May Day. A Word Part 2

Viva la Huelga! Viva la Raza! I raise a fist in solidarity with the millions of immigrants who risk so much to march in the streets for human dignity. May solidarity and direct action continue for as long as it takes in the name of human rights all over the world.

So, continuing on the subject of this so called "death" idea I wrote about yesterday that has controlled the human mind for so many millennia, here are more of my thoughts. I need to see the reality of my life as a seamless continuum. Until now like most people I've been doing all that I can to avoid the subject, a monstrous denial of the inevitable. But only because it's been steeped in such hideous, ugly fear.

Now I see that I must open my eyes and learn from the natural world. I can watch a seed grow, watch it sprout and continue to add leaves, flowers, roots. But at no point can my consciousness say there is a division between this and that stage of this plant's life (and post-life) process, that this turns into that, in varigated steps. No. I cannot see that. It's one seamless process from seed to sprout to plant to flower to fruit and the withering to produce seed again. Humans aren't plants, but who can say where we really begin and end. In fact, who can say that we do begin and end? Yes, the human race is part of nature too, and it is now in the decay stage. But decay produces seed. There is no death, no end stop, only a witness of life's many seamless transformations. It's all good.

I can see how all plant and animal processes, even planetary processes, are cyclical. As above, so below. Above meaning conscious and below meaning subconscious, I think. I see the entire biosphere, the weather, human psychology, and all life as interconnected, and a models like the Internet is a crude replica at best, but reflects the human longing to connect. The huelga en los campos, en los fabricas, en los residencias today, the incredible solidarity is electric and oh so overdue, this connectedness. It feels as if a dam has finally begun to crack.

A few days ago I came across a passage in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that is so profound. The characters Roger and Jessica (not Rabbit) are dodging the ongoing catastrophe of World War II in London.

If they have not quite seceded from war's state, at least they've found the beginnings of gentle withdrawal...there's never been the space or time to talk about it, and perhaps no need--but both know, clearly, it's better together, snuggled in, than back out in the paper, fires, khaki, steel of the Home Front. That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.

A profound passage to my way of thinking. And I'm also thinking of E.M. Forster's wonderful, continual, gentle nudge to "only connect."