Requiem Aeternum

Chris Roberts was a biker... a hot shot motorcycle rider... something that is not all that common in New Orleans, but something that he loved. He was murdered on Father's Day when he refused to let someone take his bike. You can read about him here. His murderer shot him in the evening, on Father's Day, and left another New Orleans baby without a parent. There are no official suspects or witnesses.

The folks at Confederate Cycle, where Chris worked, have created a video of his run out at the Bonneville Salt Flats a while back and when I discovered it this morning I just had to pass it on. There's nothing in it but pictures of someone doing what they most loved to do... but that's what living is really about and that's what we're missing with each person who is taken from us, whether in New Orleans, or Oakland, or Baghdad.

The video of Chris is here, and it's worth the time to watch and listen, and maybe even pray.

In the same paper this morning there was a story about someone else - this person, known only to those close to him because the police aren't releasing information - shot further uptown in a neighborhood not far from my house (in fact it's a neighborhood I went walking through the morning I was last in NOLA) and an accompanying story about the case against the murderer of Dinerral Shavers, the Hot 8 Brass Band drummer, being dropped because the witness wouldn't testify.

I didn't know any of these folks personally, but I miss them all. Their deaths have made my life poorer because of their absence in the world. I don't know how we stop this, but I keep thinking a lot about Gandhi's remark that you must become the change you want to see in the world.

I just keep wondering... Can I possibly change enough?

The Want of Peace

All goes back to the earth
and so I do not desire
pride of excess or power,
but the contentments made
by men who have had little:
the fisherman's silence
receiving the river's grace,
the gardner's musings on rows.

I lack the peace of simple things.
I am never wholly in place.
I find no peace or grace.
We sell the world to buy fire,
our way lighted by burning men,
and that has bent my mind
and made me think of darkness
and wish for the dumb life of roots.

Wendell Berry

--

A number of things have brought me back to Wendell Berry of late and passing by a collection of his poems that I bought at my first Jungian conference in San Francisco in 1983, I greeted the morning with this reflection on resting in the simple. I tend to do a lot of bouncing back and forth between what Berry mentions here; at once longing for the excitement of the world of burning men and then turning to seek the quiet of the meadow and the peace of the ocean. As we come into the snap, sizzle, flash of the 4th of July, the quiet of the morning, by contrast, calls to me and offers me rest.

At least for today.

Peaceful evening on the edge of rough seas

I had a hard day today.

No money... crumby work... frustrating conversations... You know, the kind of day that most of us have at one point or another when all the little ducks you need in a row wander off out along the levee line and nothing of much worth gets done.

That was my day and while I sit here trying to remain upbeat and cheery, the fact is that I'm fighting one of my classic uphill emotional battles against a deep, dark depression.

But I'm working on old web work that needs to get done, and I keep attempting to break the monotony of the task by gazing out the window at the soft, balmy evening while old Dave Brubeck tunes try to pull me toward some kind of safety and solace.

One could do worse.

PEOPLE ARE AWESOME...

Yesterday was one of those startlingly beautiful rare and amazing days in San Francisco, a summer day that was indeed both warm and sunny. The Pride Parade went off without a hitch and even the mayor found it necessary to leap out of his convertible in the middle of Market Street and do a partial strip tease (well... he took off his jacket and untucked his shirt) before waving to the crowd and hopping back onto his seat top perch.

Around the corner from where the parade began, the Giants were actually WINNING a second game in a row, and against the Yankees no less. Things may have been turned upside down around Civic Center for the Pride celebrations, and most people were wondering what happened to the fog, but not much was more surprising than the short-lived streak from the boys in orange and black.

The best thing about the Pridefest, at least for me, was the real sense of joyful chaos expended to celebrate the idea of just being whomever, and whatever, you are. The crazy, full-hearted, ebullience of living this strange adult version of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. The celebration is for me a little like Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans, a time to completely give in to the absurdity of living on this spinning planet hurtling through space. Days like yesterday (whether parading or ball playing) are the real point of existence.

PEOPLE... really... ARE AWESOME!