Beat to a Pulp

Beat to a pulp

I just talked to my best friend, Joe - an ancient soul living in the body of a 21 year old college student....I'm convinced. He's probably the smartest, wisest, kindest, most genuine and noble person I know - in all the right ways. One of the very few people I've met in my life who I know I met for a reason. He has a way of finding a simple answer to even the most complex of qusetions, as if it were obvious all along. He's the kind of person you'd want ruling the world because he's patient, even-tempered, and has an all encompassing sense of inner peace - even though he may not know it yet. He's my hero.

He's been in Kenya since January, traveling around & soaking up the culture, richness, poverty, ignorace, wisdom, depth, value of Africa, or at least a small part of it. He shares my need to travel -and not just to see the world, but to feel it, experience it, soak it up, and be a part of it.

There are so many fucking people living on this planet, and it shatters me to think how few are actually doing something to really be a part of it, to really recognize the suffering that takes place on such a vast and regular basis, and to contribute - even in just a small way - to the healing that is so desperately needed just to maintain a sense of balance, let alone recovery.

I'm guilty of it. I live in one of the most polluted and jaded cities in the world, and I work in an industry that thrives on capitalistic values that are very much at the root of the cancer of society. Greed, pride, ignorance, self-interest. I'm shocked daily by people who toss aside morals that to me seem so blatantly "right" just for the sake of making a buck. "Why should we close this deal with Camel Cigarettes? Because it's a million dollar deal! Sure, I think smoking is wrong, but we need the money."

Burn in hell.

I see it killing each of us every day...the people I work with...the ones with values, at least. This sense of a void of meaning, this cloud of convolution, this complete and desperate resistance to "settle"...as Drew said so perfectly "every day it takes a little piece of my soul." It does. I need out. We all do.

The only thing that keeps me going is the fact that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. That light being my impending trip to India. People keep saying that 4 months is such a long time to spend in a place like India, but to me it's nothing. How can I really see, feel, experience, learn as much as I want to in 4 short months. That's only a 3rd of a year, of many within a lifetime that so many people spend in suffering.

Even still, I need it. I need to feel something real. Sure I've experienced pain - the universal pain we all feel....the void of childhood, the loss of lovers and friends, the longing for those we know we will never have, the constant struggle to find something familiar within yourself and within another....But there's so much more. We get so wrapped up in these personal struggles - which are very real, don't get me wrong, and very necessary to a point. But they're just the tip of the iceberg of a bigger, more universal suffering of which we're all a part of, but so often fail to acknowledge.

Everyone keeps telling me to "be prepared..." "Be prepared for the poverty.....be prepared for the illness...be prepared for the ignorance, the filth, the suffering, the violence, the anger, the hate." But the truth of the matter is there's no way to prepare. All there is to do is to strip myself of expectations, of my needs, my beliefs, my values, my fear....and go. I need to allow myself to be slapped in the face, beat to a pulp, and spit out by something so blindingly real that there's nothing left of who I was before. I need for all my judgements, my hate, my insecurities to be belittled by this "bigger picture" of which I am just a mere particle, floating on a small, insignificant path. And then - and only then - will I know what's real, what's true, what's right within my own mind and heart, and what part I'm meant to play in this big, cyclical game of life.

Or not.....we'll see.

Individualism

"...I said to myself, 'I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me...shapes and ideas so near to me...so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.' I decided to start anew - to strip away what I had been taught - to accept as true my own thinking."

-Georgia O'Keeffe