Ten years from now
In our lives and in the world we/I live, what we now anticipate will happen fast, will not change, and what we are not considering now, will change, and fast.
I believe that people speak to each other to, and from, behind masks, that what gets said gets inside no matter what – and that we receive messages that at the time, we do not acknowledge, unless and until at night, we dream. I believe the dreams we receive interpret who we are, and what everything else is, using our own symbolic images.
Dreams match our life and bring together everything that happens, in front of the mask, and behind. Masks are not real, dreams are. I look back at my past few years and find a relationship I could not imagine failing, failed. And bees dead. And an oil well shouting, “Everything will die,” the “revolution will not be televised.” The revolution will not be imagined, it will be what we cannot see. It will be what it will be, whether we can see it or not.
We, or many of us, look ahead to the next ten years, but we don’t really - that’s the mask. Behind are the conversations we have with ourselves, bringing together all our hopes, lies, facts, and whatever else anyone tells us, true or not. We then look ahead through lenses blurred and transformed by intellect and fantasy. It’s a trap. We know it. And we don’t.
I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I don’t want to imagine the world will become what the unimaginable suggests might happen. That would be unbearable. However, I do imagine the realization of the unimaginable is familiar to, among many others:
Vietnamese
Afghans
Nicaraguans
Chinese
Ugandans
Haitians
New Yorkers, on Trinity Pl. and Liberty St., 2001.
The point is, I’m not prepared to be surprised, but I know I will be. Too many tracks are no longer parallel, they converge somewhere in the future. Things like global warming, soil degradation, ocean death, and deforestation, the disappearance in the U.S of the middle class. At this point, something seems unavoidable, and I should be headed to a plot of land sufficient to cultivate a years worth of food stuffs.
Still, I’m thinking about my lost love, my friends and my immediate problems, my aged mother, my job, my bank account, suffering people in Darfur, an interesting story I’m reading in Permaculture Activist. Relatively speaking, I lead a privileged life, one that affords me the luxury of thinking about the future, and the facility to do something about it. I think, but I don’t really know. I look, and at times see myself looking outside my mask.
My dreams seem real.
