May the sun rise in every heart

I didn’t grow up irrigating farms. Or raising livestock. Or fishing from a canoe.

I never molded clumps of clay into bricks to build a house. I never crouched in the woods waiting for prey with a bow and arrow.

I never consulted any elders about the signs of the stars. I never attended any gatherings of the clans or tribes or councils.

I had no culture.

I grew up among merchandise and meadows, among the useless commodities of the supermarket and the ineffable silences of the nearby woods.

I read Rilke, Jung, and Nietzsche and I never met them. I never went to Germany.

I read Fromm and Maslow and Goffman. Foucault and Kühlewind. Pessoa and Keats. Borges, Márquez, Rumi, Hafiz.

The Upanishads and the Gita. Buddhism and Sufism. Humanism, feminism, empiricism, existentialism. A whole bunch of words.

I listened to the snow, I watched the crickets’ hum. I was there with the rippling lake, I was there with the freezing stream.

I accompanied the falling leaves as they fell down disintegrating softly irreversibly.

My companions were the fish and the fireflies. The stones and the foliage.

I had no culture because I was lost in words and woods.

Lost in thought and lost in the leaves that seemed to signify some kind of meaning like the alphabet of an unspeakable language.

Lost like a fog that a person sees for the first time and then thinks, “so this is what a fog looks like”. Like a fog I was here, and then I was gone.

Restless, homeless, never belonging, never rooted.

I had no culture because I had no anchor and no foundation. Unchained but not free either. Unbroken but not whole either. Not actualized either. Not innocent either.

I had no culture and if I did it probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyways because this is what a life is – here, there – and then gone, lost, like a fog that is seen for the first time and then is obliterated from existence except in memory alone.

Some people grow up with cultures and they feel secure in their inherited protections. But they are deluded and even more lost than the wanderers, because they are not aware of their own wandering state.

They are convinced of the weight of their anchors but they, too, are free floating like dandelion seeds suspended in sunlight.

That the people of the world may recognize this ubiquitous lostness.

That the people of the world may come together to find a way.

But the people of the world have been sorted into cultures here and there, and have forgotten how to step away from their huts.

That each person may be free individually, and that all people may be free together, serving as mutual guardians of the collective freedom.

May the people of the world rediscover that peace. And may the people of the world rediscover that which matters more than cultures here and there.

May the sun rise in every heart.

May the light of the heart prevail.

May every person be free.

May every universe be illuminated.