“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” Mahatma Gandhi

Man, I have been busting to sit down and write this story, wherever the hell it ends up going. I have given up the idea of being like a conventional writer, whatever that means anyway. I am a storyteller and I would like to think there is a spontaneous quality about it. It’s like the story is most important and however you get it out there is just fine. I guess, as a result, I can often sound terribly unprofessional, breaking many of the rules of smart writing. 

One of the things a writer is supposed to do is to get to the meat of the meal and not waste people’s time, because they will simply go elsewhere. For those of you who are really hungry, this would be the time to ask for another menu. I am a victim of my mind and I go wherever it takes me.

I begin my stories on Friday afternoon. I get home, sit down at the triangular, computer table, wedged into a corner of my living space, activate my personal Pandora DJ, look at the blank screen and start up with a story I have thought about for at least several days before this weekly, Coming to Jesus moment.

Well, this time I had nothing and rather than just let it be, I started writing an incredibly stupid piece. it was about, you guessed it, having no idea what I wanted to write. I puked up about 500 words and figured I would come back to it the following day, which is today. God, it was awful.

If you are still with me, thank you for your patience and now I do have a story I really want to share. I always look for a poem to close out my podcasts, which I record every week. Initially, I started out reading my blog posts, which made for energetically flat programs.  I couldn’t stand listening to them. Who cares? Eventually, I decided to cover news stories of all kinds that occurred during the week, leading up to the recording session. I have always read the news, but making it the spine of my podcasts, changed how I reacted to them. I felt myself becoming  passionate about certain recurring issues. It had nothing to do with thinking anyone might be listening, it had to do with my voice and how I wanted to be heard. 

For my last podcast,  I looked for a quote from Gandhi, figuring he might have the words I couldn’t find. I was incredibly upset by the Israeli Palestinian confrontation, which I had to include. It was about the fruits of violence and the absence of even a speck of compassion, regarding the bestial abuse of power over those with none. 

You know, when I was thinking about the story I ended up deleting just a few minutes ago, part of it had to do with what right I have to be speaking about issues of international importance. Who am I? Who cares what I think? Why am I wasting your time with my stories?

Gandhi’s words made me cry, and they make my cry right now, because it is why I do this. I don’t write this, because I think I am good at it, I write this, because if I don’t, who will? 

What the hell are we doing? I don’t know if it is my advancing years that make me step back, the way the astronauts did when looking at this marble of magic in the sky. Maybe, it is my years of meditating every morning, letting my breath gently carry me into the arms of possibility. Look at what we are doing to each other? We are part of a much larger story and that’s the one I want to talk about going forward. 

No, I don’t want to be some bible-thumping, snake oil salesman, spewing superlatives and the promises of immortality. It’s the fault of  that damn podcast I do, making me listen to my own voice, concerned about the legacy of my words, even if I am the only one to hear them.

We are in a crisis of our own design, like Shakespeare on an acid trip gone wrong. Over the millennia, we have created such a convoluted plot. It is nearly impossible to resurrect life’s libretto, why we are here and what our responsibilities are, to each other and to this planet?

So many of us are living in a paved world, surrounded by buildings and overrun by cars. Billions are living in poverty, where any idea of hope has long ago been starved as even being a possibility. The natural world is a distant one, irrelevant and absolutely unrelated to our day to day challenges. We are losing species in our house of cards existence and it might as well be a video game, because our disconnection from its consequences are misperceived as some far away, on-screen shoot out. 

If you are still here, thank you. I guess the good news for me is that there aren’t that many people writing about this stuff, or if they do, it degenerates into a political tirade, backed by facts, etc. Something is so incredibly wrong, a pandemic of the soul, a near sightedness that is blind to tomorrow. In the meanwhile, I am going to look for a vocabulary that speaks to a misguided way of being that is thousands and thousands of years old. I know if I choose to do nothing, Gandhi will give me the finger!