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| Public domain image courtesy of Pixabay |
Reprinted from the Ruminate Magazine blog, 29 September 2015
Up with the
roosters this morning. And yes, I can hear one of those feathered alarm
clocks―his voice far greater than his body warrants―ratcheting his endless
observations through this dark and drowsy neighborhood. Does this remind us of
the current political scene?
Ah, human
nature has not changed since satan shaped his body and his lie to the contours
and contents of a tree. He still slithers up our spine, our trunk, to reach the
hidden source of all thought: our cerebrum.
The crown of our own Tree of Life―The Eden of our every intent, that incomprehensible core of us that births the comprehensible . . . over and over each
day.
And ah,
again: the enemy has entered our garden with new and poisonous seed. Fruit that
we have known forever―for we have always tweaked the message to fit the
equivocation. But there's something shrewder happening in this Time, this edgy, edgeless season, this
strange new world we live in.
We are assaulted, continually, by crushing changes in social
contract. The welter of ways of our time-tested "role playing"―the
nudge-wink-wink of flawed and fatuous discourse―is almost "quaint"
today. Humanity's thoughts, and tongues, are honed to lethal verbal weaponry. And
primped with a litany of obfuscations that distort the realities beneath their
promises.
"The world is too
much with us..."
William Wordsworth, commenting poetically (at the dawn of the 19th century) on "the decadent material cynicism of the
time." A prophetic insight. The seeds have sprouted, replicated
endlessly.
Some mind-shift largely inexplicable―often unperceived, even unpredicated
on such a scale―is ripping through communal relatedness, and indeed, rippling across
our larger earthlife. It is shattering our histories, our stories, our ancient
inter/intra-societal algorithms. Something ingeniously crude is tweaking the long-established,
heart-felt empathies into ersatz niceties and/or nasties. It births and preens
a strange hybrid of smooth double
entendre and a razor-rough hide.
Tensions escalate and boil over. Now, across continents,
great uprooting, wars of tortured words becoming bloodbaths. And now, across
continents, the homeless, the forsaken tread their via dolorosa on the way to nowhere.
We who watch, hearts in our throats, are left groping
consciously for the known that has
staked our own perimeters like a pivot point. What does all this mean? What is
the why of it? What do we do with such misery? It has torn the very fabric we
are wrapped in.
We are all in shreds. It is, yes, too much with us.
The cock has
crowed over this broken world. We are all akin to Peter, retreating in fear
from the sight of his bloodied Master, denial his only defense.
There is only one Voice louder, fuller than the roosters of
this chicken-little world.
In the beginning was
the Word . . .
We cannot
know anything pure, ultimate, bounteous beyond the Word of that mysterious,
ineluctable, unfathomable Primer Mover who reigns beyond the stars―and deigns
to harbor in our tiny cranium. We know nothing beyond and aside from His
preternatural act of defiant mercy: the birthing of the Son who was born of our
blood-line . . . and lived in our skin. It must have chafed. Badly.
But this
earth-shaped-One had His Father's genes. He decoded
earthlife just as preternaturally. He spoke into the blatant hypocrisies that shaped
the theses and postulations, the smiles like scythes, the lies that wreathed
Him like a troubled cloud. He knew each forgery of truth, each vanity . . . and named them.
He is
waiting. Forever waiting in the wings of this great, rickety teatro oscuro. He is the author. All the roosters of the world will go hoarse when
He edges back onto Stage Earth.
But here―ah,
here is a thought I gleaned unexpectedly, just after the next-door rooster gave
up. Ordinary, simple, uncannily powerful words. From the front of a birthday
card!
"Forever stay open, curious,
fearless, transparent, and willing to be and love being exactly who you
are." *
This has dropped
like ripe seed upon my sterile soul-soil. How pertinent to everything! Words of YES
to carry with us, into the gulf of grief around us. To fear not, and deign not to accept the small, the
pinched, the shrewd and slanted forever
forced upon us. To break through barriers of pretense we sense around us. Fearless
and transparent before the great deceit. The deceiver.
Who we are,
and choose by the moment to become, and Who we listen to, and choose to rise up
and follow―openly, gently, fearlessly―across this great, crumbling stage . . . this
is our constant, whatever-the-circumstances YES
to life!
This is the mending of the broken mind, the healing of our
broken heart. A steady and sturdy Gift of hope for our broken world.
*(© Legacy Art Studio, Sunrise Greetings)
