The reckoning
“In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell
There will come a time in our life when we’ll meet our maker.
And it may not be the end . . . of our life.
That might be hard to fathom but look around you. Not your locus but something much deeper and potentially more malign.
In my case, it’s this gnawing and enduring sense that our hubris and ability to grow our way to prosperity is about to bring down a Leviathan hitherto outside the realm of our earth-bound understanding.
In short, the end is nigh.
And my maker?
Well, it’s the fact that I’ve been at this work/life thing for a very long time — too long in fact — and I know that it’s taken a tremendous toll on me but more so the earth.
Now, I’m not profligate or at least I don’t think so but when I think about all the stuff I’ve accumulated throughout my life, the rubbish I’ve discarded and the fact that I’ve brought three other people into the world whose MO is very similar to mine, I realise what that looks like. I imagine a pile of “stuff” in the middle of a Superstore, and it feels like it’s a mile high.
Yes, but your maker?
The earth.
Now of course, I’ve no way of knowing the truth of what I’m saying but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to living with the grief and loss that comes with all my living, and the fact that somehow revenge will be sort. I know that sounds woo-woo but I don’t believe — never have — that the earth is malign, less still anything in nature. Like you/me, it’s a living thing and something we very much take for granted.
I can’t know the future nor you but I do have a sense — unease if you like — that we’ve not seen anything cf. to the past.
For the record, I don’t spend much time looking at the science of the Anthropocene but I do talk to the trees, the birds and the land not in a Dr Doolittle sense of the word but to tune into my earthbound sense of time which nature offers in spades. (As a segue, it’s no accident that I talk about going out on the saunter which is a procession on “holy ground”.)
I suppose what I’m trying to convey with the foregoing is that for a very long time I’ve been battling my demons when it comes to my modus vivendi. I know, in simple terms, that this (i.e. the way I live out my life) isn’t normal or at least it’s not normal if I want to lend my spiritual weight (I think I should pray more to the earth) to my birth not in an entitled sense but more in keeping with being at one with my animistic roots; but it’s hard when I have to buy practically everything save perhaps a bit of gardening which is something I’ve never really enjoyed — odd that but there it is. There is also the sense that there was no reason for being brought into this world when my parents’ aspirations extended to nothing more than me getting a blue-collar job. No, seriously. That’s all I ever remember them discussing. Faith, spirit, soul or something more reverent or mythic was never part of the dinner-table lexicon; I had to come to each of those much later in life.
I realise that a lot of what I’m writing about sounds narcissistic and for that I apologise but all I’m trying to say is that in being here on this earth I take NOTHING for granted including the fact that I’ll wake up each day expecting to live. In fact, each night I go to bed I constantly tell myself that this could be it. That’s not morose or depressing — not to me — but a simple reminder that we’re human and even though the odds are with me that I’ll live my three score year and ten, it wasn’t that long ago (say 150 years) that 57 would have been a lived achievement.
As I circle back to the rubric and digest what I’ve just written, I suppose there’s no way of knowing anything but the older I get the more I feel the spirits of the past come among me. Yes, I think that’s it. I can feel that I’m not alone and even though I’ve no ability to translate what they’re saying, nevertheless, I know that this way of being on the earth is far from normal; and I will, at some stage, have to pay my dues.
Blessings,
Julian