Wednesday Morning Meditation

I woke up with my dog licking my face. He lies watching me until he thinks I’m awake and then helps the process. I dressed and walked him outside this balmy spring morning.  Pink dawn colours were still painting the clouds.  Bird song had begun.  He pooped. I picked it up.  I carry a roll of doggie bags in pockets of my jackets. Back home I sat for morning meditation and prayers.  I feel closer at time to God and then far away, the constant hide and seek of the great romance.  Attending to my breathing, bring my attention back from the myriad of distractions.  Feeling for God, like reaching out in darkness for a pair of glasses. Knowing it’s the journey and the doing, not the arriving.  Then coffee.  

I opened my iPhone and reviewed my Facebook.  Too much politics.  Clear evidence of mutual hysteria.  The people who like me thought the world would end with the election of Justin Trudeau in Canada are decidedly wrong.  Canada is a much poorer place.  But despite his best efforts Canada as a country has survived.  Similar in America there were riots of the violent angry outraged and terrified when President Trump took office. Yet here we are some time later and the world has not ended.  Yet the same level of lucrative shrill political marketing fills the airways.  

It’s spring. A new day is dawning. I’m weary of Facebook and social media.  The humour is less and the family is less and more a more the feed is filled with uninvited commercials for businesses I have no interests in and ideologies that frankly bore me.  I flip through dozens of feeds now in search of an increasingly rare sharing of family or astute humour of friends. it’s disappointing. Too much of this and I forget the pink colour on the morning clouds.  

I am going to work today.  I commute and daily see the evidence of poor driving and random chaos.  We lemming to the city where no one who works can afford to live as the urban madness and tyranny increases with incompetence and dependence.  All the government serves the parking lots. Landlords are the deities.  And I am just one of the millions of acolytes who worship there.  Regulations and restrictions exponentially increase to protect the turfs of entrenched corruption and I will leave this place where trees grow free to go to that cement prison where the inmates pay their lives away to be on the inside.  I worry about my dwindling time.  

The ugliness of bureaucracy and callous minions of corporate and government hegemony obstruct my vision and strangle all but a few new ideas.  The old prevails re worked over and over again. I don’t know if this is right or wrong.  

I have a general malaise. I have tasted the nectar of God’s love and wonder as I move through my day how this is bringing me once again closer. I know if I sit still it will circle round me but I miss the wide open seas or the deep dark forests.  Each day I think of camping and canoeing and wait for the weather to warm  as arts students reduce the science of weather to politics.  Everywhere it’s I and them, the tribalism of todays colleges and universities speaking to the rise of stupidity among the teachers terrified of students whose ignorance is increased by their drugs and delusions.

I wait for death.  My family has gone before me, mother, father, brother, aunts and uncles.  I know them as memories and guardian angels. I feel them close at times. I dream of them.  

Life is good.  I liked the coffee and yoghurt today. I’m looking forward to driving with the top down on my convertible. It’s a short week. If the sun stays out I may lie outside on a lawn chair and read a book with Gilbert tied to the leg of the chair.  My motorcycle is calling to me.  Showering and shaving and dressing is a challenge.  All day I see people who don’t work and ask them if they can at least get up and out of their apartments before 9 and know they can’t. The city is full of foreign wealth and social housing.  I have to accept that I’m a suburbanite. No longer living in the insanity of the city I am losing tolerance for the mass institution of ghetto living.  My eyes look out to the towns and rural spaces where the new genius arises.  I am caught between.  I am ever straddling fences.  I long to head out on the highway. I am instead going to a little box and frankly I like it most of the time.  The idea of it is scary. The warren. 

But here the sun is coming in the window and shining now on the cactus I hung in a pot there.  I live in a rain forest and long for Arizona.  But I like the surplus water too and am forever ambivalent.

I’m grateful for my breath. I’m grateful for the sights and sounds. I’m grateful for my dog and the vehicles that entertain me as I fool myself out of the house and into the work place. I’m grateful for coffee which lures me from one place to the next. I liked the hamburger I ate at the Heatley yesterday. Shannon’s smile as she served me coffee was uplifting. I liked the chef with his 18th century beard.  This generation of castrated male Canadians act out their loss by manly beards while women every where abort their babies. 

There’s always chocolate. And tv.  One can get lost in NCIS.  An alternative reality where the man leads in the field while the woman leads in the politics or the black man leads in the politics.  These higher paid jobs are mysterious in their way while the sherif rides off to slay the dragons and get the bad guy and protect the navy. it’s silly really.  But there’s a pattern to it like all westerns and we want the good guy to win and the bad guy to lose because we go to work and there seems so much more uncertain.

But the Bible says the good guys win.  Lust is good but love is better.  Smart is good but wisdom is better. And all day long I look at materialism and hedonism and talk to addicts who just want money and a fix but have come out of the pleasure chase to be cared for by me , not willing to give up but wanting a breather before they again chaise the elusive ‘pleasure principle’.  They’re all Marxists and socialists and the government celebrates their existence and tries to give them more stuff like negligent parents. They don’t know it but they really want love but won’t go to the places where people will gather and give them relationships.  But they’ve bought hollywood and want something for nothing. And it’s easier to steal and I struggle to remain positive in the daily grind of their sales pitch.  And behind me their are fat rich eurocrats wanting to punish me for imperfection but desperate to keep me between them and them, this buffer against the rise of grief and anxiety.  They are the control freaks. They left the chaos of reality and escaped to the constant committee classroom meetings with countless little napoleons and proper servitude. There are no Gibbs in this world.  The Gibbs are strangled and shot in the back.  These people have killed to escape reality and now pass razor sharp memos and build more and more walls all the while denying they like walls with their boundaries and police and their guns in the security forces.  Layers and layers of security to protect them.  

I am terrified of lying women.

I am going out to face another day where sometimes the shouting scares me.

There is a sensitivity that you can only have like a second wind on the front.  Soldiers who returned again and again told me of this.  I like the others like me who have seen thousands and stayed face to face.  Now I must shower. I like the shower.  Shaving is less attractive but I’ve had my share of beards and today like the soft baby face.  

I am saddened that my friend has a sore throat.  

My dog’s eye is hurt. There is illness in the world and dying.  I am here praying.  I’d ride my motorcycle to work but the dog doesn’t care so much for that.  And I don’t like the rain and grease on the road this year and am more scared of injury as less and less funding goes to the hospital front lines and more and more to the smoke filled backrooms

Thank you God for this day.  Lift up my spirit and guide me in all my actions and words. Please Lord let me not offend another person who is looking for offence and please save me from those who are seeking accidents on the road. Help protect me from this whole new rash of victim predators.  Guide me and keep me safe that I might do your work and serve you.  Thank you for all the blessings you have bestowed on me.