YIELDING AND FLOWING

Love in the Time of Cholera. It's something like that here, now. Our "cholera" is the virus, and our "love" is that other overwhelming presence, the wildly aggressive, unrelenting heat, day after day, gnawing away at us, draining us, along with its sun-glare and drought. Novelist Gabriel García Márquez knew that when you mingle two ferociously consuming situations, somehow they produce something much more formidable than just 1+1. Being a monist, I'm easy with that, since it's clear that the One Thing is just expressing one suffocating purpleness in two different keys. But most people don't think like that, and it's harder.

Some old timers here say that with the heat starting so early and not giving up, waters in our area must be stewing something awful. Maybe this is when the Big One curls into its counterclockwise whirlpool just off the Guinea coast, then buzzsaws westward exactly toward us, picking up energy and intent as she comes. Maybe pretty soon. So, three monsters in the room, hardly believable.

Long ago I learned the power and beauty of yielding, so in early morning I do enough physical labor to keep the body toned up, but then, when the heat comes, I flow into shadows with breezes and other kinds of currents to flow with. If an idea gnaws at the brain, I write it down, like I'm doing now, but that's a yielding, too, yielding to the guidance of my dæmon, who always nudges me along.

My dæmon is different from that of Socrates. The little interior voice of Socrates' dæmon only told him what NOT to do, but mine mostly suggests what to do. Socrates was by predisposition a lusty, hard-drinking, loudmouth kind of guy, though, so you can see why his dæmon needed to specialize in reigning him in. In contrast, I'm by nature lazy and slow-witted, so my dæmon helps with that. Yielding comes easy to me. I stumbled onto the beauty of yielding, and of identifying and merging with the flow of things, by accident, beginning the day I started following my dæmon's advice. We all have a dæmon, by the way, at least when we're young. In most of us, though, the dæmon's voice is ignored until it just slips away and most people spend their adulthoods adrift.

These days I read a lot, look around a lot, and think a lot. That's all a kind of yielding, and very much going with the flow. I yield to books' ideas, so I can examine them and maybe flow with them. What I see when looking around, you know from my writings, and maybe you recognize that there I'm yielding, too, being an emptiness into which all kinds of currents may flow. Thinking is yielding, too. At least the kind of thinking I do, which is more a kind of absorbing insights already around me, than of trying to cobble together new ones inside myself.

So, for me, these are good days and nights. And if the heat and virus and The Big One get me, I'm alright with that, too. That's because I no longer believe that "my" tiny, ephemeral, much benumbed zone of the One Thing's spirit and consciousness matters much at all.

Good times, these are, yielding and flowing.