First Rain

We have been burning but now it is raining, the earth sighs with relief, the crisp risk eases. I stare into the black pool, beads of good oil hovering on the surface, I drink deep from the good hot black pool, and return to my senses. In my peripheral I see a familiar flash of black as the cat sneaks by and then I feel her fur on my feet, then claws, then teeth – checking in. 

I have been waiting for this, I was warned and I listened. We are burning, we have burned. We came from stardust and we will return to stardust. This is the order of things, of entropy, of impermanence. 

Making meaning in the inevitable dark is today’s challenge. The grip of panic, of the need to control and plan and mitigate – eases away and finds ground. Kneading the dough to make bread, straining the elderflower tincture which looks like protein rich piss but which will stop you from sneezing next May, if we make it. No, stop that. 

Picking the ripening blueberries, leaving a few for the birds because that’s karma and karma soothes – once you get what it means. 

I learnt what Karma means at a Buddhist evening class, run at the local centre that used to be a convent on the brow of a hill, overlooking the growing choking smoldering city. Proudly making knives and forks but mainly bombs and guns. Making a few people rich and a lot of people dead.

I learnt that karma isn’t an exchange value commodity that you earn through good behaviour, as I had always understood it to be. It is an intrinsic value state of being. You figure a good way to live and then you live it. You don’t wait for other people to sign up, you just start to do, to be, to put out  the goodness, and you do it with open handed generosity rather than waiting for your reward. And do you know what? It works. 

When I think about the misery of others, which I do a lot, it seems to well up from a deep seated sense of resentment at the way other people behave. And there really is no escaping that if you don’t just figure out another way to be. 

So you leave the blueberries for the birds because you think it’s the right thing to do. You don’t battle against the birds for the berries, hating the birds more with every passing summer as they survive by snacking on your hobby. Adding netting and lazers and fake crows until you are a wizened knot of entitlement and rage. 

This lesson applies to most areas of life but it is hard not to give in to the rage. I’m not saying the rage isn’t real. 

I am expecting the rage to overwhelm me sometime soon as my wisdom swells beyond the capacity of others to accept my wisdom. 

I see this happening already, I see others casually adopt the last thing I said as their own thought – as though my words are now an imperceptible miasma. I am spoken over, I am dismissed and ignored in the most gentle and benevolent of ways – I notice, I get up and leave the room and it all carries on as I settle quietly somewhere else. There must be a way to translate this invisibility into a superpower? Invisibility was always my fantasy super power (ideally combined with the ability to teleport) – so now I have it, what am I going to do with it?