Skip to main content

Closer to Fine: Making Peace with my Mortal Coil

"There's more than one answer to these questions 

Pointing me in a crooked line

And the less I seek my source for some definitive 

(The less I seek my source)

Closer I am to fine."     - Emily Sailers, Indigo Girls


God, dear lord, this song moves me. It took me an instant to give up Christianity, but it's taken me a couple of decades to wrap my arms around that loss. 

We are humans. We live, and we die. Our sons and our daughters live on. And they die,, and their sons and daughters live on, and we, as a species, ideally - 

have eternal life. 

But there's no ME in that scenario. I'm a cog in the wheel. I'm dust and decomposition. I'm the roadkill the crows would be pecking at, were it not for embalming or caskets or cremation. 

And I don't want to be nothing. I don't want to have no consciousness. I want to know what happens next. I want more than what I'll likely be given - 100 years or so on a planet, as a fairly evolved mammal - evolved enough to say, think these thoughts and write these posts. 

So, there's a Great Depression in knowing that I spent my first 20 years believing in the God of a bible (my chosen source - or, more so, the source chosen for me.) And then I spent another 20 trying to convince myself that it was okay to walk away from said source. 

Like the song said, I even spent time trying to take from multiple sources. 

I even spent time thinking through the metaphors in the sources - the Son versus the Sun. You know. If you know, you know. 

All of it sucks. 

All of the hate, done in the name of a god. 

All of the longing for something better than this mortal coil.

All of the comfort in believing the Evil ones will "get theirs" in Eternal Torment. 

But there's none of that.

There's only pointless hate, carried out for ego and for power.

There's only this mortal coil.

There's no comfort, no Eternal Torment, just a glitch in the brains of these mammals around me that make them hurt and kill their own.

There's only here. There's only now. 

And it terrifies me to have conscience, and it horrifies me to lose it.


Like Shakespeare said, "Conscience doth make cowards of us all." 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

in which i have a birthday and a giveaway

The blogger as a child. p.s. it's my birthday. And people at Starbucks like me. (I did get this for free, but it was not for the benefit of my blog.)  (Obvi, it was a gift .) There's a cupcake in that box! There's a hazelnut latte in that cup! In other news, I'm having a 100 Followers/ It's my birthday giveaway. You should enter. I'm giving away the following goodies: 1. A $25.00 VISA giftcard. 2. An original poem, which will be hadwritten and autographed on pretty paper. It might be about love, about being a writer, or maybe the winner will be able to choose the topic. We shall see. This giveaway is a bit seatofthepantsspice. 3. A frame from my wedding day. In fact, this very frame: 4. A mystery. The fourth goodie will be a surprise until you open the package! 5. The whopper: I will dedicate a karaoke song to you, personally, and put it on my blog, vlogger style. If you want to enter this smashing contest: leave a comment. 1 entry if you follow and comme...

First Page Blogfester

Preface: TGIF. It has been a day. So. I'm participating in the First Page Blogfest in which writers around the blogosphere post the opening 24 lines of their WIP. (In a "real" book, this is the approximate amount of work that would appear on page 1!) This blogfest is being headed up by Kelly over at Kelly's Compositions . Please check out the other entries and leave them a comment on their work. My own WIP will be featured on Roni's Beta Club next week, and I chose an excerpt from the beginning one chapter one for critque over there, so today I'll give you the true beginning: the opening lines of my prologue. Here goes nothing. My working title is A SAD SONG IN A FLAT KEY Genre: Literary Fictionspice Prologue May 2005      Laurel sits Indian style. She faces the head of her bed and tries to focus on Cafe Terrace at Night, pretending it is priceless artwork instead of a cheap replica. She counts the tables first, and the...

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Seriously, Sarah? I am more irritated with you now than I was when you called Katie Couric perky on Oprah this week (and wasn't that the annoying pot calling the whistling kettle black?) and more irritated than I was when the interview with Katie Couric aired and you couldn't think of one book or magazine that you read on the regular. (Oh, I'm sorry - you chose not to disclos e the titles of books and magazines and newspaper you devour, because Katie Couric was annoying you and treating you like an uneducated inuit.) Maybe you should have just swallowed your ego and mentioned Newsweek. I mean, I'm not suggesting that the cover page would look different if you had, but could you try any harder to alienate the media? I know, I know, they are all evil, with their leftist agendas and loose morals. I understand. It's so difficult when the world won't give a feminist maverick a fighting chance, and harder still when that maverick has been ordered to stay on scrip...