Our lives are inconstant. Some days, some times, there is less to say. Sometimes, we find ourselves in shaded canyons where the water flows fast and deep, where one misstep will sweep us away forever. We may even be able to see the ridges tinged with sunlight, see our colleagues and companions there, but we cannot reach them. We cannot figure or foresee any way out of our predicament, and the walls seem high and close and closer. Oppression threatens to crush us.
Times of falling away, where silence supplants the bubbling of the brook and the long slow conversations of the trees. In the distance, green trees and the sound of birds, but in the foreground the black, hard stone surrounds us. This is the emptiness at the very base of existence. The emptiness of Tao, the Dharma, or God (and whichever or which several you prefer).
Not to dispute that the unseen hand may hold us, guide us, carry us across ravines that we cannot perceive and of which we remain blissfully unaware. Not to dispute that the universe may care for us and provide for us in ways that we cannot begin to apprehend. Yet, so many remain hungry and on the streets, forgotten, and shelved by society. These don’t have time to wait for another election to “vote” their way out of their present circumstances. Not that they have voter’s registrations, and I privately suspect that many polling stations would rapidly turn them away should they even try to make their voices heard.
Sometimes there’s nothing to say at all. Birds sing in the canopy and we are too wrapped up in the mundane to worry about the sick, the poor, or the elderly, or to spend energy on fruitless concern about those who, for whatever reason, couldn’t make it. In the United States at least, there remains an unspoken underlying idea that people “should” be able to manage, “should” be able to thrive, “should” be able to utilize their own ingenuity because “they are given every opportunity” to succeed in this glittering capitalist marketplace.
And if they don’t? It’s their own fault. Like “non-adaptive” species, they should be allowed to fail and go extinct. If certain kinds of owls or frogs, fish or mammals cannot manage to survive, what is it to me (the reasoning goes)? Nature will adapt. God will take care of it.
Handy justification that absolves ourselves of responsibility for our own connectedness to the world. We want to help people in war torn places like Syria, but we want to “help them in their own countries”. We don’t want them to come to ours. We certainly don’t want them to overtax our support systems. We would much rather throw a few dollars to the efforts to rebuild the war torn neighborhoods so that such people can stay where they are. In the meantime, children sleep in the streets. In the cold. Children. We turn our backs on them with our justifications. We turn our backs on our sisters, our brothers, and the world. We get up and go to work. We have things to do. Others are taking care of this.
The rest is silence.
Still, don’t mind this voice too much. It’s just a blog. One of so very many blogs rattling on in the seemingly endless wilderness of the internet. Even ghosts have difficult weeks and this has been a proverbial doozy. Bitter and dissatisfied? You bet. The thing is that I know what I’m doing about it. I have to wonder what others might be doing about it, right now and today.