Poem: The Joyride of Becoming

I rarely write poetry, but I'm finding myself in new territory these days (divorce, new home and several other related changes), feeling some angst when it would seem that I mostly have cause to celebrate new perspectives and opportunities.  I've often joked that I experience this sort of distressed happiness because of my gypsy roots.  Friends tell me that this is the plight of control freaks and that I need to loosen up. This is my response to them. I've long been fascinated with the writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. I made his theory of the flux the focus of my poem.

The Joyride of Becoming Erich Vieth (2014)

Heraclitus wasn’t fooled when people talked about “permanent” things. All is flux, he proclaimed. “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Now that Life has hurled me out of my self-conjured comfort, Every moment whispers that Heraclitus is correct; the world is permeated with universal acid. This is not a philosopher’s word game. I feel it in my ever-morphing bones. Everything. Every thing is a nonstop dance of destruction and creation. Every cloud, creature and canyon a ghostly multiverse, a sprawling swirling that runs through our feeble stop signs, ignoring these empty-shell words we try to use as hooks to stabilize our vivid imaginings. Even my steadfast dog threatens to become an ontological metaphor. The SuperFlux gives rise to joys that will inevitably threaten and dangers that will someday delight-- A roiling process that moves in and on in a thousand ways On both sides of our skins and skulls, whether we are ready or not. Failure to heed this fact that all nouns are verbs tempts us to walk with undue swagger and blurt out false promises. Yes, some things change less noticeably, mostly things that don’t cry, though all things eventually crack, crumble and re-assimilate. It is our friends, lovers and central truths that are the fastest fire and water: Even though they look the same from day to day, they are self-extinguishing works in progress that we struggle to know only through sparks and splatters. Trying to possess them is to try to embrace dancing flames and swift whirlpools. Act, we must. Judge, we must, or we would quickly die. We are told that to live well we must know well, though we are irretrievably smeared across all that is. Even that magic three-pound organ in our head cannot wrap itself around the impossibility of this daily task. Taking this plight seriously risks sanity. If only I could better convince myself to go with the flow. As we pause to drink water molecules previously drunk by Jesus, Cleopatra and Heraclitus, we become Fatigued. We summon up courage as a substitute for knowledge and we have faith that all Motion is Progress, whistling while rearranging our decaying deck chairs, convincing ourselves over and over that it is the Blobs in this lava lamp that are stably meaningful, rather than the process.

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Guided meditation Video

I've soured on Sam Harris over the years, but I still find him to be highly articular and engaging. In recent weeks, some friends have indicated that I look absorbed and even anxious, even though my life is filled with joys and possibilities. I have been told that I have tied myself in knots, and I have heard, "You need to get out of your own way." For the umpteenth time, it has been suggested that I consider meditation in order to clear my mind. You can learn about meditation in many places. I've read articles and even a book on meditation. Today, I stumbled across this video by Sam Harris, who has long been an advocate of meditation. The fact that he is also well versed in cognitive science caused me to be interested in his approach to meditation. This is a 26 minute guided meditation. I found myself surprisingly able to hang onto the process and to escape some of the things that have been distracting me as I viewed this video. I'm going to come back to this several more times, while I continue to explore personal meditation.

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The vision and plans of Bernie Sanders

Very few politicians speak for ordinary people any more. Mostly, they speak to those with money in order to get some of that money for themselves. A shining example is Bernie Sanders. Recently, he was interviewed at length at Salon:

What I’ll tell you is what I do say in public, which is that, at a time when the middle class is collapsing; when we have more people living in poverty than ever before and we have huge income and wealth inequality; when we are the only major nation on earth that does not have a national healthcare system; when we have millions of young people leaving college deeply in debt; when we have the planetary crisis of climate change; when we, because of Citizens United, have a billionaire class now controlling our political process, we need candidates who are prepared to stand up without apology representing the working families of America and are prepared to take on the billionaire class which controls so much of America. I think that’s absolutely imperative that that takes place. What I have said is that I am giving thought to running for president. I haven’t made that decision. It’s a very, very difficult decision. I have gone to Iowa on a couple of vacations. I’ll be back there. I’ve gone to New Hampshire. I’ll be there this Saturday. And I’ve gone to other places in the country including the south—North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi—to get a sense of how people are feeling. But yes, I am giving thought and I will make the decision at the appropriate time.

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