New Year

It has been a curious transformational time for me, since the last solstice and the lengthening of days. Something like a dark night of the soul, though not that dark really. A revival of the question,"what is the point?"

Since mid 2008, cultural policy has amounted to this: 'What? You enriched yourself using ethically and morally corrupt financial arrangements amounting to a 12 trillion dollar loss in household wealth? Here, have several trillion dollars in bailout money. Oh, and a tax cut. Will you save the economy now, please. And I almost forgot. What regulations would you like to eliminate?'

Meanwhile, hardly a glimmer of discussion about depleting resources, particularly oil. Put it this way; if a barrel of oil reaches 200 dollars, everything will be more expensive. Seventy percent of this economy, they say, is dependant on consumer spending. If it continues to climb, those economies most dependent on oil will begin to hemorrhage fatally. You think jobs are a problem now?

And more and more I hear about God, mostly from those who support the current financial arrangement, preaching the virtue of exploitation, the laissez-faire mythology of sky gods, the beauty of violence in all its sanctioned forms. Draping the US Constitution with righteousness, the cloak of the violent believer, for whom there is no reality superior to faith-based imagination, for whom even Jesus wields a sword.

And this relentless freezing cold. I sit in the sun in my bedroom every day there is sun, to bring some light in. My mood has not been foul but contemplative. Wondering, are we too late? Am I the only one thinking, how do I position myself in the Great Contraction? What about my young niece? What about my tiny nephew? Am I the only one who knows, the one thing more corrupt than the current financial arrangement is the dominant conception of God?

Who am I? Asking is like asking 'who is God?' The more I ask, the more mysterious it becomes. What I know myself to be is but an infinitesimal aspect of my being, a speck of a far grander universe than I can ever hope to articulate. Who am I? I could utter a sentence on that topic every day the rest of my life and not begin to offer a thumbnail of the whole. That all the universe is energy, my voice is the energy of the universe articulating itself. How clear am I being?

Precarious territory, this. Hard to sustain. Not sure where it will lead. To a second book more accessible than the first, I think. Maybe an audacious act next solstice. Maybe not. Meanwhile, I write. I sing and I dance and I eat. I sleep. Repeat.