There’s been a lot of the sharing of opinion in my valley lately. More about that here. Folks are sharing what they think. I appreciate this because we are not entitled to know one another’s opinions. Sharing them is a gift, a glimpse into the mysterious process of becoming who are in the process of Being.

“Be thou being made holy, even as thy Father in Heaven is holy.”

Late last week, I sent out some opinion of my own. I wasn’t hoping for anyone’s agreement. I just thought some folks – particularly those now living away from our home town – might like to take a whiff of this suspicious stuff that we found in the back of our collective fridge.

The responses, and the sharing around town and on the phone and on message boards – has been very interesting. Got me thinking about communication again.

I fear that without sharing, we are all locked away and apart in our little rooms, in silence. But communication is so hard. We open our windows to feel upon our spirits the rare press and flutter of transpersonal discourse. We pretend to be amused or enraged, saddened or uplifted, by a presence in the dim distance of another of our kind. But the human mind is a singular entity and there is no unseen, ephemeral organ of sympathetic, shared neurology at work.

We long for the thoughts and expressions of others to impact us. We pray that some line of poetry will make us weep for beauty, that a joke will force laughter from our mouths, or that some perceived insult will propel us to indignation. We pretend: We say “No one can offend me unless I let him, and please God let him, because between grief and nothing I will choose grief.” But in the end, each man is alone with the static in his skull.

Some of us butt our heads and hearts repeatedly against the intransigent carapace of solitude, tacking lines upon the millions of lines of hopeless, infinite literature.

Others, perhaps as a means of self defense to such futility, resort to censorship. (“Hey, you can’t say that! You can’t put that there!” … Remember the Christmas trees removed from the Seattle airport last year? … Who can blame them?)

It is all so difficult, this life, this intractable Being. In the words of Stegner:

So I envy those who sport a fine, clear, dogma. I used to have my own, but it has drifted away like fog on the Rincon. I just don’t know anymore. It seems like every damn story has two sides to it. And I fail to trust my own subjectivity, let alone that of others. I find myself grasping for syllogisms which have more premises than conclusions. And often I find myself like Diogenes The Cynic – Diogenes the Doggish – dipped in darkness, feeling for the light switch and muttering,

So as much as I’m into the Progressive movement and its concomitant Change, some days our society is one big soggy, stinky diaper of existential angst. Then I don’t know if we’re up to the task of changing this.

While we ponder how long we can all hold our noses, I refer you to the words of The Chink:

“I believe in everything; nothing is sacred, I believe in nothing; everything is sacred, …Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.”