When I was a kid, Easter used to be a fresh spring day with white lillies, green grass and a new dress. And then we’d hear about the gorey dying and triumphant rising of the Messiah, of life out of death, of a way out where there was none. Into peace and harmony.
It seemed a bit magically charged to me, even as a child — both good and bad, complete and incomplete. Later I viewed it as growing toward the spiritual and away from the material. But all the while the things I viewed in harsh life around me puzzled me. Where was God about then?
Every time I look over things that I have had to adjust to, I’m really struck by how even my most sincere, high-intentioned large-life altruistic plans have collapsed — practically every time. I just can’t seem to do it, to rise from behind a rock. It’s come to where I don’t know if I will ever bother again. At this stage in life, is there a point? It’s as if I’m being told to try something else. And then I pick up and think, hm. Should I listen to that? Maybe I’ve been accomplishing things all along…. just… not in the circle I thought. Maybe I shouldn’t think that’s all. Maybe I should just keep working?
Lately I aim into the field of what should generally be a good direction and hope for the best. I don’t mention efforts to change things in myself or others anymore. I just wait to see if they work. If they were the right thing. I am still longing to achieve a triumph over evil at pretty much every step of my existence — evil being: that which wastes or destroys or devalues life and true growth. If we could just attack that, that would create heaven, I think.
I now rest in the hope that this is the mindset I actually should have begun with at first. I don’t know if that’s right; but being the sort of person who’s 100% in once I make a decision, I am trying to relax and gamble with it here. Maybe this will move the stone.
Loosen up, fahggetaboutit.
But don’t forget to keep looking. Keep looking out as everything spins.
Looking at other people’s lives — they seem so ….. easy at first. But are they? I remind myself to look at the three strata:
THE RICHES
Some people seem destined for an assured, calm tour of life. On the wheel of life they’re on the slower outer edge and never step out of the material wheel –they grow up with focused, driven, monied parents in an affluent era, choose their scope on life early and with plenty of good counsel, and attack it like a game of chess, leaving only something as unforeseen as war to scatter their dreams. A high number of people in American society seem to manage that kind of life. I have met and lived with a number of people like this — born into good homes, good families, rich uncles or trust funds, multiple properties…. and they all have had problems. Serious problems. It’s not as if they were simply blessed — but rather as if they were blessed enough to get simple things out of the way and let them work on larger disasters.
Take my friends W & R. W&R were married in the 80s, and had everything at first glance. W was the granddaughter of a magazine mogul. She had her funds in trust until she was old enough. She had the choice of attacking the world from the jet set launch, but chose instead to be more in step with the generation of hippies she was born around. She veganized and groovified herself with clothes that were garnered from designer boutiques and specialty diets from upscale groceries, lopped off and threw out nearly half of a strawberry when eating it, went to the school she chose rather than the ivy covered halls of her predecessors. And then she married R. But life had lots in store for them. R., who loved to photograph, was slowly going legally blind, W had bad posture, possibly due to osteoporosis. Various other health problems made them decide children were out of the question for them. And her early history wasn’t pristine either. Mommy and Daddy had been so far into their martinis that they hadn’t really noticed her while growing up, which left her with a giant unfillable ache. Things were never easy for them. Not really.
In fact, three families I lived or worked closely with had incomes in the several hundred thousands, lived in over fifteen rooms, and had obscenely spoiled children. In each case there was the business exec mom, burnt out, exhausted, guilt-ridden; and the ambitious oblivious nearly absentee dad. All of them used money and orchestrated activities to placate their own guilt and carpet-bomb a cloud of happiness over the short periods of time they could spend with their children. All of the children became problems of one sort or another. Demands that were unmet went screaming into the wee hours of the night. Later it was fighting and antisocial behaviour. Then it was delinquency, wrecked credit, drugs, promiscuity — anything they could find to figure out what the world had to offer them in place of the centered comfort they so lacked. None of it was a surprise to me. But it was a huge surprise to them. They were all tumbled down castles inside. But still they go around.
“Nobody in this world ever gets what they want
and that is beautiful….
Everybody dies twisted up inside
… and that is beautiful.
They want what they’re not
and I wish they would stop….”
THE REST OF US
If those folk seemed to have everything in place (with the center dissolving), I see the opposite about me. The ones I am surrounded by most of my life, diligent honest people who are left adrift to rise and sink and float in the economic vortex. We’re in the CONSUMERS bin of the Higher Being’s grocery, dished out by the scoopfuls like penny candy. A vast blank majority, but so diverse in all our mediocre methods and talents that we’re a viral phenomenon — clueless perhaps, but with such potential. We’re the Las Vegas gamblers of our own futures, our positions never assured, inebriated and running loose in the hotels of the universe, where life is just a big psychodelic merry-go-round with God playing a less-wasted Hunter S. Thompson, beckoning us off onto safe landings with,
“Come on! Hop!
Quick, like a bunny!”
Those less entangled in the glittering world will just jump on a count of three. They know they’ll sink deep, but they rise back up eventually. They even laugh now and then. They remember the great Him (or it or her). The rest of us are still looking at God whizzing by in our bleary whirl and buckling knees saying,
“What???.”
“A dead man says What,” he says suddenly sporting a fierce black afro.
“What??.”
The Hunter S. Thompson hat and glasses return; he sighs and waits for us to come round the next time.
THE OTHERS
BUT,
if you look,
no matter where you are, there are those who have shit happening to them,
I mean just -
shit,
that shouldn’t happen.
There is something unforeseen in each day for these people.
Teetering off balance on a sharp slope is a daily norm.
They’re the ones we have questions about. We look round the merry-go-round then and can’t see a thing. It’s black void. Silent.
They’re the ones on our TV screens whose neighbors are taken away in the night by militia in black and white clips, or appear as the “exotic” faces of the other in social commentary films with Phillip Glass scores, rag picking their way through life, malnourished with large bellies among flies and dust, or sometimes helmets, bags and shopping carts. There they are bending over in the fields of chemical dust, or standing on a bus stop with no means to get anywhere and a baby in arms, or or moving from each bombed part of town to the next, losing someone they know
each
day.
Do their beliefs bring it on themselves? Is is our fault?
Are they helpless victims? Are they trapped in ignorance? Or just hapless pawns of those who could save them but refuse?
Does it matter why?
Because here they are, the frayed zig-zag lives that never should have been, or never should have become so, and yet we always have them with us.
If you look at the one that would have thrown the money changers out of the temple, it would seem that it’s US he’s waiting for to get off the damn merry-go-round since there are others behind us, waiting, sick with the spinning.
Now go,
quick,
Hop!
Like a Bunny.
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