Samsara

Trying to create my sanctuary of enough in a western world greedy for more, is doing nothing for me but causing wind tunnels through my shoulder blades. That striking pain that burrows through your shoulders has often been linked to the heart and all it wants and all it tries to beat through. My heart feels full of tar after seeing the non-narrative film “Samsara”. The film itself was a mixture of ego and pretence but the images of humanity and lack thereof has left me feeling tight and constricted. I felt like a glutton even on an empty stomach and nothing but my disgust in every human has worked me through this strange weekend. Consumerism has never sat well at my table but whether this has ever stopped me serving my dinner on my private piece of wood is another matter. The film was pushed as inspirational yet failed on all fronts and just left this empty vessel echo bound. I left the theatre confused, disgusted, uncomfortably full and remorseful for my species. To be honest I entered the theatre with the same sentiments as I had come to that conclusion long before, but the difference was, amongst a film that was supposedly spruiking hope, I left with none and I left defeated. I left with the alarming theory that film maker Ron Fricke believed that nothing could be erased, nothing could be saved and every empire, value, idea and action of our species needed to be swept away like sand in order to start again. Humans are a funny folk. They move like no other on earth, think like no other and create like no other species on earth. They are perhaps the most unique and useless of all species. Perhaps the only species on earth that survives without contributing to the welfare or survival of another. Recently there has been a lot of talk and panic that the native bees of the world are close to extinction. These small marvels are solely responsible for the pollination of the world’s crops. It’s amazing that the survival of something so small could mean the difference between us thriving and dying. There are literally millions of seemingly insignificant, voiceless creatures that walk this earth that create the symphony of life yet we stand alone in our relevance to that sheet music. Our existence does not create another, it does not breathe meaning, worth or life to another organism as we stand arrogantly alone as the species that hinders instead of helps the tapestry of life. Ironically we seem to believe that all this music created around us is for our ears only when the truth is, we hold nothing but the volume dial which we insist on turning down on species with our deafening machinery, pollution and insatiable appetites. If our species were to die and lie down within extinction the world would thrive instead of slowly dying. It is hard to wake and face a world with that weight on your heart. It is hard to feel pride in a world where we see only ourselves as every question and answer that dirty soil dares to ask. A silly conversation at a work lunch table last week branded me soulless as I questioned the existence of fate. I was seen as loveless, hopeless and without meaning. I asked their shocked mouths why they believed that our species was deemed so important that something as frivolous as fate would exist solely for them? I asked them why they even sort meaning within the lines of lives seemingly so random. Why they insisted on believing in something more when no evidence has ever presented itself that our worth even exists beyond the bounds of our own flesh and rotting guts. This conversation strangely lead to them theorising which planet they would inhabit once they were done with this one like it was nothing more than an empty greasy chip packet raped of its contents. I asked them why you would bother going to such great lengths to save something as irrelevant as the human species that surely the fate of extinction was good enough for us seeing it fit like tailored leather gloves for every other species we dare to even look at. The conversation amusingly so took part in the lunch room of a medical research lab where every second and beating rodent’s heart is devoted to the survival of our species. Often my occupation is at odds with the sentiments that roll around my head. But this the very thing I love about life, the contradictions, the perceived notions of needs, the time we hopefully and hopelessly put aside for joy. To me, fate stands alone and distant from the blood and bones of life. The moments of joy, ecstasy, beauty and peace are all there to drink, to feast upon whether you hold its meaning accountable or not. Joy stills exists for those who don’t believe in fate and love still exists for those that don’t buy divinity and hope should never be taken away. Hope whether it is a myth or not wakes us up in the morning, drives us safely to work and brings us home at night. Hope is everything our species is as we exist purely by its sentiment, our blood and bones are crafted by it otherwise we wouldn’t exist as hope is the only thing that separates us from other animals. Hope creates art, it wets our quills and brushes, it puts hues in our humanity, and it allows us to peer into mirrors that don’t break with the ugliness that we always face them with. Hope is something that is unmoveable, ungraspable and not something a film maker could ever possess. We are destructive, despicable, often disgusting, and the devil on earth, our existence destroys everything it touches including our own but each day we rise, we plan, we work towards ways of making this less so. We lose our way too often and cross the wires within our own moral positioning systems too much but more often than we realise we colour the world with love, meaningful intention and most importantly hope and for that we should give poise. Unlike Fricke, I believe that we have it in us to forgive our past, we are capable of unmeasurable good because each day we dare to rise with the hope that we can.