Wonderland

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Is the self a cage from which one should struggle to be free?



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Or should we see it as a home?



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Is it both things?




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Maybe I should treat it both ways while I try to work through the conundrum. I can patch and paint the worn walls, knock down the cobwebs, scrub the floors, fix the toilet, open the windows to let in some light.

At the same time, dig at a spot on the floor with the spoon I hide from the guards under my mattress, take a handful of dirt out each day, working on my escape.



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We watched "Inside Job" last night. A documentary designed to make you pissed off, if you weren't already.

I couldn't help seeing the behavior of the wall street investment banks and giant insurance companies, the traders, the politicians, the regulators, the insiders and money-makers, as inevitable. Environments are made to be exploited. That is to say, that the very function of life, of living organisms, is to exploit the resources of the environment as efficiently as possible. And that's all that happened.

It's just that those guys are parasites that live off our labor and our efforts and they are sucking us dry and they will keep at it until all of us are stone cold dead.

It's nothing to get mad about. It's in their nature.


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Something we should probably take notice of, however.



If we want to survive.



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I am not a big-picture thinker. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that I am not a big-picture actor. I don't really believe in protest, in sign-waving and chanting and all that. It irritates the fuck out of me, point of fact. I can't tell you how fast I reach for the knob when I hear some fucking yahoo shouting, "What do we want?" and then a bunch of outraged people shouting "PEACE!"


*click.*


I got no patience for it.


I have a more contractive, isolative, individual reaction. I grow the hedge around my house higher and thicker. I dig the moat deeper.

Put more heads on pikes around the perimeter.


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And inside the walls, I tend my private paradise.


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I guess it's the same with my self, my ego. Barbed wire and trenches filled with gasoline on the outside, a gorgeous walled garden with burbling springs, redolent with the scent of roses and lilacs, abuzz with the sound of bees and birdsong.


All built on a giant raft that's headed for the falls, the mist rising and the roar getting louder by the day.



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Namaste.



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