Slipping and sliding

 

 

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

 

We get a break in the weather today, a dusting of snow, and then a rise of temperature above freezing.

Ice has gripped our world over the last two days, in some ways worse than the reported horrific snow storm, Juno that wound up closing off subways and highways, but was little more than a typical storm this time of year.

We are all in a panic mode, either fearful of the next major disaster or aching for it to arrive, letting news media hype us into frenzy. Our leaders are inept, unable to make proper decisions if any at all, and we must live with the consequences.

Going to Hoboken on any snow day is like a trip to hell since the city is trying its best to discourage people from using cars there – a social manipulation similar to what Bloomberg did with cigarettes. By reducing the ability to park, the city seems bent on creating a new green society that makes it impossible for ordinary, non-corporate types to get to and from work and make a more ordinary living without going broke.

With snow turning to ice, I could not make it up the hill in Jersey City let alone find parking on streets of Hoboken where cars were prohibited from parking in many places.

So I stayed home and worked from the desk in the basement, a regular worker ant struggling inside a warm hive as the weather worsened and the storm that was not historic disabled the landscape in a way the historic one had not, closing none of the trains, but only access to places I needed to reach.

A day later, the landscape is a sheet of ice, and because I did not leave my house yesterday, I made the trek to Hoboken anyway, parking near Washington Park and slipping and sliding down the viaduct to the office.

This is a precarious season, but it is also out of this that life emerges, a constantly dying and growing, and dying again, and the most hope that we have comes at this time of year because out of this the green world rises again.

This is a promise of salvation that Christians stole from the pagans, but it is a proper interpretation. What makes the world mean isn’t life and death, but the presumption by the most presumptive that are condemned to live in only one cycle of it, and that we have no place beyond, no spring to follow our winter, and this is a dreadful assumption, because it creates the belief that we need grab all we can now or never get it.

Each season is supposed to prepare us for the next, and so we learn from good and bad times, some important lesson that will allow us to make the transition.

Belief in nothing brings us nothing, regardless of how much we grab in anyone one season.

So I endure these trek, slip and slide with the hope that in this journey I am gathering experience that will allow me to transcend, not so much into heaven, but into some next phase of life, where I might gather more, harvesting riches that the most presumptuous of souls cannot even imagine.