Sitting in my idling SUV at the Walgreens drive-thru, waiting for my script to fill, gazing at the extra-planetary cliffs of Mesa Verde, its fist-like folds in shadow between the meandering promontories. The air, in the 60’s. Chalk blue sky. The Carrizo and Lukachukai Mountains in the arid, Arizona distance, belonging to another tribe.
I think about how crowded it’s become in Cortez. I have to share the cliffs at the base of Mesa Verde with everybody else. We’ve tried sharing the world with each other for about 9,000 years now. How well’s that working? Just ask the Native woman behind that thick glass, a glass designed against smashing. Her tribe’s still paying for sharing the land with Anglos.
In our definition of sharing, something’s missing. And if it’s missing, it’s not shared.
I get my script and drive back home on the crowded highways. I text a friend from my office. He’s into crypto trading. Texting me about how governments can’t stop it, about the fervor among young people regarding it, about an unstoppable global movement, a true international central bank conspiracy against crypto. And I’m listening to the choral music of Paul Schwartz, State of Grace II: Turning to Peace, and reading snippets of A Course in Miracles while my PC reloads a new software update. And it’s all coming together: the music, the book, the texts, the beautiful smile of that Native woman.
Then my computer finally reboots: my online newsfeed trumpets that the market’s dropped almost 1,200 points today. People are clamoring for open borders (which I’ve been against). I text my friend back as the choir on my music box, a chorus composed of women and men, soars. I write: ‘For all of us, the next step: It’s already HERE. William Gibson said that the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed. Now I get what he meant.’
It means no borders. It means no nations. That’s why we could never share before. That’s what the warming weather and cryptocurrencies and the markets and the protest for open borders are screaming to us: we have to open, rather than close, as writer, Michael Singer, tell us in The Untethered Soul. To share is to resist the urge to close. It’s to remain OPEN at all costs, in all ways: economic, cultural, national, spiritual, ecological. We can keep what we have only by giving it away.
That’s the meaning of sharing, the part in the definition I’ve been missing; that we must share everything. We must give all of it away, for free. Without expectation of return. Without the perceived need to defend. And when we do, everything we give is given back to us. If I try to keep anything for myself alone, that thing dies with me, and the whole gift is rendered impure. When I love, it’s by nature infinite, because love is infinite. To limit love, to curtail any gift, is to place expectations on it. It’s to exchange, to trade, to negotiate, trying to change love into a medium of exchange, a currency so unlike itself that it might as well be the dirty green in this paper, the brick in that wall.
By its nature, love is unconditional. It’s infinite, eternal. It’s all for all, the giving of all of itself. If it were a mere limited thing, love would have exhausted itself long ago, spent itself. But love is in everything since it is everything, even the ugly and the crass. The miracle of love is that it multiplies itself in the act of spending itself. It reproduces itself in innumerable quantity, without regard to number. It expands itself in all directions without regard to space. It goes back into the past before the sun had risen on this day and undoes any harm. It sails into my future and remakes my destiny into a vision of peace. Do you believe this? Or do you, like I sometimes do, try to contain love, try to fence it in, thereby corrupting it into a thing akin to death? That’s what happens when I don’t share, or when I try to abide by my old definition of sharing: Some for you. Some for me.
My new definition: All for you. All for me.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within