Life is fascinating when you can see through the horrors, when you are willing to stand without running, and let it rip your heart out. It will. It will take every single person you love, everything you thought important, the innocents: the children, the soft and cuddly 4-leggeds, the mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, just trying to do good. It will hit you personally, and collectively. It will leave you to watch helplessly as humanity proves time and again that it isn’t humane at all.
Perhaps that is why there is so much hate in the world. People are hurting, bleeding from invisible wounds of a lifetime, and don’t know what to do about it. Some are still valiantly trying to figure it out but somewhere deep inside they know it’s a losing battle. Even if they get that house, that new relationship, even if they manage to avoid the magnetic pull of homelessness or loneliness, death will come. It will get them in the end.
We are not fighting political battles even though it seems like we are. We are fighting against our impotence. Unaware of what this is, of what we are, we think we need to stop the sands of time, but we cannot. Death approaches, the death of our desires, our virility, our tenacity, our resilience, our agreement to be here.
Life does that. It takes everything.
Now, here in plain sight, life is powerfully absurdly maniacally knocking out the beams propping up our remaining illusions.
The US is now the bad guy, reviled by countries across the globe, most all of them, other than the ones we used to revile. But were we really the good guys or is that one of the illusions shattering? We did some good things, at different times, but not all that we did was good. That was red, white and blue propaganda.
If we really were the good guys we wouldn’t be here now.
We wouldn’t have let education slide into the abyss. We would have taught civics with passion and passed along sacred appreciation for The Constitution. We would have paid more attention to all voters’ rights and protested the jury rigging of districts. We wouldn’t have allowed discrimination against anyone. We wouldn’t have made the poor beg for assistance or gays run and hide. We wouldn’t have created fly-over states, states we left to rot. We would have demanded accountability, real social responsibility from all businesses instead of the monkey business that only cares about next quarter’s profits. We wouldn’t have manipulated countries around the world and believed we had that right.
If we were the good guys, we wouldn’t have done a lot of things.
But we did.
Nothing can change that.
But we can switch gears and move forward together.
We can see that power over has never worked. It never got us what we wanted. In fact, it got us here.
We can see what’s going on. We can sit down and stop until the reality of our situation sinks in, until that recognition rewrites our programming, until it clearly shows us that power is not strength, that it is the exact opposite of what is needed. Then we don’t have to figure out what to do. We only have to commit to who we choose to be. Being flows naturally into accurate doing.
When we put the cart before the horse, we will always be tripping over our intentions, no matter how good they are.
We are impotent. We cannot stop the pains of life from seeping into our homes. Life will break us. We cannot heal the heartaches, the brokenness within. When we break, we are forever broken, but that is not bad. Breaking apart is a remaking, a reverent affair.
We will lose everything, sometimes all at once, sometimes death by a thousand cuts. There is no way to stop it. It is happening.
Stop and let that in. It is what life is. Breathe. Relax. Be here.
Religious beliefs, all kinds, may seem to ease that impotency but really, they don’t. The escape route is their big draw, the hammer that drops, the zip ties that keep folks coming back. They offer a hall pass, a get out of jail free card. They address the battle, not the here now, the after: after the battle is lost and I’m dead. They are a remedy for the overwhelming impotence that is undeniable but still denied, that most refuse to feel, to acknowledge, that is scarier than death itself.
That remedy doesn’t seem to be very effective though, does it? If it was, there wouldn’t be so much hate and anger in the world.
Religion won’t save you. Heresy. I know. What can I say? But even worse than its empty promises is that it may make you feel safe, well safer than you were, and that may just keep you from inquiring into life yourself, from finding out what you are, what life really is.
I’m one of the crazy ones. I decided a long time ago that I’d rather know what is actually here than listen to stories designed to protect me from the big bad world, or to create stories in an attempt to protect myself. The only way I’ve found to meet life, is to actually meet life, to meet it as it is, to feel my way into the heart of life, into the impotence, the pain, that deep angst that ate away at my peace and happiness.
I thought the pain was unavoidable. It is, and it isn’t. It’s another of those darn paradoxes. 
Amaya Gayle is the author of 6 books, the latest Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY
Image: Powerlessness by Beata Piwowarczyk on DeviantArt
Amaya Gayle 