A letter to a dear friend
[Dear Friend]
It was wonderful seeing you at the [20 year high school] reunion, and at least in superficial aspects, to see that nothing has changed with you in demeanor and presentation.
Many people experience me very differently now as compared to then, though I’d like to think it is only - or maybe primarily - that I’ve learned somewhat how to be in the outside world.
How to put on the mask of acceptance,
how to be in the world of normality
knowing how constructed or destructive
many aspects of it are
compared to our authentic selves
and those we’ve come to love in adulthood.
Although I adore the journey I’ve been on, with many mistakes and tribulations, possibly earned and some not - I really cherish that we were able to meet each other and become friends as kids.
Time and space can be very clarifying at times.
Reminding me of the genuine face and spirit of an old friend living an honest and present life is both refreshing and relieving.
Relieving in the sense that I really do gravitate to those who are living a good life in service to humanity and to those closest around us, along with navigating in some peculiar manner what it means to be here.
Do I appear altogether different than I was, or am I in some ways the same?
It’s impossible to see yourself clearly, really, isn’t it.
I’m still finding myself on a journey I can’t truly define easily, at least not out loud.
It must be some Euro-centric anxious need to find out
what is going on around us,
and put it in front of everyone.
Or maybe to risk defining it and therefore be revealed as merely idealistic - or worse still, imbecilic - I would dare to say that we are all deceiving ourselves to get by day-to-day.
We are making the best of it.
Is this a fantasy to raise these concerns?
It would seem so excepting the moment anyone turns their thoughts to the current political situation…
I am terrified those of us with good will towards our fellow men and women, and even morseso wanting the best caretaking for our children’s progenitors yet to have the blessing of making active choices in the matters of life, death, happiness, and the harder reflections of what to leave back to us in the form of moral and practical judgments___
I am terrified that we will be taken over by the worst person in recent human history and thrown into the next horrible dictatorship that fascism, or the next term that will developed for the torment that will be created, enables those horrors our modern situation will develop with no real resistance to speak of - in our own country, the most powerful and with the most destructive potential as far as nations ever to exist in this historical context which we created some thousands of years ago - and that most people will wonder how it happened. There is so much more that each one of us needs to know about ourselves.
I know. It feels to big for all of us. Some of us have children. Best to focus on what’s important. Keep peace of mind, as what happens to parents in their nervous system is reflected in young children as diagnoses throughout adulthood, something the parents are solely responsible for while in the raising role for the first 15-25 years - and is very serious.
But the outside world also does not wait on us, although it is also made up of individuals dealing with similar decisions - and depends on how they are made.
But -
Many times I come back to this question:
Why does evil exist?
How is it really defined?
Who embodies it?
The main areas this ends up for me are the following:
More questions are generated.
Assuming evil is totally alien to yourself or only incarnate in historical tyrannical figures as anomalies to the human experience is to avoid the problem altogether.
We must admit that without fighting for what is most dear to us now invites the worst parts of us to be brought to the forefront
if our systems, our society, and our fellow citizens are driven to desperation and threatened by conditioning or compulsion by law or by brute force.
This may have sounded lofty 10 years ago.
but I still would have written it this way.
I was having waking nightmares about totalitarianism yet morbid interest in it due to it existing at all in reality.
I also came to a realization in 2011-2012:
Why would I assume someone similar to Hitler wouldn’t exist in my lifetime, and in the same areas of influence or power or greater?
This was very humbling, and I wanted to share this struggle publicly, though it was mostly carried out in private.
The actual pathway of this possibly coming true is much less satisfying as some sort of clairvoyant prophecy, and more of a devastating condemnation of humanity as a whole.
Maybe it is a test of Gaian or universal forces.
I don’t really know.
It just feels like time is very, very precious right now.
The way we use it MATTERS.
Most people are not aware of what they have, and the effects of their behavior.
Most people also somewhat paradoxically want what is right when it comes to fundamental truths applying to all of us,
but their blindness to their upbringing
cultural
familial
national
spiritual
emotional
physical,
the unconscious biases and violent cultivation of hatred extracted from our true brotherhood, to ensure national boundaries and collateral industries are upheld at the behest of common people’s marginal hierarchies,
these are what cause genocides
death camps
tragedies thought unconscionable here, wherever “here” is
until after they’ve come to pass,
and the true bad actors defined clearly
so everyone’s conscience
isn’t too damaged with guilt.
The memorials 50-100 years in the making.
Yet most people live normal lives.
So what is our part?
What is our part, you and I?
When it comes down to it, for each of us that is an individual decision.
But for us that live in the United States and have some semblance of physical/material/emotional space to even consider the problem compels a necessary responsibility.
Even if it goes nowhere.
If we do nothing it will go somewhere we would never want to imagine.
We owe it to our children to say we did what we could,
and witnessed as honest and good souls.
I’m sorry this is so esoteric.
It is the spiritual realm I live in,
and I need you to know it.
It’s so hard to let anyone into it, if merely for fear of being misunderstood as sentimental or simply incoherent.
I love you, and would love to catch up on more temporal things as well.
When can I meet your wife and kids?
I’m hoping I can visit Charlotte in the next 1-2 years.
Elle and I will always keep a place in San Francisco, though we are also looking for jobs in Europe.
Let me know how best to stay connected in the meantime.
Your dear friend,
Marion