Originally posted April, 2012
What Now?
You’ve got the music in you, don’t give up, this world is going to pull through. On the ITunes page is the album cover; a yellow square with a caricature of a man with too big feet. And as sound emanates from the dash once more my feet remember the pointed toe, the arch, the movement of muscle under my heart that makes me smile.
               In recent days religion has sent me to the edge. I drew my nightly warm bath trying to find ways of self-soothing. Can it be that I will have to live with centuries of patriarchy once more? Wasn’t it just forty years ago when I was fourteen that the world began making sense.
               If in that tub of warm water I began writing a letter to the Catholic Church that I wanted to be known now as EX – who would I send the letter to?
               A little, old man in Italy who wears Prada and has a cologne designed especially for him?
               An archbishop who wouldn’t allow Muslims and Christians to have a conversation at an all girls’ school for fear of terrorism?
Or how about his right-hand man, who is a Yes-Man I worked with, only to realize how foolish I felt when he manipulated me for his own gain?
How about the university President who’s hand I shook at two graduation ceremonies as I strode across the stage having found my voice in the theology of freedom? Can it be that was just eight short years ago?
The song – You’ve got the music in you-resonates. The voice says – when you’re near the breaking point just bend. Shall I bend? Shall I do as the Tao reading of the morning light suggests and live in obscurity, because to know anger I must first have known happiness. To live in obscurity, anonymous – to be invisibly supportive is to make peace with the ego and allow the world to make its own sense.
In life there is fight, but there is also flight, or perhaps inaction. Perhaps the solution is no solution, the letter unwritten, and the thoughts carried on the breath of the wings of a butterfly.Â