rebirth

I haven’t blogged in a while which means I have a reservoir of topics that have built up over time. The one that stands out I had shortly after Easter, where I realized that the subtle shift from celebrating the rite of Spring to celebrating the resurrection of Jesus meant that our focus on the passage of one season into the next was co-opted or perhaps a better word is transformed from being about the world to being in the world. We went from thinking about seasons to thinking about Man, or specifically one man, and his power over death. What is that relationship? That is, what is his relationship to death? What is our relationship to him? And what does that all mean about our relationship to God? All came into question, and at the same time it pushed out questions like: What does it mean to be one of the myriad living things one this planet, all of which are mortal? What do we understand about the cycles of life and death that we see all around us? What does this mean to me, personally? And so on. Christianity, for me, messed with the cycle. It went from being about the cycle, to being about the man. And thinking about man, as the only important thing worth thinking about has created a lot of trouble for mankind over the years.

I am not really about basing Jesus or Christianity, after all Easter is about rebirth. It is about a death and a resurrection. It doesn’t get much more cyclical that that right? I mean there are plenty of religions that have the same motif; the death/rebirth of Osiris springs to mind, or the Fischer King, civilization is replete with the standard. What do I hope to add but a little Jesus bashing? Except to day that I can’t think of anyone who has ever colored the Easter event for me in such a way as to make it synonymous with the little green shoots popping out of the earth, or the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees and the moon up above. No, the story of Easter for me was always about chocolate and eggs and a Rabbit. The story of the Crucifixion of Jesus was always told to me like I was one of the members of the crowd who had gathered to see the spectacle. Far from understanding the story as part of a cycle of rebirth, Easter, for me, was about shouting “Crucify Him!” flowed immediately but a two nights and a day of guilt that is conveniently pacified in the end with scads of chocolate and a ham.

No, I am not a Christian basher. There are other that do the job far better than I could ever hope, no my job, here, is for me to muddle out what all this mean to me. What does it mean to me? I mean, for example, why are cycles important, why it the question important? Is this just another, we need to get in touch with the cycles of Mother Earth, Green, Hippie, Lovefest? Is this just another rant that ends in someone telling me that God is really the Goddess and that instead of driving my car I should be biking and planting a tree and eating local foods? Because, if it is, I don’t want to read it. Scratch that. I don’t want to write it and I sure as Hell don’t want you to read it.

No it is important to me because I am beginning to understand how important it is for me to see my life as a series of cycles. Too long have I imagined the future as the unbroken line extending into the distance without thought about what comes after or before or after or anything at all. Live in the moment. Embrace the now. The now is where consciousness dwells, so too should I dwell there for to live in the now is to be enlightened. I am guilty of thinking this way, while all around me I see the things of the now, coming back around full circle time and time again. Don’t get me wrong. The now is all-important. It differentiates this pass around the loop from the last. But too long have I been so consumed with the now that I have ignored everything else. I have been consumed with the state of my soul. To put it in Christian terms, I have been obsessed with my own redemption. Am I a good man? What does God think of me now? How about Now? And Now? How about Now? Now? Now? Now? I am an arrow, released from the bowstring at birth I have striven towards my target unwaveringly. But the more I sore, the more I think “something feels painfully familiar here.”

Studies show that men are just as hormonal as women. The Men move through cycles, and that our thinking, our very fabric is designed around theses shifts. We are not immune to cycles. The moon passes over our head, the earth turns around the sun, the sun around the center of the galaxy. Yes all of these things are subtle reminders that we are cyclical creatures. Sometimes I am prone to depression, other times I am indomitable. Today I create, tomorrow I sow, on Wednesday I weeps and on Sunday I laugh. The more I strive to understand these cycles, the more I come to understand myself.

In writing this piece I had a vision of a story of a man who owned a rat, or possibly a ferret. The longer the man and the ferret lived together, the more the one became like the other, till finally, the ferret had become the man, and the man the pet. For me the Cycle is the Man, the Ferret the Now. They live together in the house of my soul, circling each other. Exchanging information. Slowly learning to live together, slowly learning the others ways. Till one day they awake and look in the mirror and they do not recognize the other. They do not recognize themselves. They are in a frenzy to make sense of it and all around the world seems topsy-turvy. Someone recently called my short stories Kafkaesque, but only I think because I recently woke up and discovered I was a gigantic bug. More and more I think, I am not the bug, I am a man living like a house pet, living like a man, trying to wake up and doing things the only way I know how.