Old Heart Essay December 5 2014

Old Heart

December 5th 2014

What a depressing day for no reason at all.  Yes, cloudy and rainy and I had to drive to Poulsbo and back, but really?  I feel like crying?

December 6th, 2014

Same sort of terminal feeling this morning; it’s not anxiety.  I think it was triggered by watching a fb video of 2 or 3 cops harassing a black family in a car.  It was horrible.

The whole world is exploding right now.  The media is so toxic I cannot stand to listen even to music.  Riots country wide, protesting low wages and racial prejudice, police brutality and riot brutality, terrorism, and people just trying to escape.  Isn’t it clear YET that we are refugees?  All of us?

Anxiety is a rising feeling.  THIS feeling, however, is a bitter death curling in feeling, that wants deeply to be done.

Angry Gods.  Righteously vigorous Holy men.  Suicidal crusaders and zealous politicians.  Generals.  Brigands and cartels; Anybody who thinks it’s their divine right, duty, profit and/or delight to hurt another human on philosophical, economic, or just plain insane grounds.  I am a woman.  I cannot live here.  It’s grinding the life out of me.

Still, in this America, there is rank prejudice against our own U.S. citizens and small regard for the thousands of souls trying to find refuge legally or not, in the ideals of our country, who are fleeing from murder and mayhem, and we to storm off to other countries, policing their own bigotry?  I saw race riots in our cities.  I watched us extend ourselves with great precision and destruction overseas.  All these mounting conflicts and abominations, because one person thinks he’s better than another.  Actually has the right, or duty, or license, or spiritual authority, to kill.

I am 64 years old and have not yet personally experienced war.  But I grew up on it; Newsreel footage of extermination camps, watching in horror as naked skeletal people, many still barely alive, were dumped by loads into huge graves.  World War II movies with John Waynes of many descriptions.  Supper for four years of high school watching the 6:00 news with my folks.  Nightly body counts, bombings, warnings, and Vietnamese streaming their lives to the ground.  This, padded with the Man from UNCLE, Bond, and several more decades of increasingly brutal war movies which I struggled to avoid, since they make me physically sick, give me terrible nights, and depress me with no end in sight.  

I have watched, with crumbling heart, a world at war boasting the ability to annihilate everything, and proceeding to do so, starting with violence, forming into politics, moving into agriculture, stock, commerce, and ending in extinction.

This is an evil spirit we have aligned with, which despises our potential for peace and quiet and neighborliness, which hates the underlying truth that ultimately, we all have the same mother.

I am not strong or clever enough to deal with this, any more than the whales or the dolphins or the rhinoceros or the elephants, or the cows and pigs, or the vegetation, or the orphans and the homeless.  He has all the weapons, and he has the science, and he has the money, the media, and the governments.  All I have is this hollow old heart.  He is in every way wicked, coldly holier than I, and in spite of all this exposure, my heart still feels every exquisite pain as deep as the first cut.

Anam Cara, I ask you to forgive me my abandonment of manly structures and channels; even ritual and intercession lie almost inert. My stomach is gone.  It is impossible for me to consider myself holy; my own journey is circuitous and I hide a lot.  I too am a refugee--from the world of mankind, from the troubled havens of spiritual community, even the holiest courts of the unseen God;  I have sought these harbors; but all that we have, preached of the Most High in his fury, terrorizes me so much I cannot form even in his mildest presence.  My vapor evaporates immediately in this holy zeal.  This is the fear of Almighty God indeed.  So, where to run?

I have fled to lesser Gods.  Buddha, my guru.  Jesus, my blessed savior.  The Tao, my map and my mother, branching slowly over Europe’s grassy fields into the Celts’ restless wanderings, coming to roost in the Bards and Druids whose blood runs inside me, urging me to remember.  Saint John, my walking companion, who breathes my heart back to warmth. And here, in this America, with all the coydogs, I stumble along with Wakan Tanka wishing I could call down the Rain, wishing I could call up the Buffalo, crying bitter tears because my Red relatives are not. I cannot side with one against the other, brethren, we all serve the table.