been “A True Believer” in Eric Hoffer’s definition in any one or thing institutional and in sincere confession asked God to be true and God is truth, all else falling far beneath that bar. To be true to one self is to embrace all of it, the good, the bad, the ugly and divine then chose which center to live from. I fail this again and again yet fallen face forward in the dreck I get up and keep moving the goal always beyond my grasp yet the journey is the goal in itself, love life. Be here now.
--Dag Hammarskjold (Statesman)
“Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.”
“It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.”
"Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible; not to run away."
"There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return."
“Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines.”
“You wake from dreams of doom and--for a moment--you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love's calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.”
--Horace
“He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.”
. . . and in the end I will never forget being led to read Kafka’s “IN THE PENAL COLONY” previously read at age fourteen then lost but too well remembered save for the title.
