Lookstwice

    I wanted this blogging thing to be simple, eh?  I also wanted it to be coherent, and make some sort of difference in people’s lives… Just like my blogging "heroes" that have sustained me the past few years.

    I sit down here to write, and as I think of what I need to say my spine seems to freeze as despair crawls up from my belly. How to begin? I should state the purpose of the blog, of course. Should give some background; let the reader know who they’re listening to. I’m not thrilled to be putting any traceable info on the web, but it’s way too late to worry about that… for all of us.  (Can you tell I’m reading John Twelve Hawks second novel right now?)  So, let’s be confidants, and in the manner of a confessional I’ll publicly write it down. Warts and all.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

    On the morning of August 12^th, before going in to work, I watched the first 17 minutes of the movie "What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire."  It brought tears to my eyes, but was also a release to my spirit. It was a recognition that the time of the Lone Wolf was over, and I must reach out somehow and lend a paw…

“Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
    -W.B. Yeats

I was born in the buckle of the Bible-belt (BJU territory), and it was thought that I’d grow up to be a preacher.  But there is some "wild" blood in my veins.  Maybe it’s because my maternal grandfather is Native American, or because my soul was enmeshed in the community of life, like any child.  Also, there were situations in my childhood that made it attractive to hang onto that consciousness longer than most.  (And as the years piled on top of me can we say “cognitive dissonance”?)

“I was raised on a pothole street
Amid dreamy trees and vacant lots
Open fields’ running back of the fence
I saw faces in the clouds
I sat and watched them pass
I was always hangin’ out in the leaves of grass

“I was king of the world then
I held court over wonderland
A jungle lord wildly content
I swung from limb to limb; I swam the seas
And wild beasts, they were my friends
It was meant to be”
    -R.B. Morris

    So, I watched the rest of the movie.  It was an emotional release to see and hear our situation spelled out so graphically, so on-target, so personal.  I looked at my lover, my friend, and preached at her about our situation in the world now, and what’s comin’ down the pike.  Not news to her, she agrees totally that it’s apocalyptic times (TEOTWAWKI), she just thinks that there’s not a thing we can do about it.  That it’s going to be worse than we can imagine, and we are looking in the wrong direction.  Y’know she could be right, but if you see a hurricane coming, you run away from it.  It can’t be helped if you don’t know that you’re running toward earthquake territory.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

    Of course, she left me.  It’s been a couple of weeks now, but I talked to her today, and I hope she’s coming home.  Laws-a-mercy.  I have to find a balance.   I  have to find the Center… ah, there it is. 

    In the pothole, a weed is growing.  Life lives.