Watching Wind

"Deep down within us lies a relentless quest for meaning. Some might say that this is nothing more than a coping mechanism thrown up by the human mind to shield us from the unbearable pain of knowing that life is pointless. We dream of a universe in which we have a meaning and purpose, and prefer to inhabit this imaginary country rather than face up to the bleak and grim barrenness of the real world.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) argued that talk about 'God' and such things was nothing more than a crude wish-fulfillment on the part of those who could not handle the harsh truth of a godless, meaningless universe... Karl Marx (1818-1883) declared that our thoughts of God or a world beyond our present experience were just a way of coping with the harshness of our economic and social situation. Such thoughts consoled us in the sorrow and pain of life. They were the 'opium of the people', a narcotic that eased the pain of life and dulled our senses to the anguish of a meaningless world of suffering and oppression."

~ Alister McGrath, "Glimpsing the Face of God: The Search for Meaning in the Universe"

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Dear Alex,

In the whim of wailing this week, wind and rain whipped a bough by the street a stretch from my porch. Its fall I did not see till last eve.

What wickedness! Young shoots were sprouting, leaves mounting before their bowing bye-bye.

Of all bark and grip in decade, this limb could not cling onto one more hallowed overnight, its fortune capped. However bold it looked before, we know better now.

Or so it seems.

A picture is worth not a word till the wind speaks. Closer we come to behold something sacred - the shape of Wind.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

It is good to hear you writing again.  I don't mean overhearing the rumor that you are, but listening to a dying voice searching for life.

You spoke poetically, as you often do in your writing, though in real life you don't talk like that.

In real life you are prosaic, pragmatic, very Freudian, fundamentally Marxist, as all modern Man should be.  There are no other ways to work this life.

What drives us daily, I wonder, if it's not the dogmatic assumption of a a lying dying Man, that the moment we stop making life work life will stop working for us.  This might be a working assumption open to nuanced articulation, but its status of foundational truth is cemented with our every action, every thought.

Why don't you speak prosaically in your writing?  Is your real belief, true Self too vulgar for stanzas?

Poetry is dead.  Stuffs in the bookstore are public masturbation, or, put poetically, speaking in tongues: for the sole pleasure of the speaker at the expense of everyone else.  I've given up on it.  I am too puny for this persuaded world.

You can't expect people to think, as I've been often corrected.  Between the lines there is noting; we go to church to learn how to stuff God in.

Genesis gives an account of functional rather than material origins when the speaker utters (poetically, how else?) how God creates, speaks everything into existence.  In the same grand tradition we babble about God to make Him work for us.  He creates us in His image and we return the favor.

Yesterday I walked my dog and the wind was strong, a warm gust, enveloped us like a cosmic puffer jacket.  The warmth was strange, for being unprecedented to me, this time of the year, here in Raincouver.  The first thought entered my mind was: let me Google this right after I go home, there must be some meteorologist out there who could tell me why.  What else should I have considered, that God let out a fart?

Yours, Alex