Good morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between. First coffee of 5785 is sweet.
Today is also National Poetry Day. It’s been a while since I posted in poem… I roam the SM landscape usually looking for animal posts, always have. I run into the “other stuff” occasionally and we all know it’s bad. Very few good news. A couple of days ago I found a simple video of a girl and a cat like millions of others. But not so much.
For some reason I can’t explain it made me think of life as we know it and as we wish it. Of all that is wrong in this world more than of what’s right. All our struggles and battles, everything we find unacceptable, the bane of our existence. Every single conflict begins and ends inside us. And that’s where it exists. Looking at the man in the mirror I hardly recognize him; he changed so much. He’s old, he looks tired. Time passes.
There’s no trace of happiness on his face except for a glimpse of the child within and the gratitude for life itself which is now renewed after a brief encounter with the prospect of an untimely death. Then it occurs to me death is expected to be so and rarely otherwise but I am still grateful and still aspire to live long. Don’t we all. We depend on hardships to appreciate their absence as if without them we’d be oblivious of what a good life is, free from suffering.
We often forget the true meaning of harmony and balance and pretend good can exist on its own. It can’t. We wouldn’t be able to recognize it if it did and the feeling of utter emptiness and sadness, seemingly inexplicable, would be nothing more than the absence of evil. And it all plays out inside ourselves, where it all begins and all stops. It looks like at times our perceptions are created by our actions rather than the opposite, in a game of excuses we play to sleep at night.
There is much evil in this world and we could use less of it, for sure. Balance. The reason we’re so upset with our world is not because evil exists in it but because so little good remains. Perhaps we are looking at it wrong. Perhaps we should be focusing on creating more good rather than eliminating more of all that’s bad. We’ve been trying to put out the fire with gasoline for so long we don’t even notice it anymore.
You can’t get rid of one thing in this world that would fix all others as there are so many reasons for torment in our lives but if I could I would take two of them out: hate and greed. Trust me, there would still be many other wrongs to make right but at least our lives would feel lighter and we’d have a fairer shot at happiness. We need more acts of kindness and more love in our lives, even when in battle. It’s hard. When someone hates you it consumes part of your loving soul.
That’s perhaps what hit me, watching that girl and that cat. It wasn’t the peaceful simple life it portrayed that moved me. It was all that lays behind it: the sadness and hardship, the hatred and greed, the torment of life itself. Without them that girl and her cat would be just another clip among millions of others. Meaningless. As it is, it turned out to be what I wish life could be, in a few seconds. How wonderful would it be to live life so simple and perfectly balanced.
Do not allow evil to consume you for that is what it does: it turns you into it. In a world of hate, please love. Be kind and selfless in the face of greed. You don’t have to stop fighting to do these things. You will find your heart lighter and your soul lifted. A sparkle of light in a sea of darkness. The calm within the torment. Hope where none existed before. You will become the promise. Trust me on this.
Have a peaceful sweet day. 🍯🍎
The girl and cat video:
