"You have to make your own world, instead of succumbing to the one that presses on you. You have to turn the tables on what appears to be fate or the full weight of society. Against the greatest odds, you have to keep your wits about you and refuse to surrender to anyone or anything less than divine.” -- Thomas Moore
I have so much to say about this quote. There's so much in it for me.
I feel like 25 years ago I did this without knowing it. The world pressed down on me. It scared me. I had to change. There was no other choice.
So I rebelled. I'm going to live my life my way I thought. It ends the same for all of us anyway.
If you follow my posts right about now you might be like how many times have I heard this? Which I understand. Yet soulwork or therapy is telling your story again and again. Refining it so you know who you are and where you have been.
I tell it on here so I don't have to pay somebody to give me pills to fix my psyche (Is it mine?) to help me adapt to an insane system.
The quote though has something in it that I haven't talked much about. The last sentence. I hear it telling me not to surrender to anyone except the divine.
Well I don't. Because then I'm back to square one again being all anxious and depressed.
And of course this takes me back to Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael." Another recurring theme in my writings, in case you haven't noticed. :-)
Here's a point that he made that doesn't get talked about at all. So instead of complaining about it I will talk about it here.
God, he said, didn't start paying attention to us until we started settling down, growing crops, storing food, growing our population, and growing cities.
Prior to that, for hundreds of thousands of years, while we were roaming the earth hunting and gathering God wasn't paying attention to us. We were on par with the game we were hunting.
But everything changed once we took up agriculture. In our history this is called The Agricultural Revolution.
It doesn't get talked about much like the base layer of the Internet. They are mechanisms that lay the foundation for life as we know it now.
No fields full of crops, no cities. No base layer to the internet, and you don't read this.
So what does this have to do with the last sentence of the quote you might ask.
Understanding this about our history and God's willingness to ignore us for those hundreds of thousands of years got me wondering about his or her or its intentions.
I never wanted to surrender to a divine being that did this. That might sound like hubris to some ears. But I think part of being human being is wrestling with God.
After all it gave me a brain to think and nervous system to feel with.
I mean was I doing God's work when I was cutting trees with a chainsaw to make a living?
When I started out, the day I turned 18, I thought I was. I imagined the trees I was cutting they were being shipped off to make 4' X 8' sheets of chip board would help build nice homes for families across the world.
Then one day the world pressed down on me. Out of desperation I started reading books. Surely somebody has went through this I thought. Suffering alone is the worst kind of suffering.
And in one of the books I read the author, who I've known since I read his work, said something that shook me to my core:
We have to silence the world to do what we do to it. (Paraphrasing)
There were birds living in the trees that I cut to make chip board. I don't ever remember hearing their song on the logging jobs I did for 5 years. I silenced myself and I silenced them to get the job done.
The world was partly dead, and so was I. Yet there was something inside of me that you would not surrender.
The part that sat in a deer stand with my Dad. The part that sat on the ice with my Grandpa and Dad fishing. The part that was at first base in Little League while the wind blew through the dark green oak leaves next to the diamond.
I surrendered to the God of the hunt, game, and leisure. And I turned my back on the cold, calculating God of numbers and rules measured growth at all costs.
Fire #121
2.2.25
