The Common Cup

We drank from the common Cup and passed it on until all were aware.  The small radio bleated thin music into the summer night.  My hands felt warm and too large and hers felt perfect on my neck.  It was a simplicity that echoed around the wooded campsite, a message from the soul of life that all things were exactly as they had been intended.  It was the fight that caused disease and the letting to that cured it.  More specifically, allowed us to live with it.  The disease was never dispelled.  That was a myth pressed by people who never let go.  The disease was always mis-named.  It had never been an enemy.  It had simply been a constant that we were challenged to adopt.  

A coyote will chew off its leg if caught in a trap.  It does not see the leg as its enemy, only that the leg must be sacrificed to save the body.  But we are not that simple, we people.  We chew the leg and it hurts and itches with its infection that we caused.  Then we see the leg as the monster.  We view our diseases as 'otherly' and place them far from ourselves.  Suppress them intentionally and hope for them to die, not accepting them as part of us, the part that makes us whole.

And so we drank from the Common Cup and sang along to the tinny radio song and let the cup move from mouth to mouth, allowing each other in.  We had often been weak and selfish and solitary.  We had often tended to our own needs and disregarded those of others.  We had used words like 'others' to separate.  But now we were shared.  And in the sharing, we had given up the struggle to remain 'one'.  And in giving up the struggle, all those things we considered 'otherly' became essential parts of us.  Weakness, sadness, anxiety, success, happiness, exaltation, despair, the humbling to seek forgiveness, the birthright to forgive others, to sit by their beds and tend to their wounds and not think them weak or lesser as they are in need.  To look down and accept that it is us in the hospital gown and we are breaking and fragile and tiny to the universe but we are not alone.  Someone sits at the side of our bed as sickness goes slowly about its business of making us whole.  Someone sits by our bed and sings thin songs in a distance, her voice strained from singing all night, even as we slept.  her voice keeping vigil in the night air as to welcome the forces that unite inside the spirit and build a bonfire there.  It burns, and in the burning, it renews.  Slowly, fiddleheads unfold from the ashy ground and color returns as vivid as a dream.

There is a sense and smell that the seasons are changing.  There is a looking forward.  There is a blurring about the edges of what was once defined as 'I'.  There is a grace to the world that is almost impossible to explain and can only be shared.  The words we created have failed.  They do not represent the world we inhabit.  They are the part of us in the trap and we will never move on until we realize that they are neither evil, nor necessary.  Only words.

We take one last sip tonight from the Common Cup and breathe deeply the shared earth wind.  Time, hatred, pride, comfort, greed.  They have all gone off in a peyote-cave as they no longer believe in themselves.