Life As Performance Art 82

Writing this blog has been a therapeutic discipline, to say the least. I have seldom missed a single day, these past five and a half years, where I haven't had something to offer. Sometimes, as today, I feel like I am running out of ideas. But they always seem to come back, often with renewed force and vigor. I am trying to think of life post-blog, but I can't really imagine staying away from this disciplined exercise. Not even for twenty-four hours. This is akin to breathing, this exhalation of air and noise and fury, but in text on a fictional virtual page. This is the true power of never shutting up. I never know who is going to read this, sometimes I have had as few as six readers, sometimes hundreds. I think there have been people from almost every nation on earth, except for North Korea, reading this blog. What an honour! It is very interesting trying to write knowledgeably about things of which I know almost nothing. But I try to admit this. These are simply ideas, speculations, different and shifting frameworks for how we perceive, consider and embrace life. But life is what we embrace. We'd might as well, since it is always going to embrace us. We have little choice in the matter. We are alive because God breathed life into us, and by extension, we are the product of his breath. We are part of his message of the universe, incarnate. Even those who don't believe, or don't want to believe. It doesn't matter. And here, we have this power, this capacity, to think of, envision and conceptualize the universe. A tiny, insignificant animal is the human being, but oh how long and how wide our reach, even if it will never meet our grasp. It is something amazing and wonderful that a kind of half-formed, large brained ape such as our progenitors, could actually migrate from their ancestral African continent and to wander throughout in order to fill all the earth with our presence. We still are not biologically designed for many of the climates we inhabit. We remain a tropical or subtropical animal. Only in those kinds of climates do people wear little or no clothing. Everywhere else, we need clothes, (a mercy, this!). We have not evolved the body fat, fur or circulation in order to cope with most of the climates we now live in. Not even the indigenous people of Canada, whose myths insist that they were created in this region, have evolved the biological necessities for being able to live here without clothing and fuel for fire and heat. I suppose I want to emphasize this a bit, because I recently read half of a rather fatuous little book, titled First Nations 101, at the behest of my parish priest, since the Anglican Church has made indigenous people their flavour of the month for tokenism. The book is largely okay, informative, but the university'educated author, an indigenous woman, seems to expect us to swallow all the aboriginal myths as though they are equal in credibility to scientific fact and this is where we part company. The postmodernist style of education has really pushed cultural relativism to such an extreme where no one can think or speak rationally and get away with it. The whole scientific standard of inquiry, research, observation and experimentation is essentially an invention of Western Europe, though I do understand that the Muslim Middle East of the Middle Ages and ancient China, not to mention the Maya, are also worthy contenders for this honour. I am simply not going to even begin to accept that the myths and legends of a pre-literate people are going to be credibly considered in the face of tons of scientific evidence to the contrary. Yes, aboriginal voices must be heard and respected. However, they have no right to hijack the narrative, and I do hope that Anglicans and other well-meaning but rather dumb, guilt-ridden politically correct folk will not completely wipe their behinds with their common sense till there is nothing left fit for common use. On the other hand, we have a lot to learn from the First Nations people: about respecting our Mother Earth, living in the environment, treating others with dignity and respect, and true democracy and social justice. We don't have to agree on everything. And we are not going to be equal in all things. But respectfully, we must learn from one another, and perhaps this is finally, in faltering small steps, beginning to happen.