From the Archives

Found this that I wrote back in June 2002. As Venus heads into Gemini for some big astrology/astronomy, I find this to still be pertinent now, but with some different nuances having experienced the past 2 years of my life. Enjoy!

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So, it being Gemini time and all, I guess it’s appropriate that I am currently grappling with a duality. “Which one,” you ask? The big one, I think. The one that sits below the surface of most of our decisions, like the troll beneath the bridge of our ethics, just waiting, salivating, for an unsuspecting goat to come trip-trapping across. The very same one that hides beneath the forest floor of our inner peace with hair-triggered poison-tipped darts to booby trap us if we become so complacent as to actually believe life is that simple. Except that it probably is. Like I said: duality.

You see, we all have this mental construct of ideals upon which we rest our ethics, like bird eggs in a nest kept safe high in the treetops from the hungry beasts prowling below. Upon ideals like the inherent goodness of humanity and the sacred order of the universe do we incubate the ethics we live by, like “be honest” and “never gain anything to the detriment of someone else” and “love is all there is”. Eggs are funny things, they can handle tremendous amounts of uniform pressure; you can squeeze them like crazy in your fist and they won’t break, but if you tap them gently on one side the shell gives way like a straw dam in a Texas flood. Things that eat eggs rely on this fact and relish the chance to gobble up a nice fresh one, way over easy.

Which is where that circle of life thing comes, in, Disney be damned. Nothing in life seems to be personal, everybody’s just taking care of their own needs. I can’t just stop laying the eggs of my worldview because something might come along and destroy them, and the egg-eater has to eat somewhere. There’s no malice intended, but in it’s actions I am harmed. So now what?

That such diametrically opposed realities exist tells me this whole vacation on Planet Earth must be one big smoke and mirrors show. If it weren’t, we could all agree on the basic stuff quite easily. But there is a different perspective for each head on this planet, which gives us a set of dimensions for reality that is more than a little mind numbing. It’s no wonder there’s war…I can’t even get along with the people I call family all the time. Ultimately it comes down to my word and yours, and if they don’t agree, I can either trust me or trust you. The implications of either choice are hard to swallow. If I trust myself then I could be guilty of narrow-mindedness and could perhaps be fooling myself to hide from a fear and maybe I am not honoring you, but if I trust you then I could be found guilty of codependency and maybe I am not honoring myself. You might as well flip a coin to decide, because it probably won’t be for years down the road that you know for sure.

God knows I was pretty high in philosophy class, but I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning life being this hard. I remember a bunch of dead guys coming up with constructs to support their own judgements. Maybe that’s all any of us ever do. Maybe mentioning it is futile, like the warning label on the side of the cigarette pack. By the time you’re buying, it’s a bit late for things like warnings.