A LITTLE AND A LOT

after the rain

The rain has begun. A couple hours of it is forecast. Then, the forecast says, it will turn cold tonight, stay cold a couple days and nights, then all next week 70-72 every day, no rain. What a nice reward after 3 months of ice. It's just as unsettling as the 2 days we had in high 80s. Apr 6&7. It's too unusual to even think about, because I don't know what to think about it. I'm not a Republican, so I am convinced global warming is a serious matter, at least to be prepared for. My alarm arises from noting the obvious. The people who study these matters say it starts gradually and doesn't take long before it goes really fast. This Apr 6&7 make me wonder if the speeding up time is creeping up on us.

I can't help but think we need to be reining in the war machine, find a way to run a capitalist economy on something besides the machinery of war, turn our troops into firefighters to keep the forest fires at least somewhat contained. They say we're deforested, but every time I have flown over American landscape I see forest everywhere. When the fires increase in frequency, we'll be wishing we were completely deforested. This kind of fits with the prophecy of fire next time. It could reach a point where the surface of the earth turns into desert like the planet Luke Skywalker came from. Underground colonies could be a trend in the near future, finding ways to live below the surface. All over the earth are places with tremendous caverns. Everybody knows we're going into a radical time. Radical in a lot of ways. Not just wingnut politics and a re-emergence of popular fascism, whales beaching themselves to get out of the water, extinctions occurring at a tremendous rate a long time ago; now polar bears are eating each other and everybody says, Do we have to watch this channel? There's nothing we can do about it.

I feel like I have some little bit of understanding of the changes over the last century brought on by electricity. For 50,000 years before, it was fire we lived by. Suddenly it changed to electricity, the next step, like from the age of Reason to the age of Intuition. A great big leap in the raising of collective consciousness, which, to my understanding, goes through the same process as individual raising of consciousness. A spiritual picturing of the process for the individual would be the same as for the collective. It's that the collective goes very very slowly like a glacier. I've come to see that the prophecy of the Revelation, which has the same elements in the vision as the prophecy in Zachariah, the four horsemen, though filled out with more detail, is a vision of the raising of consciousness, as natural a law as gravity. It's about the fight the ego puts up when it's facing extinction, which is the end of the prophecy, the devil in the bottomless pit, gone forever. The devil being our own self-interest, the me-first mind, the mine mind, which has to go before we can come to our own inner peace. It's wanting, when you get right down to it, that has to go. It's at the core of all our individual problems and human problems. If I can let go of my interest in a given dispute and seek to understand the other's point of view, it only takes one side of a conflict to put the fire out. And I'm not talking about a knockout, but calming the sea, easing anxieties.

I knew I'd be different after the experience helping Jr have the right to die in his own bed at home cared for in old age when he had no relatives near enough to be obliged to help him. When I think about how I wish the world was, I remind myself I can make it that way by being that way. When I live what I believe, my world becomes the way I want the world to be. When I stepped in to help Jr for an unknown stretch of time, going into no telling what, committed all the way for Jr's sake, it was my way of making the world more like I want it to be. I would like to live in a world where people take care of each other for no reason other than that someone needs help. Today at the grocery store check out, the woman at the register spoke one of their required lines, "Would you like to give a dollar for the food closet?" My automatic answer was no, which is really retarded, given that's not how I want my world to be--saying no to the poor.

The moment I said no, I saw the place and the face of the woman running it, remembered that this is a great service to our community--the community helping its own poor. I remembered how wide open generous they were the time I needed a test of my own humility, to walk in the door. I vowed to myself when I was able, I'd do them a good turn and help them out, which I've done and will go on doing. I thought of the people I saw there, the down and out people. Every one had his/her own reasons for being down and out, whether full time or temporary. No one asks them why they're poor. Are you irresponsible? Are you a freeloader by nature? None of that. They basically just ask you to fill out a form to identify yourself for their files of people they've helped. I'll tell you what, putting your name in their file is a humbling experience.

I broke out laughing and said to Crystal, "Yeah, I'll give them a dollar," and put a dollar in the jar. A lot of a little ends up a lot. I laughed at myself for automatically saying no. At Dollar General it's a dollar for literacy. I don't even understand that. I understand Food Closet. I don't see much reason to promote literacy in a post-literate time. But I see a great deal of reason to channel a little of my own overflow to help make my world a place where people having a rough time of it, in whatever ways, for whatever reasons, are not allowed to drop into the pit of oblivion. A safety net they call it. I imagine if all the money involved in the "war on drugs" were used to put a free and professional clinic in every town and multiples of them in the cities to help junkies get well, it would be a great deal more effective in dealing with the problem than a wall on the border. Such an Israeli thing to do. That's just one way of looking at it, the way I'd like it to be in my world, my Mr Rogers Paradise where all of us are important.