Three Meditations
It's April and I'm thinking about taxes – social security and Medicare, the New York City Transit Authority and the Brooklyn Public Library; immigrants, fire fighters, garbage collectors, cops. I pay for them. I pay for National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Arts, corporate subsidies and the souls of families that are detonated by our drones and – please, let it be true – the search for signs of intelligent life in the universe. But tax day is only one day, after all: I look forward to the first frost of autumn, the toll the seasons take as they orbit through the constellations, the strange lights that rearrange the night in the sky, the familiar faces that change and yet remain. I look forward to a nation in which tribute is given to the most just and beautiful cause.
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I live in a city which isn't real; the trees wave at me with their million chloroplastic hands as I walk under them, and the clouds, like intelligent children in conversation, show me the wisdom of not conforming to the rules or the topic that's at hand. Even when the super-rational sun bosses me to labor at some sum, distant from the flow of my most true and unreal being, I come out the other side victorious: the stars and planets glitter like trophies in a cabinet lined with black velvet. The language of my city's citizens is familiar to your ears, but twisted just enough to make you nervous; what odd observations will come next? It is not in total disagreement with mankind that I must hasten to my retreat, but there are unforgivable mistakes – which, in a merciful April mood, I have forgiven. I'm trying to be intrepid, to hold the possibility of discovery and renewal – here is my open hand – level, waiting as a bridge.
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Categorization brings its own type of pleasure. It is not the pleasure of pushing the body in exercise or sport, which is the pleasure of intense concentration mingled with pain and the threat of exhaustion (exertion is, perhaps, the healthiest relationship we may form with death). It is not the pleasure of being pampered at a spa, swaddled in thick robes and cloaked in soft floral scents. No – between the Martian and the Venusian there is the pleasure of the mind, which rests in Mercury. Although the mind is quicksilver, like its chemical namesake constantly shifting shape and flowing into one form after another so that in the span of a mere minute it has touched upon ancient Egypt, Napoleon, ice cream, the woman who invented the humane slaughter of cows, and Coyote myths, it yet is most satisfying when dried out; concretized; put into a mold and stabilized.
And when we find a thing which does not fit into our taxonomy? If we are truly rational and compassionate, we find a new place for it. To expand our system of labels and directories is a way to say nothing is really "garbage": everything has a right place and purpose.