Hmmm. Conscientous Presumption… That’s more than a mouthful, empty. For too many of us who presume consciousness, the only “life” alternative is to attempt to guide your actions from the heart, to believe that managing how & what you consume may make a difference in the ultimate dispostion of your soul; to love, to be kind, to refuse to return violence with the same, to exault in the beauty of what life has yet to offer — & there is plenty: just watch the miracle of a cloud, see the sea (radioactive or not?), observe the miracle of a child. Seeking hospice mirth. See the art in the mechanism, or make art yourself, write, cook: feed others whatever you can, even if it is only the lonely gaze of love.
Still. So many days I am floored by the brutality of our world. As I was parking this past lunedi, crazy day Tuesday, I saw an old woman, probably my age, or younger. She staggered on the sidewalk before me, blinking as she moved from the shade of an awning into the bright morning sun. Filthy, matted white-blonde hair, sunburned face, clutching two plastic bags, her dirty white coat her only home, her skirt a tattered rag. I felt sick with compassion. I felt sick with fear, knowing how little separated her plight from my own, our only, lonely, common, teetering future.
What prevents us all from getting there, to that frayed existence, life of litteral litter, human trash on the floor of our, ahem, society? Who are they that say you can tell a lot about a society by the way they treat their least fortunate & where are they now? Sipping champagne, perhaps; to ease their ignorance of the real pain? Why do we even tolerate this? And who are we? Why don’t I give her my hand, bring her to our home & offer her our care? Because the crazy are difficult to talk to & I can’t keep up with my own inert inner voices? Surely the richest nation on earth might spare something from our weapons addiction to sweep these homeless, down-trodden people into a rehabilitative custody of compassion. Not a broom of wrongs (outrage of children in cages at the border!), but perhaps that last straw of love for these dustpan people, those who’ve passed sensibility, long past their last moment of ability.
Ability. Dis-ability. A toned young woman, glistening, jogs past in the other direction. Myself, I cannot run. Too many old injuries have ganged up on me. So, too, too many “issues” have climbed onto this woman & dragged her down. But surely she must have children, or family, or a compassionate nation. I read yesterday of more trillions now budgeted to renew & modernize our nuclear arsenal, yet have those same arsons burned away all fields of charity leaving not one single straw, no hay?
Later, this now of contemplation. Writing, trying to right what has tipped over: me.
Home here where I complain to myself, my muttering brain, that the floor of our kitchen is so dirty & I’m the only one who cares. Or, rather, my love is too busy fomenting rebellion to see our kitchen floor as anywhere near a priority. So I care for her. Allow myself to become the wife. One blessed just to have a kitchen. I must learn to allow that my love, who also jogs no longer, doesn’t see me staggering against my own grave disabilites. A blind environmentalist twitterholic. Oh, how tempting the rage! Oh, I should just move out & go live in my truck in a gasp of elder bravery! But then I reframe, calm myself. Breathe. I help her in this way with her self assigned, most important work. And so we get along. The planet is burning. I inhale the smoke; what I know about climate catastrophe, the laws of physics which sting my lungs, the meaning of exponential change claws at my throat.
Somehow here, finding myself fortunate inches from that flame, I find that even sweeping can mean beauty if the broom is driven from my heart. A straw breaks off from the broom. And these little piles, the detritus of our privelged lives which I flick into the dustpan. Is there meaning in that? I don’t know what to do about that lady staggering in the brilliant morning sun, though I cannot forget my glimpsed vision of her, a future I fear. Perhaps I presume there is no doing. (Everyone says, “You cannot help those people.”) Or I’m too selfish, & console myself because, at the nucleus, the center, the fault is those trillions for a cinder; that that end was begun before I was born, 68 years ago. That end, this end. It’s a tunnel? A telescope. And I’m just a lens. Barely focused, telling myselves, “I’m just beginning to learn to live, learning to be prepared to say goodby to it all in an instant, or a week; & know that our last nano-second may not even afford opportunity to compose & refl…
~jwl
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2016-0622, 2019—0322, 0403 & 0410 & 0414