Beltane Garlic Moon
Be Glad You Exist, the Greek inscription I mentioned a few posts ago, got me thinking. A persistent prod in American culture is the I’m not doing that well enough, or fast enough, or soon enough or with the right attitude. Not studying enough, eating too much, not working enough, not working out enough, not relaxing, not being charitable enough or financially successful enough.
It’s an argument from lack that has as its premise that jockey metaphor I came up with a month or so ago. In case you forgot, I did until just now, I suggested that many of us take on board, sometime in childhood, a jockey who rides us, rides us hard, always pushing us toward the next, the better, the hoped for, the not yet achieved.
This argument from lack is the jockey’s prod, his quirt that comes out when he senses flagging will or decreasing purpose.
But, what if Be Glad You Exist was the baseline? Just that.
Then we might start not from a place of lack but from a place of adding, of completing, of maturing, of enriching. Moving ourselves not with the lash, but with a model more like Maslow’s where the underpinning opens new possibilities, like the emergence of the butterfly, say, from the caterpillar. A caterpillar is not a lesser butterfly, but its necessay precursor.
Orienting ourselves this way (I realize I’m writing about myself here, but maybe a bit about you, too.) does not require the scorched earth of bad diet, bad language skills, inadequacy of any kind; rather, it could have Be Glad You Exist as the ground of our being. Sounds like a good thing to me.
