Friday, April 27, 2012

Eating peanut butter and crackers in the middle of the night

            There’s an adjustment to be made here in this process of reintegration into domestication after going through the gauntlet of post-materialistic realization. I am awake. I have awakened. I feel the gnawing of hunger and remember that there is peanut butter and crackers in the kitchen. At 4:30 am I rise up from a night of restless sleep and get these and the cup of cold coffee left over from the previous day. As I sit and eat and sip I reflect back on my reality two years ago. I was sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. I had no money. I would walk an hour from where I was staying to the community kitchen for food on the days they would serve free food. On those days they didn’t serve, I would try to have something to eat, but sometimes that didn’t happen. I was staying with a friend who considered it irresponsible if I wasn’t employed and earning a living, so he refused to help out with food. He had a jar of peanut butter and crackers by his recliner. He would sit and eat these for a snack while watching television. At night I would get up when the pain of hungry got to be too much and go eat some of his peanut butter and crackers. I would try to do it so he couldn’t tell that I had taken any.
            There are indications that it takes time to overcome obstacles and recover from hardships. Living in survival mode took me past my usual sense of self. I can endure. I will endure. I have endured. I have been enduring to the point where endurance is a function of everyday life. I don’t have to lay there and be hungry at night any longer. I have been disciplined to endure so I forget. It is a reality I never forget. Lying there at night knowing that if I try to sneak in and get something to eat my father will hear me, and we all know what happens next; that memory. I endure.
            The need to survive emanates from chosen stature. Others would attempt to impose cellular re-modification in an effort to disrupt the ability to endure. The knowledge that survival is ego-based and a healthy ego survives best ensures that I keep focused on the goal beyond post-materialistic dis-unification. Reunification integrates that achievement. The reintegration process utilizes all aspects of self and self is defined by cosmological vision, not constrictive societal constructs. Society would have it otherwise. The paradigm of behavior modification is that if enough pain is imposed upon a person they will yield to societal demands. Endurance and the will to survive with the understanding that reunification and reintegration are self-regenerative processes that supercede non-irreparable damage makes it possible to persevere. Beyond irreparable damage is the knowledge that regeneration will occur anyway, transcending time and space through incarnate behavior.
            Nothing is lost. Nothing is gained. It is all the same. “I don’t miss the crumbs/I do miss the crackers” was recited as verse in the appeal to White Feather. Now some crackers are missing. Now some crumbs are revealing. After the deluge the idea remains intact. We are Holy as One/and more/and more/and more.

Oliver Loveday © April 27, 2012 7pm EDT

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