"Your Own Damn Life" {quiet afternoons foster deep thoughts....}

I've been reading this interview in the magazine The Sun, called "Your Own Damn Life: Micheal Meade On The Story We're Born With." The introduction describes Meade as an "author, mythologist, and story teller," and I have to say that some of what Meade discusses in the interview is a little too abstract for me and I don't quite understand what he's getting at (for example, he says that to him, the term "God" is "short-hand for the ineffable divine presence" -- what does he mean by that and why, how....?) BUT, he also makes some valid points and interesting comments in regards to being human, being oneself, and I'd like to highlight and discuss some of that here.

To begin with, I really liked this (my emphasis):

"There's an African proverb: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' Alive means living your own damn life, not the life your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or the political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live."

Now, we can have a whole other conversation about "soul" and how people interpret that and what it means, but the message here is that YOU are living YOUR life, not subscribing to someone else's ideals, whatever those may be. I think it's important for us to realize this for ourselves, but also to realize it for other people, for us to encourage each other and allow each other to live our own "damn life"....

Naturally, the interview moves to thoughts on mass media and the Internet, which I found particularly appealing because lately I've been making serious efforts to detach from the Web (this doesn't mean to abandon the Internet all together, obviously, but to just detach, to realize what's a priority and what's not). Says Meade:

"My complaint is that the World Wide Web, with all its horizontal strands, lacks a vertical dimension. . . Take social networking. The problem is that it's not really social enough. "Social" suggests being together, being companions in life. The story [of life] comes not just from horizontal experience. The dramatic part appears when it goes vertical."

This is not to say that social networks like Facebook are bad or useless or impossible of fostering deeper connections, but that there is so much  more:

"We're not supposed to live a horizontal life on the surface of things. We are supposed to live the entire gamut, from the heights of thought and imagination all the way down to the depths of woundedness and the deeper capacity to love.

[...]

What's often missing in modern mass culture is this depth of connection. When you see a culture dividing into simplistic polarities -- which is all of our politics nowadays and most of our religion -- what's going on is a loss of soul."

Polarities not only divide us, they reduce us to labels, ideologies, he-said-she-saids. We are so much more than that. And Meade encourages people to realize that, to discover what we are, collectively and individually. WHO ARE YOU?

Meade continues, encouraging others to discover themselves by doing what they love:

"When you sing [or dance or write or run or do anything you feel deeply passionate about], you realize that you are human, and that the people you are passing judgment upon are also human souls trying to find their voice and way to proceed in life."

He then goes on to talk about the importance of authentic experiences, how they shape us and help us grow:

"...with young people it's critical, especially in our substitute, technological, materialistic culture. The people most valuable in a culture aren't those who avoid all trouble, those who never slip up or fall down. The most valuable people are those who fall down and become deeper and figure out how to grow from their descended place. . . When times get hard, you don't want leaders who have never taken risks. You want leaders who have survived mistakes and then figured out where the beauty is, where the meaning is, what real courage is."

And on a final light-hearted and self-serving note, I'll end with this quote from Meade:

"In the long run it's the poets, not the newspapers, who have the news. The news is a superficial exchange of information that can never tell the whole story. The poets tell us we're in this great, on-going dance that includes opportunities to fight and love and fall down and get back up. Hopefully we have the occasional chance to do our particular dance in the middle of all that."

The interview spans several pages--I just shared the parts I found most valuable. Read the interview in its entirety (some of which I don't necessarily align with, but that's what makes culture, individuality, etc.) online here.