Waiting...

It has been a year that has turned out well for me, though it has been carried through with the steadily clarifying message that all is not well for most people. It has always been this way, and to presume that there has been a more loving time without conflict is to be blinded by an all-too idealistic perspective. To assume that there was a beginning without seams that were torn is not to tell the truth. We were born of matter that is bound to explode, bound to implode and cast shadows and bright light far from where it emerged, and that is not a matter to shy away from. The truth is that this universe, and the universes that perhaps surround and are contained within this universe, is always emerging and always bending, folding and creasing at its edges (edges, by the way, that don't exist).

To assume that there is an inherent human responsibility is not wise, for humans do not have that all-seeing perspective. Nothing can be further from true than to assume that humanity has a pivotal role in the universe and beyond. Even to nurture those who live far from us, living lives that seem to bear no resemblance to our own; this is not a given. But it is something to aspire to, and something- unlike many things- that is always within reach. Regardless of the moral aspect- for we can see that abstract morals are useless- there is always necessity, and morality is truly another way of describing necessity. Beginning this year with turbulent thoughts and a wracked heart, I searched for inherent love and humanity not only within myself, but within the surrounding earth, but mostly within myself. It is not a quiet, shimmering place that I found myself longing for but a place of creativity, color and self-worth. The morality and the love we speak of is a way of living life and feeling ourselves within unfolding space and time. Everything moves, sometimes with a sublime essence which can only be captured by fleeting musical phrases, sometimes only by the most subtle smile of recognition.

The truth is though, that there is no morality that can be held and perceived quietly as though time and space did not exist, as though we were not always discovering new ways to live and perceive life with a different sense of value. Right now I identify a nadir of culture and a quiet submission to color and expression in other people, whilst it still remains within all of us. So much life to be lived ad without the need to spend and think about the future. The future is dull and you cannot paint the future, but you can paint the fields and the sky within a moment. The lull that has followed all of our endeavors to reach beyond ourselves is just incomplete notation. The melodies and harmonies that have yet been unheard remain within us yet we expect to hear them for others. But what others can we mean? 

And this year began with tumult and self-denial. Yet revolutions spread through newspapers and across television sets, never adequately understood but at least felt in some small aspect. The economy that we have for so long trusted our lives to began to falter as every economy based on unnatural principles is bound to and we began to worry about the future yet again. And all this thinking of the future struck me as painfully short-sighted and I began to worry that we had lost a sense of ourselves until America blossomed with people who began to understand their actual human role, in the present. The future cannot exist without taking part in the present and it has all been too passive for too long. It cannot be said that love and mutual care and solidarity can ever emerge through gatherings of individuals, but it can be said that once the oversight of how we are all one soul, not even one species, but one vast and inexplicable entity capable of so much more than divisions and revisions. 

This year woke me from a long slumber in which I was waiting for something to happen, for some sense of the world as it makes sense to appear to me. And then there it was: everything, all at the same time. We may still be cast under the self-delusive spell that we were born within, but when I think of my children I smile. Because what is happening at this very moment and how I am yet to explain it are phenomena that formal politics, economic theory, history, and our own understanding of human cognition simply cannot explain. There is no control, and as soon as I understood just where I was and at what moment in time I was living I began to stir from a long daydream I woke to understand that God is awake and that a petty human understanding of life and what it means had always held us from what will soon become a very lively and creative existence far from what we once thought ourselves capable of.