None of us asked to be born. Delivered into someone else’s story. Start with parents: theirs. Born into our parents’ existence. And their families, friends, jobs, conditions. Captured inside somebody else’s circumstance. Glass of ice coffee on glass table. Spawned into epic histories of states, nations, corporations, individuals. Impact, alter, contribute to, blend with society’s constructions. Delivered into somebody else’s world, slowly our own. Here, have your own story. Here’s your story, Kid. Welcome to the city, the town, the country. I arrived on a different continent than my parents or grandparents. Dropped into another’s situation. After a world war, species-level state-level individual-level decisions. Begat within an existing narrative, dealing with possibilities, proscriptions, limitations. Tulip, butterfly, and rose. Birthed to the couch pillow, the TV, genre category, art existing before me, during, afterwards. Welcome to your run. We make our own with everybody else’s. The All-Mind.
Asked to be born. Willed it. Alive within the accident. Coffee on the coffee table. Food distribution production system, labor regime, money love market, waste removal, schools, cultures, songs, beliefs, expectations, roads, names, brand gods, Top 40 and the Pledge of Allegiance. Trending. Typewriter to Facebook Minolta to Canon iPhone from rotary. Cultivate within the paradigm. Blossom, harvest, leave behind. Lord, the Powerful One, born into that story. King, Owner of All we see before us, toiling the land for protection, Landlord Prince President Billionaire. Squeezed into yarn, here soul farming. Land you provided, shade and sun. Here woman and two sons. Care for your commons! As the first decision. Everything secondary to loving. We didn’t choose this chapter, these relatives, those spaces. But own action. Wake in the morning and rise. Act within collaboration, work within power, construct our own. Understanding the All-Thing.
We know those thoughts, driving to Boston to see mom, corpus, dying. In a bed view of concrete, glass, ductwork, footbridge they call the Pike. They’re doing their best. Circumstance dictated her decision. Lived a few days beyond her voice. Where to die. How to exist. Living choice within the accident.