How do I meet you, where you want to be met?
How do I speak to you as you want to be spoken to?
How do I hear you as you want to be heard?
Do I need to anticipate your words and thoughts, before I put my own on the page?
I am struck, today as many days, by who will be our next statistics.
Reading the news, I realize, you are removed from me. Are you the heart, the soul, the courage I call to with these words?
Are you who I write to without knowing as I read stories or hear stories in and on the news, more “numbers”, more “statistics”, God forgive me, you are removed from me.
Because today I am ok.
Today I am here, in a country I love, in a place where I am adored, in a world where the best of all dreams have manifested. To me the best of all dreams is what I inhabit, the love of a select few, so pure; yet, not without its moments of impatience. Within and around this world, I have food, a roof, electricity, I have the ability to pay bills. I have feet, legs that carry me to my car to start my day, I have a career, esteemed some would say, but that is not the pivotal signifigance, the pivotal signifigance is that I have and embody, at least to this day, the wherewithal to carry on.
Who would I be without it?
Where would I be?
And despite this awareness of fortune and luck, I read the news, devour the news, surf for different versions of the same story, wanting, panting over the search, the journey for the truth to figure out how it is any of us could treat each other as if we were not part of the “us”.
Can I see a mother in the news grieving, struggling despite the news to carry on, because really, what else is there to do?
I wonder at the ones we mark as misfits as this global world closes into itself, where will they go? Trapped where they are not wanted and don’t belong; yet, marked from exit? And suppose, just suppose, we are wrong in our adjustment of perception, so much so, that we brand the innocent guilty? Can we live with that?
I know, statistics can meter out that the price of a few innocent lives are worth it to capture the maybe guilty ones…but something deep within my heart cries out, screams and says, suppose, just suppose, it was you or I? or a beloved child that we knew, as well as we can know anything, who was and is good, what then?
I have never spent much time on the depth of literature or biblical studies, not that I don’t have degrees, learning or education, it is simply that my mind seemed to discard that which did not ring true with the collective human heart.
I don’t care. I simply don’t care what the Bible has to say, I think the truth for humanity lives within us and resonates so true and so pure from the most beautiful part of our hearts and souls, that truth of that nature is hard to disavow.
I think our society has succumbed, has bowed itself to the inevitability to evolution on an industrial and technological level. Really, I have no better choice, no better solution, I know not what a better world would be for us, I do know this, we are culpable, day after day, in the moment exiting sleep and upon awakening, that is the breath within which we embrace the best version of who we are and we shrug it off, most of us, and don a suit of clothes, to play charades for the better part of our days.
I do not have the one answer, the one path, the signs or the miracles that point the way.
Sometimes though, what doesn’t work, can point the way.
We spend so much time afraid of each other, who has what, who will do what, that we cannot live.
What would happen if 98 percent of the world chose differently? Chose to have a voice and use that voice and live in whatever best version of the Divine we could embody?
Is it really so far fetched?
Isn’t that truly part of what we search for, this life cycle of questions and answers?
Can’t we just accept there are many things we do not know, but despite that, acknowledge there are things we can agree upon to honor each other?