Spring Breeze


Dear Eugene,

It's a soft Friday night.  Everything feels so right.

Or so I feel.

So I feel that the world is in the right with me.  Right in my book.  Suits my flow.  In my humble opinion.

What if nothing is going right in a different person's life?  Would that make my right not right?

I happen to know a lady who is, as I am typing away now feeling the spring night breeze on my left cheek thanks to a sliding door opening to my backyard balcony with a window screen in between winnowing out unwanted elements in the air, working the closing shift in a big-box store, making one-third of what I make, toiling three times as hard as I ever did, three hundred miles wide a gulf between us in our assessment of how right everything is this very evening, three lifetimes of difference in our access to education and resources, ingress to culture and community, entitlement to love and care.

I wonder if what is alright with me tonight works for her too.

My wife said to our neighbor, Your husband is a strong and able man, even at 84!  The lady replied, He is one hell of a person to deal with.

 They were both speaking truths but the truths weren't speaking to each other.

I suppose my wife could insist the lady has reason to give thanks (Come on, you want to deal with a weakling who falls on stairs and shits in his pants?), but to impose our truth we must expose ourselves to other's hell (Why don't you try having my shotgun of a man for a day?).

Why don't you try this? we say to friends.  You must not do that! the scientist warns us.  Even if we truly care, even if we are willing to die for our truth, it doesn't make our truth true in righting the supposed wrongs.  The only point we would make is that we die making a point.

The point sometimes gets across, but it is only a drop of right in an ocean of wrong.  We could heed the good advice to do more exercise but that won't stop us from destroying ourselves in a million other creative ways.  Our head isn't even speaking to our heart, let alone bridging over to that of others.

Truth rights wrongs, all wrongs, and sets everything right, a spring night breeze for all creation.  "Happily ever after..."

Do you believe in fairy tales?

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. TimMay 28, 2018 at 3:41 PM

    Thank you for all that you have been writing about truth recently, Alex. Over our 4 day holiday, I read a book about truth, La Verdad (though the book is in English), about the truthful witness of a courageous Salvadoran woman who witnessed a massacre by the Salvadoran military, and then chose to bear witness in the face of many powerful men trying to silence the truth. (We lived in El Salvador during the time she describes, and so the story packed for me a heavy visceral wallop... but the book also has me thinking about the nature of truth, and what we can and cannot know truly... and now you join in the conversation going on in my head!)

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