Why All The Crazies?
Dear friend,
You’d think the countryside would be silent, but it’s not. At night the dark chirrups, hums and hoots and there’s the occasional growl of a distant car or the splutter of a moped. The moon low and orange shone magnificently yesterday evening. The frogs singing to her as she hung close over the tree tops, so near you could see her craters and the pencil lines on her face.
The pine tree outside the guest room window is full with cicadas, during the day, to my ears they sound like hundreds of tiny angry sparrows going at each other on overdrive. Chiara finds the sound relaxing. If I were to inwardly protest about them, they would drive me crazy.
When I accept them as part of the environment they merge into the background, along with the sound of farm machinery and the radio murmuring away in the kitchen.
Someone asked me recently if the world has always been crazy. He mean’t full of suffering and people harming themselves and one another.
The cicadas have fallen silent. Maybe they’re listening for an answer.
If you look at the longest confirmed human life span, the oldest living person as of the time of writing was born before the outbreak of world war one.
In living memory we can say that humans have slaughtered millions of living beings with machines we built for the express purpose of mass murder and destruction.
Now we have machines so sophisticated a operator can kill a stranger from one side of the world as if playing a macabre video game.
So yes.
Ever since you and I came here, the world has been crazy.
Not that either of us set out to make it that way, but it’s the way we’ve found it.
Will the place still be mad when we leave?
Highly likely.
Sanity would mean the outbreak of global peace. The rich resources of mother earth sustainably shared amongst all living beings with humans relearning the lost arts of living harmoniously with nature, one another and technology.
Humanity will rediscover its spiritual nature. The eastern religions tell us there is, somewhere in time, a golden age, where kindness and compassion and love and forgiveness and sharing and cooperation are as natural as breathing.
Individually our golden age can and must be now.
No need to wait, it’s more that we are called on to lead.
Why all the crazies?
They’re following insane leaders deeper into insanity.
If you wait for the world to become peaceful, clearly that’s going to eat up a lifetime in disappointment and suffering. I don’t mean to be bleak about it. Quite the opposite.
It’s not selfish to cultivate personal peace now.
It’s the most generous gift you can give.
To follow the teachers of peace, whichever path appeals to you.
Along the way the lessons will include gratitude and appreciation, kindness and compassion, forgiveness, stillness and contemplation, love and service.
It’s not something that can be forced on an individual. It has to become something you reach for. Often you do that when you can no longer stomach the madness around you and you reach for another way.
The cicadas are at it again. They started up sometime while I was writing but I didn’t notice.
Maybe if you find yourself endlessly doom scrolling or looking for signs of hope in the media, if you’re finding no relief, maybe now is the time to begin your journey to inner peace.
Reach for that other way?
You can start with an inner question or request.
Something like, “Ok, what do you want me to learn?” or “Who is my teacher” or “What am I not paying attention to that you want me to hear?”
Talk directly to the divine as if it were right inside of you waiting patiently for you to notice.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey