For me to forsake the world is to turn my back on all the elaborate plots humans have created to obscure the reality of their experience. I recognize that I have been part of that effort. I have been occupied with and supported assorted vain attempts to make enduring edifices to capture what has been but a passing experience. So much of this effort has been misguided, misleading, and, as I now realize, a mistake.
Learning from experience is not the same as preserving experience. Yesterday’s rose may be pressed and preserved between pages, but those same pages blur the beauty of today’s garden.
I forsake the world of this morning’s newspaper headlines, an unending recital of our failure to come to terms with our experience. At best, it is a gleaning of shallow observations of what has occurred. I am daily invited to live in a fantasy social environment that does not exist except in the imagined edifices of country, state and city.
I struggle daily to forsake my identity as a white male, an identify littered with the privileges, rights, expectations and fears of days long disappeared. Every day, I realize more deeply the mistaken and misleading veneer of religion that I have identified with. Old structures hardly give meaning to a world that is constantly evolving. On balance, the religion identity of Monday is the pressed rose of Tuesday. More is obscured than revealed.
The more I forsake of human invention and fantasy, the more clearly I can see. The moon glows more brightly, the birds sing more sweetly, and the Bloodroots shine brilliantly with white petals that will be gone by evening.