June 14, 2016 by IdealisticRebel

How Many More?

I don’t have an answer for the question, How Many More?, and I wish I did. What I do know is that we need more music, art, conversation, love, compassion, caring, random acts of compassion. We need to take care our ourselves and our own issues remembering there is not one of us that is perfect. We need to heal our own blemishes first before even beginning to think about someone else’s problems.

Kindness should come before boasting, healing hands before violent ones, medicines to cure diseases should come before guns. Food for every person should come before Christian Dior bags (and I love them). Housing should come before a luxury car. Trees to improve the air we breathe should come before chemicals in our food. Clean water should come before stock dividends. Helping someone should come before what color their skin is, what their sexual preference is, or what spiritual path they follow.

Peace should come before war, being a part of the family of man should be more important than how different someone seems to be. Action is more important than talking about mass shootings and doing kindnesses is more important than thinking these events should never have happened. Perhaps most important, those who have been taught not to think for themselves and not to speak must learn to speak once again or for the first time.

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Unlearning not to speak

Blizzards of paper

in slow motion

sift through her

In nightmares she suddenly recalls

a class she signed up for

but forgot to attend.

Now it is too late.

Now it is time for finals:

losers will be shot.

Phrases of men who lectured her

drift and rustle in piles:

Why don’t you speak up?

Why are you shouting”

You have the wrong answer,

wrong line, wrong face.

They tell her she is womb-man,

babymachine, mirror, and penis-poor,

a dish of synthetic strawberry ice cream

rapidly melting.

She grunts to a halt.

She must learn to speak

starting with I

Starting with we

starting as the infant does

with her own true hunger

and pleasure

and rage.

—Marge Piercy, feminist poet and novelist

World Peace everywhere for everyone

April 6, 2014 by IdealisticRebel

Interpreting Your Life

“The decision to speak out is the vocation and lifelong peril by which the intellectual must live.” —Kay Boyle

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“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged…I had poems which were rewritten so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.” —Erica Jong

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There are ordinary truths and eloquent truths. The ordinary truth is that some painters can garner six figures for their canvases while you probably can’t. The eloquent truth is that this abrasive fact need not alter your resolve to live an authentic life. The ordinary truth is that you will make mistakes and messes and fall short many times. The eloquent truth is that this need not defeat you, that you can keep trying and that you can keep kicking. When you marry these two ideas—willing yourself to matter and willing yourselves to reckon with the facts of existence—you truth becomes much more eloquent.

We should be reminded of Sisyphus, who was doomed to toil for all time rolling a stone up a mountain but who rebelled by asserting an essential freedom of attitude. They myth of Sisyphus and his stone is the story of a man reckoning with the facts of existence and not subcumbing to them. Had he succumbed to them, he would have been left with nothing but an eternity of pain. Here is how the myth ends, Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of the stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

A creator’s task is to reckon with the facts of existence very much as Sisyphus reckons with his. Viewed one way, it is a cruel, harsh and punitive universe. A creator might come to the same conclusion about his/her situation, were he/she to tote up the facts of existence not to his/her liking. Sisyphus has decided to force his life to mean. He makes use of the freedom at his disposal and reckons that, as he is not dead, he still has meaning to make. It seems absurd to call him happy but if that is how he sees his life, then who can argue with him?

We all have the choice to decide what our life is worth and what we have to give to others to make the world a better place. Let each and every one of us make the decision that benefits their inner needs. I choose to give back. I choose to make a difference. You can make your choices.