Today, the middle of the work week, the heat outside cools, it’s feeling a bit like Fall. Starbucks is a hubbub. Those present are regulars to my eye, parents, grandparents seated with children before the kids are off to school and the adults off to the days planned activities.
The world is a collection of patterns, regular activities, customary ways of thinking. We are creatures of habit. Some habits are dysfunctional, unhelpful. The pain is simply overlooked, interpreted as “normal.” It is hard to impossible to take lessons from the usual ebb and flow. Something extraordinary has to happen in order to wake us up. Then we may pay attention, and ask, “What could I do differently?” A hurricane may wake us up; or the election of a tyrannical president; or a diagnosis of cancer.
Some have enough money to buy their way out of almost any circumstance. They resist with anger and resentment anything that may lift them out of that false serenity.
Here is a cherished quotation from one of my notebooks.
THE SECOND COMING
indignant desert bird
Turning, turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
