Extinction

My gratitude comes from the sheer gift of Life itself.  

I have been having the experience of a terminal person, rather than of someone who only knows about death. Life has grown more vivid, now that I know the end is here. It occurred to me recently, that we humans are already experiencing an extinction event. It isn’t popular to mention this, even less desirable to suggest it is already happening. I think it is. Fair warning. That is what this Slow Lane is about. My subject is what some call “the end times,” what I call, “fulfillment.”

I am not under the thrall of some ‘New Age’ dream about transformation. I sense death and destruction in the air (literally in our atmosphere). I can see where the trends are heading, and I can feel despair and anxiety growing. I directly experience the grief in my soul. I am, at times, very ashamed to be human, cause look what we are generating.

I know as a writer — the wind has gone out of my sails. I don’t have several generations of others to write too or for. My audience is becoming dust. I don’t see a future to dream about. This awareness constantly disturbs me, upsetting the joy aging has brought me. The prospects, I see for my daughter, haunt me. I worry that my time on Earth, has somehow been tainted by this planetary suicide. For all of this, I feel immense, and on-going, grief.

I am only a man, what can I know for certain? Perhaps something surprising is going to play out. I don’t know! Humanity may have more chapters to play out.

But, dying has shed an alternative light on all of this. I am experiencing the way inevitability enhances life in unexpected ways. Take conflict, for instance, the inevitable lack of resolution, leads to a living with conflict, and no sense that it has to go somewhere. Relief lies in inevitability. There isn’t really a dominate world-view. The end insures a complete life. The clouds of expectations give way to acceptance, a quality far too scarce in our current human world.

I have, as I have been coming to the experience of dying, witnessed the way it has altered my being, making me more human, and sensitizing me to the miraculous nature of this existence. My later years have been the best — they have led me to be more fulfilled in life — than I would have ever imagined. Because I have witnessed, and know fulfillment, I can imagine that it might be in the offing toward the end.

I have been blessed, if you want to call it that, with enough time in the darkness, to know that darkness is another form of Light. It is, to be sure, the form I most fear, but it is also the experience where I have been most alive, available, malleable, and aware. The darkness, I’ve learned, is the womb of light and change.

Because I am a creature of darkness, I can think that the coming time, as opaque as it is, might lead us into a blaze of glory. A warm, friendly, inexplicable dark and massive bonfire. As we become more subject to the darkness, the better angels of our being are roused into being.

Suicide is not the end, nor is it, when it is collective.  Instead, it just might be fulfillment of a sort. 

 

 

 

This Moment

Who 

you are

cannot

 be fully contained

 by what’s happening

to you

 just now.

That’s right!  The moment doesn’t capture all of who you are. Think about it. Are you only who you are, when you have one of the mini-rants, you go on, when you are confronted by the political divisions of our times. Of course not! Nor are you solely like you are, when a baby is around. Humans are such complex beings, that no moment can fully capture the wholeness of our being. So, your worst moment, only says a little bit about you. Maybe enough, for some people, but never very much. Beware of judging on too little information.

I mention this, because too many of us fall prey to this tendency, for quick and too simple judgement. This is another of the ways that speed can be damaging. This is the most negative form of reduction. All too often, it is one of the sins we commit with ourselves. We are not just what we did with our last insensitive move. So, it’s time to let ourselves off of the hook. Knowing oneself means, knowing what runs deep and consistently, inside. The moment rarely catches our wholeness.

Yes, the moment is extolled. Certainly, there are people who, at times, are unable or unwilling to come into the moment. But, too many of us are defined by a moment. Getting into the moment, and getting out of the moment, are real skills,  that are more complex than many of us realize. The moment can be a trap. Don’t get captured by it! But, do find your way to it.

There are intimate, desperate, funny, defining, harsh, loving and liberating moments. They are all fleeting, and all deeply involving. They capture so much, and so little. Life is a parade of them. Enough of them, and you have a tendency. Then, you can start having a response. But, until then, watch out, they only give an impression.

The moment can be sacred. Transcendent too. In it, one can die. It is ephemeral — can be transporting, and enlightening. But, the moment can also trick and mislead. The moment can be eternal. It is what one makes of it. So, be careful.

In a moment, you will realize that this moment isn’t what you think it is.

This is a fair warning — that abuses the moment — to reflect some of it’s joys and limitations. It is a momentary reflection upon the moment, a comment on a complexity that can paint a lifetime.

Enjoy the strange, everchanging moments left you.

 

 

 

  

Dawdling

"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

 Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.

 We cannot cure the world of sorrows,

but we can choose to live in joy."

                                                                    - Joseph Campbell

The pace of modern life is hectic, it is as if, speed and efficiency are the signs of a good life. We all know that isn’t true, but that awareness, doesn’t keep us from the consequences of speeding along. Who knew lemmings were so fast.

Every year, I promised myself long ago, I would write at least one Slow Lane that addressed the way we speed through this life. This piece hails back to that impulse, the one that served as the beginning place, for this long-winded diatribe about Life’s gifts. Speeding is decidedly not one of them, because it tends to obscure the real beauties of existence. Slowing down, not only reveals the real sorrows and miracles of life, but reveals how they are joined. It is this invisible (with speed) symmetry that makes the holy vision of the world palpable.

Lately, I have found myself grieving about another way speed, the pace of our race, has enabled the denial of our truest humanity. Like water that adhering speedily to the surface, creates a flash flood. Too many of us, caught up in the rat race, never experience depth, and as a consequence, never really know ourselves.

It makes sense that we are haunted by so many conspiracy theories (threats from others). It is difficult to maintain a life, that is so easily thrown off course, because of others actions. To maintain course, one needs the ballast of solid self. Speed, the over concern with having too much to do, denies self-knowledge. Constant activity prevents experience of the self. That is why some people keep themselves busy. They don’t want to face the emptiness, that comes with not knowing self. And that experience of shallowness inside, and distrust outside, is the recipe for feeling threatened by outside sources. 

The solidity and depth of one’s self provides the confidence in one’s self-motivated direction that keeps one on one’s self-chosen trajectory.  To get anywhere significant, one has to slowdown enough, to take one’s own measure.

Then going has intrinsic meaning — paradoxically —slowing down speeds one up.

The essential message of this tract is, that the holiness, created by the blending of the world’s sorrows with the world’s great joys, cannot be apprehended going too fast. Slow down, and feel your heartbeat. It is a part of the world’s rythem.