Beyond the Cock-Crows

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)

Poem: Road out of Aleppo

Photo of Aleppo courtesy of Asia News

Road out of Aleppo

Watching the evening news

He trudges along in broken step, pale

face frozen in a blank stare,

and all the long, long river of moving

bodies pass him by. Even the frail move

faster, framing him against their blur

of anguish, like a film that runs slow

motion, etching one small centerpiece

against the screen of the unwilling eye.

Upon his back―as if coupled there,

ribs fused to ribs—rides an ancient man,

more skeletal than fleshed, skull

rocking gently, rhythmically, arms

crooked absurdly over the hard-set

slope of shoulders, hands snatching at

the brittle air. Thin-stick shanks dangle

loosely over the young man’s arms,

bob against the plunge and stagger

of his legs—like metronomes that pace

the broken angle of each step.

Still they come, he comes—like a crab

caught in an unremitting tide—

this strange, two-headed creature

all its own, with its four unseeing eyes,

its single haunted soul. An awful

metamorphosis, a horror that we cannot

look upon, nor speak of, nor forget.

And still they come, inseparable,

inexorable, the dying and the young―

a ghost that rides the shoulders of the world.

© 2017 Judith Deem Dupree 

Finding and Losing The American Soul-A Tribute and a Tribulation

Recently, during a personal writing retreat in Colorado, I was involved in a group book reviews event. (To each his/her own choice.)  I presented a book that I am currently inching through fervently, riveted by the thesis, knowing it is a pivotal theme for any resolution of our national crisis. And yes, we are in a crisis.

The book: The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders by Jacob Needleman.  It has garnered increasing acceptance and acclaim since publication in 2002. At that pivotal moment, barely post-9/11, he saw, with extraordinary clarity,  the state of our disunion. Wiser minds than mine have churned through Needleman's tight and elastic  (both, paradoxically) explorations and summations, and said "YES!"

His theme? It could be multi-labeled, for all his applications and intimations, but Needleman basically assert s that our nation has  lost an incalculable gift of national and international particularity in a world that needed—and heeded—our unique and God-given/driven view of nationhood . . . and that we can only recover it by heading back to the creation of this great primal experiment in governing. For its primal wisdom. By revisiting our founding fathers—applying to the pursuit a soul-set we've never really attained before—we  identify who and what each had become as a person at that historical "moment."

We finally comprehend what they agonized over individually, thrashed out together and, finally, contracted, that created "the greatest nation in history." We are invited into a startling frame of reference on both character-building and nation-building. We are offered a "dynamic" that is historic in its integrity and diametrically alien to our present fragmenting life as a national and world entity.

Also intricately woven into Needleman's chain of premises—as equally indispensable, and perhaps even more stirring—is the compelling life witness of Abraham Lincoln. A breakthrough concept of our evolving history would be impoverished, incomplete, without this remarkable man at the helm during a pivot point in history.  In a meditation on this president, the author describes, with a depth that can only be called visionary, the impact upon him of the photos of Lincoln. And because Abe is the "continuity" that was requisite to our survival as a nation, he is shouldered firmly into the pantheon of heretofore  idealized non-idols who conceived the original "American dream."

The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders is a masterpiece of historical weaving, unraveling, reweaving. Ergo, my gratitude for a landing place for my constant, gnawing concern for this nation, and the stunning relief I experienced in finding a rationale for this concern. Here I found a practical and prophetic analysis of what we have lost . . . and what we must admit to—and grieve for. And yearn to discern in order to become once again, to survive and thrive as a people.