Growth Rhythms

I had a phone conversation last night with someone who presses all of my buttons.  I was tired at the end of a challenging day.  They began talking about their agnosticism, that they are an agnostic rather than an atheist like our Prime Minister, and usually I like those sorts of conversations but this one was cramping me up, being alcohol-fuelled from their end.  I find I need to forgive this person constantly and regularly for so spectacularly failing in life, failing me, that all of their conversations must be conducted from the neck of a bottle.  And needing to forgive myself that their attempts at connection make me feel this way.

If those expectations hadn't got in the way, as they sometimes do, I think my end of the conversation would have gone something along the lines that for me, the greatest evidence for the existence of God is in the awesome mechanics of cell duplication, in the world of nature, in the golden thread that occurs between humans who are turned to face each other.  That the best evidence is on the inside where it can't be proven, within communion.

But I don't talk that way to this person, and how could I say those things to them -- though I do know and readily understand that they respect my intelligence and opinions -- when my body, if I am turned to face them, incites headaches and stomach churning?  That I despise them for producing only this counterfeit communication, that talking with someone under the influence of secondary items feels like dealing in laundered money, or pirated DVDs, or looking at paintings that are forgeries?

So I guess I need to forgive myself for my lack of response.  I guess, after all, it turns out that I am not a continuously gushing fount of love and compassion.

I still do, however, feel inside, whether rightly or as some believe delusionally, that there is a godde who is a continuously gushing fount, connected to all.  It feels so often to me on the inside that this godde, she fills out the spaces where my own nerve endings are frayed, the golden thread connecting disconnection.  And so I guess I feel a little sad that I couldn't rise to the occasion past the hump of my disappointed expectations to have a moment's shimmer in that shared space where everyone lives, from my perception.

But not this time.  Sometimes my rightly-held and justified feelings rise up and cut the golden thread off at the pass.

Which is just the isness of it all.  The world is full of passes for us to be cut off at, or that we cut ourselves off at, and there is no shame in that, despite the reality-denying culture and my own soul's critic saying otherwise.  That culture neither understands nor respects laying fields fallow, or turning off the lights, or lying down to sleep that knits the ravelled sleeve of care.  And so how would it understand the rhythm and pace of humans, the way we work and heal, the way all that works?  Geez, that teenage culture has as its religion a god that plonks down a hell at the end of life to aid conformity and recalibrate the expectations while disallowing the space for them to be fulfilled.  Everything to be fulfilled by the end of life, like the clocking-off in a factory and the end of one little life, puny and glorious even with the aid of beeping things and pacemakers and pretense, still ending in a last gasp and rattles.

The culture expects a return on its investment like a Baby Boomer in the property market while denying the required rhythms of growth, just like its version of a god expects a return on his white-bearded hydroponic investment, a paying up of a perfect life lived under fluorescent lights, out of the rain, the coming of night and the rising of the sun afterwards, followed by the descent of the light, the coming of the velvet dark, the rising again of the golden sun of the morning.

The reality, I suspect, is somewhere a little more comfy than divide and conquer strategies.  A place for us to breathe in time with the rhythm of the earth's breath.  Beautiful, and messy, just how we yearn.