(no subject)
Throughout my years different things have been my focus and primary activity. It has been school, it has been yoga, it has been circus arts and theatre, it has been being a friend and having fun with friends. Now, I am solidly in a place where my primary activity is work. I have a career I believe in, an extraordinary job, and a measure of financial security. This is wonderful. What is sad, however, is that there are only so many hours in a day and so much energy that I have aside from work. By the unrelenting mathematics of it all that means other things get less time and energy and naturally suffer. The saddest part of it is how little I have been able to devote myself to friendships. Add in the ferocious drive to isolation brought on by this cursed fucking pandemic and I have neglected many a friendship. I can only hope that my bonds with people are resilient and that the love is understood. I simply cannot water my plants and talk to them every day.
People are complicated and relationships are complicated. I just wish everyone had enough of everything they needed. I wish everyone was 100% honest with everyone else all the time and that everyone was correspondingly emotionally capable of handling that honesty gracefully. Without the latter we will never have the former. Our culture is sick. And that sick culture creates a sick economy which in turn creates a sick culture. Please be as gentle with each other as you can be without being dishonest to each other. Please be kinder than you are nice. Please be forgiving. It's a depressing world out there right now and we can ill afford to tear each other apart, be it in politics or our personal lives.
I've been teaching the kids about human rights these last few weeks. These rights operate not only on a political level but also in the personal. Some of these rights are absolute. One may never kill, enslave, or torture another. Other rights have a circumstantial element when they threaten to conflict with a more core principle. We have freedom of movement, but we don't have the freedom to move when we would spread a deadly, contagious disease. We have a right to privacy, but most of us would agree that going around talking about an intention to shoot people is good cause for a warrant to search your home for guns and murder plans. We have a right to own property, but I dare say we don't have a right to own so much property that other people don't have enough for food and shelter, enough to live decently on.
The macro and the micro fall in on each other, sometimes more obviously than others. And dare I ask what is the state of heaven when what is below is as what is above? Nature is cruel and beautiful. Fur is soft and fangs are sharp. So strange is this world.
People are complicated and relationships are complicated. I just wish everyone had enough of everything they needed. I wish everyone was 100% honest with everyone else all the time and that everyone was correspondingly emotionally capable of handling that honesty gracefully. Without the latter we will never have the former. Our culture is sick. And that sick culture creates a sick economy which in turn creates a sick culture. Please be as gentle with each other as you can be without being dishonest to each other. Please be kinder than you are nice. Please be forgiving. It's a depressing world out there right now and we can ill afford to tear each other apart, be it in politics or our personal lives.
I've been teaching the kids about human rights these last few weeks. These rights operate not only on a political level but also in the personal. Some of these rights are absolute. One may never kill, enslave, or torture another. Other rights have a circumstantial element when they threaten to conflict with a more core principle. We have freedom of movement, but we don't have the freedom to move when we would spread a deadly, contagious disease. We have a right to privacy, but most of us would agree that going around talking about an intention to shoot people is good cause for a warrant to search your home for guns and murder plans. We have a right to own property, but I dare say we don't have a right to own so much property that other people don't have enough for food and shelter, enough to live decently on.
The macro and the micro fall in on each other, sometimes more obviously than others. And dare I ask what is the state of heaven when what is below is as what is above? Nature is cruel and beautiful. Fur is soft and fangs are sharp. So strange is this world.