The Burning Sky
I crest the hill and my reward for enduring the commute greets me. The sky blazes with the orangest pink spread in Lovecraftian tendrils across the slate almost-dawn sky. Colors and patterns that defy sanity spring from nature’s canvas. A smile creeps across my face as I sit a little straighter in the driver’s seat.
And yet, by the time I descend the hill and find a place to park under the dull quadrangles of mass-produced steel and concrete, the colors have bled out leaving a deathly blue pallor on heaven’s ashen face.
Packing ourselves into shiny metal boxes bedecked with purple and faux woodgrain pushes the beauty out of our heads as we wrangle with the social vagueness of relationships in transit. Life becomes a monotony of questions, of clarifying action’s meaning, of offense and niceties, of philosophy’s death in a thousand papercuts. Tiny details of our interactions and even why we choose one word over another outweigh the feather on Anubis’ scales.
Action in the post-industrial world centers on endurance. Conflicts grind on until one side exhausts its resources or tires of the exercise. And the side too stupid to figure out a better way “wins”.
This cold war philosophy has bled into our everyday lives. It worked for us against the Soviets, why shouldn’t it work everywhere else?
How can we perpetuate a way of life that forces us into thought boxes, that rewards inertia, that bleeds creativity, that kills beauty?
We can’t. But we have options.
We can take the joys that surround us and choose to focus on them. We can take the anti-sensical burning sky into our souls and use it to frame our days. We can look and see the goodness in everyone around us, no matter how hidden by cynicism. We can accept the world the way it comes to us and try to return it a little friendlier.
We can control our own thoughts. We can free our spirits from the cage pf physical limits. We can lighten our hearts. We can send our thoughts out to the cosmos and hear the harmonics echo in perpetual positive feedback.
We embrace Ma’at and weigh her feather down on the scales of our lives.
Maybe winning doesn’t make sense any more. Maybe we should change how we view the game of life from a zero-sum, winner-has-the-most-toys model to one that rewards the quality of our experiences instead of the quantity or quality expressed by stuff or power or whatever man-made scale we choose.
It’s time to figure out a new scale for life measurement. And when we do, remember to chalk me up a few points for seeing the burning sky this morning.
And yet, by the time I descend the hill and find a place to park under the dull quadrangles of mass-produced steel and concrete, the colors have bled out leaving a deathly blue pallor on heaven’s ashen face.
Packing ourselves into shiny metal boxes bedecked with purple and faux woodgrain pushes the beauty out of our heads as we wrangle with the social vagueness of relationships in transit. Life becomes a monotony of questions, of clarifying action’s meaning, of offense and niceties, of philosophy’s death in a thousand papercuts. Tiny details of our interactions and even why we choose one word over another outweigh the feather on Anubis’ scales.
Action in the post-industrial world centers on endurance. Conflicts grind on until one side exhausts its resources or tires of the exercise. And the side too stupid to figure out a better way “wins”.
This cold war philosophy has bled into our everyday lives. It worked for us against the Soviets, why shouldn’t it work everywhere else?
How can we perpetuate a way of life that forces us into thought boxes, that rewards inertia, that bleeds creativity, that kills beauty?
We can’t. But we have options.
We can take the joys that surround us and choose to focus on them. We can take the anti-sensical burning sky into our souls and use it to frame our days. We can look and see the goodness in everyone around us, no matter how hidden by cynicism. We can accept the world the way it comes to us and try to return it a little friendlier.
We can control our own thoughts. We can free our spirits from the cage pf physical limits. We can lighten our hearts. We can send our thoughts out to the cosmos and hear the harmonics echo in perpetual positive feedback.
We embrace Ma’at and weigh her feather down on the scales of our lives.
Maybe winning doesn’t make sense any more. Maybe we should change how we view the game of life from a zero-sum, winner-has-the-most-toys model to one that rewards the quality of our experiences instead of the quantity or quality expressed by stuff or power or whatever man-made scale we choose.
It’s time to figure out a new scale for life measurement. And when we do, remember to chalk me up a few points for seeing the burning sky this morning.