It’s a Peanuts world of suffering,
and the Buddha is poking me on the shoulder
saying, “I told you so.”
He points to a path and says,
walk, it’s only eight steps,
and a smiling Jesus is standing by the gate.
He’s got a little white lamb in his right hand
and a bloody sword in the left.
“Remember the Passover?” He asks.
The Buddha puts his arm around my shoulder
and looks into my eyes.
The first noble truth is all about suffering.
So, don’t forget to get old,
make sure you get sick (painfully if possible)
and be prepared to die,
perhaps alone and forgotten.
I open my eyes and it’s a lead blanket blues morning
shrouded in a cloud of gray fog and stale coffee.
It’s a dog crap that sticks on your shoes day
and spreads over your clean white carpets,
and I don’t even have a dog.
It’s the 2 a.m. sleepless night
when the clock ticks and the pillow is hot
and my nose is stuffed
and my head is filled with a damned stupid commercial jingle
that just won’t go away.
Grief! Is it really so important
that we need to focus our minds on it?
It’s there all the time.
But I want to talk about it,
the anger, the frustration,
the endless Twilight Zone episodes
and visits to Motel 6.
Strange phone calls from sick children.
Emergency room visits
and mixed messages from doctors and medical staff.
I want to spew out my sorrow
and get it out of my system.
It’s therapy,
like howling at the moon
or chopping wood.
I’m trained to be an expert
at listening and hearing people’s pain,
but – oh, woe is me –
I’m a terrible listener, I guess,
especially when it comes to the people I love – my family.
It grieves me because I think I’m deaf
or have some mental defect or brain tumor
that drowns out their words.
I am a reformer and a helper
at least that’s what my Enneagram test says
getting out of bed every day
to do battle with the forces of sin and evil.
I turn on cable TV
and it’s another visit to the Death Star.
I must be crazy to think that a large orange tyrant will change
or that we will soon wake up
and discover our nation under the leadership
of the sane and the sound of mind.
My dreams are filled with mushroom cloud-flavored atrocities
and chlorine-gassed infants.
I see Gaza, Ukraine, and remember Viet-Nam.
When I look away I see Adolf’s ugly face
reflected in a thousand mirrors
and goose-stepping North Koreans
pounding out the monotonous sound of war on steel drumheads.
The rise of the new dictators and the strong men
portend a world that goes back to the Dark Ages – of the Twentieth Century.
Vlad the Impaler now resides in Moscow
and I’m reliving a world where little children
duck and cover beneath their wooden school desk shrouds
and basements are converted into concrete fallout shelter mausoleums.
There’s a corroded five-gallon tin can of peanut butter
that’s good for the next ten years.
My cell phone even has a Conelrad symbol.
I grieve for this world which is drowning in sorrow,
drowning in the hot water of melted glaciers,
drowning in ignorance,
drowning in injustice,
and just plain drowning in stupidity.
But while my grief comes from without,
it also comes from within –
my body, my mind, my soul
and spreads out like dark water on glass,
an angst-filled syrup
that often leaves me pallid, dry, and wasted.
I grieve for my children
who drift in a techno-millennial world
that is shallow, wasteful,
and wallowing in a mindless sea of social media and video games.
I am sad for their futures
because they don’t speak of spirit,
joy, service, enlightenment,
or even of God.
And I think about what I did wrong,
or perhaps what Sunday school lesson
I didn’t present with truth or passion.
If they even mentioned Jesus, Buddha, or Adonai,
I think I’d faint!
Did I not pray hard enough?
Was there some salvific gene that just didn’t make it through the blood-brain barrier?
I grieve for this body
that is aging and sometimes beginning to fail.
For tired eyes and ocular migraines,
for aching lower backs,
for painful knees,
for too much gas
and not enough peace of mind.
I despise this grief,
but strangely it provides the energy to fight back.
It is the yin that is essential for the yang.
It is the darkness which is essential for the light.
It is the emptiness and weakness of the human spirit
which is essential for the penetration of the divine immanence.
It is the paradox, contraction and contradiction
that enables creation.
And strangely it is the seed
that is transformed into joy.
Ah, Blessed Joy, Blessed assurance.
Jesus smiles and caresses his lamb
and Buddha claps with one hand.
(C) Richard Gordon Zyne
061224