What If?

A Gentle Pre-Inauguration Dance With The Moon

I can’t sleep. It’s not because my mind is racing through apocalyptic potentialities possibly heading our way. No, no dear friends. The world has ended many times before and surely will again, forever and ever amen… This happens! No… I am bright eyed and bushy tailed at 2:00 A.M. because The Moon is beautiful and kind and has generously invited me to dance with Her. And how could I refuse such a lovely offer?

She whispers sweet nothings in my ear as we tip toe through the garden. I feel special for an instant but soon discover I’m not Her only lover and things get rather, how shall I put this… spicy. Several other winged ones come to join in on the merriment, as well as a slithering snake, an owl or two and a horde of laughing frogs. Eventually others join as well. No one is turned away. Everyone welcomed as royalty.

“What if…” asks a caterpillar to a snail, “we were all born to die and it was decay that finally woke us from the ugly illusions that forbade us from dreaming dawn?”

“Ahh! Very good! I like the way you think!”, said the snail in response, as he slid slowly down a flowering vine. “…and what if our identities weren’t limited to concepts and names, that like Madame Caterpillar these containers were but vehicles for radical transformation, temporary, ever-changing, carnivalesque lift-offs into flight?”

Some are terrified now, moaned the willow. As wars and rumors of war spread, fueled by a rapidly changing inner ecology, many fall ill.

It is true enough, remembered coyote. When Mother Earth’s health weakens, we all grow ill too. He threw down his dice and stared into eternity slyly.

The talking ceased for a moment and a little fire mesmerized the interspecies cohort as they considered the rearranging foundations of what many considered to be Truth. Yet deep in their bones they all knew that without night there would be no day and without the mud no lotus could grow. Joy and Sorrow after all, are as inseparable as racism and people who allow it to exist. You simply cannot have one without the other. Every drop of rain understands its relation to the clouds and the bottomless sea. Every bee too knows this simple law. Every porcupine and ladybird, every cucumber and black-eyed pea. We inter-are, you and me.

I surmise then, chimed the wise old owl, that nothing is as it seems. Perhaps instead of ashes we are but seeing the birthing of fertile soil. Perhaps instead of societal meltdown we are seeing the forging of an altogether more beautiful world. Could it be that what we view as sickness is but a revolution being brought about by the Lords of Viral Creativity?

“Time will tell” whispered the moon. “I have seen this all before. Nothing in this world ever lasts. All phenomena eventually passes. Each empire and even the grandest of ideas. Even Space my beloveds, even time. In the end (which doesn’t exist) all that remains is The Dance. As supposed “cease fires” usher in yet further insanity. As baba-ji’s soak their dreadlocks in the now polluted River Ganga. As greed burns a hole deep within the hearts of men, yet again. Yet again. Yet again. Yet again. The whole saga swirls ‘round incessantly, as it always has, forever churning the milk ocean into a frothy pool of possibility. How easy it is to forget Her, blind as we are by our big ideas. How strange to abandon that which gives Light, yet somehow this foolish act is as natural as falling in love. Which begs one to ponder, Might that which we fear most be the very thing that keeps us alive?”

There are people I see every day who have not looked me in the eye for years. There are trees I have walked past thousands of times whom I have never said “hello” to. There are tools I use daily whom I’ve never offered a gift to, sang a song to or even had the courtesy to say “thank you.” to.

Hmmm. I stare into the bluest of flames. What if it is I who needs to look that person in the eye? Could it be that it is I who is being the stingy one? What if I am the slave master, forever forcing Her to do my bidding? Maybe we are not so different after all; man, woman, Palestinian, Jew. Republican, democrat, farmer, water, air.

Last week there was no vine where tonight I frolic. This meandering ecological invader is not indigenous to this place. She seems to have stolen the poor natives homeland, entered without asking permission.

“It’s like this every year” whispers a curious old man to his ancient wife as she patiently pulls at a wild old forest root.

I was here before you but before me there was they and before that those guys invaded that place after many others claimed it temporarily when the other ones were there before them and took it rightfully because it belonged to them because of the book that declared the thing about what happened after the original ones lost it because the land belonged to someone else who forgot about who lived their before them and…

“We have been here forever.” cried the wind.

No beginning, no end.

Suddenly I hear music again. From some far away forest where children play still in moss-laden ponds and aren’t afraid of happy strangers. My chest is tight. I’m tired but fully awake. I hear my daughter calling for me, from another world, right here.

It’s hard to say how long we will be granted time in this place. A few more hundred years? Another day or two? It’s all but a flash of lightning in the dead of night. We come. We eat and steal. We make love, make mistakes, make a little beauty and try our best. And some of us, some brave and simple souls, manage to re-member a wee bit of the goddess… They rise to the occasion, and dance…

Come with me, said the moon.

and I did.

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All blessings:::

gp

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#mayallbeingsbehappyandfree