Writing Home

We write to remember. To be remembered. To discover ourselves. To reveal ourselves.

A friend sent a video of Obama, an excerpt from one of the debates. She said she follows and favors Obama at this point in "the race"...while waiting for the appearance of any candidate "willing to weigh in strongly on the side of PEACE."

I watched the video and wrote "Where is Marianne Williamson when we need her?"

Then I selected the text, deleted it and instead wrote (and sent)

I remain, unfortunately, unimpressed by any of the candidates presently in the race. I am beginning to believe that the most responsible route is to get educated and stand with the political scientists, social activists and others who are spreading the word about the myriad fucked-up systems and policies that are, at varying rates, eroding the freedom, prosperity, security and general well-being of all life forms on the planet.

Or

to pour the rest of my life hours into artistic and spiritual expression and exploration.

I am influenced by the world and the lives of the people in it. I was introduced to the concept of humans as spiritual beings having physical experiences (in contrast to physical beings having intermittent spiritual experiences) fifteen years ago in Gary Zukav's book "Seat of the Soul". The concept and the book changed my life.

Just hours before receiving my friend's email message, I heard a radio interview of Robert Reich about his new book "Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Every Day Life". The discussion provoked a roiling despair in me, a seething discontent and I watched the Obama video less than half an hour later. The radio interview changed my life in the short term. Moving in my sensorium like smoke in a glass cylinder, it set the mood in which I listened to Obama's remarks.

Tonight, I watched the PBS film, "The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo". The biography was gracefully edited and delivered a portrait of an artist who lived passionately from the beginning to the end of her life. And I felt the fascination and envy that I always feel when confronted by stories of passion.

She was mostly bedridden in the final years of her life. She loved Diego Rivera. The relationship was not easy. In her journal, during the bedridden years, she wrote of her love for Diego in what sounds to me like the voice of a spiritual being have a physical experience of love.

I compared my life to hers as I watched the film--the risks she took, the rules she broke, the things she did that I have assiduously prohibited myself from doing. And I remembered, as I always do since being introduced to the concept in The Book of Runes, that it is foolish to compare my life to any other. It is tiresome stumbling on uneven ground into a dead-end.

When the movie ended, I checked my email and found a response from my friend:

i'm in favor of the latter. . . the former isn't much fun and easily leads to severe frustration, along w/increasing feelings of hopelessness. besides which, if what u focus on expands, then focusing on the problem is likely to get us more of -- guess what -- the problem. make art. repeat.

yeah.

Something is breaking through (or trying to breakthrough?) in my life. I often feel it while writing here. Fissures, hairline cracks in the swollen, stretched tight skin of my upper arms where something molten and sacred is swelling, near bursting.

Or it feels other times like my life is approaching the time to lay down a very heavy burden I have been carrying for a very long time; to take off the long, black coat forever.

Like a spiritual being having a physical remembrance of freedom. Of home.