56

Those who know don’t talk.
Those who talk don’t know.

   Close your mouth,
   block off your senses,
   blunt your sharpness,
   untie your knots,
   soften your glare,
   settle your dust.
   This is the primal identity.

Be like the Tao.

It can’t be approached or withdrawn from,
benefited or harmed,
honored or brought into disgrace.
It gives itself up continually.
That is why it endures.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, trans, by Stephen Mitchell

Others describe with a precision that I admire, and with words more vivid, stark and compelling than I can muster – this rising darkness that has been brewing for generations. Conversations take place about what if anything can be done to slam on the brakes, find a switch to shunt aside this run-away train of ignorance and rage. Assassination does not seem out of place in this zeigeist. Irrational and naked force is revered as if fallen from heaven (or having arrived out of hell). Extortion and blackmail as official policy. All of this did not materialize unaccountably, ex nihilo.

Present day America began when Europeans arrived believing everything they saw was theirs for the taking. So we slaughtered those already living here, forcing the survivors to live on land we didn’t want. Also, enslaved Africans were shamelessly used on rice and cotton plantations. JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, participated too by accepting enslaved people as collateral for loans, insuring slave ships and owners, providing loans for plantations, and financing the Southern cotton economy. 

What is to be said? Nothing really.

We are receiving the effect of what we have desired from the very beginning.

Words must fail, nothing conceivable expresses what we have done and now are doing…

And yet, you and I friend must simply live. Live without justification or excuse. 

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I dreamed this morning. Or was I dreamed?

In predawn twilight I drove a road-weary, battered old truck on a wind and rain lashed two lane country road. In the truck bed was secure a load of something, I never knew what. The freight must be delivered. Headlights illuminated a narrow bridge just ahead. I could see the timbers were broken, twisted, buckled from abuse and neglect. I knew that bridge would never bear the weight of this truck. Unable to make a full three sixty degree turn on the narrow road, I abandoned the truck across the road, a barrier to anyone else who might put their life at risk by crossing that bridge. I stood for a moment and walked away.

Then I awakened, in a cold sweat. 

“The bridge” is our Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States. We stand before a derelict, broken bridge…

*The header image is of Gandalf facing the Balrog on the bridge of Khazad-dûm, Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.