thirty minutes of thought

Thirty minutes. That is the official Whitecourt Library time limit for internet use. No exceptions. So here are my thirty minutes of ponderation:

Chasing after the Truth is not about morality because "morality" (the state of being in full alignment with the way things actually Are) is impossible.

The truth is, Truth IS, and nothing I do to try to attain to it can alter that. All my actions are subservient to the laws of reality, because Reality emanates from the character of God and is therefore unchangeable and insurmountable. Even my stubborn attempts to negate truth are useless, because they verify Truth by inevitably resulting in negative consequences.

The problem we find when we make morality our primary goal is that it is well nigh unto impossible to know what "Morality" is. The list of actions now considered okey-dokey that were once deemed morally reprehensible is very long indeed. And vice-versa. Morality as we understand it is always redefined by the folks with the power. Those who are winning in any given situation write the rules. Always. And we, born naked and small and weak, are ready vessels for someone else's agenda.

I believe in Truth, yes, but how can I fully know what IT is? I see now but through a glass dimly.

I am not, however, trying to suggest that Morality (in the ultimate sense of that word) cannot be known or that they're utterly determined by our socio-cultural context. I'm just pointing out that our understanding of True Morality will always be warped by our mind's lenses.

Neither am I advocating a deppressive nihilism. We should instead struggle fervently to de-contexualize our minds of the inherent lies ingrained in them by our culture and recontextualize ourselves within the Reality that is God. This effort is the only way to avoid stagnation, which is death. If we believe and demand, however, that our struggle end in success, we will be sorely dissapointed. The value is in the effort because it is by this process that we can discover our nearly infinite limitations and thereby attain a sense of our dependant, finite state as itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny humans. This humility IS our reality.

Furthermore, we should never use our ignorance of the Reality of God's character as an excuse to avoid admitting to believing anything and as a reason to cop out of trying to change things. Reality demands humility - yes - but right living demands courage. Passivism (not pacifism) is just a form of cowardice, and we are not born to live afraid. Rather, we are born to conquer neuroses and really LIVE abundant lives. Besides, neutrality is just another lie we tell ourselves so we don't have to face pain.

That is what the trees have been making me think, anyways. I hope it helps.

thumbing it

Last week I hitchhiked for the first time, which is odd because I'm twenty-six. I guess I grew up scared, raised by nervous parents (not overly so, but as jittery as most, I suppose) so hitchiking has always sat in my mind as a not-too-bright way of flirting with that dark demon, DEATH.

"Hi there" I'd say. "Going my way?"

"OF COURSE", he'd reply.

Once I'd loaded in I'd try to make small talk. "So, nice doomsday cowl - does wonders for you figure - is it new?"

"NO", he'd reply. And so on.

So there I was by the highway in Whitecourt with my younger brother, a sign for "EDMONTON", a bucket of jitters and a brain full of stories of six-hour waits and sleeping in ditches. Five minutes later a guy pulled over his battered brown eighty-seven Chevy, we threw the stuff from his seat into the bed and BOOM, we were on our way.

That, I think, was when I noticed the brown paper bag clutched in his left hand. And the conspicuous lack of seat belts. And the broken-out windows. And the gentle side-to-side movements we were making about the confines of our lane.

I should have said something, I guess, but at one hundred and forty kilometers an hour in a truck that old it becomes hard for a bleary eyed fellow with about half a bottle of rum in him to hear anything, much less register. Besides, it was starting to rain.

I think we can rank that whole experience somewhere close to the top of the "stupid things I've done list" (I mean, I actually mixed the guy's rum and coke for him). Still, after several choruses of off-key country songs, ice cream bars at the gas station (hey, the guy wasn't ALL bad) and a nonstop stream of off-color marital advice, we made it alive to Edmonton. I'm not sure who was more surprised, him or us.

All in all, it was interesting. I've taken the bus in South America and been more scared. Still, while I'm guaranteed to do more hitchhiking, I think next time I'll try to remember that discretion is, in fact, the better part of valour.

answering me

There is always someone who says it better. And so, in response to my last post of a slow and anxious fumbling towards selfcogniscence I quote Josh Garrels, a lovely little mind whom I caught quoting someone else. He writes as follows:

...

above all, trust in the slow work of God.
we are quite naturally impatient
in everything to reach the end
without delay.
we should like to skip
the intermediate stages.
we are impatient of being
on the way to something unknown,
something new;
and yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability--
and that it may take
a very long time.

...accept the anxiety of
feeling yourself
in suspense
and incomplete.

-Teilhard de Chardin

memememememememmemeee

Hello. My name is Joshua Lawrence Barkey. It says it right there on my United States Passport or my Canadian Citizenship Card, depending on who's asking. I was born a while ago, but if I give you my birthdate you can probably hack into my bank account and steal my identity or the money that's supposed to pay for Anya's education (Why would you do that?).

I am five-feet-ten inches and I weigh one hundred and forty pounds. That makes me thin - nearly skinny - but I don't mind because I'm comfortable with who I am (i think i am, i think i am).

Why is it that it is so easy to find fault with things like your inherent body structure - which you can't change - and so hard to be less of a self-centred fool, which is a pretty uncomplicated thing?

As I sit here stealing internet time from a motel in Whitecourt (seriously, the sign said "free internet") halfway through my final tree planting season, I can't seem to bring myself to write about anything but my Self. So many crazy experiences out planting, so many wild and unusual people, that it all forms some sort of big unfathomable swirling mind mess and the only thing semi-solid that I can seem to hook my shovel on is - me.

The me that is me is me. Hummmmmmmmmm. Nope, not working. Not a whole lot of clarity or oneness with anything. I am such a fluid entity you see - constantly reshaped, resculpted, redefined. Thinking about ME alters me. Thinking about thinking about ME alters me, until the question, "Who am I" blinks consistently, intermittenty on and off in my corneal spaces. For eight years I have been a planter of trees. This has pushed me away from all other of the gazillions of directions I could have gone, formed a part of me into a somewhat tough (yet only occasionally), physically minded person who - because of rapid transversalling from one world (civilization, suburbs) to another (mad jungle savagery of Canadian bush) has become something of a perpetual personality chameleon.

Seriously. If you knew me out planting and then were holding a seance which only managed to conjure up my non-planting self (Why would you do that?), you might not recognize me. In fact, you might think I was a... gasp... nother person.

So what happens when I stop planting, when there is nothing of the planting ME but the memories and the random sparks of planting me-ness? Whom do I become?

This question has leached its way through the skin at the base of my skull and has latched onto a major strand of that substancewhich flows as purple gunk through my neural processes. The current sucks me, inexorably, back to that. As I think through all the possible future directions I could take, I keep coming back to who I am right now, and how I got here.

Maybe that's what we're like, we... humans. Maybe we can't go venturing until we're sure our thatch is patched and our beams our sound. We need a hearth of self to strike out from, a sense that if things go wrong we can always retreat to a comfortable past. Tyler Durden, I suppose, wouldn't like that.

Is this boring you? Here's something different, then. Another Tyler - a french one who is in Mexico drinking milk directly from a cow's teat and has committed himself to hopping on a bus in Montreal wearing only a speedo and a cowboy hat and boots when he returns. There's a guy who knows whom he is. There's a real man - a chap who is so in touch with reality and with himself that they should give him a TV show to validate it. Oh - to be Tyler, covered in organic cow poo, drinking milk.

Since I can not be him, I'm going to drivel on until maybe I get this worked out a bit better. It is what's done, planting trees.