Tender

Tender

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Shard in my mind

Hate and love, growing exponentially. Awareness and awakening, in such narrow slices as to often prove dangerous, mostly completely misunderstood and met with unreasonable hope and expectations.

Everything is part of the story. Everything is part of the truth, even that we'd rather turn from or think can be banished by the light. That's what makes it so hard to say: this is wrong, universally, we all agree. This is right. Because we are all right, and friends, we are all wrong. Always. Why waste our energy fighting semantics rather than putting our puzzle together? It drives me to distraction, it really does.

What is my life in all of that? It's tempting to say nothing but there is something in me that knows it's everything. That I am the most important person alive, that my choices every moment tip the cosmic balance. And then I look around at every other person, the ones my brain categorizes and dismisses (loser, housewife, old lady, clerk, homeless guy, business guy, bitch, beautiful girl) and I know: the same is true for each of them. They have no idea. I have no idea, really.

When a glass breaks, no matter how well we clean up, a shard will eventually stick in someone's foot. Why that shard? How did it escape the dustpan and the vacuum and the careful inspection of the floor? It escaped, and it found the foot we tried so hard to keep it from, the one it had been meant for all along. It escaped, and by random chance, on this day, a footstep discovered it. God put it there to punish the stepper. The stepper willed it to be there by thinking negative thoughts. The Universe provided the pain of the shard as an opportunity for enlightenment. A shard of glass got into a foot for no reason at all. Why? Why? Why?

Why are we spending our time on this attempt to pick and choose, label and understand, use and exploit? We are so far from true understanding as to be laughable, after so many generations of our species. What can I possibly do in the face of all of this.

Never enough.