“Johnny, are you there? Are you out of town? Hello? Hello?” said the frail-sounding voice on the phone message.
My mother, of course. And what kind of man would just let this go by, not call right back? This kind, I guess, because I didn’t. If it’s serious, she’ll call again, or someone else will. There are only two choices here: grow or die. The former allows for love and compassion, the latter shoots out all the lights. The road to the past is littered with shell casings, I must go on–there is no other way for me to help.
Meanwhile in el Norte, I saw a little flooding in the mountain valleys last week, and the acequia is all business. Pick a river or a stream (they’re almost all called rios), it’s roaring. In this part of the world, that’s little short of stupendous. The shock and relief of seeing living water in the landscape has to be experienced firsthand. You need to know what “dry” means, for one thing, and have that as an expectation in your bones.
My life is different now. (With spring, all things are possible.) If they love you, they only want you to be happy. If God truly loves the Earth, the only thing I have to do is what I want–the sole requirement being letting go of anything that blocks the flow. I’ve learned a little how to recognize the inner clenching, a psychic hurt arising from a misdirection or mistaken thought. So familiar, this, like an invisible dismal realm I’ve always inhabited behind my eyeballs. [sigh] Guilt is like a guard rail, but you have to leave the road.
I don’t read politics the way I used to, either. Hardly at all, in fact, and as a consequence, I find I’m able not to argue. No one needs to be corrected, at least not by me, whose skill at self-correction is unparallelled and deadly. Let them find their own level of pain and rediscovery, it will mean so much more that way in the end. The same applies to every foible and misdeed. If it’s not mine, it’s just the way the bird sings.
My wife knows something’s going on. More than 30 years with the same woman, and her face has never been so fiercely bright and shining in the morning.
Either that, or I just never saw!
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
The beauty and glory of argument isn’t in correcting the mistakes of others from ones’s own supposed lofty vantage of infallibility. That’s rhetoric or homiletics or just ill temper. Argument as I would argue for it is discourse or dialectic. It’s the sparks thrown in the interchange of alert minds. It’s unpredictable, ungovernable and not preordained. It will never get you elected to office or canonized. Yet if we ever stop doing it, it’s because we’re done for as thinking creatures and there’s no life left in us. Maybe at the edge of the grave we can allow ourselves to collapse into the sleep of belief. Until then we ought to stand on our hind legs and argue. Arguendo ergo sum.
I see where you’re coming from but shall have to demur. In fact, I’m not even going to argue with you.
Do you ever visit political blogs and follow the arguments in the comments? That’s what I’m talking about, really. Something I have opted out of to preserve some semblance of emotional stability…
“Excuse me, is this the right place for an argument?”
“I’ve told you once.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yes I did.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“No you didn’t!”
“Yes I did!”
“Didn’t!”
“Did!”
“Didn’t!!”
“Did!!”
“Didn’t!!!”
“Oh, is this the five minute argument or the full half hour?”
“Oh, er, just the five minutes.”
“Ok. Anyway, I did.”
“You most certainly did not.”
etc etc etc etc etc etc…..
All Hail Python!!!!!
here, this will explain everything…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y
Yep, I’ve been to those blogs and know what you’re referring to and why you want to steer clear of it. I wouldn’t call the stuff there argument, however, but bile. Product of the self-righte0usness and ill temper of true believers. So predictable, so boring. Ugh.
I suppose what I’d like to see as an alternative to this is not some beatific state of disengagement but true discourse. On subjects more interesting than politics, which seems to require us all to drop our IQ’s by a standard deviation or two. Life and thought are bigger than that.
The thing with me is that knocking down others involves the same mechanism as beating up on myself. If I’m nurturing myself instead–something I was raised to think was “selfish”–the impulse to strike out and criticize virtually disappears. And when I’m actually happy in that way, everyone around me has lots more psychic energy…
We could all do with more of THAT!