Times of Overwhelm

It’s all of those times and none of those times when the conflagration of time and space and living burns a hole in the even tenor of life and opens up the hell tucked away so carefully in the tattered corners of the soul. We all witness the long lines of refugees trailing the bags and bundles of lost dreams through parched and dusty terrain or mud-slick melted countryside or out of cities annihilated to grey mounds in war zones and we know, it could be us.

We reach back beyond memory and feel the terror of our families, of our ancestors and know that they went through this for us and it could be again our turn. We burrow down in front of the flickering box and put on our bravest faces to our children and say, Oh, those poor people. What can’t they all make peace with each other and stop this nonsense?

Putting it over there and out of sight except for the nightly onscreen onslaught gives us the breathing space to pretend that we are not in a time of overwhelm; that we are not dancers of the hanging veils that we use to mirage our day-to-day slide and bump and grind through the human condition.

The people in power put on their grey suits over their grey minds, hoping to move through the morass of unlovely colors, the spectrum of the mierda that we are drowning in. We are taking all the liquid and solid jewels that pump from the bowels of the earth and turning them into weapons of war - coltan, the diamonds and the other rare minerals discovered with great promise to enhance our sojourn on this planet.

We are pumping the energy force of petroleum and turning it into fuel that drives us from here to there meaninglessly, to buy hardly appreciated goods that we throw away in zillions of plastic containers, slowly creeping into our food chain and poisoning our potential to live. Each day we ingest the tide of poison, and hope that the tsunami is far away.

We are creatures of the cave, hiding away our deepest fear of outside predators. But we have long ago passed that wonderful balance we had with the rest of nature when we were no longer the targets and have evolved now into the star predator. Now that we have no competition we prey on each other in ever more subtle ways, disguising our need to survive with concern for others.

We continue to erect those barriers of racism, ethnicity and colour with high barbed walls and resounding slogans as if there were many species of humankind and not just one. We are all wrenched into this world through the agony of childbirth and we all face the door of death in the same way. That is all we need to know along with cooperation, collaboration, consciousness, and love and pitting ourselves also into the downtrodden, heart-searing, lonely and isolated bright promise footsteps of others.

We need to run, hop, jump and dance into these footsteps before their imprints are lost in the mists of the confusion that we weave in order to keep working with those systems of old that strangulate and hog tie us into submission.

The overwhelm threatens our light, the spinning of the magic inside each one of us. Buying into the world of the overwhelm drags us down into the same mud-slicks that our brothers and sisters are being hampered by as they move from the old to the new.

Their mud-slicks suck at their feet but they take each step one after the other as they adjust the wings of hope that each footstep brightens as they move forward. Our footsteps can join theirs in imagination as we lift our hearts from watching their mud-stained steps and work on ways of joining them. We have no right to give up or to give in!