The apocalypse is upon us.

Actually, I thought it was upon us back on 9/11. I didn’t think about it so much around the tsunami in Asia. But nothing hits home like a city on U.S. soil being wiped out. I was driving through New Orleans just a few weeks ago, staying in a motel in Mississippi a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

Now … Wow. No words for this.

This kind of thing is one of my worst nightmares. To have all sense of life and self be swept away by an impossibly powerful force … To me, it’s more frightening than any other natural disaster, or any human-made disaster too.

Maybe it’s why I’ve developed such a strong counterphobia to catastrophe. Because deep down, I really do expect that at some point in my life, all will be swept away and I will be left with nothing but my own wits and skills.

I am amazed at the strength of all who are suffering. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose everything material, all sense of place and security in the world, to have only one’s life and the shirt on one’s back.

No doubt soon we will collectively start covering up the direct experience of this event with stories and spin. It has already started. But for now, this direct, immediate contact with death and life and the very real forces of nature — it’s sobering and enlivening.

School starts tomorrow.

Having gradually immersed myself in the terminology and mindset of the Western mystery tradition over the past couple of years, now it’s time for an about-face to a not-so-gradual immersion into an Eastern metaphorical/philosophical model. I’m a fairly simple guy, I like to have one primary philosophical paradigm at a time as a basis for my thinking, and in the past when I’ve been faced with competing models, I’ve always dropped one. But now that’s not really an option, since I’m committed both to my spiritual path and to my developing career. It’s just unfortunate that they operate from different paradigms — e.g. four elements vs. five, to pick an obvious one.

I guess I’ll just have to see how these things balance out.

It’s not that things have been slower lately, it’s that they’ve been so much busier. We just returned from visiting friends; we haven’t even really unpacked yet despite being in this house for a month; I start school in one week. Yikes!

So here’s something light, just to mark time.

I witnessed a car accident firsthand a couple of days ago. I was in the parking lot at the local library with Abigail, getting out of the car, when we heard a tremendous noise. A red car was sitting in the middle of the intersection. Amazing how much can happen in a few seconds; the front bumper was sitting several feet away and there was a huge dent right down the middle of the hood.

As I was facing away at first, I missed the first part of crash, it happened so fast; Abigail said she saw a silver car speeding off. A hit-and-run.

Someone helped the older man who had been in the crashed car to the sidewalk. He was trembling and saying, “Son of a bitch!”

Read the full post