When There Are Only Two Places Under the Sun Warming Hearts,
and Vast Others of Living Generations Need Their Own
By Don Jessup Blake Long
© March 11, 2022
What if the imperial middle tiny spectrum of liberal to liberation political and cultural cosmic battle and this beautifully made but suffocating narrow bandwidth is quite righteously widening, patiently suffering and courageously transfiguring in joyful amazing grace?
What if this neoliberal center is of all dominant and alternative political cultures in history, past, present and future, not beasts and not Gods but like equal good/bad hegemonies and God’s servant leaders who are blind like all others in this way of intoxicating love of God, power, wealth and authority with a sense of transcendence and a delicious taste of germinal feet in moist, cold mud of sacred indigenous ground of being?
And what if they are the most highly evolved of civilizations, faiths and sciences, and sophisticated of sophists, best of all good and bad fighting lawyers, advocates on every side of every issue like Gandhi though not ever for certain kinds of people, if you know what I mean…
What if modern full postal -modern, -liberal, -colonial, -structural -(philosophy and theology together as powerful commonsense, intellectual and spiritual source of joy) and simply purifying post of everything before but not too certain or affirming or hopeful of any Inspiring Futures for All, if indeed for anyone were now the overwhelming wall of sound and this is disintegrating noise blasting through all those who nonetheless remain and rejoice and race to the top in agile becoming, supple lively spirits of realism and all wondrously easy and available when needed transcendental idealist unitive, present and mindful followers -!and politicians were all great communicators as actors, and actors as the builders of great communications and moral surveillance and homeland security systems?
And now not what if but now simply look again upon the world today, our nation, our arenas of power, policy and politics that begin in the personal, family and community and simultaneously actually begin far more powerfully in the higher public embodying realms, axes, tiers and spheres dominating, confining and desiccating all areas of life—religious, cultural, political, economic, intellectual, social and linguistic—their traumatizing traumas of resenting each other for their being, ideology and mere presence causing these traumatizing traumas on everyone today.
Please, please me, stop, take sabbath rest, and everyone take flight from freedom, this insane society and cultivate your own gardens and separate peace again of sheltering support systems of self-compassion, self-love, selfhood, self-actualizing and self-centering awakenings and enlightened staircasing dancing across endless new beginnings of infinity, as well as moral crusades and armies of helpers, lovers, friends and all manner of great varieties of counselors, yoga teachers, pastors, therapists, psychiatrists, psychosocial to existential modern analysts, medications, meditation apps, especially those with Thich Nhat Hahn, and other spiritual practices, and while the world like Rome continues to burn, we are in cheerful, cool, resolute, virtuous and good places with other good peoples in various self-affirming good jobs, faiths, professions and now cocreating our own joyful long evolutionary arcs of our universe with or without borders that bends toward our well-deserved justice.
I find there is a certain acid rain thoroughly saturating all flesh and minds and spirits, a ghastly smiling specter who roams to and for and pleased to help these ancient postmodern recurring patterns of infinite lawyerly polemics, conflicts and solidarities of coexistence now even boldly accusing and condemning outsiders as the hounds of hell, deceit and self-annihilation.
Such is the violent but sublimated dynamic but optimally anxious world as divided if fortunate to be “free” at least according to self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the Constitution.
But whether freely or formally, dissenting or coercive, two places or powers are mutually dependent and enriching of loving one another as enemies and strangers. and these mutually namaste greeting powers are always occupying all differing, intersectional, wholly other or the sane opposing centers, top to bottom, in a constant loopified continuum of overheating rhetoric, oppression, repression, liberality and liberation. Their rotating and sharing and changing places is quite dizzying, we are swept away and down again in this vortex of the established higher powers, their heroic upside downing of one another, their passionate calling out of hegemonies beasts and then becoming lesser ones when in power.
But they like Zelda and Fitzgerald madly in love and ecstatically unstuck and lost in the madness of civilization and those the same of ancient wisdom practices now commodified and quite reasonably priced, they are also in holding onto both opposing truths as the indelible tattoo of their “first rate minds” while remaining in the koans vital centers of powerful, germinal, practical, imaginative, centering and holy comforting paradoxical middles.
I think we may need to rethink the sudden accomplishment in the late 1800s of the promise and life of American democracy being based on the cradling middle classes.
I believe if memory serves it was actually based on democracy.
