Being a post-cynical person

After a war, those of us who survive come home. Sometimes, there is no home to come to...so we have to create one.

A bombed-out heart needs repair.

So does a cynical mind.

The repair-work is done in the havoc that is left when both extremes of a paradox lay down their weapons and admit to impasse. The last option, it seems, is truce.

Truce allows a wary rest...and opens space for both sides to see where they're standing...and to see each other -- relinquished of defense.

Truce allows the exhaustion of battle to pervade the field; it allows combatants to absorb that they are no longer at war, but in its aftermath.

What is to be done now?

Poet Wislawa Szymborska considers this question in "The End and the Beginning":

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't straighten themselves up,
after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

Let's get to work, so we can stretch out together and gaze at the clouds.

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(with thanks to photokevin via flickr.com, whose photograph I've used here, and to Patti Digh, whose blog, 37 Days -- http://37days.typepad.com/37days/ -- is a compendium of marvels.)

Dear reader...

This is me on a very good day:

This is me on a day from hell.

This is how my mind sometimes rants:

and this is my mind at her best.

This is my mind at play...

and this is my mind at rest.

One day not long ago, the phrase "post-cynical seer" popped into my mind. Since I'm 49 years old and still don't know what I want to do when I grow up, I figure I've done enough living to try on this moniker and that.

I felt pretty cynical during the mid-1980s when I was arguing that Sisyphus' effort was not worth the struggle, and that God was a lie. My longtime companions, the trees, didn't seem to hear my soul anymore, and I refused to flirt with Spring, for it called out the men who were preying on my girlfriends; a critical mass of harm was being done.

I figure that when cynicism grows up it tempers into irony, spiced with compassion. Sisyphus might have had a stretch and a sigh as his rock rolled from peak to valley, and God...there's a Power, a Presence; that's all I can say. Life is created, sustained, cycled through; its intricate patterns and workings humble the eye and stoke the heart. Trees simply are and Spring makes me twitch with a once-a-year bliss. I flirt with whomever I please -- mostly cats -- and I'm wed to a man who's the love of my life and -- as my spiritual mother declares with a wink -- a "man...in all the right ways!" The first way: he's kind.

The "seer" part...well, "seer" is one of those words I've long wanted to use in just the right phrase. I'm no prophet or predictor; I'm an ordinary human who sees things, thinks on them...and is besotted with wordplay, colour, creation...

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Thanks to all who authored the images I've used here.