Back from a stay in the UP - an unadorned cabin without running water or electricity, miles from anywhere, perfect for the mind and for someone who doesn't have to make a living there. For those who do, it would be better to move to the southern industrial lands where one can clink out widgets or print spread sheets in safe comfort. Work there is often primary - cutting lumber or digging mines - dangerous, hard stuff in a hard climate.
There is one guy up the are, though, who lives there year-round, solo, scraping by on fish and game that I presume he gets before four feet of snow blankets the area for 4 months. Would I like that?
While living with the Indians in the Amazon area, I would take a long nap in my hammock every afternoon along with everyone else, and then wake, bathed in sweat, wondering why the hell I was wasting my life doing this. Why, real life was happening back home, passing me by as I grew older swinging in a hammock in the dull, thick heat. But of course it was not passing me by anymore than it is right here. What was I thinking? And yet I was. In the UP, I get to feel that I am missing out on the lives of others I know - and perhaps that's it. The real world consists of a world filled with people we know. They make our world real just as we do the same for them. It is not the landscape but the people who make reality, each his brother's keeper. As such, one would think that we could change realities in much the way we change moods.
Trouble is, we do not control our moods - but some can do this for us, and we love them for it. The Grateful Dead kept the dream of the 60 acid hippies alive for generations of followers. They had the power. Charley Manson had another sort of power as he changed realities, and (not comparing him with these others in kind) so did the great religious leaders of the ages. Perhaps people experienced miracles at Dead concerts. I wouldn't be surprised. Realities can be changed that much, or so we have learned from holy scripture as well as from such places at Lourdes.
But from what I can see, making a living in the UP is just a tough slog. It is far easier to meditate in a cabin with canned food bought in the flat lands than to catch it or pay for it with the efforts it takes up north. For all but a few, rapture can only overcome gravity for so long.
Blaise Pascal (17th century) thought the very same. In his collection of thoughts in Pensees, Pascal (taken from Christian Mystics by Ursual King) "dwells on the suffering and misery of the human condition, the 'inconstancy, boredom, anxiety of human life, immersed in ceaseless activity, faced with the inevitability of death.' Our existence is held in tension between two poles: 'Wretchedness of man without God, happiness of man with God.' " And this happiness is bought by the grace of faith alone, unmerited, through the heart.
And it is true: what Pascal describes from the 17th century is what our lives largely are today. I will read Pascal in greater detail in the future, but from what I understand now, we can only pray and hope, pray and hope that such grace is given to us - the only compensation being that this is unmerited (and so we common folk are just as worthy), for no human on his own deserves the presence of God. And yet...while the burden of life will inevitably affect all but a very select few, there will also be rapture and realization, and it can be bought, too; for millions, is was bought with money for a ticket to a Dead concert. The money did not do the trick, of course: but was it grace that gave them such rapture? To answer this, we might ask: was it grace that gave the Dead the ability to create this rapture?
Yes. Talent is given, not earned, and the greatest talent one might have is the ability to change reality, if even for a while. But to appreciate talent is also a gift - why is one so affected by a certain art or scene while others are not? This is also undeserved. And so we might think that many of us, perhaps most of us (most probably), are born for rapture, for a prolonged ecstatic experience that takes us above the common reality of boredom and anxiety that we have created. And also, that many of us - not as many, but not just a few - have the grace-given talent to so elevate others. Yes, there are raptures and there are raptures - some of much greater meaning than others - but apparently we are made for it, and some made to be its conduit.
And so, I would say that we are built for the experience; that we are not dead souls dependent on a spark that may never come, but are born with this spark and only need the right kindling to get the fire going. For this, we must keep aware and open; for this, we must not put the wet leaves of weary skepticism on the spark, or hide it behind a sheet of dark fear. We should understand that It is there, as I should have known in my hammock, waiting as the world passed by. At that, I must also believe that the kindling was there in both worlds all along, for I have found much in this since, but I had not recognized it; and so it was my greatest task to understand this.
Beyond that, we leave the other, the deeper, the gift of the spark, to God; not as a grace that might be doled out stingily to a few, but as our universal heritage, our mercy and our hope. FK
There is one guy up the are, though, who lives there year-round, solo, scraping by on fish and game that I presume he gets before four feet of snow blankets the area for 4 months. Would I like that?
While living with the Indians in the Amazon area, I would take a long nap in my hammock every afternoon along with everyone else, and then wake, bathed in sweat, wondering why the hell I was wasting my life doing this. Why, real life was happening back home, passing me by as I grew older swinging in a hammock in the dull, thick heat. But of course it was not passing me by anymore than it is right here. What was I thinking? And yet I was. In the UP, I get to feel that I am missing out on the lives of others I know - and perhaps that's it. The real world consists of a world filled with people we know. They make our world real just as we do the same for them. It is not the landscape but the people who make reality, each his brother's keeper. As such, one would think that we could change realities in much the way we change moods.
Trouble is, we do not control our moods - but some can do this for us, and we love them for it. The Grateful Dead kept the dream of the 60 acid hippies alive for generations of followers. They had the power. Charley Manson had another sort of power as he changed realities, and (not comparing him with these others in kind) so did the great religious leaders of the ages. Perhaps people experienced miracles at Dead concerts. I wouldn't be surprised. Realities can be changed that much, or so we have learned from holy scripture as well as from such places at Lourdes.
But from what I can see, making a living in the UP is just a tough slog. It is far easier to meditate in a cabin with canned food bought in the flat lands than to catch it or pay for it with the efforts it takes up north. For all but a few, rapture can only overcome gravity for so long.
Blaise Pascal (17th century) thought the very same. In his collection of thoughts in Pensees, Pascal (taken from Christian Mystics by Ursual King) "dwells on the suffering and misery of the human condition, the 'inconstancy, boredom, anxiety of human life, immersed in ceaseless activity, faced with the inevitability of death.' Our existence is held in tension between two poles: 'Wretchedness of man without God, happiness of man with God.' " And this happiness is bought by the grace of faith alone, unmerited, through the heart.
And it is true: what Pascal describes from the 17th century is what our lives largely are today. I will read Pascal in greater detail in the future, but from what I understand now, we can only pray and hope, pray and hope that such grace is given to us - the only compensation being that this is unmerited (and so we common folk are just as worthy), for no human on his own deserves the presence of God. And yet...while the burden of life will inevitably affect all but a very select few, there will also be rapture and realization, and it can be bought, too; for millions, is was bought with money for a ticket to a Dead concert. The money did not do the trick, of course: but was it grace that gave them such rapture? To answer this, we might ask: was it grace that gave the Dead the ability to create this rapture?
Yes. Talent is given, not earned, and the greatest talent one might have is the ability to change reality, if even for a while. But to appreciate talent is also a gift - why is one so affected by a certain art or scene while others are not? This is also undeserved. And so we might think that many of us, perhaps most of us (most probably), are born for rapture, for a prolonged ecstatic experience that takes us above the common reality of boredom and anxiety that we have created. And also, that many of us - not as many, but not just a few - have the grace-given talent to so elevate others. Yes, there are raptures and there are raptures - some of much greater meaning than others - but apparently we are made for it, and some made to be its conduit.
And so, I would say that we are built for the experience; that we are not dead souls dependent on a spark that may never come, but are born with this spark and only need the right kindling to get the fire going. For this, we must keep aware and open; for this, we must not put the wet leaves of weary skepticism on the spark, or hide it behind a sheet of dark fear. We should understand that It is there, as I should have known in my hammock, waiting as the world passed by. At that, I must also believe that the kindling was there in both worlds all along, for I have found much in this since, but I had not recognized it; and so it was my greatest task to understand this.
Beyond that, we leave the other, the deeper, the gift of the spark, to God; not as a grace that might be doled out stingily to a few, but as our universal heritage, our mercy and our hope. FK
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