I watched Masters of the Universe the other night. It was super fun and funny. It could have benefitted from a bigger budget, but the laughs were almost constant and the story was redeeming. It was basically a mashup of a lot of Marvel and other superhero mythology, but I didn’t mind.

I enjoyed how the movie explored manhood through the lens of a boy-Prince who is a reluctant messiah who eventually steps into power and mastery.

As the movie ended and some of the mythic messages were downloading into my neural net, a couple of lines emerged that were not from the movie in question.

“It’s our way. It’s the Klingon Way.”

“I know. But it’s not my way.”

I always enjoyed Star Trek: The Next Generation for the deep philosophical explorations that were hidden beneath the thin veneer of space exploration. Few characters were more compelling than Worf, a Klingon raised by human parents.

Klingons were war-like and proud, fierce and quick to anger. Theirs was a noble warrior archetype, but their stoicism could drift into a dogmatism too hung up on tradition to reconsider old precedents.

One such moment occurred in the episode, Redemption II. Worf’s family name had been dishonored because of a lie about his father, Mogh. Worf and his brother, Kurn, had worked diligently, investigating the incident in question to find the truth—a secret that could undermine the very legitimacy of the Klingon Empire.

When the truth came out, Worf’s family name was cleared and the son of the real villain, now deceased, was presented to Worf for execution, in keeping with Klingon tradition.

Worf was a proud Klingon. He practiced the ceremonies, knew the history and was competent in battle. And yet he had grown up with human parents and later joined Starfleet instead of serving the Klingon Empire. He had chosen his own way, much to the chagrin of his brother and other Klingons.

When presented with the opportunity to take the life of a young man, an innocent, he demurred. Even though it was the Klingon way, he could not follow through. Not because the act was unsanctioned—but because the act was morally wrong, despite its legality. He knew that killing this young man would have been barbaric and would have solved nothing.

Through the episodes, Worf was revealed to us as a proud Klingon: stoic, stern and uncompromising. And yet this caricature, the warrior stereotype, was the entry-point into the person behind the archetypal mask.

In the moment where Worf dropped the knife and proclaimed, “I know. But it is not my way,” we see the gap between the map and the territory. The soldier and the orders he cannot in good conscience carry out. Because any tradition or law that would have one kill an innocent young man for the crimes of his family is bankrupt.

His choice caused consternation among his brother and the other Klingons. Yet it was his choice to make. He knew the rules. He revered the culture. He was the ultimate emblem of Klingon virtue. And yet, his moral code superseded even his reverence for his people’s history and ways.

That is individuation. Courage. Discernment. True power.

Worf was perfectly capable of carrying out the order. But the true mark of a human, just like a Klingon, is the exercise of restraint.

One who looks solely to tradition and archetypal messaging becomes a stereotype, a caricature. A warrior was but a facet of Worf’s identity.

He looked inside for what honor demanded. He was a proud Klingon and yet, drew his wisdom from multiple sources--from humanity and Starfleet and his Captain, whom he respected greatly.

Worf represented the collision of two different cultures, with vastly different worldviews and ethical standards. He was of the Klingons, but also an individual, and a Starfleet officer. As a hybrid character, he brought much-needed perspective to situations and traditions in need of revision.

Suddenly, mercy had entered the Klingon imagination, sending ripples throughout the empire. His choice offered a new tradition, a new perspective, and new possibilities. One obvious result of his choice was that a young Toral survived. He was not forced to die for the sins of another—sins he did not commit. He was free from the bondage of his family’s shame, an unfair burden—guilt by association.

Worf had just received this gift and immediately bestowed it on another. A man who now held his own fate and his life’s trajectory. He was not automatically destined to be good, but to have agency.

Perhaps merciful actions such as this spread like a contagion of right action. A virtuous spiral.

This episode demonstrates the appeal to tradition fallacy: the idea that because something is ancient, long-standing, or customary, it must be legitimate and must continue. Tradition can convince us that dissent against such customs is itself an ethical violation.

Star Trek, in its brilliance, forced us, the viewer, to question our dogmas, our sureness. What does it mean to be, in this case, a man, a warrior, an adherent, a soldier, an animal, and an individual? Are we more than our conditioning? Are we static or dynamic? What makes our rules legitimate?

For if we merely adhere to our scriptures, then we are little more than docile adherents, supplicants. If we have agency, we challenge what is wrong, what is unfair and what can no longer be accepted. We revise the stale and archaic tome into a living document. A tradition that breathes and sheds its skin.

Any movement or system, any founding document that will not stand before an ethical challenge is moribund. Any system that will stand and thrive and provide for its adherents will welcome correction, as it is for the good of the people it serves.

Blind obedience to laws, orders, scriptures and traditions is not virtuous unless and until those rules are compared against universal ethics.

Any system that prevents such a challenge is hollow.

Discernment is knowing when the hour of reckoning is upon us.

These moments, these choices, contain inherent risk.

Yet, courage demands that we take a stand or we may find ourselves complicit in the ethical lapses of systems that need our correction.

When we refuse to face these risks, we elevate obedience above conscience and silence the inner voice, surrendering the judgment that makes moral action possible.

Lies are a thorny subject. On one hand we have innocent forms of deception: white lies, sweet little lies, and we can even lie to ourselves. But don’t let these quaint catch-phrases fool you; when it comes to intentional deception, the implications are staggering. There are layers of meaning, ethical questions, and gradations to consider.

Lies can define our character. Someone can be a pathological liar. Studies show we lie more often than we think. Yet we see many everyday lies as harmless. Some clearly are. Humoring someone who is unsure of whether to wear an outfit or start an artistic endeavor is innocent. It comes down to a question of intent and results.

Yet, on the world stage and in our personal lives, big lies can create similar problems because lies are often a vehicle of power.

Deception is a tool of power.

Lies are load-bearing.

Lies and deception are tools of control.

Propaganda is a form of political deception. It serves as the intellectual bedrock of a political system that usurps and hoards power. Demagogues amass power by confusing others with distortions and half-truths.

Some lies are obvious and thus spoken to demonstrate power.

Images of Mussolini and Hitler come to mind. A leader so brazen, so willing to lie, pushes key buttons in people waiting for that strongman to come along and lead us back to glory. We’ve seen these stories play out in predictably catastrophic ways.

Such characters lie, not just to peacock, but to rationalize harm. The January 6th attack was predicated on an obvious lie—that President Biden stole the 2020 election. He very obviously did not.

Remember Trump’s earlier lie—that President Obama was a Muslim and not born in the US. Or further back, that the Exonerated Five were guilty until proven innocent. Powerful lies that damage real people’s lives.

Lies serve as scaffolding for movements and usurpations of power.

“They’re eating the dogs!”

“They’re not sending their best!”

Insidious lies that fester and divide.

The election lie was used to justify harm. Not just physical violence and property damage, but political violence—the kind that very easily could have ended our grand experiment in self-government on that day.

Propaganda about Jews in the decades leading up to WW2 led to genocide--a grisly example of what scapegoating can do. Now new lies attempt to minimize the 6 million deaths that came as a result of the original lies.

Lies, in this regard, are functional--part of a plan and a process.

On a personal level, lies can be hard to catch and harder to understand. Some have innocent intentions and create little blowback. Humoring a lover or a friend. But deceptive people’s lies indicate something. Some need. Something to hide. A wound to protect. An intent to manipulate.

They can also serve to obfuscate and mislead. To hide an affair, a checkered past, or cruel intentions. They can serve to misdirect--to make a lover or a friend blame themselves when acting in good faith. They can cause a person to doubt their ability to make sense of their experiences. We call this gaslighting. These lies are powerful and amount to psychological abuse.

Your confusion gives the liar power, cover, space, advantage. It protects them from consequences: vulnerability, accountability, introspection, the need to grow.

In politics, lies can prepare the populace for domination.

In relationships, they can bring confusion that sets the stage for: abuse, neglect, affairs and loss of self. Lies can make someone feel used, broken, at fault, not enough, too much, too needy.

The lies replace reality.

On a national level, social cohesion craters, creating seismic impacts. Division, violence, tribalism, and loss of liberty to totalitarian regimes.

The individual, inhabiting both settings, feels lost, unable to trust his/her senses--leading to further isolation. This compounds the sense of estrangement which further potentiates the nefarious activities of the political powers who thrive on division and offer a person safe harbor in their cult of personality. Isolated people are more vulnerable to individual perpetrators as well.

I wonder if similar characters are behind the lies in both spheres. We love diagnosing everyone, but, you don’t have to have a personality disorder to have manipulative tricks up your sleeve. Many who deceive have modeled these behaviors from parents, siblings, friends, movies or books. Some abuse can hamper neurological development, creating empathy gaps. Some people simply lack empathy. This can free a person to do as they please.

Those of us with more capacity to feel and care are at an obvious disadvantage. Lies can have a coarsening effect, even on those with a strong moral code. Exhausted, we may come to believe, ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’. We could choose to get our just desserts by easing our ethical standards, crossing our lines in the sand. Monkey see, monkey do.

I call this the contagion of deception. It’s like a tractor beam, and it is how civilizations fall. The Roman Republic became the Roman Empire and was ruled by cruel men.

People abandon ethics and each other when truth no longer matters.

When shared reality crumbles.

And yet, that’s just one problem. People don’t merely sink to new depths of depravity. Cynicism doesn’t merely create more cynicism.

The contagion of deception is, more directly, the forced transference of shame, of confusion, of blame, onto the victim.

The unwitting recipient must now manage the other’s accrued psychic debt, the pain, the unprocessed shame, in the form of an imposed nervous system dysregulation. Such lies serve as a vehicle to dump trauma onto the unsuspecting, who must then deal with these staggering after-effects. They may feel cursed to bear this burden while trying not to follow suit--to resist unleashing this radioactivity onto another, as was done unto them.

Civilization is choosing not to replicate the wound in another.

Not to unburden oneself at someone else’s expense.

Choosing to hold oneself accountable, even when others have not.

Because truth and shared reality are the hallmarks of community.

I loved the movie, Cloud Atlas. Everyone should watch it for the sheer enjoyment and the psychological/philosophical/spiritual messages it presents in narrative form. There are so many crystallizing moments. The scenes get better and better as the movie progresses and the meaning presents itself more clearly.

This film posits that we ascend or descend based on the virtue of the choices we make. Characters rise and fall via karmic reincarnation.

The ethical focus is on countervailing ethical options. Courageous choices lift a person into a higher station in their next life. Fear and coercion lower characters to sub-human entities who spread misery.

Finally the writers demonstrate that seemingly futile gestures of faith, mercy, courage and authenticity may not always save the person in this life, but that these noble acts serve as motivation and inspiration to souls far in the future. No good deed goes un-noticed.

One could spend pages analyzing so many scenes and moments and their implications. But perhaps my favorite is the movie’s climax. Tom Hanks’ character, Zachry, is a coward. His village is being attacked by brutes and instead of fighting valiantly, he hides. He is no mere coward, however. He is oppressed by the devil spirit, Old Georgie, played masterfully by Hugo Weaving.

In the film, we can’t tell if Old Georgie is a true devil, a hallucination or a sub-character in Zacchry’s psyche. Either way, he masterfully hobbles and confuses the weak character, whispering fear and despair. Sternly predicting the worst outcomes and overwhelming the innocent and pliable Zacchry in his colloquial brogue.

This moment really zapped me because it was well written, very intense and climactic in terms of cinematography. More so, the plot device served as the perfect metaphor for what our minds do to us to keep us ‘safe.’ This safety usually amounts to a lot of regret, when the spell of fear eventually wears off. We may wonder why we didn’t go for someone or something we wanted. When we didn’t believe in ourselves and we wondered how or why.

Old Georgie is a great externalization of the inner critic and other named and unnamed fear voices that can infect us and paralyze our lives.

I can recall countless moments where I’ve given in to fear because I thought the voice of fear was me or the voice of reason. This stance is often our default setting.

Because Old Georgie co-opts real insights and insinuates himself via worst-case-scenarios: to try and protect us but always from a limited, clutching, fear-based worldview.

Spoiler alert: Zachry eventually stands up to Old Georgie and finds his courage and saves the day. And he gets the girl and starts a family and tells the story to his grandkids around the fire, now an elderly man of wisdom.

We can and must wake up to our Old Georgie scenes, our opportunities to grow, to take our leaps of faith, regardless of the short-term outcomes.

There is a proclamation and a leap I’ve been meaning to take. One that scares me. It’s an inner leap, not a quit your job and move across the country type. It’s one I’ve written about and I know it’s right, but Old Georgie always finds a way of scaring me into a stuckness on this issue. He keeps telling me I’ll disappear if I let go of this one dream, this one thing that I don’t really have control over anyway. Such is the sophistication of these twisted survival mechanisms. These tools that have become inversions of their intended purpose.

Seek out your Old Georgie moments, situations and moments of truth. Recognize that the voice is not you. Thinking of Old Georgie as a stand-in for your fear or inner critic is a powerful move. Waking up in those moments is the way we make our leaps of faith. They often feel counter-intuitive. That’s because we are so used to that inner critic scaring us into inaction. What happens when we stop obeying?

I love discovering hidden songs from favorite artists and eras. I recall a friend mentioning Astral Weeks from Van Morrison when I was 20. When I heard it years later, I was rapt. Everything stopped.

The lyrics were visual, kinetic, and emergent--a stream of consciousness that flowed between description and exposition. I was transported to ‘another place and another time.’ The instrumentation was layered and played spontaneously. Joy permeated the poesy. The songs, exuberant, arrived in simple garb.

After that seminal 1968 album, I wondered if other artists felt liberated to approach their music with similar abandon and subversion.

I recently discovered the solemn Winter, by the Rolling Stones. I thought it a stylistic homage to Astral Weeks and yet distinct–a stirring meditation that made me pause. It told me something about love that I had missed, which is why we listen.

Then I listened again and again—like I do—on repeat–decoding and decanting. Letting this unearthed appellation breathe. Sitting with the break in the internal dialogue that it caused. Beckoning its strings to shower their electricity onto my waiting ears. Riding the locomotion of the drums as they crashed the emotional waves and stirred the momentum of thawing ingredients.

A transmission from the Gods. A gleaming artifact unearthed. An artist’s expressionist rendering of a moment and a mood so distinct, so fascinatingly mundane. We are invited into his and her private wavelength, their sacred love-bubble. Yet such offerings stand as a universal decree about what it means to suffer life’s vagaries while alive and human and ensouled.

These offerings grant us secret permission to feel and yearn. To chase the essence of a moment–to bridge the distance between two beleaguered spirits. Like any real love song, Winter is a public baring of the soul. An unconditional surrender. Where no recourse is sought or revealed. When no salve soothes the ache, art is the only afforded option. They and we venture to distill a fading sunset and its synchronistic starlings as they flutter and vanish. As our perfect moments fade.

The song couches its meaning in elemental allusions–seasons and winds–and the imagery they inspire. This imparts a cold weariness, but the telling feels warm and open as I listen. He speaks his laments and yet counters with a hope that change and renewal will arrive with Spring. ‘When the light of love will be burning bright.’

I love how the narrator speaks of events and locations that don’t reveal much to the listener. Maybe it’s not for us to know what those places mean. California and Stone Canyon. We are left to imagine what secret meaning is encoded. Perhaps the song is saying that the details and locations are superfluous. Because the details don’t last. They’re the map, not the territory. Perhaps it’s enough for us to just witness his love letter.

And to remember the odes we’ve sent--and the missives not fired.

To cherish our memories as he savors his. To honor our connections, strained though they may be. The souls we know and knew. The people and places and faces we remember--that showed us who we are. Those that awoke us from slumber. The ones that stir us still.

And yet, part of me knew there was something deeper at play with Winter. This song was about exile. Winter was a gentle metaphor for his banishment. I knew it, yet I didn’t know why. There was nothing overt in the song that told me, until I searched a little deeper.

The narrator says

“I’ve been burning my bell, book and candle.

And the restoration plays have all gone round.”

At first I wanted to leave these details out of the essay because the song affected me so much without their addition. But ‘bell, book and candle’ describes an old Catholic rite of expulsion that has come to mean estrangement or a curse. So when he says he’s been ‘burning’ his ‘bell, book and candle,’ he was removing his curse. This song is his incantation. The recitation of verses, the repetition, the circularity. The swirling intensity of the strings. His counter-spell, cast at the four winds. His penance. Samson at the grinding wheel.

The ‘restoration plays’ refer to 17th century plays in Europe that were bawdy and grandiose. Perhaps he had had affairs and distractions and busyness, but that these enterprises had worn thin.

For the final incantation, he speaks directly to his lover as the song comes to a crescendo before closing.

‘Sometimes I think about you, baby’

‘Sometimes I cry about you’

‘Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you’

‘Sometimes I wanna keep you warm’

This is the heart of the song and the song of his heart.

As the strings rise and swell

No request for forgiveness

No quibbling about the terms of his banishment

No bid for reassurance or even connection

Thinking only of his beloved

Wanting only to keep her warm

To humbly protect, to shelter

A bulwark from the elements

A shepherd, a beacon, a lighthouse

Bearing warm love with nowhere to go

A familial and timeless love

Bonded and gracious

Not sullied by the cold

But fortified and burnished

His deepest love revealed

As all else falls away

As I continue to write, I’ve noticed that the direct act of writing takes a backseat most of the time to a host of other related tasks: noticing, pondering, building the conceptual scaffolding of an essay, sensing that a concept I’m working on has tangents that could all be little essays themselves. Put together they could be a book.

Mapping feels more accurate at times. Instead of writing something that exists inside of me, I experience it more like discovering a phenomenon. Mapping that can take days or weeks of intermittent study and discussions.

A big part of my style of writing is noticing things. Dismantling movies and songs, messages, social movements, and propaganda. Scrutinizing. Not always judgmentally or critically either. Getting under the surface of a song, a movie or an idea seems to be the main thrust. From there one can use it as a way to see the culture, the nation, the individual. All roads lead to Rome.

Lately, words and their manifold meanings interest me. I sense, more specifically, how certain words get co-opted by: religions, movements, institutions, political parties, musical genres etc. It’s not necessarily good or bad, but it’s constant, this drift in meaning.

We must be aware of the ways in which our words are used. Often we get into debates because two people mean two different things when discussing something. Someone gets offended by the connotation they assume the person meant.

Words are so often insufficient. The map is not the territory. We struggle to describe what we see, feel, experience and truly mean. Futile attempts to connect through words can be maddening and destructive.

As I’m pre-writing for a half dozen essays, I see how important words have been co-opted by the aforementioned institutions. I don’t mean to pick on religion, but some of the most obvious and clear cases, for me, come from a very Chrisitanized view of specific words. Most of these words are virtues, like faith.

In Christianity, faith means to believe without proof. To believe in one’s salvation. To believe that Jesus died for your sins. Since we are a nation with such a large population of Christians, we have loosely adopted many of the suppositions, traditions and mindsets of our dominant religion--for better or worse.

And yet, a non-religious view of faith is still applicable and useful as a counter point. That faith is a different animal, though related. We can have trust in others, in their innate goodness. We can have a good-faith discussion. In this case, faith is honoring the rules of intellectual honesty.

In an upcoming movie review, I noticed how a character used faith that his actions would be worthwhile because people matter. In that realization, I noticed how I had previously and unconsciously taken on the religious meaning of the word—the specific promises and theology of Christianity.

When I examined that idea, I noticed that this belief system creates an external locus of control. Have faith that God will do this act or that God has done that act which saves you. This amounts to faith in something or someone external. An atheist scholar may go on to argue that said religion instills learned helplessness by causing its adherents to seek outside of themselves for said salvation.

But in the movie, the character acted in a way that proved he had faith in humanity, in the value of life. Not because of a god, but because he viewed life as sacred. As a result, he acted instead of waiting for God to do so. He decided life was sacred.

Sacredness is another word whose meaning can be blended. Is someone or something special because they are anointed by god? Or is sacredness a concept that we need to reconsider. Perhaps everything is sacred. Perhaps what’s missing from our culture, our nation and our planet, is a sense of universal sacredness.

Not because a scripture tells us so. But because we decide that it is so. Not this holy object or this ancient site. Not this chosen people. But everyone and everything. We can take back sacredness from its narrow usage just like we can with faith. Not because those usages are wrong, but because they are not universal.

Perhaps we unwittingly end up using our religions and our words and our laws to maintain classes of people. Citizens and illegals. Jews and Gentiles. Chosen ones and Philistines. Sacred land and brown sites. We pick and choose who and what is sacred by fiat or by doctrine. Even our religions are just for those who believe, who have faith. Others are not saved.

Even our sacred words are used to divide and thus conquer.

How does this happen? I don’t have the foggiest notion.

But I know there’s a name for it.

The mind virus—wetiko. The Spell. It settles upon our nation as we speak. Infiltrating our every thought. It divides. It feeds. It poisons us against one another. It is insatiable greed crossed with fear. It hates. It sees only enemies. It steals our words and inverts our nation’s principles and our world’s well-meaning religions.

I don’t know how to defeat it, but I think continually naming it is a start. We may never defeat the mind virus itself, but we might as well marshal our forces to defeat its avatar. That avatar has the keys to the soon-to-be kingdom on this 250th anniversary of the independence of our nation.

We must look around and see only sacredness. It is the antidote to the cynicism of abject greed and deception.

But we also must defeat those forces that would usurp and chain us all to a future of totalitarianism. That threat is all too real. They are trying to create a world where nothing is sacred.

All is raw material for creating more wealth for the few—grist for the mill.

Everyone is a means to that end.

Look in your hearts. Look to our institutions. But look at our words and see how even they can be used to subtly reinforce caste systems and dividing lines. We are balanced on a knife’s edge. Every choice matters.

Break the spell of wetiko by seeing everyone as not just a means to your ends, but an end in and of themselves. They are theirs just as you are yours.

This is the core of what it means to be civilized. To choose not to trespass, even when no one is watching. Even when you have been harmed. Even when you could easily rationalize it.

I grew up with Madonna songs and videos on the radio and MTV. She was and is larger than life: a world-famous pop star, sex symbol--strong, beautiful, and overflowing with taboo. I knew the songs but I was never a fan who owned her music. I recognized her talent and daring. She challenged us as a culture to accept and respect strong women on their terms.

She sings with a sweet, well-trained voice. Her musical career has spanned 5 decades. With dozens of hits, not all of her songs are deep and meaningful, but she’s a good songwriter. Live to Tell is haunting. A handful of others stick out in my head. She deserves her acclaim.

I would hear snippets of Take A Bow in a store when walking by, but never knew what I was hearing—just echoes of that memorable and catchy chorus. I sensed sweetness—something bare and dreamy, with a touch of melancholy.

Then I listened to the song in earnest and found it wondrous, sublime and complex. This offering was deeper than the typical Madonna fare--less performative and extroverted. Her writing was subtle: using the metaphor of a stage and performance to gently tell her story of heartbreak.

The title implies artifice on the part of her lover, yet she delivers no invective. She doesn’t scorn his limitations. She merely shares a sweet and sorrowful melody. Her heart stays open. Her disappointment does not stain her love, her truth.

She merely asks, ‘you took my love for granted, why, oh why?’

The show is over, say goodbye.

In her unabashed vulnerability, she embodies the fool archetype. The innocence, the willingness, and the risk.

So many of her songs speak from a strong individualistic perspective, from feminism and empowerment. But this offering reveals the pain of losing, of the other getting the best of us. In doing so, she reveals her soft underbelly.

If Madonna was singing to women across the world that they can be strong and empowered, maybe she’s saying that there is power in vulnerability.

That the price of living a full life is performing our high wire act without a net.

That strong people sometimes lose in love.

And that no one is beyond confusion. No one is infallible.

To constantly suspect others and defend against the vagaries of loss means to forego the rewards that love offers us.

Perhaps our internal terrain is revealed in the wreckage of a connection that meant so much to us. We can take heart that even when we suffer tremendous loss, we don’t have one default setting. We don’t flatten the experience into seeing red, blaming supposed enemies. Static B-movie plot lines—villains and damsels in distress. We just feel bewilderment and a soft ache for those who couldn’t sustain the exposure of union.

‘I’ve always been in love with you’ is the heart’s proclamation--innocent and bold. It yearns but does not beg. Her love is a verdant and timeless river. It does not succumb and collapse into bitterness. Her love abides. It stands impervious to the choices of the other.

As I explore this song’s meaning and contours, I wonder if Madonna is expressing something more nuanced than mere unrequited love. Perhaps the love was just as real for the other person, but they chose to turn it off, to move on anyway. The show is over. But perhaps she discovered that she could not, that her love wasn’t mutable, fungible. Maybe what she means by ‘I’ve always been in love with you’ is that she discovered this love, this precious and living artifact in a deep cavern in her heart, waiting there since time immemorial to be discovered. Perhaps these treasures don’t expire. Maybe they don’t die. They just are. They radiate from our depths and from a timeless place. When someone can or will no longer meet us in that place, the artifact—the love, remains. It doesn’t obey the other lover’s exit.

The heartbreak is not only that the lover may have been acting. It is that he can apparently step out of the role, leave the stage, and call the whole thing finished. She cannot. For her, the love is not a scene with a beginning and an end. It is something discovered and habituated to.

Love doesn’t always wither when someone withdraws. It can fill so much heart-space that we can wonder how to move forward. Perhaps instead of trying to put out the flame or turn down the intensity, we might just grow around it. Get bigger. Build a bridge. Increase our capacity to hold love.

No need to shame ourselves or accept impatient cultural messages. Instead we can recognize that this person showed us just how much love we can contain and channel. We may struggle to bear its intensity. We may continue to speak its lines, even after the curtain falls, the lights go down and the set is broken down. Because for us, the play was real. The stage that housed it was temporary.

I was surprised at a recent epiphany. I had to double-take when the word came to my mind because mercy usually denotes a situation where force and aggression were on the menu. But it rang true in a deep place, despite the apparent mismatch with the situation I was considering. Yet I didn’t know what to say about it without my words sounding forced and trite. So I left it alone for days.

I was in the middle of watching the original Star Wars trilogy. They’re great movies and still, they’re super campy. There’s so much to say about them, but I wasn’t so much watching them as a film critic but letting myself get lost in the story after a long absence. Somehow I couldn’t help but enjoy the craft and make some observations.

A New Hope was a slow and methodical exercise in world-building. With fun, memorable characters, we felt the water warm as Lucas gradually wove mystery and intrigue into the beginnings of a hero’s journey with real stakes.

The sequel, The Empire Strikes Back was just so bleak--such a dark and effective movie. By the end, our heroes were reeling and wounded--splintered and near defeat. All seemed lost. Yet that’s where character development happens. They and we are at once galvanized in the forge of loss and doubt. These static characters become dynamic before our eyes. Damsels show ingenuity. Lunks soften. Boys become...well, larger boys, but with really cool gizmos and improved parlor tricks. Cowardly droids sometimes even save the day. There’s definitely some Wizard of Oz factor in Star Wars.

And just like that journey down the yellow brick road, we grow with our stand-ins as they mirror our foibles and strengths back to us in technicolor. These movies are about courage and self-discovery, daring-do and grit.

In turning those very tables we see how luck and commitment and belief conspire to level the odds against seemingly insurmountable forces. At the end of Return of the Jedi, the archetypal good vs evil face-off reaches its zenith with rich complexity.

I felt riveted once again as I saw the depth and nuance of this interaction. The Emperor, the epitome of evil and avatar for the dark side, had seduced Darth Vader and now was trying to ensnare his son, Luke. (spoiler alert!)

This changed the dynamic, because Luke kept appealing to his father’s humanity. Everyone kept telling him that his father was gone, that the machine and the dark side of the force had long since dispatched him. But Luke believed differently.

As a result of his inner knowing, Luke had abandoned the idea of defeating Darth Vader and had come instead on a rescue mission. A mission of mercy. By throwing down his weapon, he opened himself to attack by the Emperor. This allowed the humanity within his father to overcome the programming, the hatred and the false identity he had worn for years. His love for his son caused him to risk his life and destroy his teacher, his false spiritual father--to reclaim his humanity and to change his destiny.

Luke’s belief, his mercy and his steadfastness made him invulnerable to the urgings of the dark side. And this allowed his father’s inherent mercy to overpower his dominant false self. Love finds a way.

Maybe there’s more to mercy than I thought. Perhaps sometimes mercy means sensing the humanity hidden deep within another, and letting that impulse dictate the agenda. Maybe mercy is just another face of love. And if I love them, then I’ll do whatever serves them. I’ll fight for them. Not for me. Not to win, not to defeat, but to preserve and honor them. To set them free. To believe in them. To see them, to see past their armor and their programming. To completely relinquish agendas that control and steer and self-seek.

I thought mercy meant not killing a feeble enemy or not punishing the guilty. But I see it now as a form of surrender. A means by which the ego’s gambit is relinquished and the higher self can reassert: with the goals of healing, seeing past the mask and seeing the other with the eyes of love.

Mercy says I’m not the judge and jury. I do not see all. It is not for me to be the (self-appointed) agent of your karma, but of mine.

I see now that Luke didn’t ‘save’ his father in Return of the Jedi. Instead of salvation, Luke did ‘the work.’ He did the inner shadow work. He trained. He discovered himself. He gained proficiency, spiritually and otherwise. He was humbled and received tutelage from an elder. The hard work of individuation.

His first attempt to help his friends and fight his enemy ended with him losing a hand and barely surviving the fight. He was defeated because he tried to fight force with force and not with power. Darth Vader was his father, but, until that moment, he was unaware of this fact. That’s when everything changed.

Because he could then humanize this formerly faceless, anonymous villain, this caricature of evil. Vader was no longer a nemesis to be defeated, but a person with reasons and faults and a story. A person who could be redeemed. A dynamic character with agency, not a mere puppet, under the spell of the dark side.

That’s when the careful craftsmanship of storytelling pays off. When static characters become dynamic. When we see ourselves in our fathers and our lovers and everyone in between. And we realize our fight is not with the spellbound, but with the spell.

Luke threw down his weapon because the battle between good and evil was a trap. A false choice. Love doesn’t battle. Luke didn’t save his father. He showed him another way. He released his anger and fear as one impelled by love does not fight fire with fire. This freed him from the grip of the dark side. His father then merely modeled the same behavior. Because there was finally something worth living for and dying for—his son. The stakes offered him redemption.

Luke’s non-violence showed Vader that he did care and he acted according to his true nature, not the second nature that had come to dominate him. Then fittingly, he removed the mask that both kept him alive and enslaved.

Someone reminded me years ago that we can hold multiple ideas in mind without having to concretize our stance.

In Return of the Jedi, Luke, considering his path and his previous battle with his father, was a perfect example. He saw/believed/hoped/manifested that his father was still in there, under all the armor, the indoctrination and the sunk cost. He wasn’t Darth Vader or Anakin Skywalker; he was both.

Both things can be true. Both/and instead of either/or. Every situation does not reduce down to a 2-dimensional light switch, a black and white binary. One must recognize that sometimes, multiple choice is an option, even when given a true/false question.

That’s what Luke did. He changed the rules. And he won.

What’s different about our lives? Besides the lack of light sabers and adorable Ewoks? We don’t always have the opportunity to show off our insights and sublime understandings in a grand showdown between us, the valiant hero, and the forces of darkness. Yet, it doesn’t mean we don’t see.

Sometimes there’s just no grand gesture, no riveting climactic scene. Nothing to do and no one to save. We may not even have anyone to articulate our truth to. It just sits there, seeing the truth, the reality of a situation. We can wish or hope for a moment when we can act upon it. But until then, we can rest in the knowledge that we know this truth--this secret. That we can see past the masks and window dressings. This sense can offer solace when we realize we’re only the director of our movie. And some greater director has plans that don’t fully correspond to our wishes.

We commonly talk about love being a verb and it’s so apt, usually.

Maybe sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s a realization that we’re right about something, but it’s just for us to know. And maybe that’s enough. Because to see the truth means not being fooled by the circumstances, but not needing the world to conform to your preferences. And perhaps that’s where Mercy can guide us again. The same Mercy that helped Luke humanize his father may help us see that it’s merciful to let others be. No fixing or saving. Just seeing and knowing.

We don’t need an external triumph where we receive and offer redemption. Luke gets a great payoff. The characters save the day and live happily ever after. But life is not a movie. Those moments of high drama are the exception, not the rule. Yes! Seize them and act valiantly when life affords the chance. By all means, be the hero in your life. But we must learn what to do when we never get the chance to say our mic drop line. When the passion play can only take place internally. When our internal discovery of Mercy is the reward and the payoff.

I remember decades ago when Paul Simon’s Graceland album and the title song arrived on the radio and in our collective imagination. I was a middle school student, learning about Biblical allusions in novels like The Old Man and the Sea. So when I heard the title track, Graceland, I knew he was talking about heaven as much as Elvis’ sprawling mansion. The meaning was layered and I was privy because I had been lucky enough to be taught. I was made savvy by others who were learned in the subtleties of meaning as transmitted through art. I remember explaining this to someone less versed, someone who didn’t know about allusion. It just didn’t register for him. I was sad for the flattened perceptual experience he was living.

A year or so ago, when in mourning, I was focusing on the song Graceland again. The line, ‘losing love is like a window in your heart’ gave me pause. I liked the simile, and yet it was the revelation and the commonality that Simon imparted through his rendering that was and is most operant. He was reaching for truth and we were along for the ride.

‘She comes back to tell me she’s gone. As if I didn’t know that. As if I didn’t know my own bed. As if I never noticed, the way she brushed her hair from her forehead.’

We revel in his use of lyric and music, feelings and unvarnished scenes, to get to the real. To help us slip into ourselves and under our defenses. To embody our most tender inner being, to feel seen. We discover commonality there with the writer and all who choose to withstand and soften through life’s vagaries.

And yet music and art don’t automatically shed light. We can watch a film that propagandizes and distorts. We may read misleading pseudo-history and come to wildly inaccurate conclusions. We too often believe false narratives about pivotal scenes in history and the actors who played upon the world stage. Through art and speech, sound and image, we can be taught or tricked, aroused or sickened, ginned up for war or mollified.

Our capacity to perceive is fallible. See death cults and abusive relationships for context. We can reject the trustworthy and embrace the charlatan. We don’t know what we don’t know. So humbly seeking truth via education is a choice to accept our functional incapacity to learn, to perceive clearly without the intervention of not only experts in a subject but teachers—exemplars of discernment—those who dare us to think, to examine, to wrestle with truth. They challenge our assumptions and show us the stakes.

We must be willing to see the chinks in our perceptual armor, the fizzures where deceptive arguments seep in to court our core wounds. How the algorithm cases the joint. It sizes us up and glamours our prideful egos, luring us to court deception, mapping where we harbor half-truths and false beliefs, where we entertain fallacies that are at once tantalizing and life-threatening. Extinction event catalysts in sheep’s clothing.

So in the school of life, all art is not created equal. Some works free us and others serve us a 1-dimensional script for who we are and will be. Media can feed us generalized narratives about our identity that too many seemingly lap up and wear with pride. I see this most egregiously in radio country music. I have always found it mindless and deeply insulting. Easy tropes about tractors and trucks and other facile identity cues make me shudder. It feels like a Kincaid painting but with barbs—with consequences that would become all too clear as politics shifted and metastasized in the only nation I’ve called home.

I sensed that country music was selling its listeners a soft propaganda—a ready-made script. A hokey caricature of patriotism, regionalism, masculinity, rural life vs city life, American-ness that you can slip into and skip all that useless introspection. No nuance, no search, no layers. Here it is. Plop. Eat your gruel. Whatever I see on the surface is what everything means. No inquiry, no risk and of course, no doubt. No time for nuance and no need to veer into the uncomfortable, the messy or the taboo. No stark encounter with self and shadow. No subtle urging to face our biases, to humanize those different than us. It seems innocuous, but it’s not.

Radio country brainwashes and dumbs-down vast swathes of our population with results that have become all-too apparent in the last 10 years. My disappointment is not that there is such a Nashville machine that churns out fluff for profit—that makes mindless grist and calls it music. Capitalism is like that. I’m incensed that so many consume such tripe so willingly. They wear it like a badge of honor. Coupled with dogmatic religions that asks people to have faith in unseen saviors, too many have become the unwitting pawns of those who would usurp—the highwaymen who would gladly separate us from our sovereignty. These engineers of chaos, of the demise of our American Experiment. The stakes could not be higher.

And yet all is not lost. Our capacity to course-correct may be our saving grace. Our willingness to see past the surface is needed now more than ever. Cynical times led by cynical politicians leads to cynical citizens. We are starting to resemble our counterparts in Russia and other non-free nations. They are wise to the propaganda. They vote and yet they know that this vote is a charade. They are initiated in public deception. We must become so and yet not lose our sense of people power.

We do this by examining, by employing awareness, by seeking understanding. By measuring our capacity for discernment with humility. We must listen to our guts, but assess the conclusions we would jump to with scrutiny. The appreciation of art is part and parcel of the embodiment of discernment. Art presents us information in a fashion that deeply soothes and harshly confronts. It blurs lines and breaks rules as it contorts and swirls and toys with the permutations of meaning. It seeks to meld the ethereal with the mundane, the vulgate and the sacred. Art dissects and scrutinizes. It magnifies what it encounters. It passes judgment and redeems.

Art demands and rewards presence: something that is often in short supply. Humility and beginner’s mind go a long way in our vigilance against misinfortion and disinformation. Let’s investigate the seemingly innocuous streams of entertainment that we digest, for they could be our custom-tailored and bespoke Trojan Horse. True art does not lull us to sleep. It does not typecast. It does not generalize. It beckons: awaken and experience your humanity and alchemize your suffering through rhythm and integrated chaos, not mere spectacle. Witness yourself through the mirror that art and nature provide. Come back to center. Metabolize the detritus. Venture out once more and see the world anew.

A year ago I awoke with a melancholy song in my head and a knowing ache in my heart. Enter Springsteen’s Bobby Jean: his tender goodbye to a band-mate and dear friend. The song reminisced about their shared history over a sentimental soundtrack. Through this transmission I sensed that I had to reluctantly let go of someone I cherished–someone I was certain would be my forever person.

Spirit ushered me captive into those bitter mornings via such songs to soothe and broach that unwelcome reality in my preferred language and medium–these artist’s homages to those they knew they must release but couldn’t bear to do so. In those early days, dawn would arrive with a jolt–a caustic reckoning with the stubborn truth my mind could not fathom and my soul would not accept.

Bobby Jean, aka Steve Van Zandt, soon returned to the band, but our lovers often don’t. We find our way eventually, despite the loss, or because of it. Or maybe we don’t.

Perhaps these songs aren’t mere entreaties to loves lost, but are woven to serve a deeper purpose. Lately, Billy Idol’s Sweet Sixteen haunts me. A lament to his girlfriend while on tour, this song’s title invoked the story of Coral Castle and its creator, Edward Leedskalnin. He moved to Florida and built this impossible stone monument to his love, his sweet sixteen, who would not marry him and who never came to see his otherworldly creation. Yet thousands of visitors grace his halls every year and honor his testament to love.

Perhaps grand gestures like his are more than meets the eye. Maybe they’re not just for the love object. What if they are the hard labor of one’s soul excavation? Toiling in vain, these bittersweet monuments to those we couldn’t have—to unbridled love with nowhere to go. Channeled revelations, discharges of divine spark, harnessed with ghostly reverence. Pleading and shedding. Forswearing and exhausted relenting.

The nihilist in us can discount these odes to passion as empty melodramatic charades cast against a cruel and soulless abyss. What apparent folly, what hapless futility. Yet, perhaps love finds a way around the stumbling blocks. Yes, Pattie Boyd didn’t come back to Eric Clapton and Stills chased Judy Collins to no avail. But these titanic homages stand regardless as each artist’s respective magnum opus. Layla and Suite: Judy Blue Eyes preside atop rock and roll’s pantheon of lost love offerings—the blinding zenith of both artist’s towering creative capacities. They aren’t mere masterworks to be viewed in some gallery, lauded for their technique and tidy brushstrokes.

These open letters reached me. They engulfed and riveted me before I had tasted agony, before I had lost love, before my soul had been torn down. They lit up my circuits with an intensity and aliveness that forewarned and celebrated life’s impending tragedies and deep joys.

With each acrid gulp of loss and longing, they met me with understanding and permission to mourn and plead. To implode, to grasp and clutch. To need. They met me with grace and honor. With rage and confusion that accompanied me in the devastation. With the sense that I might trudge through my sacred wreckage in the windswept footfalls of these weary troubadours. By metabolizing my pain like they had recontextualized theirs: through creating art. Because there were no better options.

No wonder we revere our singers and writers and rock stars. They channel their pain into medicine for the listless listener. They lead by example. Risking everything to share their deepest secrets in hopes that they might be accepted, seen and loved for their flaws and frailties. In their smallness. This offers the listener permission to be small and sad and hurting. In return they humbly ask to be seen: naked before the world. They let us in.

Neither the singer nor the listener is above the other. The artist is not a god on a pedestal. The fan is not a supplicant in the cheap seats. Both are humans in pain, reaching across the void for meaning and love. And they each oblige.

Both are no longer alone. Love finds its way. Thus an inextricable bond is forged between these long distance lovers. The fans offer the artist the love he or she needs. The singer’s art heals the listener and makes them feel vested and linked to the pain of their heroes. We realize the venerated star is just like you and me: a simple human. We can heal through their words and sameness. But greater still, the artist shows the fan that true healing comes when we choose risk and metabolize our inner struggles. To consume art is fantastic. To create it, to reveal oneself, to offer this magic to the world: that is transcendence.

In a time where there is so little cultural cohesion, the musician serves as bard—as shaman to a weary and rudderless populace. This is not mere entertainment or distraction. That’s the surface, the trance. A circuit is created to heal all parties, to link them with love and solace. Appreciation and adoration. Each reveals their wounds. Catching the other as they fall.

Love Finds A Way.

Epilogue:

After 3 years of intense struggle and 1 year of the deepest mourning, life is starting to make sense again, thanks to friends, family, and the catharsis of receiving and creating art. I didn’t believe I’d ever feel alive again. The worst storm of my life has dissipated on all fronts. Never had I experienced such loss and despair–especially while so hamstrung by complex circumstances. Music and art purged what I could no longer carry. Such a transformation is uncanny to experience. It’s a process. Thankfully, I had my own vehicle—my writing, to help me process the losses and revelations. This helped me sidestep learned helplessness. If my writing does anything to you, let it be to coax you into your own introspection and creation. The world is waiting for your medicine, and so are you.

Like many, I knew the powerful, yet over-played Jefferson Airplane hits from the 60s like Somebody to Love, sung by Grace Slick. Yet, among others of the time, this band was deeply talented; their repertoire went far deeper than the singles. The Marty Balin offerings really struck me: his rich voice, his ballads tender and unabashed. The eclectic album Surrealistic Pillow epitomized the San Francisco sound and the Psychedelic era: a time and place of enchantment for me to this day.

My favorite number, the ethereal Today, occupies rare air because it behaves in contrast to our expectations of standard love-song fare. In lieu of glowingly describing his lover, he regales us with his overflowing love, his burgeoning reverence.

We know little of her, save the grandiose state she inspires. Not her perfume nor the shape of her eyes. Because he’s chosen instead to narrate the primeval force that subsumes him. His soul has become love’s vessel. Yet his is no parasitic possession, no mere infatuation—but an inner saturation, heralding the august arrival of the overman.

The song is a procession. As verses advance and pervade, the harmonic intensity grows—rippling, stirring, and swelling at the transcendent unity of his love experience.

As a listener and a lover, digesting such a song inspires similar states. Through these offerings, we acknowledge love’s embodiment. We relish the splendor of our love stores which the song captures and colors and translates. The towering adoration it reveals and reawakens: our majestic capacity to see and want and choose. We savor and project this affinity to the other, even in absentia.

There exists no feeling more certain or more rare. When reciprocated, the joy is boundless. Yet even as I awoke in the absence of she who I adored, my love radiated so pure, so humble and so alive. It would conquer any obstacle. No circumstance could deny this love’s veracity.

I stared back ensconced as she revealed with unguarded eyes and hushed sobs her innermost secrets. They kissed my heart and rang bells in my mind, these words lost on pages wet with tears. But the movie didn’t end that way.

Yet when I laid down worry and fear and the deep sense of loss, this unyielding Love was all that remained of me. An open letter, a promise, a message in a bottle, bobbing and floating up to eternity.