Faith And Collective Trauma 6

Who are we? Who am I? You cannot ask one of those questions without also having to ask the other. What makes us, us? What makes me, me? I am recalling what I consider to be Doris Lessing's greatest novel, the Four-Gated City (otherwise I would have not read those six hundred plus pages more than twenty times in my life). She described her protagonist, Martha Hesse, in her experience of herself as she wandered alone at night through the streets of London five years after the Second World War, having just arrived there from her home in southern Africa. She found herself to not really be a concrete or solid self at all, but rather a soft, receptive intelligence. I do not have a problem with that concept and it actually squares with my own experience. I was visiting a friend yesterday, an Anglican priest (a lot of my friends appear to be clergy!) in a coffee shop. I mentioned how I do not have a definable personality, but I seem to be fluid, not a chameleon, but something that flows and eddies like water. This could also be from my relative lack of baggage. I have never owned my home, a car, I have never worked at a legitimate well-paid profession, I have never married or raised a family. I do not have any of those milestones that mark one in contemporary middle class society as a legitimate contributing adult. Even though I am a legitimate, contributing adult. If there is an image that fits my personality, such as it is, I would call it fire. Sometimes a small flame blazing against the surrounding dark; sometimes a river of fire sweeping and overflowing the banks. This isn't to say that I don't do anything constructive. This morning in the very small hours, I got up at three, following a deep six hour sleep, and made bread, which is now cooling on the counter. I am doing laundry, and sipping Costa Rican coffee that was grown and roasted on a farm just three or four miles from my friends whose bed and breakfast I stay in when I am visiting Monteverde. I have spiced the coffee with cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. Exquisite. And I am listening to a radio documentary about panpsychism, which expounds the idea that not just humans and higher animals, but everything in the universe has consciousness. I believe this, but also because my experience of life is that the spirit of the living God fills and inhabits everything in the universe, including us, and the interlocutor has just said that it is so magical and mysterious that science may never really figure it out, and that what may need to change is the way we do science. I did wait till the program concluded before I went downstairs to put my clothes in the dryer. I am responsible, and generally try to free up the machines for others who need them, but I thought this program about panpsychism to be so fascinating that no one should mind at five in the morning if I leave my clothes for five or ten extra minutes. I suppose that this little thumbnail sketch of my morning so far would give you, Gentle Reader, a small idea of who I am? And I forgot to mention that I changed my bed, showered, cleaned my apartment (quietly!) and did my devotional readings (Bible in Spanish, Psalm, and reading from Acts and from Matthew's Gospel, followed by a reading from a devotional book called God Calling). The laundry I do once a week, first thing in the morning, when I am also baking bread (whole wheat, natch!) My breakfast will be freshly baked bread with peanut butter and honey, and an omelette made either with extra old cheddar or Asiago (cheese, of course!). Then I will take my clothes out of the dryer and fold and put everything away, following which I expect to relax, work on an art project and maybe take a nap. Then, I will take a long walk of some three to four miles or so, to arrive early in a coffee shop where I will be visiting a friend I haven't seen in a long time. I will spend much of the walk singing hymns, or conversing with God in Spanish, or in silent enjoyment of the lovely surroundings. So, Gentle Reader, I have just provided you with a number of potential adjectives and metaphors with which to describe me. I am probably both all, and none of those things. Just like you, darling.