My
favorite sponsor who does not yet have a blog, my sweetie. You go honey!
From Rob Brezsny's newletter
A
BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE by Jack Gilbert
Sorrow
everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace,
they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But
we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings
before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at
the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known
and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while
somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day
in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but
not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our
gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the
only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the
locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end
had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite
everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored
late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the
waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as
a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all
the years of sorrow that are to come.
First
I didn't know this was a poem until I read further into the text in which I
found this, but okay, poem or not, I think it's an important directive in this
sucky world of ours: it's important to acknowledge and work against evil in the
form of bad government, mean people, environmental devastation, animal cruelty,
senseless violence, greed, heartlessness, callousness, insensitivity, and plain
stupidity. Important, important, important to talk about it and to ACT on it.
However,
the minute we let our minds and hearts be filled with the concentration of
evil, the minute we hold it in our bodies and let it drive out what is glorious
about being alive, I agree with the writer, we "lessen the importance of
their deprivation." We actually do a disservice to those with less than
ourselves when we fail to uphold and enjoy all that is good in a balance with
pushing down and out all that is bad.
Clearly,
there is much to delight in! We fail at truly living if we cannot balance our
serious work with the ability to laugh out loud. In fact, I say, if your
serious work in this life is not also joyful--even if that seems wrong because
your topic is so serious or awful--then you're doing it wrong.
Them's
fightin' words, folks! Challenge me, I dare you! I'm doing my serious lifetime
work right now in writing this, and I'm enjoying the hell out of myself. In the
words of MPR, "THIS I BELIEVE."
And
you?
