Meditation moment

It’s Sunday. It is forecasted to be 106 here in town.

I understand and have endured cold weather. But this, this record heat, is certifiably unprecedented.

What if I – we – don’t live on to see the Heat Waves subside? Brief life we have lived.

Never enough time to finish that song, that book or a full love cycle (boy meets girl, looses girl and has her back – the Hollywood formula…”why do birds, certainly appear…every time, you are near….”)

I heard about Dr Death, about trends in Europe where people seriously contemplate suicide.

Here in the US, the pharmaceutical industry clings to the hope that dementia patients could slow down disease progression for almost half a year. At what cost?

I want to ponder life as I have experienced iI, having observed adults got angry, fought, played and at times, not fair. People and their infinite capacity for rationalization, flipping and spinning, calling Black White and vice versa. It all depends…it is all relative, given the contour and scale of things and time etc…

At this rate, no one will be put in jail. No court, no case, no justice.

It’s expensive to litigate. The middle-men/women shall always be with you, just as the poor and downtrodden.

People are hungry. Hence Lie, cheat and steal their way into better positioning. To whitewash the past. To reinvent themselves and rewrite their history.

What mass graves (in Hue, 1968, and Native American children up North). I personally visited the museum of skulls where the Khmer Rouge massacre took place (village of Ba Truc).

Don’t tell me there weren’t any atrocities. What triggered a self-righteous rage in me, was the story that people were made to get in line, to stoically receive their decapitating (those who ran, shot).

This “Killing Field” type of script was never popular. Not against the backdrop of predictable results Boy-Meets-Girl, Boy-looses-girl formula generated. Thank to a NYT journalist and a Cambodian actor that we, the audience, finally got to view (from a safe distance between the screen and our seats) mis-en-scene 20th-century mass killing.

That propensity to take lives, to act upon the urges, under whatever name, resides within each of us. No court, no jury, no judge. Just pull the trigger, swing the machete, press the gas pedal into the metal…

In Thelma and Louise, they did just that, only to hit and free fall in mid air, to freedom.

Girls just wanna have fun…till the Sun comes up from Santa Monica Boulevard.

Meditation on our short life. It’s already short enough. Too short to finish that beer, that book and that flick. Yet some people want to take the suicide option. While others, just take someone else’s lives, unasked and uninvited.

We finally see the wheel of justice takes its turn, shooters of El Paso’s Walmart, of Pittsburgh’s Synagogue, of Colorado’s Club…

Mind I remind you of our most recent history of violence. Or further past, of atrocities.

All the wasted lives, unfinished lives, and otherwise, genius lives cut short.

I mourn for lost potential. For yours and mine. For memory loss among the millions of dementia.

Billions more (myself included) who are suffering extreme Heat due to Climate Change.

Again, human are endowed with the capacity to think, to rationalize and of course, to deny the truth.

The last point saddened me. We might as well close our eyes and ears, for observation leads to analysis, to evaluation and comparison (to precedent cases)…then judgment. I know deep down, whoever made us and endowed us with those faculties (then seemingly let go of us to observe from a distance) sure equipped us with enough to ID problems and solve them collaboratively, might they be big catastrophes I have just mentioned, or if we slack off, HE/SHE/IT might as well intervene before it’s too late.

The capacity for self-destruction is there, bubbling below everyday surface, waiting for the right trigger. Then all those meditations, this one included, would serve as down time, waiting for some sort of Happening. The Omega end point. If you don’t think history progresses linearly, at least bear with me and contemplate the reality of our own end-point. When we no longer feel the extreme heat, cold or lukewarm weather. It’s good to remember windy days, when we were out , flying kites.

Why do birds, suddenly appear? Every time, you’re near.