The world and I are one. It hasn’t always been so. For a long time, Earth was for me to live on and to do things on. I was a very high achiever in an upper middle class family where my parents expected a good performance and cheered me on. As a child, I saw the world through the eyes of my lawyer father, the closest thing in my life to God, who would explain what I needed to satisfy my limited curiosity. I never felt involved in any of it. Wars were good guys and bad guys doing their thing, and disasters around the globe were like movies and not meaningful in my life.
I am a 180 from there now. Maybe it was psychedelics that burst my materialist bubble. Or, the Human Potential Movement when encounter groups pushed me out of my comfort zone. I do remember a long time of being in-between worlds, when I tried to convince my parents that curiosity was in order. It was a hard sell.
I am unconscionably old now, something I never expected. Concern with self and caring about oneness are playing out in one theater now and I’m the audience, wondering what the drama is all about. While the curtain is up, something has to be going on, but “so what” is a haunting question.
It’s odd to be stuck in reality when the curtain is coming down. Omg, so much trouble humans are in and I’m the achiever so it’s my job to fix that. How can I not knock Trump off his soapbox? He’s depraved. This drama we are in, where people pretend he’s acceptable, is surreal. We argue about his policies, things we can get our teeth into, or the tweets he sends or the laws he breaks, but, with him mean-spirited and endangering the world, the nightmare is being slept through. My job, dammit, is to get him removed.
Closing thought for this riff is some gratitude that I care. I guess. If I didn’t, I could concentrate on having a good time. I could paint again, and read books. I could eat out and find whatever else sweetens a life more than full-time calculation does. But oye, oye, oye, oye, I am stuck in you being me, motivated and despairing, not knowing how to get the world fixed in my time.
Maybe start a club. The Fixers. Big job. We take it on.
Lex Hixon, my superstar friend who died young, left me with this membership qualification. If it fits you, be in touch and let’s see where we go from here:
A coalition already exists in spirit. It is coming together now in the social context by the attraction of its unconventional intelligence and compassionate form of high-mindedness. This natural coalition is drawn together by the recognition that the elevation of consciousness is our fundamental life work. This is a genuinely democratic, self-organizing force, flowing through persons of all descriptions. This force does not flourish as any highly structured form. It is not an institution or a foundation or a non-profit company or anything conventionally named. This coalition is a living organism — natural, wild, free. It is made up of individuals devoted to serving the world and developing themselves as finely tuned instruments of service. They learn to gather in the energy of will-to-good, from which authentic goodwill flows out subtly to the entire world.
Read more here…