It wasn’t much. The days have been hot and dry and clear, bad for gardens and for the big industrial farms of the area, but beautiful for the light and shade and freedom of living without need of coats or shoes or, if we were another people, underwear. For me, I have had a special bonus of seeing beautiful sorrel colors everywhere, an intense reddish brown in the trees and the earth and horses and the deer. Whitish color deer, it is said, are a portent of a deep winter, but bright sorrels mean nothing to me. They are only a particular sort of beauty that I had never thought of, a new idea painted in living color.
All good, all the more wonderful until a minor comment from someone hit like a poison dart, a pinprick of anger that was so small that it should have passed like a touch of intestinal gas. Instead, for some reason the beauty not only withdrew from my life, but disappeared altogether like a half-forgotten dream – as if it had never been.
The badness has mostly left. The poison has worked its way through, it’s strong effect akin to a flash from a little alcohol on an empty stomach. But how could it be? How could days of happiness and wonder vanish with one spate of bad humor?
Then again, why would it not? Isn’t that the way it is? How often do we let – I said “let” – little things mess up the big things?
It has certainly been that way with politics for many years, and recently that other thing, the nasty little disease that flew on silken wings from the east. Ruined, we were brought to think, our lives have been ruined, doomed, destroyed. Certainly, either from politics or disease, some were and some will be and all will be eventually, but not one sorrel horse or beautiful, sun-lit day will be blotted out because of any political posture or lab-fueled virus. Everything remains as beautiful and wondrous and awe-some as before. The difference is only that an interior cloud, a dark shadow, has come to block what most everyone should see.
This shadow has always been at the forefront of the thinking of the great philosopher philanthropists. Why, they ask, are we unhappy? We do have to work by the sweat of our brow, as was said of Adam and Eve after the Great Expulsion, but is that the full reason? Does weeding a cornfield neuter the rhythm of summer or squelch the perfume of wild roses? Does daily monotony by itself suck out all the joy of living? Or is it the poison dart, the stings of bad humor and bad intentions that cause us the most suffering?
We might think of the sociology of group conformity, or the psychology of the ego, or the political science of class structure, but all of it begins with ourselves. The problem then becomes a matter of will: are we free-agents or more like puppets being bounced around like emotional billiard balls on some giant god’s pool table? I contend that we are both; that in this beautiful world we are both twisted by bad humor and bad events, but also have the ability to say “no” to them on a lasting level. Otherwise we are thrown about like cannon balls on a ship at sea, or, as said, are forced to dance like puppets on the strings of fate.
I for one have never been very good at self-control, and have even extolled the freedom of emotion as if I were Isadora Duncan dancing naked and drunk in the Fontana di Trevi (we might now say, “a rock band in a Vegas ‘pleasure’ house). But I have since found that the forfeit of control to emotional whims often runs contrary to the inherent wonder of nature. For instance, it turned out that my reaction to that small verbal slight was a prelude to high humidity and a slate of roiling thunderstorms. And so my days of joy were more likely dashed by a change of atmospheric pressure.
So it is with the uncontrolled; so it is that we touch on something that the afore-mentioned philosophers of human joy should never forget: that whether or not the masses control the means of production, a baby will still cry, will throw fits, and then will be as gentle as a lamb; and whether or not we are raised in the slums or a golden ghetto, we will find fault with others and will resent any slight to our egos. To be at the mercy of fate, to body chemistry and physical accidents and so on, we forfeit prolonged happiness. We are not blank slates, then, but creatures of change, of calms and storm, and only the force of will can smooth those tempests. Were we wise enough, we might even see beauty in the worst of storms and calm in the highest seas.
Gautama Buddha was beset by tigers and demons as he sat unperturbed beneath the bodhi tree; Jesus of Nazareth took a nap in a fishing boat during a great storm while his panicked disciples begged for mercy. Both knew that beneath all horrors and storms is an eternal calm, and within that calm a beauty and joy without end. They knew because they were no longer controlled by the things of nature, but rather lived within nature as full humans, as people of will. Most of us cannot reach this state, but we can have faith that what they said and experienced were true. In this faith is the wisdom that shows reason for calm, a wisdom that stands, as the Old Time Religion says, as “a rock and a savior.”
Such calm and joy will not be secured inside a Skinner box or in a radical classroom. Those things and ideas are of this world only, jagged earthly rocks on a small coast in an infinite sea. Calm and joy can only be found in the depths of this sea, that which has been called the spiritual realm, which imparts eternal beauty to temporal things. To dive deeply within takes astounding faith and courage. I have not found that fortitude yet, but the time for strength is soon coming. It is coming for everyone. Will we panic amidst the jagged rocks on shore, or seek the Rock of Ages, not matter how deeply it lies? What will rule in the end, the given of passing nature or the will to enter eternal beauty?
It wasn’t much. The days have been hot and dry and clear, bad for gardens and for the big industrial farms of the area, but beautiful for the light and shade and freedom of living without need of coats or shoes or, if we were another people, underwear. For me, I have had a special bonus of seeing beautiful sorrel colors everywhere, an intense reddish brown in the trees and the earth and horses and the deer. Whitish color deer, it is said, are a portent of a deep winter, but bright sorrels mean nothing to me. They are only a particular sort of beauty that I had never thought of, a new idea painted in living color.
All good, all the more wonderful until a minor comment from someone hit like a poison dart, a pinprick of anger that was so small that it should have passed like a touch of intestinal gas. Instead, for some reason the beauty not only withdrew from my life, but disappeared altogether like a half-forgotten dream – as if it had never been.
The badness has mostly left. The poison has worked its way through, it’s strong effect akin to a flash from a little alcohol on an empty stomach. But how could it be? How could days of happiness and wonder vanish with one spate of bad humor?
Then again, why would it not? Isn’t that the way it is? How often do we let – I said “let” – little things mess up the big things?
It has certainly been that way with politics for many years, and recently that other thing, the nasty little disease that flew on silken wings from the east. Ruined, we were brought to think, our lives have been ruined, doomed, destroyed. Certainly, either from politics or disease, some were and some will be and all will be eventually, but not one sorrel horse or beautiful, sun-lit day will be blotted out because of any political posture or lab-fueled virus. Everything remains as beautiful and wondrous and awe-some as before. The difference is only that an interior cloud, a dark shadow, has come to block what most everyone should see.
This shadow has always been at the forefront of the thinking of the great philosopher philanthropists. Why, they ask, are we unhappy? We do have to work by the sweat of our brow, as was said of Adam and Eve after the Great Expulsion, but is that the full reason? Does weeding a cornfield neuter the rhythm of summer or squelch the perfume of wild roses? Does daily monotony by itself suck out all the joy of living? Or is it the poison dart, the stings of bad humor and bad intentions that cause us the most suffering?
We might think of the sociology of group conformity, or the psychology of the ego, or the political science of class structure, but all of it begins with ourselves. The problem then becomes a matter of will: are we free-agents or more like puppets being bounced around like emotional billiard balls on some giant god’s pool table? I contend that we are both; that in this beautiful world we are both twisted by bad humor and bad events, but also have the ability to say “no” to them on a lasting level. Otherwise we are thrown about like cannon balls on a ship at sea, or, as said, are forced to dance like puppets on the strings of fate.
I for one have never been very good at self-control, and have even extolled the freedom of emotion as if I were Isadora Duncan dancing naked and drunk in the Fontana di Trevi (we might now say, “a rock band in a Vegas ‘pleasure’ house). But I have since found that the forfeit of control to emotional whims often runs contrary to the inherent wonder of nature. For instance, it turned out that my reaction to that small verbal slight was a prelude to high humidity and a slate of roiling thunderstorms. And so my days of joy were more likely dashed by a change of atmospheric pressure.
So it is with the uncontrolled; so it is that we touch on something that the afore-mentioned philosophers of human joy should never forget: that whether or not the masses control the means of production, a baby will still cry, will throw fits, and then will be as gentle as a lamb; and whether or not we are raised in the slums or a golden ghetto, we will find fault with others and will resent any slight to our egos. To be at the mercy of fate, to body chemistry and physical accidents and so on, we forfeit prolonged happiness. We are not blank slates, then, but creatures of change, of calms and storm, and only the force of will can smooth those tempests. Were we wise enough, we might even see beauty in the worst of storms and calm in the highest seas.
Gautama Buddha was beset by tigers and demons as he sat unperturbed beneath the bodhi tree; Jesus of Nazareth took a nap in a fishing boat during a great storm while his panicked disciples begged for mercy. Both knew that beneath all horrors and storms is an eternal calm, and within that calm a beauty and joy without end. They knew because they were no longer controlled by the things of nature, but rather lived within nature as full humans, as people of will. Most of us cannot reach this state, but we can have faith that what they said and experienced were true. In this faith is the wisdom that shows reason for calm, a wisdom that stands, as the Old Time Religion says, as “a rock and a savior.”
Such calm and joy will not be secured inside a Skinner box or in a radical classroom. Those things and ideas are of this world only, jagged earthly rocks on a small coast in an infinite sea. Calm and joy can only be found in the depths of this sea, that which has been called the spiritual realm, which imparts eternal beauty to temporal things. To dive deeply within takes astounding faith and courage. I have not found that fortitude yet, but the time for strength is soon coming. It is coming for everyone. Will we panic amidst the jagged rocks on shore, or seek the Rock of Ages, not matter how deeply it lies? What will rule in the end, the given of passing nature or the will to enter eternal beauty?
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