Questions and Answers
I have had a few songs in my head over the last days, battling for attention. The first is from Moody Blues – the Question song. A sampling of the lyrics is below. I included the very famous and compelling chorus (can you hear the knocking at the door) with the strongest of the questions “about hate and death and war”, as well as the second verse, which I never really listened to before. This verse brings the topic into searching for a soul mate, and illustrates how personal actions and motives are at the core of these huge questions, and perhaps an egocentric rationale is the real reason for no ready answers to the thousand million questions we have.
Question – The Moody Blues
Why do we never get an answer
When we’re knocking at the door
With a thousand million questions
About hate and death and war?
‘Cause when we stop and look around us
There is nothing that we need
In a world of persecution
That is burning in its greed
Why do we never get an answer
When we’re knocking at the door?
Because the truth is hard to swallow
That’s what the war of love is for
It’s not the way that you say it
When you do those things to me
It’s more the way that you mean it
When you tell me what will be
And when you stop and think about it
You won’t believe it’s true
That all the love you’ve been giving
Has all been meant for you
I am at a time in my life and career when I feel these and other questions sailing around me and though my brain and soul, nearly every day. We have a crisis and opportunity in front of us, and the response is predominantly avoidance, denial, and lackadaisical deference of responsibility.
Why? Why can’t we embrace our power in this world and then, as Spiderman came to learn, use that power with its inherent responsibility? Why can’t we recognize crap when we see it, and choose to make something despite that crap or even with it. Seas will rise – what can we do? So very many things, but not enough with no will. Toxins will continue to create chronic illness, and it is well past time we stopped being shocked about this – we brought them into our product market, what can we do, now? Get them out is one simple and clear answer, yet to do this without becoming responsible in our relationship to the rest of the world is not possible. We share our air, water, soil, energy, but lay claim to it based on geopolitical barriers and on money. Neither parameter is tied to natural systems. This has got to stop.
So I become trapped in my ever cycling brain, seeing only the stoppage and the neglect and the lack.
The other song is Fly Like An Eagle from the Steve Miller Band. Again, I have listed some of the lyrics below. This song compounds my frustration in many ways. I feel time slipping – and it’s slipping into the future, meaning to me that we are giving power to that future instead of contributing to its eventual appearance.
Due to our lack of focus we are letting the future write itself. Not acceptable.
Fly Like an Eagle – Steve Miller Band
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future
I want to fly like an eagle
To the sea
Fly like an eagle
Let my spirit carry me
I want to fly like an eagle
Till I’m free
Oh, Lord, through the revolution
Feed the babies
Who don’t have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin’ in the street
Oh, oh, there’s a solution
And then there is a bit of hope in this song. The clarity and simplicity of the sentence “Oh, oh there’s a solution” just grabs my heart and soul and spirit and compels me to find it. To grasp it. To simplify it so it can be attained. Because really, it is simple. The solution is simple. Feed the babies, shoe the children, house the people, build the compassion and community, heal nature’s systems (that are our systems of existence) and not only face up to the challenges, but grasp the opportunities through action, connection and solution. And yes, “simple” is not the same as “easy”.
I find embracing our potential to write our own future is a simpler approach than denial, avoidance and finger-pointing, and it is certainly optimal; using energy for a positive goal rather than energy for avoiding doing anything. I choose, in a simple and personal way, to breathe and focus my energy to find the opportunities we face, and to write our future, collectively and with intellectual and spiritual understanding.
“Oh, oh, there’s a solution”
Don’t let time slip into a future we do not embrace…
Jodi
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