Two words in english that are almost irreducibly basic to our experience both have smaller and greater meanings that need qualifiers or context to make their usage plain. "Life" and "day".
"Day" is simpler and more technical, but they both have a poetic aptness that refutes what seems to be a confusion or vagueness, a lack of clarity in the language itself, as though we had run out of words and had to use these over.
Ask someone how long a day is and they'll say 24 hours, ask them what the opposite of night is and they'll say day. It's tipped toward the light, the language doesn't allow the split between them to carry through.
Life is what we have between our births and our deaths, and life is what all this is, all these birds and trees and cities full of people and the fish and the armadillo and the bugs in our intestines, the earliest protozoans and the children of the future whose lives haven't yet begun. All that is life.
So that can seem like a blurred sense, a sloppiness, or a poverty of naming, we had to make do with what we already had.
It's a sign, a pointing toward the larger picture. Our lives are inseparable from life. That's the poetry of it.
A word like "sacred" is hard to use now. It's intellectual property and it's owned by large corporations. What I wanted to address here is what I believe is sacred, and that's life. I believe life is sacred.
My life is sacred only because it's part of that larger life, not so much connected to it but within it. This is easily diminished and wide-open to ridicule, but that's only because the anti-life power that runs most of the systems in our lives now dominates our ways of thinking.
I check myself when I begin thinking like this, the arguments surface like missiles, arguments against the answer I hear when I ask myself what it is I hold to be sacred.
There's a rhetorical trick that's real common now, where anything that can't be firmly stated and precisely drawn is dismissed as unscientific. But the ocean gives us a rebuttal to that constantly. The line between the sea and the land should be simple to find and easy to draw. Nothing could be more exact. The sea - water; the land - sand and rock. But that line is never in the same place for even an instant. It's there, but it isn't there.
The insistence on the primacy of logic, of things being chopped up and analyzed, and only those things having importance, gives us this arrogant reduction, and leads to doubt in people who know there's truth in the sacred, that something somewhere is sacred, though they can't seem to find it without slipping into wishful thinking and childish fantasies.
I believe life is sacred and that consciousness and will give us an ability to move toward and away from the sacred, and I believe that just as the word life contains within it that movement of scale, what we see is contained within something greater, that what is sacred is ultimately beyond our capacity to know in the way we can know the distance to the sun or the age of a mountain.
The idea that what we live within is no more important than water or dirt is a part of that crippling illusion that says we're insignificant against the stars, because the stars themselves are insignificant, in that view. That's insane, as logic, but I don't think it's a result of faulty thinking, I think it's an intentional deception.
There's a very common reaction - it's the result of example and subtle training - that people have when viewing the images of the universe that are so plentiful now. How small we are, how insignificant it makes us feel. But that's not true.
There is an infinite space around us, yes, but there is an infinite space within us too. We trivialize the interior because it's ours and we've been trained to ignore the promptings toward the sacred that are natural to us, trained to see our lives as small and nearly worthless. They are and they aren't. Like the sea and the sand and the line between them, it is and it isn't.
We have bodies, we are bodies, we live by eating other life, and what we are continues itself by a steady rhythm of birth and death. There is a short-term gain to be had by interrupting that rhythm; for the ones who prosper from it there's a chance at total circumvention, physical immortality is just around the corner.
Yet at the same time we're being taught that we're insignificant, that our lives are essentially meaningless, we're taught to glorify our appetites, we're constantly reassured that our selfish hungers are all that matters. Even religion plays that tune, promising the reward of salvation, but it's the salvation of the self. How many believers would sacrifice their place in heaven for their children?
I believe that life is sacred, and I believe that my life is sacred because it's lived within that larger sacred life. There's a lot that I don't know about what's going on here, but I know that.
It's possible to refuse the sacred, to ignore it, to run from it, to cover it with lies; I know that, too.
msg 21.Oct.04
"Day" is simpler and more technical, but they both have a poetic aptness that refutes what seems to be a confusion or vagueness, a lack of clarity in the language itself, as though we had run out of words and had to use these over.
Ask someone how long a day is and they'll say 24 hours, ask them what the opposite of night is and they'll say day. It's tipped toward the light, the language doesn't allow the split between them to carry through.
Life is what we have between our births and our deaths, and life is what all this is, all these birds and trees and cities full of people and the fish and the armadillo and the bugs in our intestines, the earliest protozoans and the children of the future whose lives haven't yet begun. All that is life.
So that can seem like a blurred sense, a sloppiness, or a poverty of naming, we had to make do with what we already had.
It's a sign, a pointing toward the larger picture. Our lives are inseparable from life. That's the poetry of it.
A word like "sacred" is hard to use now. It's intellectual property and it's owned by large corporations. What I wanted to address here is what I believe is sacred, and that's life. I believe life is sacred.
My life is sacred only because it's part of that larger life, not so much connected to it but within it. This is easily diminished and wide-open to ridicule, but that's only because the anti-life power that runs most of the systems in our lives now dominates our ways of thinking.
I check myself when I begin thinking like this, the arguments surface like missiles, arguments against the answer I hear when I ask myself what it is I hold to be sacred.
There's a rhetorical trick that's real common now, where anything that can't be firmly stated and precisely drawn is dismissed as unscientific. But the ocean gives us a rebuttal to that constantly. The line between the sea and the land should be simple to find and easy to draw. Nothing could be more exact. The sea - water; the land - sand and rock. But that line is never in the same place for even an instant. It's there, but it isn't there.
The insistence on the primacy of logic, of things being chopped up and analyzed, and only those things having importance, gives us this arrogant reduction, and leads to doubt in people who know there's truth in the sacred, that something somewhere is sacred, though they can't seem to find it without slipping into wishful thinking and childish fantasies.
I believe life is sacred and that consciousness and will give us an ability to move toward and away from the sacred, and I believe that just as the word life contains within it that movement of scale, what we see is contained within something greater, that what is sacred is ultimately beyond our capacity to know in the way we can know the distance to the sun or the age of a mountain.
The idea that what we live within is no more important than water or dirt is a part of that crippling illusion that says we're insignificant against the stars, because the stars themselves are insignificant, in that view. That's insane, as logic, but I don't think it's a result of faulty thinking, I think it's an intentional deception.
There's a very common reaction - it's the result of example and subtle training - that people have when viewing the images of the universe that are so plentiful now. How small we are, how insignificant it makes us feel. But that's not true.
There is an infinite space around us, yes, but there is an infinite space within us too. We trivialize the interior because it's ours and we've been trained to ignore the promptings toward the sacred that are natural to us, trained to see our lives as small and nearly worthless. They are and they aren't. Like the sea and the sand and the line between them, it is and it isn't.
We have bodies, we are bodies, we live by eating other life, and what we are continues itself by a steady rhythm of birth and death. There is a short-term gain to be had by interrupting that rhythm; for the ones who prosper from it there's a chance at total circumvention, physical immortality is just around the corner.
Yet at the same time we're being taught that we're insignificant, that our lives are essentially meaningless, we're taught to glorify our appetites, we're constantly reassured that our selfish hungers are all that matters. Even religion plays that tune, promising the reward of salvation, but it's the salvation of the self. How many believers would sacrifice their place in heaven for their children?
I believe that life is sacred, and I believe that my life is sacred because it's lived within that larger sacred life. There's a lot that I don't know about what's going on here, but I know that.
It's possible to refuse the sacred, to ignore it, to run from it, to cover it with lies; I know that, too.
msg 21.Oct.04
