O Slave, liberate yourself.
Where are you, and where’s your home,
find it in your lifetime!
If you fail to wake up now,
you’ll be helpless when the end comes.
Listen, O wise one, says Kabir:
the siege of Death is hard to withstand.
Nearly every morning I get up and marinade my brain with this sort of stuff.
I have to. I choose to. But the truth is that thinking like this—that needing or wanting to think like this—has become as essential and necessary—and effortless—as breathing to me. It’s something I do oft and repeatedly throughout the day.
Fact: If I don’t open myself up now, while I’m alive, while there’s still time, death will do it eventually for me and in spite of me, and then there will be no time left on the clock. And all of the Love I could have given, all the tenderness I could have shown and received, all of the Love and insight I could have shared and left of myself on this earth to possibly brighten it, will go in the ground or up in flames over the pyre.
And my one chance at living and loving will be over.
It will be gone. Finished. Finito. Never to be repeated.
And billions and billions of years will come after me and wipe away all trace of me and whatever I did with my life—whether I played it safe and lived out of fear and clung ruthlessly to any sort of security I could find; or whether I let myself be fully opened and not play it so damn safe, and live and love on life’s terms.
So what am I waiting for now? And you reading this, what are you waiting for?
What are any of us waiting for?
A day without reflection and contemplation, a day without love, a day without loving others and being good to them, a day without facing our fears and stretching ourselves beyond them, a day without the depth of love we know we could have if we were just a bit braver, more open, more daring, in need of less security, is a wasted day.
And yet this is what so many of us do. Gotta work more, gotta earn more, gotta save more, gotta get more security and safety, gotta anesthetize myself more, gotta avoid life more, gotta avoid what frightens me more, gotta numb myself more, gotta live on autopilot more, gotta read crappy books more, gotta drink more, gotta daydream more, gotta escape more, gotta get more comfort.
And day leads on to day and turns into weeks and then months, and more and more time (and life) gets wasted.
And then of course one has to justify all of the wastefulness and start fighting for it; one has to dig in one’s heals, twist one’s thinking, and start compounding the mistake, and begin the process of heaping error on top of error.
Why do so many of us live on so little and live such small sheltered frightened lives and want so little that is real for ourselves?
Why are we so afraid of our own emotions and of being overwhelmed or flooded by them?
News flash: What we fear is going to happen one day to us is going to happen to us one day. Later or sooner. We each owe a death. It’s unavoidable. Inevitable. We each have to play out that scene. And when that time comes, it’s too late for us to really become all that we could have become earlier, in our prime, if we had lived with greater courage and steadiness and composure. And love.
I see all of the fear in others and myself, how much we flinch and tremble, how we shut down and run away from life, from love, from others, but most of all from ourselves and from growing up and facing ourselves and our larger life situation (life’s inevitables) honestly. And it breaks my heart. Why do we (some of us? most of us?) do this to ourselves and to each other?—torment each other with ourselves and our pettiness and avoidance? Why does something—life, love—that began so beautifully and with so much promise and passion and possibility have to end so badly and scatter in debris on some loveless shore? Why do so many people do indecent things to each other? Why do hurt people hurt people? Why? Why? Why?
“The Crunch” – Charles Bukowski
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAIwmHt2PRc
too much too little
too fat
too thin
or nobody.
laughter or
tears
haters
lovers
strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks
armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.
an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other
one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners
it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.
or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone
untouched
unspoken to.
people are not good to each other.
I suppose they never will be.
I don’t ask them to be.
but sometimes I think about
it.
the beads will swing
the clouds will cloud
and the killer will behead the child
like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone.
too much
too little
too fat
too thin
or nobody
more haters than lovers.
people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.
meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we have not yet
thought of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say
“no.”
If you really think about it—if anyone dares to really think about it—no other way of living really makes sense other than this: than to live as courageously and honestly and openly as possible, to love and be loved, to grow and mature emotionally and become less and less beholden to or controlled by our fears and weak points. Sure, others might take advantage of us and our openness and use it against us. So what? Do it anyways. No one gets out of here alive. We’re all caught in ticking traps. We’re all going to turn cold and one die—even those we love and cling to will eventually die on us. So what are we so afraid of? Why aren’t we all living with greater openness and honesty and courage? And Love? (The real stuff.)
“We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. Instead we let ourselves be distracted by nonsense, terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We’re eaten up by nothing. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fucks. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.”
– Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have taken over the Ship (1998)
Full Catastrophe Living and Loving 