I began to awaken on Kinney Road that bitter dark winter, Izzy and me chasing sunsets, running from life, running to life. This morning a friend said to me, “are you following what’s happening in Egypt? It’s disturbing, not good for the world,” and then a few minutes later, another called me and said “did you hear what the Supreme Court did? Isn’t it terrible, aren’t you disturbed?” And then running someone on the street, she told me “I know you don’t vote. You must vote. Everyone must vote.” A young dental technician told me this week that she was not sure of bringing a child into the world, it is so bleak and grim. And there is this friend who has listened to doctors his whole life, done everything they told him to do and is now poisoned and ill by medications that had no side effects but did.

And I thought my friends don’t know me, don’t get me. I fear they are asleep. Why are they telling me these things? Why are they embracing this idea of what news is, what the world is. What their lives are, shrinking into a fearful, left-right world.  Don’t they know that this is the same story every day, packaged in a different way from a different place with the same message: the world is an awful and dangerous place and you better pay attention to us or you will be caught unawares? Another script, like struggle stories, we are taught we must follow.

They need us to be alarmed and distressed so will fall asleep and accept this idea of what the world is and will be. Of what we need to be happy and secure. Of how much money we need in our IRA’s.  Or how we must shrivel up and disappear in anticipation of dying.  They know fear is addictive and we will follow it and pay for it and make them rich while we tremble and hide from our own lives and possibilities.

Some people chose to awaken, some people do not, and it is not my business to tell other people what to do. It is good business for them if we lead small and mindless lives, looking for our daily fix of gloom and despair.

I am giving out the wrong signals if people are telling me these things, and think they are important to me or will draw me into their dark spaces. Or that I will dance this dance with them, the how-awful-is-the-world-line-dance-that snakes over the horizon. The world has always been a roiling brew of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, safe and dangerous. There is nothing that is new. Only the way in which it is thrust upon us for profit of the hollow men.

Perhaps they are drawn to something inside of me that I have yet to purge. So this is not my news, I have begun to tell them. This is not my life. This is not what is important to me. I will not support or vote for a system that does not reflect my beliefs.  I will not be a small person with a spirit so timid and a mind so soft that I will accept this grisly and hopeless idea of what the world is, of what is important to me, of what I will pay attention to each day. I am grateful for my awakening, every day. The world is a beautiful place, and life is bright and full of promise.