Fragile Beings

Pic by Darren Wyn Rees under a CC attrib/sharealike licence)

It's easy to think that it's just you.  That you're the only one who is paranoid/insecure/jealous/fearful/depressed/not coping/socially inept.  But really, the further on I go the more obvious it is that these aren't only things that I struggle with at various times.  Everyone else around me is struggling to one degree or another.

Some days, it feels like we're a giant old-fashioned kettle, about to start squealing 

I guess humans at the end of an empire really don't have a whole lot of turning circles within which to be comfortable and expansive and giving to others, do they?  In an environment like this one, you gotta shore up yo shit for yoself.

Which is probably partly the reason why we're in the pickle we're in.

Birthing new ways of doing things is hard.  Even when it feels awfully natural, and you're coming from an unnatural space.  Even then it feels scary, like you're walking without seeing where you're going.  Which we are. 

But still, every time I get despondent that the very worst of human nature - the greed and the nastiness of small-minded people who give not a fuck for the earth they live on when it's profits they need, or the closed-mindedness of people who should know better - I remember what I keep forgetting:  that the aim isn't probably so much to be fighting what is already established.  That is crumbling to dust before our eyes.  The real aim, the real creative bearing-down, is in working out what's gonna come next when the dust of that shit clears and we're left just with each other.  If we are lucky.  And when I remember that, I turn and look at those who are already practising alternatives.  They're everywhere.  Often in non-Western countries.  We are as poor and blind and deaf as can be culturally speaking when it comes to wisdom.  Sometimes I get the feeling that we are almost ashamed and embarrassed to talk about such childish notions as beauty, or of justice, or of freedom.  It feels almost like we are so far gone down the jaundiced road of cynicism that to speak of those things is some sort of blasphemy.

Fuck that.  Those things be where it's at.  Where we're going.  Maybe, if we're lucky.

The jaundice is what happens when you're on the rat race wheel too much.  It's a symptom, that's all.

Here's to new paradigms as old certainties and status quos crumble.  Here's to spaces where beauty, justice and freedom are not naive pie-in-the-sky ideals but qualities we are able to practice more and more, as the time goes on. Here's to a space where our fragilities and vulnerabilities are shared, not shored away because the space where everyone was a danger, and to be hated, and threatening, has passed, and we have moved on to something more sustainable in every possible way.

Here's to a space where those who are first will then be last and those who are last will then be first.