My thoughts aren’t original or groundbreaking. I know that. But maybe I’m here to remind you to think more deeply about the mundane stuff. Or that which we consider to be mundane. Like sleep. Isn’t it crazy that, for eight hours a day, everyday, humans enter into a state that (basically) makes them dead to the world? Eight ritual hours of nonexistence. Or television consumption. Eyes glued to a screen, watching other people live their lives but doing nothing themselves. And the various needs of the body that a person must obey, or else. If they don’t, the result could be death. No exaggeration. Hunger and dehydration–and a million other things–are real, people. Or the mere fact that humans live in houses and drive cars and hold fancy jobs and arrange the arugula and chicken on their sandwich to look pretty. Is there no such thing as a feral person anymore? Why has everything become so structured? That can’t be human nature, can it? And now most of a person’s life is stored on the internet for the world and all eternity to see. It must seem hypocritical of me, typing this from the comfort of my heated home, but I can’t change how things are, how the world functions in this day and age. The biggest difference my lonely, little self can make is challenging the masses’ way of thinking. Probably nothing noticeable will take place, but maybe, just maybe, people will begin valuing themselves for different reasons. They won’t see their worth in the lofty education they have received or all the connections they have made. They’ll find their meaning in the fact that they exist in a wide world with a consciousness so vast, a person’s whole life could be spent watching a river flow and thinking of all the beauty that has come before. It seems so surreal to think of all that has happened and will happen on this one tiny rock floating through space. We are so tiny, the universe so vast. The most we should expect of ourselves is equal appreciation of divine and earthly pleasures. We aren’t made to follow rules or conform to norms that should exist in the first place. We are made to simply be.
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Saragun Springs 
Jordan
You hit the point on human futility. We have this strange need to hold meetings and hire advisors for problems instead of acting on the obvious.
It is a well documented fact that the State of Washington spent over a million dollars for each homeless person in the state a fiscal period or two back.
It is obvious what happened to the money. It went “Bleak House” the way money goes that was intended for the powerless.
Now, the essay is full of caring and frustration for the drag and enforced death march that often describes life. Still, you care, most do not to any real extreme. Well thought out and well written.
Leila
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Interesting post and it does make me hanker back to the sixties when for a brief moment it did seem that we might go another way – Alas it was not to be. dd
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There is something very wrong and insidious about the ways of humans.
Good questions about human nature. The human wants security, comfort, and to be entertained at their own expense.
They love row houses, big screen TVs, and Speedway gas stations. Food, full of poisons, coming to the door by grizzled fellows wearing Buddy Holly glasses.
“A feral human” that’s an interesting description. The authorities would capture and send the wild human to a mental ward. Just for wanting to be freely ignorant–free of all of it.
Civilization, for who?
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Dear Jordan Eve,
The power of your thinking and your ability to express it in conversational yet urgent prose are vastly impressive. Conformity, thought control, the thought police, Groupthink, the herd mentality, have all become so utterly commonplace now that very few in relative terms can see beyond these. They think they are being original while in truth they are being led around by a ring in the nose with blinders on their eyes. Your transcendental, essayistic prose addresses some of the most urgent, crucial, important issues of our time. Breaking free of the algorithm that is designed to keep one on the end of the hook cannot be overstated in its importance NOW and for the future of humanity, and the Planet!
I deeply, deeply admire the way you discuss aspects of the divine in your work. Very few are able, these days, to approach such topics with the subtlety and nuance which you bring to the table. It’s usually one way or the other: ideological, dogmatic, judgmental, closed-minded attitudes and stances, OR shallow, hollow, simplistic, and simple-minded rejection of anything having to do with the divine at all, as if it were God’s fault that humans have screwed everything up, and because SHOPPING and other such distractions are more important. The middle ground you walk in this respect is, like your ideas about conformity and nonconformity, truly unusual in the best of ways.
THANKS for contributing your prose and your ideas to Saragun Springs! Looking forward to more of your work whenever you’re ready…
Sincerely,
Dale
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