Daily Archives: December 17, 2011

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Literature, Myth and Story

The Simple Life. Bah, Humbug

Leave a comment

Samain                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” – Henry David Thoreau

(Walden Pond, 2010)

When I bought my farm up near Nevis, Minnesota, Thoreau and I would have been on the same page.  The Peaceable Kingdom had its own well, a septic system and heat provided by the forest I owned.  Of course, that year the simple life saw a divorce, the temperature hit -50 and a heavier yet reliance on beer and scotch.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think simplicity is a beautiful thing.  Then again, so is complexity.  If my body simplified itself, there wouldn’t be much me left.  If my consciousness simplified itself, the rest would slip away.

There will always be, of course, the few who take the Taoist monk approach, a life lived close to nature.  There will be, too, those folks who just find wilderness better company than the rest of us and who’s to say they’re wrong?

Me, though, I love samsara, this whole roiling, boiling mess we have for a place to live.  I love computers and television and movies and books, philosophical and political thought and action.  I love relationships, messy and unwieldy and complicated as they can be.  I love art, often complex and difficult.

I suppose this means I’ll never have a Walden experience or the insight of wandering through the Tao.  I’m ok with that.  If you need simplicity, then seek it, make it so.

As for me, give me complexity or give me, well, what?  Greater complexity.

 

Politics

Five Fists In the Air

Leave a comment

Samain                                  Moon of the Winter Solstice

Protesters as Person of the Year.  Tyranny comes at a price, at first often with an invisible price.  Who can see thwarted dreams, diminished freedom?  An early reaction to tyranny may be to turn anger toward oneself, increasing domestic violence, suicide, anxiety, depression.

If tyranny has an effective enforcement arm, then the early reactions can change to despair and, worst of all, resignation.  Eastern bloc countries under Soviet rule.  Native Americans on reservations around the turn of the last century.  Nanking under the Japanese.

Even despair, though, masks, does not eliminate, the human desire for liberty.  Any tiny crack in the casing of despair or fear can bring outsized responses.  Just ask Qaddafi, Mubarak, Assad, Wall Street.

Protest speaks the language of despair, gives visibility to the invisible.  Protest changes our perceptual range so we can see into the infrared end of the political spectrum, the place where the oppressor’s hand lies heavy but hidden.

Some Occupy Wall Street folks say their time in the occupying camps are the highlight of their lives.  Of course.  Whenever we stand up, say enough, our lives themselves become visible, tangible, even to ourselves.