peace on Earth
Michael Bridge
REALLY BAD THEATER
Is blame the deadliest and most addictive of all drugs? It has my vote. Yesterday I wouldn't have posed this as a question. I would have said it outright. Today I'm training my voice away from pronouncements, absolutes, and such. Sometimes I seem to get away with pretending to know something.
If I let blame own the day, it will steal my story line. I know its habits. It will do that. It's an unforgiving thief.
It will confiscate my thoughts and feelings. It will take them to the spinning wheel of the day and the spindle of the moment and spin the whole mess of it into a combative thread. Then, if I allow it, the thread will weave itself into the fabric of my mind and the fabric of the story I invent, weaving my passions in adversarial patterns—the patterns of an unending war with myself and whatever else. I'll make it into a 'you're either with me or against me' kind of thing, though both sides are the same war. I know the game. It's worth the effort only as it teaches me something about who I don't want to be and what I don't want for my life, our children's' lives, and for the life of this precious Earth.
Yet I like being provocative and sometimes I like making trouble for myself. But I don't enjoy getting caught in the tangles and adversarial threads of my own web. A spider told me once that writing is spinning webs for catching flies. Writing is my hiding place. I write to hide and to catch flies.
Getting caught in the patterns of my own inner weaving can be embarrassing so I'll always conjure up some kind of enemy to help me not look at myself. To maintain the adversarial tensions that hold my web in form and in place, a reliable supply of enemies is needed. But enemies are high maintenance. It takes a lot of energy to keep them high enough on the spectrum of illusion so I can keep pretending they're real. I don't have that kind of energy. And if I start running out of enemies I'll have to do something to replenish the supply.
War is an idiot and bombs are dumb, really dumb. They say they've got smart ones, but don't believe them. Maybe some bombs aren't quite as dumb as others, but idiocy is purposefully and carefully bred into genus bombus. May no bomb fall on your head or your child's head or your neighbor's head or your neighbor's child's head or on the snail in your neighbor's garden.
Wars are really bad theater. They celebrate a telling lack of vision in the imagination department and a telling surplus in the denial department. Denial plants and tends the field whose harvest is war. Retribution is complicit with what it answers. It's the best ally of what it answers. I am my own enemy so the peace treaty is here on the table in front of me waiting for me to sign it. I wish I knew something for certain, but the only thing I know is I love who I love and there seems to be a problem. The solution is probably obvious. The meaning of life is in learning to see the obvious. That's a belief. It's not an actual knowing.
Yet wars seem to automatically grab the attention of the world, like they own our attention or something. It seems like the global attention is educated on adversarial dramas—wars and such. It isn't healthy. Someone should write a bad review.
If it were me, I'd reeducate the global attention on some non-adversarial theater. I'd put some great theater on the global stage. I'd take some of that bomb money, take a battered Palestinian town like Bethlehem, refurbish it, bring in new water (some kind of desalinization thing or catalytic thing so we can distance ourselves for a minute or two from adversarial water issues that compound and inflame the wounds in the Middle East), and I'd make it into a shining university, a model of ecological sanity and sustainability, a living monument to peace, a permanent planetary buffer against the thought of war surfacing ever again in any heart. That would start turning things around. You know it would. Here I am gray and frazzled and I still want to be a writer when I grow up. I wish someone would give me a job. They say some people actually make a living by putting pen to paper. Don't believe them. It's a cruel rumor. The ones who spread the rumor are the same ones who pour salt on wounds because they think it’s a fun thing to do. If it were me, I'd develop a bigger imagination for peace than for war. If we're not standing together in a vision of peace, who are we? What are we? Make an interesting and provocative peace or inherit war by default. To the ends of the Earth we will be visited by war drama after war drama after war drama until we enact a global peace drama whose light reaches the stars. Drop your veil O’ Bethlehem. Come the New Jerusalem.
Michael Bridge
cell: 707-540-1289
see: www.co-intelligence.org/P-gestures.html