Here's one way that I sometimes think about my life:
For some reason, I am operating a piece of bio-machinery that I thought was just a tool and, it turns out, completely controls me in every way. So I'm learning to partner with her, to love her, to respect her own strange nature, and we are finding ways to stumble along this terrifying three-legged-race.
To what end? I can't know. The ultimate of can't knows. There's a part of me that yearns, still, for an incontrovertible and comprehendible answer. I nurture that part. because I do love her, even her - pushy to the point of obnoxious, obsessive, raw, emphatic little her. She's on a lost cause for justice, and it breaks my heart.
So I berate her, try to shake her out of it. I try to control her with a whip. How long did it take me to understand that my body is not a piece of machinery, not inert and simply inhabited by me? She owns this life and I'm riding along, hopefully influencing the outcomes. I achieve my growth in the place where we come together, body and spirit, and we both need to be willing.
I wonder if it isn't this - the body is conscious, the spirit is conscious, but the only way to live on this plane is as a new kind of creature, a new kind of consciousness that exists only as this particular body and spirit merge. The body is of matter. What is the spirit of?
My particular incarnation of spirit and matter has never existed before, will never exist again, and I am responsible for it. What if I am the most important person on the planet at this moment? Does that change how I live?
Ah, musings for a Wednesday morning.
