Sometimes wonderful

The paint is peeling from the wood of the Guides' hut. Inside, my girls are listening to a fat woman with a shrill voice telling them about something I'm not sure what, I'm not listening. We are standing out in the cold, dutiful parents in the best place we can be: serving our children.

The hut is ageing but it will likely outlive me. I was thinking, no one will sing over me. Am I sad that there is no magic in my life, or that there is no magic in this world? It has always seemed prosaic to me; sometimes wonderful, true, but nothing beyond what there is and how that makes us feel.

But I wish love really was eternal so that I could love my golden girls forever, so that there was a little piece of remembrance of my love for them throughout time.

I was reading today that a physicist, a true hierophant of naturalism, theorises that there is no dark matter, and the unexplained pull that we know is there but cannot find its source is the echo of a deeper universe, that all we perceive is the froth on an ocean that we cannot see, touch or feel.

I like the idea. It suggests that the universe is not random, but that what we perceive of it seems random because we cannot discern the underlying pattern.

And sometimes I like to think I want to know the answers, but other times I feel it is just as satisfying to have to make your own. Sometimes I have wanted magic, and I have felt envious of those who are able to have faith that it is there. I find their god unsatisfying but that does not mean there could not be one that offered a better fit.

***

The other day, I was thinking, maybe the rightists are not wrong. Maybe it really is just a dog-eat-dog world, devil take the hindmost, and I have just been hindmost. I worry that that is why I am on the left: not that I believe in community, but that I believe in the underdog because I am one.

But, you know, they are ugly and the world they paint is ugly too. Whyever I believe what I believe, it leads me to believe in a world that can be beautiful, in the goodness of my fellows, however little they show it, in a numinous "better".

I will take aesthetics if I can find it. Without it, we have to just be angry apes in a hostile world, and really, do you want that?

***

We move through the night, the cold fogging the windows. I am thinking about the people I have loved and how clueless I am about why they just slipped away. I am just not good at it, and in thinking that, I wish I knew whether I mean, at being loved or at anything at all. It is so hard not to just be hollow, to let the currents of your life echo inside you.

I grab Zenita and hug her. I love you, she says. My every cell sings. It doesn't matter what this really is. It doesn't matter how you explain it. It exists. That is all we need.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:32 pm