The First Ones To The Dish

People love a cause, a common thread to hold onto and fight for with all the love and emotion we can have. However, if I am not one of these particular people, or one of their hangers on, they only seem like a bunch of zealots to me, which of course they are.

The zealots and the equally tenacious anti-zealots, who are really only zealots with different faces, are potentially dangerous sorts. I want Lennon to live his life with a zest and love that leaves him glowing with joy, but I am reluctant to have him find his bliss too early. If his bliss is something like categorizing butterflies, or writing obscure little things like My Thots, no problem. If his bliss is saving humanity, or the whales, or people dying of AIDS, it could be a death sentence. People have died for all these things, even Gods have died for some of these things. Of course Gods are either eternal, or just myths, depending on my point of view, but either way they meet some pretty grim ends.

What is worth suffering for? What is worth dying for? I mean really dying, not fading off the screen to be resurrected on tomorrow's soap opera. This living for real business is pretty serious stuff. People who forget this can be immensely powerful figures...in history, or battles, or any movement. They get lost in the ideas and make big changes in the world. Unfortunately they may also forget which changes are actually possible, or for the real good of those they are influencing, and which ones grow up out of runaway egos, thus ending their lives in infamy.

We can be like puppies, so excited about being the first ones to the dish, that we run over our little sisters and brothers on the way there. Taming that impulse is really hard, because if we don't eat -- we die. Dying physically, or spiritually, or even creatively is a fearful thought. Scary enough that some of us, who think too early, never accomplish anything.

There are people ready to push us over if we lean a little too far in one direction, yes-men who sacrifice us to the pitfalls of our own judgment, and people just waiting to shoot us down when we allow ourselves to become vulnerable. And if we aren't sensitive to all of these people, we cannot be sensitive enough to find our own true bliss. No wonder it is so hard. It sounds like another Bartholomew story. This one would be "Soft As Sunshine, Hard As Rocks."