An explanation...
As usual, I sometimes have trouble finding my own voice, so to assist me, I'm going to use a song I love as a jumping off point. All the quotes below are from the song Prince of Darkness, by the Indigo Girls.
"My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark"
I have often felt, from the time I was very young, that I didn't quite fit in this world. It may even have started before I have memory. My mother once told me that for almost the first 3 months of my life, I would not stop crying unless I was eating or sleeping. She shared a theory with me that it was because I have this huge, tremendous spirit that was suddenly confined in a tiny, tiny body.
I can sometimes feel the light within me, illuminating my path, guiding me, supporting me, but all too often, the vile, petty things of this world rise up to try and strangle it, to put it out. This mostly happens when I pay any attention at all to the news. Wars, financial crisis, murders, terrorism, and other forms of idiocy serve as potent reminders that this world is not right, that something, deep down, is fundamentally flawed about the way we live, or choose to live, or are forced to live. The high prey upon the low, seeking nothing but money that is, in the end, mostly worthless. Our way of life does nothing to support and feed our souls, and a lot of the time, nothing to support and feed our bodies either.
Something isn't right with the world, and I can feel that all the way down to the core of my bones, and nothing has ever really shaken that feeling.
"I do not feel the romance, I do not catch the spark."
There's supposed to be something romantic about the world, and I admit that when I look at the things of nature, far away from the things of man, I can sometimes feel the barest flicker of the romantic. Most of the time, though, trapped within a city, a gilded cage of concrete and steel, smog and pollution, that flicker is completely obscured. Whether it's been beaten out of me or simply pushed so far underneath all the rhetoric and pain of daily life, my own spark, my own fire in the belly, seems to be gone, as if it never was. I've always had ambition, but I've never had drive. I've always wanted to do something important with my life, but never had the will or perseverance to actually pursue that course. The only romance and spark I have ever really felt is in interpersonal relationships, specifically my love life, which, since it began, has always been vivid and experiential in nature, and always very real and present. The rest of this world seems like so much shadow on a cave wall to me, and I have yet to find the fire that is casting them.
"I don't know when I noticed life was life at my expense"
Everything here in this world comes with a price tag attached, and there is nothing that is free. Whether you have to pay for it with money, with sweat and blood, or with karmic baggage, everything costs something. To get anything in this life, you have to pay for it, either from yourself, or from another, and with very few exceptions, you do not get your money's worth. We invest 40-50 years in a job to be given a pension that can't cover our expenses, we work 50 hour weeks for money that still doesn't cover all of our bills, we invest time in people that turn out to be utter scum sucking parasites, and otherwise waist our resources on the worthless and nearly worthless. It is rare enough that we break even in this process, much less actually make a profit on our initial investment. Something within me tells me that this isn't the way things SHOULD work, but my overall experience suggests that it is the way things DO work.
"The words of my heart lined up like prisoners on a fence"
I have a great deal of trouble actually finding my voice. Sure, I love telling stories, but they normally relate to someone else's point, and don't ever exactly come to making my own. I sometimes feel like I have so much to say, on such a variety of subjects, and yet my words remain trapped, caged behind walls likely of my own making, held tightly by my own hands to prevent them from escaping. I start thinking that my words are not going to be enough, that the changes I hope and long for are never going to come about, for the simple fact that so many others want to keep the world where it is, with the powerful obtaining more power, and the weak mere tools for their aquisition. My words are imprisoned by the knowledge that, even should they escape, they will be able to accomplish little, if anything at all.
"The dreams came in like needy children tugging at my sleeve, I said I have no way of feeding you, so leave"
Oh, I have big dreams, dreams of a world at peace, without war or hunger, without profit at the expense of others, without greed and exploitation, racism or hatred. A world united by our common connection. Yet, almost everything in this world is set up to divide us from one another, to force us into thinking of our differences, rather than our similarities. Those in power want nothing so much as our disconnection from each other, since a house divided cannot stand. So, my own dreams go undernourished, as I have nothing to feed them, nothing to give them to help them grow, not my own fire, and very few tidbits of news that show that these things are even possible. And because my dreams are so big, they need so much more nourishment than I seem to be able to give them. So I ask them to leave me alone, so I can have some measure of peace in my life.
"But there was a time I asked my father for a dollar, And he gave it a ten dollar raise.
When I needed my mother and I called her, She stayed with me for days"
Even with all of this, however, there are glimmers, however faint, of hope. My friends, most of them, seem to understand that the old ways of division and seperation will not function to keep us alive as a species. They seem to get that in order to see the world we want, we have an uphill, virtually impossible climb ahead against a tide that will surely work against us from the time we begin our fight to the time we end it. And while the bits of hope are few and far between, they shine the brighter against the backdrop the rest of the world provides them, and perhaps that is the point. Hope, as they say, springs eternal.
"And now someone's on the telephone, desperate in his pain. Someone's on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine.
Someone's got his finger on the button in some room. No one can convince me we aren't gluttons for our doom."
I have felt so desperate, so lost, and so alone that I have attempted to commit suicide, and it is only by divine intervention that I am still alive today. I have been so desperate for this conflict between hope and desperation to end that I have stalled out my life just to avoid it. I have tried to escape it in one way or another. In all of this, I have been unsuccessful. And yet, we as a species seem dead set on destroying ourselves, whether by nuclear destruction, ecological disaster at our own hands, or wars that devestate whole regions. The darkness keeps rising to snuff out the light of hope, the rainbow of potential our species has, and this self destructive urge is fostered and encouraged by those who would try and profit from it.
"But I tried to make this place my place. I asked for Providence to smile upon me with his sweet face"
So far, I have tried to fulfill my vision one person at a time, and for the most part, this tends to work. I am pretty persuaive in a one on one situation. Normally, at times where I am offering help or advise, or hope, I can feel the hand of the divine stretch through me to touch the other person, and it is in times like this that I am most at peace. It is when I face the far more daunting task of healing the whole world that I falter, that my sight gets dim and my fire gets lost.
"My place is of the sun and this place is of the darkI do not feel the romance I do not catch of spark
(By grace my sight grows stronger, and I will not be a pawn For the Prince of Darkness any longer.)
It is only by grace, by the touch of the divine, that I will be able to pierce the darkness that the world provides in so full a measure, and only by grace that I will have the strength to fight against it. By doing nothing, by not acknowledging that I have gifts that must be used, that I have a connection to the divine that must be tapped, I serve only to deepen the crisis we as a species find ourselves in. By caging my words, I serve only to make the world a worse place than when I left it. By hiding my light under a bushel, I serve only the powers that would try to snuff it out.
But I have no idea where to begin, and it is this first step, perhaps, that is the most daunting thing of all.
If I want to heal the world, where do I start?
"My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark"
I have often felt, from the time I was very young, that I didn't quite fit in this world. It may even have started before I have memory. My mother once told me that for almost the first 3 months of my life, I would not stop crying unless I was eating or sleeping. She shared a theory with me that it was because I have this huge, tremendous spirit that was suddenly confined in a tiny, tiny body.
I can sometimes feel the light within me, illuminating my path, guiding me, supporting me, but all too often, the vile, petty things of this world rise up to try and strangle it, to put it out. This mostly happens when I pay any attention at all to the news. Wars, financial crisis, murders, terrorism, and other forms of idiocy serve as potent reminders that this world is not right, that something, deep down, is fundamentally flawed about the way we live, or choose to live, or are forced to live. The high prey upon the low, seeking nothing but money that is, in the end, mostly worthless. Our way of life does nothing to support and feed our souls, and a lot of the time, nothing to support and feed our bodies either.
Something isn't right with the world, and I can feel that all the way down to the core of my bones, and nothing has ever really shaken that feeling.
"I do not feel the romance, I do not catch the spark."
There's supposed to be something romantic about the world, and I admit that when I look at the things of nature, far away from the things of man, I can sometimes feel the barest flicker of the romantic. Most of the time, though, trapped within a city, a gilded cage of concrete and steel, smog and pollution, that flicker is completely obscured. Whether it's been beaten out of me or simply pushed so far underneath all the rhetoric and pain of daily life, my own spark, my own fire in the belly, seems to be gone, as if it never was. I've always had ambition, but I've never had drive. I've always wanted to do something important with my life, but never had the will or perseverance to actually pursue that course. The only romance and spark I have ever really felt is in interpersonal relationships, specifically my love life, which, since it began, has always been vivid and experiential in nature, and always very real and present. The rest of this world seems like so much shadow on a cave wall to me, and I have yet to find the fire that is casting them.
"I don't know when I noticed life was life at my expense"
Everything here in this world comes with a price tag attached, and there is nothing that is free. Whether you have to pay for it with money, with sweat and blood, or with karmic baggage, everything costs something. To get anything in this life, you have to pay for it, either from yourself, or from another, and with very few exceptions, you do not get your money's worth. We invest 40-50 years in a job to be given a pension that can't cover our expenses, we work 50 hour weeks for money that still doesn't cover all of our bills, we invest time in people that turn out to be utter scum sucking parasites, and otherwise waist our resources on the worthless and nearly worthless. It is rare enough that we break even in this process, much less actually make a profit on our initial investment. Something within me tells me that this isn't the way things SHOULD work, but my overall experience suggests that it is the way things DO work.
"The words of my heart lined up like prisoners on a fence"
I have a great deal of trouble actually finding my voice. Sure, I love telling stories, but they normally relate to someone else's point, and don't ever exactly come to making my own. I sometimes feel like I have so much to say, on such a variety of subjects, and yet my words remain trapped, caged behind walls likely of my own making, held tightly by my own hands to prevent them from escaping. I start thinking that my words are not going to be enough, that the changes I hope and long for are never going to come about, for the simple fact that so many others want to keep the world where it is, with the powerful obtaining more power, and the weak mere tools for their aquisition. My words are imprisoned by the knowledge that, even should they escape, they will be able to accomplish little, if anything at all.
"The dreams came in like needy children tugging at my sleeve, I said I have no way of feeding you, so leave"
Oh, I have big dreams, dreams of a world at peace, without war or hunger, without profit at the expense of others, without greed and exploitation, racism or hatred. A world united by our common connection. Yet, almost everything in this world is set up to divide us from one another, to force us into thinking of our differences, rather than our similarities. Those in power want nothing so much as our disconnection from each other, since a house divided cannot stand. So, my own dreams go undernourished, as I have nothing to feed them, nothing to give them to help them grow, not my own fire, and very few tidbits of news that show that these things are even possible. And because my dreams are so big, they need so much more nourishment than I seem to be able to give them. So I ask them to leave me alone, so I can have some measure of peace in my life.
"But there was a time I asked my father for a dollar, And he gave it a ten dollar raise.
When I needed my mother and I called her, She stayed with me for days"
Even with all of this, however, there are glimmers, however faint, of hope. My friends, most of them, seem to understand that the old ways of division and seperation will not function to keep us alive as a species. They seem to get that in order to see the world we want, we have an uphill, virtually impossible climb ahead against a tide that will surely work against us from the time we begin our fight to the time we end it. And while the bits of hope are few and far between, they shine the brighter against the backdrop the rest of the world provides them, and perhaps that is the point. Hope, as they say, springs eternal.
"And now someone's on the telephone, desperate in his pain. Someone's on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine.
Someone's got his finger on the button in some room. No one can convince me we aren't gluttons for our doom."
I have felt so desperate, so lost, and so alone that I have attempted to commit suicide, and it is only by divine intervention that I am still alive today. I have been so desperate for this conflict between hope and desperation to end that I have stalled out my life just to avoid it. I have tried to escape it in one way or another. In all of this, I have been unsuccessful. And yet, we as a species seem dead set on destroying ourselves, whether by nuclear destruction, ecological disaster at our own hands, or wars that devestate whole regions. The darkness keeps rising to snuff out the light of hope, the rainbow of potential our species has, and this self destructive urge is fostered and encouraged by those who would try and profit from it.
"But I tried to make this place my place. I asked for Providence to smile upon me with his sweet face"
So far, I have tried to fulfill my vision one person at a time, and for the most part, this tends to work. I am pretty persuaive in a one on one situation. Normally, at times where I am offering help or advise, or hope, I can feel the hand of the divine stretch through me to touch the other person, and it is in times like this that I am most at peace. It is when I face the far more daunting task of healing the whole world that I falter, that my sight gets dim and my fire gets lost.
"My place is of the sun and this place is of the darkI do not feel the romance I do not catch of spark
(By grace my sight grows stronger, and I will not be a pawn For the Prince of Darkness any longer.)
It is only by grace, by the touch of the divine, that I will be able to pierce the darkness that the world provides in so full a measure, and only by grace that I will have the strength to fight against it. By doing nothing, by not acknowledging that I have gifts that must be used, that I have a connection to the divine that must be tapped, I serve only to deepen the crisis we as a species find ourselves in. By caging my words, I serve only to make the world a worse place than when I left it. By hiding my light under a bushel, I serve only the powers that would try to snuff it out.
But I have no idea where to begin, and it is this first step, perhaps, that is the most daunting thing of all.
If I want to heal the world, where do I start?