I’ve been so sick. I think I got food poisoning. I feel a lot better this morning. But I was in bed all day yesterday and slept through the night again last night. Which was just kind of wild, felt like time didn’t exist in the same way. I think I’m learning a lot about how things tend to be in the world from like almost a mechanical perspective? I think there’s like a place in me that remembers a way to be. Sometimes I have trouble accessing that.
I’m more myself than I’ve ever been, but I’m also just following a path that’s shaping that person in specific ways. I’m learning a lot and I’m also just aware that the world is struggling and suffering in profound ways right now and it’s heavy. There’s a sort of hunger for the healing of the world. I see the rips and the gore and the blood everywhere. I feel the complicity. It’s hard to feel that. But in some ways it’s just how the world works. We grow from a seed and then we are immersed in a cultural environment. We are drawn into something that is itself a mechanism that teaches us how to be in the world.
We don’t understand what greed and lust for power are doing. Why food costs so much. Why there’s pollution in the meat we are eating. Why everything is wrapped in plastic. Why racism exists. We don’t understand. We are just in the world. Looking for a friend. In need of a friend. And I think that’s what it’s like to be a human. Seeking to understand, in need of a friend. Perhaps that’s a truer way to be human. I don’t understand, would you be my friend? There is a more violent path that leads to plastic wrapped chicken in a dumpster behind the grocery store while folks go hungry and oil spills in the ocean. A path of lust and use of power for the sake of the image of whomever is seeking that domination.
I think it’s hard for me to understand sometimes. To comprehend. I mean, not that I want to stare deeply into evil. That “not enough” is poison enough. I don’t need “better than” to send me spiraling. This belief that because a person has “made” something of their life in the eyes of others that they are somehow deserving of more consideration than the person who exists in a different way. I think the most profound part of looking into all this has been the profound truth that, “the greatest among you, will be the servant of all.” The more I lean into that the more I am safe. I am safe from the ego pathways that lead me down into the hell of better than.
The spirit in the wilderness tempting him with the lust of possessions, image, and misused power. A material kingdom drenched in blood. A temptation to bend the knee and worship at the feet of existence divorced from trust, the curation of image at the expense of the other, performative engagement. “one cannot truly (be) through the consumption of material food alone, but through the softening to and embrace of every movement that comes from the heart of the blessed”
we were all made to be free and inspired. our governing structures do not share this vision. in such times those with the least access to resources suffer the most.
structures of home 