I buy a book about God
I buy myself a green sweater. I buy a probiotic supplement, a membership to the hot yoga studio, new earrings, cake. I eat the cake in bed and skip dinner. Fill an online shopping cart with moisturizers that promise to give me glass skin. Download a meditation app. I listen to a podcast about hope. Google Vipassana retreats nearby, then decide to read the biography of a white Buddhist nun instead. I consider getting botox. Wonder about having kids. Wonder if art will fulfill me more than family. I buy a book about God. Wonder if its all worth it, then decide it has to be. I close all my open tabs.
Jan Zwicky says that meaning comes to us in the form of gestalt. We make meaning through the experience of something larger than what we have witnessed—the way an orchestra resonates with a beauty larger than the sound of the instruments. Books about God say the same thing. That we are tethered to a larger whole. A belief in God is the belief in our capacity for empathy and the ability to change how we frame our experiences. We are bound together by something that resonates within each of us; we are more than ourselves or each other.
You are not just a consumer, an environmental activist said when asked her advice to the young. Your government should work for you, and only you can make that happen. She said this as though she was oblivious to the significance of purchasing power. The suggestion that our consumption should be used for political ends ignores the complex cultural system to which our consumption is bound. Enabled by the landlessness we experience as a generation, our coveted luxury objects are the only hope we have at feeling wealthy. Perhaps, the only hope we have at feeling secure. Patti Smith’s advice to the young: stay strong, try to have fun but stay clean, stay healthy. I’m doing the best I can.
Drinking a turmeric shot I bought at the organic grocery store, I feel insatiable. I go back to edit a poem, a non-exhaustive list of healing methods I’ve attempted, adding new herbal remedies to the list, but the additions fall flat. Yes, find God, greta, now what?
I had to read this more than once, in the good way.