Tuesday, April 5, 2016

The myth of nation and blood. Part one

Looking at your world, the one you live in and asking the question how did we get here and what are we doing here? This is a challenge that goes so far beyond the daily tasks. The tasks may be hard, like cultivating a plot of rice. There are parts of the work that are backbreaking. It's like you must break your back and broil in the sun and get bitten by snakes just to have a little something to eat. You are in that rice field all day and sometimes nights in your bare feet and little to wear. You carry a simple tool. You feel the mud and stubble and dust and water with your feet and you must wonder. Why am I here? Or maybe you don't wonder because is there really a reason to ask this? Maybe you have no reason to ask this question because. Because. It all is here. The world is here in this paddy in this land. You do not know what this land is beyond your village and your but of paddy and your but if forest. Beyond the path that leads to your village and leads out. This is a world not self contained but nearly. It is there as one piece. A world that holds everything. Existing on its own seasons of sun and rain and your backbreaking work and not exactly nothing else but very little else. You are in this world and you do not need an explanation for it. This is you. You need no answers because you have no questions. Not about the paddy. Not about the forest. Not about the wewa, the body of water your village uses. But maybe there is someone who asks, who does want for an explanation. How did we get here in the first place? Why are we here?

Your story like all peoples' stories is an ancient story. The land renews but is ancient. The story is ancient but renews. Like you. Renewal replays the ancient story and in its telling, retelling, planting, replanting renewal and your story and your place repel change. They are. You are. It is. Here. Here is where you are but how did you get here?

You live with others. How did they get here? It is an ancient story of the people. You are part of those people, that people. You have a people. The movement of the people. The people came by movement. Movement from some other place. Your people came not from here, even though they have been here forever. You know you don't know where your people came from, only they came here to this landscape with its jungles and water and sky. The sky gives rain in season and in season it does not. Your people know of this sky. Your people learned this sky. They can divine the seasons by the stars in the night sky. Perhaps your people came from the stars to settle the land, to establish the seasons, to make the plantings and rice plantings and telling tales and retelling tales of the people. There is no need for an explanation. No requirement. Only because it is there. It is here. There is no why. It only is. It is eternally. It was eternally. There is no was because it only is. It is eternal. Your putting that tool to mud, your planting paddy, your motion, your touching feet to soil, your backbreaking work is eternity in its planting and its telling. You move in eternity. Your moving is predicted by its place in eternity. Eternity itself is only moment and that is the moment you find yourself in, if you find yourself. If you need to think beyond now, backward or forward, to consider some beyond, to find or define some origin. Your finding depends on looking and you may not do any looking. You may live without looking. You are able to leave your shack in the dark and grab your tool without seeing because of the dark. You find your way to the fields in the dark, the only light stars or the chill of morning. You do not look and you do not find. You are in this moment you are this moment. 

Your moment is a landscape with landmarks. Your moment's landmarks are in time and space. Space and time engulf you and are part of you. You are positioned in this space and time and even if you asked, which you don't, you may but you mustn't so you move without asking, this space and this time are your home. You live in the landmark that is your space and time, your time, your space. This fluid at your feet, this fluid of your eyes, this fluid in your veins. These fluids define this space, this time. These fluids are your landmark. Fluid requires no how did it get here or what is it doing here because look. Feel your heart beat. Stand. Carry your tool. These are evidences of your place and time.   There is no question because there is no explanation. This is. 

The people, your people, are like a fluid. You move in and among that fluid like you move in space and the way you move through time. Through a successions of yesterdays and tomorrows but not too far back or too far forward not back or forward enough to challenge the continuity, to make the river of being seem to bend or to curl like smoke from your village fires or the snake slithering up your sill. 

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