My Fine Ass, Reporting for Duty

So yeah. Yesterday was a bad one. And even as I posted, I wondered how I could follow that one with anything light or hopeful or irreverant EVER AGAIN. But today is a new day, the first of 1460, and living in that dark space for too long isn't going to do me or anyone else a damn bit of good.

I'm becoming quite the fangrrl of Mark Morford, but I just can't help it. His column today said exactly what I needed to hear. I'll share some here with you, but really - GO READ IT.

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Never think you have all the answers. But just know that you know how to ask the right kind of questions.

Which is to say, it's all about validation. Of truth. Of your truth. Of what you know to be true of progressive kaleidoscopic open-thighed human consciousness, and how radically and beautifully that belief differs from the small-minded black/white pseudo-Christian BushCo truth.

And in fact, I would argue that this kind of regular, daily validation is mandatory right now, that as far as Bush goes, living well -- living your beliefs to their utmost and allowing them full, raw manifestation, sacred or profane, luminous or pointed, naked or slathered over in karmic whipped cream -- is the best revenge, is by far the best thing you can do to counter the seemingly interminable BushCo onslaught.

So go ahead, skip the dour headlines. Forget to read the newspaper for a while. Refocus your intent and screw the sneering BushCo pomp and ignore the conservative flying monkeys who've stormed the castle and have announced there will be no good or progressive or healthy or spiritually radiant news for the next four years.

Know that this is not you. Know that you do not have to kowtow and you do not have to succumb and you do not have to bury your head and merely endure. Know that you have this one humble and luminous choice, always and always and every single day: no matter if it's dark energy or light, low vibration or high, raw intimate self-defined sensual divinity or dumbed-down numbed-out force-fed conservative sanctimony, you can either trust that truth and follow your own hot moral compass, or allow it to be stained and warped and doused in fear and led wide, wide astray. It's not about them. It's about you. Make your choice now. Grip it like a baseball bat.

Then, the good news. No longer will you have to ask how to survive. No longer will you ask how you can possibly endure the next four miserable, homophobic, warmongering, Earth-bashing years without daily weeping and clenching and rending of karmic flesh.

That truth of yours won't just set you free; it will lay you open and feed the universe and allow you to laugh at the mad circus of it all, ultimately morphing that sad resigned news-fatigue nausea back into outrage and ire and healthy intellectual fire. And you will, by default and almost automatically, get your fine ass back in the game.

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Through some twist of fate, I was born into a life that has been blessed with comfort and ease. I don't struggle simply to survive, I haven't lost those I love to a brutal war. I am very aware that my daily concerns are first-world, and I am thankful for that. There's no shame in living the life I'm living. The comforts and the trivialities, the joy and laughter... isn't that what I wish for everyone - to be at the self-actualization level of Maslow's hierarchy? To have the luxury of high-speed internet and a blog to post one's musings?

But with that attainment I feel a fundamental responsibility to recognize not only that most others don't have such ease, but also that my comfort comes, in some part, at their expense. And then follows the need to do my part to change that - to be willing to give up some of what I have so that others can have too. Yeah, I guess at heart I'm a big ole socialist. Big surprise.

Awareness and action. It's not THE answer, but it's an answer. And a right good one.

So there it is. With regards to what I post here, it will certainly bounce around, covering the wide range between deadly serious and stupidly trivial - maybe even both on the same day. And that's okay. Life is like that.