The Daily Death, Meditation #21
I died a little yesterday
night. It has become habitual, and, in the scant maturity I have acquired at
43, it is woven tightly into my rituals of being alive, of keeping my heart
open, of caring, of loving... to die a little every day in order to live while
I am alive. And this last death allowed me to wonder if this is what critics
label as blue or gray periods in artists' lives. This latest death heaped
despair in my heart as I finally mustered courage to finish an article I had
began three months ago, called Blood Ivory ( Nat Geo Mag, Oct 2012)about my favorite animals, elephants.
I wanted
to press control, alt, delete and reboot the relationship our civilization has
developed with the mystery of the divine and our expressions of faith. How can
destroying the gift of the life of the gentlest of giants, my beloved
elephants, all for the ivory of its tusks, to carve inanimate objects, honor
God? It is a crime perpetrated by Catholics and Buddhists, Hindus and atheists,
but I fail to understand the utter lack of common sense that justifies this
crime; hiding behind rationalizations of power, greed, need, or even worse,
faith. My desire to voice, protest, rebel, educate, inform, pulled me out of
the deep hole of my rage. I commit my spoken and written words, my heart, my
art, my passion, to add drops of care and clarity to the trickle that might
coalesce and create a river of reason to illuminate our behavior. Richard
Feynman's words held my hand as I found my way back to face another day:
"In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown open-
ajar only. We are only at the beginning of the development of the human
race."
And as this picture seems
to whisper in my heart, there is always hope, as long as baby elephants and
baby creatures of all sort keep making their entrance into our world, that we
might just get it right the next time around...
With love, Lina.
