Sunday, May 13, 2012

mother

the next time someone asks me what i do, i am going to ask them, when?

the next time i ask someone what they do, i will follow it with, what else?

a human's capacity to burn up the things that humans create constitutes that human's value. who are we outside of that?

the next time someone asks me what i want to do, i will tell them "i want to be a lighthouse".

i have a friend in yemen, working with usaid. he sent me a long, instructive email outlining the chicken + the egg conundrum associated with finding a job. he is helping yemeni people transition from a turbulent past into a turbulent future -- problems that money and weapons can solve, problems that money and weapons conceived. humans are tools used by their own tools, solutions to the problems they create. problems are not opportunities, they are problems. so many mantras are geared toward denial of emotion. you aren't sad, you are disconnected from true self. you aren't isolated, you are temporarily removed from your essence.

where is truth in all of this?

the inside outside nature of our world becomes religion--it becomes rote--because it is never questioned.

i'm thinking about hope versus expectation.

what are we taught to expect from life? how much of that actually comes true?

if you do this, if you are good enough, if you persevere, if you kiss enough ass, you will get where you want to go.

and where you want to go is also preordained.

try to think outside of institutions for a moment...if someone asked you what you would like to be when you grow up, and you aren't thinking within the confines of institution, would you even know what growing up means? let alone, the concept of being some thing?

i've been thinking about hope in love. being asymmetrically conditioned to believe in expectation rather than hope leaks into every aspect of being. take relationships for an easy example: think of the last relationship you had that ended in disaster or tragedy. was there an expectation that was unmet? or a hope that was mutually undefined, mutually forsaken? perhaps there was both. expectation is man made -- a synthetic construct that stems from stories made up in our minds about how a person is meant to behave in certain circumstances. the rules for living are defined from an early age, with very minimal derivation from what is dictated. who benefits from these rules?

today i went to church. there was coffee in the lobby, with a sign that said, "strong coffee. you are welcome to enjoy it in sanctuary". the rules of sanctity, of decorum, of church and sanctuary were thus broken. i sat in the chapel, children were wandering the aisles, and two of them brought me gerber daisies in appreciation of womanhood -- specifically, motherhood. the sermon was about the gift of motherhood. i thought about being a mother -- something i have given up on as a prospective milestone in my life. i wondered why motherhood was such a mark of honor, aside from the obvious "days are long, years are short" mantra that mothers have to recite in order to avoid infanticide. for a woman, within the confines of institution, a child is not just a symbol of human propogation, of mankind being promoted through the sacrifices of womankind. it has become an individual status symbol. if a woman is married, a child in a stroller signifies value. someone valued me enough to choose me as a mating partner. i have been entrusted with the propogation of a socially competitive member of our species. a child born to an unmarried mother also boasts something -- despite the stigma. her attraction, her temptation, is a two-in-one shame and a glory. or, it is evidence of a lack of education. someone somehow somewhere failed to inform this woman. or, she took the information and ignored it, leaving ignorance as the gateway to the survival of humanity.


fewer women are having children now. why?

what if, instead of parents, everyone had a mentor? what if, instead of adhering to socially or religiously mandated expectations, people adopted mentees and cared for them the same way they cared for their own or prospective children? to foster the growth of just one other human being -- regardless of whether or not they came from your reproductive DNA--to create this buzzword/verbal bullion/award-winning element called change...is it all a matter of demanding individual accountability? fidel castro saw education as a compelling alternative to imprisonment. he also predicted that by the mid 1980s, education would be unnecessary in cuba because cuba's population would be so educated that simply living in cuba would be education enough. that the children of an educated cuba would be naturally exposed (not entitled) to adequate education. maybe they would not be competitive in a globalized world. but what are the virtues of a globalized education? as long as hegemonic ideology abounds, as long as headlines are dominated by agenda, a globalized agenda is only euphemism for the ability to afford a peek into the control room of a faux wizard, one who wishes to propogate rules that serve its own narrow agenda. how brilliant to farm humans through a conveyor belt of beliefs that serve a minority? that rob them of humankind's only hope for survival, and that is independent and uncorrupted thought and insight.

what are we taught to hope for? is hope discussed in school? is hope implied, or is expectation the currency of compulsory "education"?

i ask people who go to high school and junior high, what did you learn today? the answer is invariably, "nothing". i don't chock this up to hormonal disinterest. i think the people that are currently being educated are not being prepared or encouraged to lead. they are being discouraged from thinking outside of pre-approved religion. a religion of creation, consumption, and status.

how cool would it be to visit an earth filled with humans who believe or know only what incidental and informal education has taught them? humans unchained to ideas that build false constructs that seem to satisfy needs for survival while destroying hope for true existence?

what if we were unconcerned with development. what if countries were not defined by their level of "development". what if development itself did not look like a steeled industrial machine. what if millions of people sharing one toilet was unheard of, because someone imagined a better way that didn't step on any financial agendas, if the way your body and soul felt every single day was more precious than any other commodity?

air, space, sound, silence, health -- the things that are irreplaceable and sacred, sell for more imagined wealth than anything else. quality of life. backward people. modernity. we cannot look eachother in the eye. we reject the religion of our parents. but we have nothing to replace it with. what is less absurd about using man's random choices to explain social and global phenomena than using ancient deities to explain the seasons, the existence of an afterlife, the lots dealt to men in this physical life?

in this return to the green, to whole foods, to using recycled grocery bags, to the rich hijacking sustainability as a mark of eptitude...where is the return to original thought? why do we still value "higher" education as the key to a better life?

the key to a better earth lies in this distinction between hope and expectation.

what do we hope for? what do we expect? what was expected of us? what is hoped for for us?

what do we do as a matter of course that builds hope? what do we do as a matter of course that fulfills expectation?

as science is eroded by truth -- and humans recall their roots in magic, in the inexplicable and the incalculable, maybe we will allow for hope to be a more widely accepted pasttime, instead of amplifying expectation as the shortsighted solution to unforeseen disaster.

it's what lies in whitespace, in the silence between the notes, in the words that aren't spoken and the forgotten topics that will elevate humans from formulaic chains to the infinite realms of pure existence.

when the words that we speak create a texture that can be felt and make the eyes of the listener engage and recall a more primitive rhythm, we can begin to make the paradoxical journey -- a forward movement that requires a dedicated return.







No comments:

Post a Comment