Large Fierce Mammal

“Man With Scythe” by Walter Hunt

“As a Husband, a Father, a Teacher, a Student, a Friend, a Comrade, a Man — as one who strives to be a complete specimen of that animal called Human — I understand that in all things, cycles prevail.

“To be a complete Human is to embrace the spectrum of Life from end to end, and not shying away from any of it. Through every life, lived fully or not, taken note of or not, cycles repeat within and without our mortal vessels. Tiny samples of starting and ending match the macroscopic in their ebs and flows. Rises and falls. Wins and losses. Loves and hates. Embarkations and abandonments. Just as a spell of ascendant convergence may arise from a wondrously perfect storm, an equally perfect one in opposition may cast all that was uplifted into destruction and despair.

“Peril lies in averting the senses so these patterns, in their perfect similarity, remain unnoticed over time. In this, the quality of Living is willfully diminished, for we are meant to embrace them, both to be a part of these cycles and to make them a part of us. So we will not accept bobbing on the currents, the swells and troughs, like a cork upon the ocean, but so we can navigate. Ride out the stills and storms with confidence in our choices, even to our inevitable meeting with Death.” ~ Dark Sentiments Season 8 — Day 1: A Greeting from your Favourite Reaper

As I’ve previously written, all of Life is integrally bound to cycles. In many cases, one might also refer to them, and quite correctly, as rhythms, but not in all.

For centuries up to industrialization, society was built on an understanding that it was governed as much by rhythms as the inevitable cycles. Technological developments came at the behest of getting the most out of available energies. Those of thought, muscle, and the avails of Nature.

Cycles are inevitable and to be ignored at your peril. I would posit that rhythms mimic cycles, and again, for centuries up to the very recent past, could be regarded as smaller components thereof.

Post industrialization, and as with many other terms, the words “cycle” and “rhythm” have been rebranded, and harnessed to the purpose of manufacturing wealth out of vapid nothingness. So today we have cycles of commerce that take retailers from one Christmas shopping season to the next. The sweat inducing rhythms between television show seasons and sports seasons. The breathless interregnum between introduction of last year’s iPhone and the next. Of putting into action what you learned last year about getting in front of the competition so this time you can freeze your ass off a mere six back in the lineup, along with all the poor bastards lined up behind you, for the 24 hours before the store unlocks for that Black Friday sale.

Vapid. Nothing but fun, games, and a case of beer for a marathon of the last season of whatever. Except something, however vapid, doesn’t come from nothing, and the magic of making you think that it does comes in making the sure the buyer thinks the price is nothing more than an item on a bank or credit card statement.

As I’ve also written,

Money’s like a crop that can
Be sown and reaped anon.
Time is as a bottled dram,
That, once it’s drunk, is gone.

Marketing, in its cycles and rhythms, has supplanted those of Nature in the massed minds of the throng. Urbanized living offers an illusion of detachment — even immunity — from the realities of Nature. Notwithstanding finding oneself bearing the brunt of periodic horrors wrought by lack of attention to those realities, a sense of entitlement overlays all, so that cushioning, even salvation, from them lies in the hands of someone else you think you have on retainer to make it a sure thing for you.

For the children of Nature, once you’ve been given Life, the race is on to keep that upper case “L” in front of it before time runs out. In times of peace, and absent illness, most of the quality in Human experience comes from choices, and so we enjoy the advantage, sometimes illusory, of controlling the quality of what happens, even as we expect someone else to take the helm of quality control. To make our mistakes all better so we can keep on making them absent consequence. Some amalgam of your Mother and Ray fucking Donovan.

More on this coming soon.