Solstice

I am having trouble finding something to write that I haven’t already written before. All my scholarship walked out on me these past few weeks, and I am just flowing, flowing, flowing. It’s summer. It’s time for sand between my toes and the cool taste of watermelon. I can have watermelon, but there will be no beach-going for me. I am here, witnessing the back yard changing, changing, changing.

There are bats in the hollow bricks in the garage. Around thirty of them, they start pouring out around 8:30pm, with a buzz and a drop into the dusk.

Well, there is something about longer days and sweet humid air that induces a sort of nostalgic reverie. When faint memories of the past come and pinch my heart with yearning, I remind myself they are merely ghouls. That place in memory does not exist, those people are long gone, I can never go back to that. I am not opposed to images rising up from the mind, but they are pertinent only if they are plucked from the dreamy air of the mind and swallowed carefully by the body, to be felt deep in the muscles and bones. I live my images in their full intensity right here right now. My gastric juices strip them down to essentials; please don’t ask me if gods are real, unless you have looked inside yourself in the pits of depression and found Medusa staring back at you with a maggot-tongue slither-whispering to your cells: “You are not good enough”.

Do you know how I can tell that one has integrated their shadow? By how much compassion is flowing through them when faced with someone or something challenging.

I know all too well what it’s like to be addicted to one’s own suffering. I fought hard for my right to be miserable, defended vehemently my limitations. I feel sad for a world that is caught up in so much bullshit. Narratives of past and future that are being propped up as evidence, explanation, reason, justification for all kinds of things. And it’s all to stave away the fear of the unknown, the fear of confronting one’s deepest truth, the arising present moment. What we are witnessing now in the world, particularly in the U.S. is tragic, in the Greek sense of the word of becoming humbled so that we return to a proper relationship with the order of the cosmos, with nature ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. We are being presented with the reality of how wrongly we have positioned ourselves in relation to the ecological systems on which we depend, greedily and hubristically extracting, polluting and over consuming. We are also being confronted with the issue of having wrongly positioned ourselves in relation to each other, by colonizing, enslaving and robbing people’s bodies, cultures and histories. These are all connected, and directly linked to how our egos have been inflated and placed above the rest of the psyche, a little ‘know-it-all’ pinpoint among an ocean of psychic energies.

As anyone who’s bottomed out can testify, things change when things reach an impasse. Society will collectively bottom out for good, and no existing narratives and systems will work no matter how much we try to ‘restart’, ‘reopen’ and prop them up. Like ants whose nest has been crushed and scattered, we will scramble to figure something out, to adapt. I mean, there’s no use in arguing in terms of morality anymore, not when the terms of this whole enterprise of society are based on individualism, not when a human-being is skin-encapsulated and skull-encased. We are arguing for things profoundly evident, but our voices fall like copper coins down an abysmal well. Our societies need to be digested and stripped down to the essentials; metaphors, myths, assumptions and fundamental views of self and reality.

It’s not just that I’m tired of pretending to be an idea of myself, chopped up by definitions and concepts, it’s that I’m tired of defending my perspective, and hearing others defend theirs. Hasn’t this world suffered enough? Does this planet need more splintering information polluting its airwaves and projected onto its colours? Can’t one make a little space for care and love that’s real and deep and vital? Can’t we for once listen to the silence between the words, view the space between the letters? Don’t you see that your throat and your belly unite at the heart, and that your heart holds a gentle truth that is needed right now?

Now is the time to do the work. Not just the work of tearing down, of dis-membering, but also the work of healing, of re-membering. Like the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, now is the time to pass through the seven gates of the Underworld, shedding one item of clothing at each gate. Naked, cold and on the brink of death we will reach the throne of Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Great Earth, Lady of the Underworld, and in our final act of hubris steal her throne. The demon gods of the Underworld will sentence us to death. Our rotting corpse will be hung on a meat hook. We will be alive again, but not before the ultimate sacrifice is made.

I can write, and point out the robins hopping around in the yard, stopping just now to glance back at me, but I can’t make you love them. I can’t make you love me, I can’t make you love yourself. There is no amount of inspiration, compassion and softness I can transmit to you that doesn’t already exist inside you. I can’t put you back together, I can’t make you whole. That is your responsibility, and it’s the only real work you have to do. Mr. Sisyphus lifts stones, but Mrs. Sisyphus feeds the chickens and waters the vegetables and reaches a hand across the kitchen table to touch another soul. Remember? Humanity is an art and a privilege, a balancing act of sorts.

Now look here: there is so much in the present moment to tap into, so much to sink one’s teeth into. Get your work done so we can play.