I was just reminded by a stranger, (or new friend depending on one’s orientation) of the importance of mindfulness and loving gratitude, this from a passing greeting at a friend’s table. It is just past the nuyier and i’m exhausted from the sham and pretense of the recent holyday celebrations and gave the stock reply about 2021; this wizened bloke was having none of that and proceeded to pin my ears back and share the abundance of personal discoveries he had made during the past year of adversity; he did so without a trace of criticism or commentary - just simple exuberance, and it brings tears to my eyes to imagine the power of such an act amplified by the billions of hard-pressed humans in our world at this time. Last night i found a key for which i’d been searching a long time - unconditional self-worth: essentially laying claim to your right to exist.
This is distinguished from the touchy-feely psychobabble about feeling good about one’s self by building self-esteem which always presupposes an arbitrary set of standards representing accomplishment and achievement, activities i grow more and more leery of because they are fungible and external making them easily manipulatable by unscrupulous characters that pass through one’s world. Self-worth is a different beast that is immutable and as personal as breathing - it is the right to exist; to take up space, to be alive however one conceives that to be. It is also something the ruling class is attempting to redefine, by depriving human beings of the essentials of shelter, water, food and air. That is unacceptable and must be opposed by the strongest possible actions.
This planet, cannot be owned - most especially by a handful of amoral parasites who increasingly represent little more than luck as a measure of value - luck that is in fact nothing more than where eggs were fertilized, much less by whom. The gentleman who kindly turned my morning around with his timely generosity about sharing his personal response to adversity is to me a gazillion times more valuable than the billionaire class that has well established its reluctance to face facts, much less act responsibly about distribution of diminishing resources to a growing population which the ruling class is goosing to grow like some dystopian protein farm, or reality depiction of “Soylent Green.”
We are being forced into a corner which is untenable, lead by murderous ideologues wielding weapons they do not own, did not build and from whose destructive power they do not suffer. The telephone indoctrination is nearly so complete that “they” are now just fine tuning their ability to manipulate people against one another, without ever having identified their hand in the struggle. The Vatos where i come from call it the “Black Hand,” - the shot caller - all these billionaire kiddy programers see is the boogey man of poverty breathing down their necks if they do not get with the program. Divide and conquer is being accomplished on a scale unimaginable to our parents, and we have seen its destructive capability in the rending of the very fabric of ‘merica.
Not that ‘mericans hadn’t long ago sold their soul to the satan of consumption without any help from #45 who obviously can’t grab his ass with both hands; we were on a long spiral arc toward doom long before the 1st MAGA hat. It is the destabilizing effect at a time when climate and contagion will further exacerbate isolation and fuel the divisions so necessary for social control. I do not know much outside of the simple timely and oh-so-useful commentary of the kind man pointing out the benefit to his own growth through his willing immersion in tribulation. So maybe that is what Buddha meant after all: if you wish to live, you must suffer, and to live deeply, you must suffer deeply - like listening fully to a single note of a Mozart piano concerto, or fully experiencing a single brush stroke of a Cézanne fruit - again, i don’t know · i’m mindfully guessing.
jts 04/02/2021
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