Life - The Primitive Rite

April 14, 2020April 14, 2020

Everything is Keep Changing

Why do we fight the idea of change so hard? We know it’s inevitable. We know it happens. Just in the process of reading this short missive, imperceptible changes are taking place in both you (the reader) and me, having written this however many hours, days, weeks, months, years ago.

Everything changes.

We should know that by now. We should have embraced it. But, if one thing this COVID-19 pandemic has shown us is just how much we HATE change and how EASILY we can adjust to a different level of “normal” and function in a way similar to how we did before.

While we think we want a static, predictable environment, I think the human machine is really an instrument of change both internally and externally. We adapt.

Our ancestors adapted–first to the cold of the ice age and then to the rewarming as the ice melted. Did we like it? Probably not. Imagine the communal grunts of complaint at the extra foot of snow one year to the next, or the wetter than normal annual thaw (assuming those that disliked living on the walls of ice moved to warmer climates).

And that’s the thing. We adapt. We move on to the next sustaining thing that moves us back into a zone of comfort and security. We find a “new normal” which is a phrase I hate. Really, our environment is just changing. There are no real peaks, plateaus, or valleys of “normal.” It’s not new. It’s just normal.

The title for this missive came out a new story where a reporter had asked a homeless person what they thought about the adjustments because of the coronavirus. Their response was broader than that. Their response, in my hearing, had everything to do with their life in general. “Everything is keep changing.”

And so do we. This is just a moment in time that will become an end or a start of a chapter for many, but not for all. Bad will come of it for some (which I wish wasn’t that case) and good (measured on a relative scale) for others.

Such is the lightning bolt of change–in a flash, what was, isn’t anymore. It’s something else.

Everything is Keep Changing.

Featured image: Chaos transmutes into chaos. Change changes everything, even time itself.

November 27, 2019November 27, 2019

Memento Mori

What does it mean to think about death? I’m guessing as long as we upright monkeys have been able to articulate sorrow and loss over something we love, we’ve contemplated this question. Our own, of those around us, of the things we love (or of the thing we hate).

Death. It’s that grand unspoken thing that, deep down, we’re terrified of and seethingly wish upon others. Having experienced so much of it in the last couple of years, I think I started to come to grips with and begin to understand at a cellular level what it meant to face the inevitable.

And, it changed me.

I can’t say if it was changed for the better or the worse. To be honest, I don’t think it’s a better or worse thing. From a high level, the only way I’ve been able to process it is in understanding the change through the mental lens of Memento Mori.

I’ve always had a fascination with the imagery of a Memento Mori: skulls, hourglasses, guttering candles, more so when combined with alchemical elements of change and the necessity to capture one’s thoughts surrounded by the imagery. But I don’t think it ever impressed the ideas into my head until undergoing the loss of so many around me.

Remember Death. Remember Your Death. All Will Die. You will die. I will one day die.

It doesn’t evoke fear or terror at what fate awaits us all. No, it’s more a melancholy over what the life misspent and an unyielding drive to not squander the time I have left. Remember death. To forget or block out the inevitable is crime perpetrated towards ourselves that once gone is lost forever. None of us can go back and recapture the lost time of our youth, the misspent idylls of our existence.

The cellular realization of this was the ignition of a fuse that burns in my veins to not lose any more time. On anything. On doing, on loving, on producing, on learning, on being.

I’m terrified now of losing each unproductive moment of life. Because once it’s gone. It’s gone.

Memento Mori. Remember death. It’s coming. It’s inevitable. Don’t let the time slip away.

I’m not. Or at least I’m trying not to. There’s too much to do before it’s over.

April 25, 2019April 30, 2019

Four

Four is the number of deaths I’ve experienced in the last 12 months, almost to the day.

I know I’m not unique. I know I’m not the only one on the planet to have experienced this. Despite those diminishments to the experience, I feel affected.

One was the passage of time. Another the failing of health. Fate and circumstance took another and the last the victim of the nature of divine cruelty for the created.

I am affected in the way that these passings remind me, 4 times over, of the fleetingness of this physical existence. No matter our wealth; no matter our status. Which makes what we do and when we do it that much more important.

A symbolism guru I study relates the number 4 to the human situation, “…the external and natural limits of the totality.” It feels like that here—four examples of how and why to live.

What do you do with this kind of knowledge? What do you do after the grief, sorrow and melancholy have moved through their phases?

What’s the question I’m asking myself (again) in the wake of the latest news. In some respects, I’m feeling angry with the actions of the world, but resigned to the notion that it happens. Of all the takeaways, I think the one that makes the starkest contrast is the drive to do more. To create and make art. To make sure I can get out what it is I need to get out before my time comes.

Is that a little morbid? Maybe. A little selfish? No, I don’t think it is. I think it’s making the best out of the worst. I want each one of these losses to be a lesson to me to not lose track and forget what it is I’m doing here.

I’ve had enough of death. I get it. I get the message, universe. One day I’ll be the reminder for someone else to get on with their lives and get moving. Hopefully, I will have gotten out everything I needed to get out.

May 15, 2015May 1, 2019

The World Awaits

One thing thats struck me hard is the transition of the child into an adult. Ive read its comparable to the feeling of physically losing a child, though Im sure that pain is much more enduring. The transition of one’s own flesh and blood from a dependent appendage of your existence into its own recognized self-aware being is a slow birthing process that at its conclusion feels every bit the ending of one life and the beginning of another.

You would think this would give with it some measure of joy and it does, but at the point of transition it feels as though the contents of your soul have departed you leaving you wondering why.

Its in this way that the lessons of the Hermetica strike me. While left without that piece, I imagine how the divine essence feels in its long night awaiting the return of its children. Perhaps this is the same in other faiths of patrimony, the divine estate of father to son transferring title across generations. In this instance, though, as the divine source releasing its creation, I find as the joy in being the source of the good, the giver of life, wisdom, and nourishment.

It feels as though if it were a rite of release, the letting go of that essential element that was never mine to begin with.

Go, fly, my beautiful creations become what were always in your nature to be.

The world awaits you.