LET GO OR BE DRUG

I'm not sure what I was reading when "…let go or be drug…" leaped off the page as the most universal metaphor for the self/other context of life I've ever come across. I carved it, along with other gems I've gleaned along the way, into the surface of the two and a half foot crosscut section of oak that serves as my ganjava tabletop in front of my home where folks may gather on occasion.

It seems that all pain results from an unsatisfiable desire for the security of permanent certainty in an eternally changing universe. Rather than seeing life as an opportunity to experience and celebrate the curious wonder of infinite variation in both the perceiver and perceived, culture requires a uniform perspective of a world within which its adherents wish themselves safe from the contradictions it chooses to ignore. The more dependent on such predictable norms one becomes the greater the anguish is felt when faced with the inevitably unseen event and the less able to integrate any novelty into one's less than curious shell of certainty one becomes. Unable to relinquish comforting faith in best wishes, reality becomes a gauntlet the hope filled suffer every day.

LET GO — OR BE DRUG