The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.
Cesar Chavez
The labor in the fields.
Your life was once a field of corn.
Your life was once a field of sunflowers,
a field of alfalfa. A field of wheat.
With hoe and seed and water and sweat
we worked the fields of the living
under the watchful eye of the sun.
Then, in the darkness between those days,
we worked the fields of the dead.
jobe
We were created to look at one another, weren’t we?
Edgar Degas
When the sky burned.
The sky was doused with gasoline,
and set on fire. I raised my hands
up into the flame without hesitation,
but, friend, I did not burn.
The fat in the sky melted
and dripped down onto the earth,
making rivers, making the oceans.
ashes came down, too,
Making the hills and mountains.
The fire burned for a million years.
the smoke was thick and curly,
like a young girl's hair.
I twisted one curl-lock around my finger,
again and again.
It felt very human to do so.
Looking up, the girl smiled at me, and then
she cupped my face with her perfect hands.
jobe
The words of a fool.
Don’t listen to my words for I am nothing. I am no one. An empty shell that should hold a man but instead holds emptiness. The Void.
And don’t follow in my footsteps for I am lost. A fool with no sense of direction. I have no destination. I am moved by the wind. By distraction.
No past. No future. The perfection of this moment. Hold on that and be free. If you can. To be aware in the moment is to know yourself.
Goodbye.
jobe
There is no space wider than that of grief.
Pablo Neruda
[Traveler, your footprints]
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.
Antonio Machado 1875—1939 CE
Man, I do not want to be chained to the machine that runs it all. This world, this nonsense. No, let these flowers be adored and fall with the rain onto the beautiful streets of tomorrow. No, let these children play as they wish in the blue snow of the singing winter mountain, in the creeks of the summer woods blessed with strange and colorful birds, and on the swings of the parks in heaven. Deny the machine, let a new sun and a new moon make love in the purple and red sky at dawn, crying out with passion and delight. Let that which is greater than you adore and dress this life with something worthy of worship. Deny the machine. The time we waited for is here, now, and every screaming second pulls us closer to our faith and our hope. This is the new beginning, cast off the pain and the lethargy of the years and decades that you waited, brother, sister, the joy that we wanted for so long begins now.
jobe
Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.
Jack Kerouac
A quick note here. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of our youngest son, Will. He would have been 34 this year, he died in 2017. I was 34 the year he was born. My father was 34 when I was born. A random thing, I suppose.
Also, this week I received word that a former co-worker has passed, a good man who was my age. Cancer. I don’t know if his family would want me putting his name here, so I won’t. He was a kind and funny man, who had lost his first wife to cancer some years ago. There are two adult sons left behind. I enjoyed the years I spent working with him very much.
Death weighs heavily on me today. My son, a friend, the people being bombed in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and Ukraine. Measles killing kids in Texas, floods killing people in the Midwest. Israeli bombs, Russian bombs, American bombs. I’m not here to get into politics; but I am a political person, that’s just not the point of the book of jobe. I will say this; we humans are missing the point somehow. I do not believe we are here just to grieve and kill.
No matter what your religion or politics are, we need to do right by each other. We need to do right by the world.
Thanks for reading this, thanks for your support. Beyond this point the content is for paid subscribers, something that is perhaps worth consideration.
All good things,
jobe
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