#24 - #24

Today is not a good day. I didn't get much sleep yesterday because I drank so much coffee. I had gone to see Ruth and we talked about David's crossing. It was amazing to listen to someone who had just come back from that threshold talk about a good death. We spent almost three hours talking about it. Time just flew. There was a silence which held us. The fire flickered, the air was still. As if everything we listening and at the same time resting. There was such an air of peace about us. There was no sadness. There was and there wasn't. 

There was grace and gratitude I think. The deep deep held sense that it was a good death and that was all you could have hoped for.

It was better than good.

It was as close to a perfect death as possible.

I came home and could not do what I should have done over the past three weeks. I sat and ate and watched some TV. I tried to sleep but couldn't because of all the coffee I had drunk. I thought that coffee had ceased to have an effect on me, but I was wrong. I couldn't bring myself to drift off. 

But I couldn't do any work either. I listlessly tidied. I cooked dinner. Everything seemed to be done in a haze. I tried thinking about the world around me and what that meant. 

I lay on the bed and listened to music. I understood that in parts of the Western world the Covid narrative was falling apart. The parties at No 10 had inadvertently led to the disregarding of the rules. Commentators like John Campbell and the alt - middle are leading the way in dismantling the scaffold of fear. Cats are being talked off ledges. Down trees. Perhaps this is the beginning, the semblance of normality. And yet in Australia, New Zealand, the rest of Europe there is a fire in the brain. Austria is now implementing fines for people who won't be vaccinated. Macron has said that he will 'piss off the unvaccinated'. Justin Trudeau apparently has said that the unvaccinated at racist, misogynist and something else ist. It is mot distressing to watch the levels of intolerance consume people. What happened to them?

I was wondering about this version of science which has weirdly taken on the fanaticism of religious zealotry. Vaccine purity they call it. Is it because the only thing the West has by way of a spirituality is science - science will save us. Not quite sure what it is saving anyone from... Ruth mentioned that people can die being filled with fear and I said that it is because of how they have been conditioned. If you have been told your whole life that there is nothing at the end of course it is a terrible thing to enter. And in the confusion ... it actually amazes me how badly people are prepared for death seeing how that is definitely going to happen to us in one way or another.

It is almost as if they have evolved into this consciousness where nothing, no room for doubt can and should exist... no room for the possible. It is also interesting that many people who suggest alternatives are non-white people. Sunetra Gupta, Jay Battacharya, Vijay Prasad... even Z Dogg - they all have a much more circumspection in their sense of what the world is like. They can see through the structures of self interest and hypocrisy because they encounter it daily. So even though they are insiders they are also outsiders. They have been able to question everything along the way.

For me it is the being unable to read the patterns or a fear of what it means which has been most awful. Most disconcerting. I am filled with a real concern about what this means for the future. I don't know anything so that when I think that men and women my age or slightly older are making decisions it terrifies me. Already they have done such a terrible job of it. They haven't learnt from mistakes nor have they held up any sense of dignity and scruples. It is awful. Just awful.

The arrogance and the callousness - we might as well have kings and their advisers making idiotic decisions. So much for democracy - just another tool for the greedy to bamboozle the guileless, just in the same way the Church used religion to fool the true believers. And of course if you questioned it, you were burnt at the stake. I think that has been the most galling, appalling thing about this entire episode which seems to have lasted forever - that zealotry still exists. That the blatant disregard for others existed. That children were sacrificed. One of the most awful things to see were these 8 and 9 year olds in Quebec saying how unvaccinated people should be essentially deprived of their humanity. We are not two generations separated from that. To get on in life, all you have to be is a parrot. I saw that up close to struggle with individuality towards freedom that is the hardwork.

I don't know how it will all end. The patterns keep changing, they keep messing themselves up, they keep screaming. And I cannot seem to do the work to keep the ones I have going. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.