Comfort

Posted on 08 December 2009

I have been a little off center for a few days and so nothing has shown up here on my website, too bad this little cyber machine doesn’t generate entries on it’s own, but it doesn’t.

It’s been a hard week personally. No reason to go into details, really. We all have our hard times in our own particularly way and mine will hopefully find their way into some poems, which I have found myself starting to write again. Funny. I haven’t written much poetry in quite awhile, but as pain surfaces so too it seems for me does poetry, like some Greek Goddess’, Athena, maybe (I hope). I always liked the myth of Odysseus.

And my feelings around my personal struggles (family stuff, mostly) cannot be separated, I find, from the state of the world, our world, the USA. This country has had many dark times, has weathered them. I hope it weathers this one too. It’s a good country. There is much about we Americans that is good, but there is much that is troubling as well, as there is much troubling in me (after all I have sprung from this place, I’m not immune.)

It sometimes feels like we are living in a kind of Dark Ages, that perhaps in five hundred or a thousand years from now (I do believe as a species we are going to survive) that people (not all that different from us, but clearer) will look back and see this era as another Dark Age.

And for some reason this thought comforts me. It comforts me to suspect that (as a culture) we know very little. We know very little of how our minds work (so we drug them and run them into the ground, etc). We don’t know much about relationships, so we divorce, have wars, fight and do whatever we can to avoid really digging in. We know very little about the universe, so we make up stupid stories about it and we pollute as much of it around us as we can get away with.

In short we live in a Dark Age, even as we tell ourselves (as those in the last Dark Ages before us must have told themselves as they labored over their glorious cathedrals, for instance (as we labor over our skyscrapers, jets and nation building) that we have reached a kind of apex of what it is to be human.

It comforts me (at the moment) to understand that we have not reached any kind of apex at all, that at best we are like those “alchemists” (sometimes burned at this or that stake) who carry a bit of the old truths around with them (with us) – the truths that humans are miraculous, infinite, complex beyond the stars and molecules – that to kill one of us or even hurt us has ramifications beyond those stars and molecules, that someday this will be understand by a solid majority and acted on, someday.

I suppose it’s a bit strange that this comforts me right now but there you have it…