The wedding of history with the coffee we drink in our ever shrinking days awakes our need to reinvent love.

Another morning, of the many that I have been lucky to enjoy in my sixty eight years.  Fall comes, the sun shines brightly, and the slight chill promises a comfortable day.  I confess that I awakened to a familiar foreboding, a background tone of anxiety generated by my imagination.  Those closest to us, upon whose well being, our well being depends—have the potential to create hell for us.  My default memory, the background that lies so deep that I cannot excavate the details haunt me with insecurity; a fear of authorities, anyone who wields power.  I know the source.  Raised by a grandmother, who survived the Great Depression, who was raised by a mother who survived reconstruction, the aftermath of the Civil War in the rural South—grandmother was a severe, imperious woman.   A parent is the ultimate authority to the child.  So, the child within remains fearful of a center of authority.  Existentially these are a hurricanes eye, spitting out bands of high wind, and a great storm surge.   My default, the given to be worked with….

The need to reinvent love is unending.  Love is a strong refuge for the battered self.  So, here I am with my coffee at Starbucks awakened to my need to reinvent love.

Philosophy brings us back to simplicity.

Yes, it has and continues to lead me back to what is essential, to the bedrock.  I am not referring to academic philosophy, the hothouse exotica of the professional pontificators.  I am referring to the words that point to the bones, the connecting tissue of existence; the words that illuminate the impartiality of Nature, the interface between beauty and meaning, and trace the mystery of man/woman as a troubled creature capable of great good and great evil.

The wish to inhabit storms leads to cities in flames.  Traces turn into signs and thinking precedes itself in the deep recesses of the brain. Bodies are always naked under their clothes.

Don’t be distracted I remind myself.  There is the surface of glitter, spiked heels, skin-tight jeans, etc. or the the opposite,  adornment of dark tattoo’s dissonant, unartful to my eye.  The mind easily is captured by the surface foam, a distraction from the substance of a personal history, a story that would not be alien to me if I were to hear it.  The surface effects, the noise may seduce us into preparing a strategy of defense, or offense.  Triggered into military mode, such a mind can and has left a city in flames.  The challenge is to listen to the thinking that precedes itself, the unutterable bond that we have with one another, and with Nature.  What every child knows.  Each of us is a standard issue human being, naked under our clothes.

Thanks for listening.

---

The quotations are taken from Night by Etel Adnan.