URGENT: Please Read

Most of us are just folks, aren't we.  But it's not enough.  The doors of the train were closed, not permitting the stink and unnatural radiation of the station into the small car, safety behind those doors, with some kind of silver protection which seems like enough.

Behind the door was the couple.  Hispanic, as usual, as they seem to encompass the more banal and complacent in all of us these days - too short, too fat, too often the worst set of clothes tapered onto the least proper of bodies, worshipping the idea of the lazy american, their pedestal, as they were in the sight of the eye for just a moment's time.  A moment, in which the car just started to move, and he pushed her away from him - casually, not with love but just with the sense of getting her a bit farther away from him.  At the same moment, her faceless self, back to us, vomited something golden and awful, the sort of puke that one might find themselves encompassed by in the latest hours of night, in the hungover late morning or early dawning, but no - in the later rush hour of 7 o'clock on a subway platform.  Then the car was gone.  She was non chalant, and clearly wasn't bothered by it - or so the closed and sealed doors told us.  But to have that beast exit out of you in mid spring evening - what in the hell brought that on.  That's not love.  That's most people.  Living in the murk below the sunset and not seeing any of its colours. 

I don't like the way our brains work these days.  I don't like that we are thinking of twenty things when talking to each other - our eyes averted, not a gaze amongst them.  Ever want to be the aggressor, or the magnanimous one, or the innocent or the loving one.  It's all in the intention, in what you are.  The thing you cannot get away from not matter how you try.  But then, in that moment, look into their eyes and don't leave, don't look away.  Nothing like it yet in today's technology.  People don't know how to be with one another anymore.  A life without activity and a life without so called ambition work-wise is seen as failure.  If only they knew what failure really is.  It is not living in the presence of those around you, of loving with your whole person, of being in the crux of that cluster of stars that you call your life.  That's all there is, every day.  Nothing else matters. 

I see myself in the wrong place, with the wrong people, having loved the wrong people, and wasted myself on the earth.  I hate myself for each of these moments, but forgive at each and every turn.  Because I know what's what.  If it's broke, you must fix it.  There is no other way out of it.  Wasting our days with fools enacting useless acts, making shams into great truths and lies into something which we cannot transcend from - to that which we deserve at our better and best selves....that is the worst sin which in his time Jesus could not even dream was possible.  Drink from the cup, and let it awake you, every sinew, sensation, dream and brightness.  It is never too late to stop being just folks.  The flame forgets how many times it is put out, and the privilege of being who you really are, forgets its place and your sunset falls away, into the cloudy water of everyday folk.  In our own hand, we have it...for now.

M. Lucia