I’m back. Things have stabilized around me to the point where I can think about more than just the immediate future. I’ve been looking down at my feet, uncertain about the next footstep, picking my way through the tangled jungle of my “right here and now”, but it’s time I looked up and took stock of the longer view.
We are always immigrating from the past into the future, along the daily pathways we’ve learned to follow through experience. But if you’ve looked around lately you may have noticed that we have wandered off the familiar map and into a seeming wilderness. Our normal mental GPS system has no clear advice to give us here.
There are all sorts of experts of one form or another who are telling us that they have plotted out the topography around us and indicated possible routes that can lead us onto the pathway to a successful future, but how do we know which ones are right? One thing we know for certain is that some of the experts are lying, and some are just plain wrong.
So we can’t just go about our daily life and trust to someone else to describe the territory, choose the path, and lead us on our way. Not this time. This time we’re at the edge of a minefield.
We have to be very, very careful. We have to take the time and exert enough effort to ascertain just where we are and where we want to go, before we take more than just the next few short steps.
Remember that we’re searching for a very great treasure—for what is worth more than a glowing, generous-hearted future? Just as in the legends of old, we must search for the sections of the treasure map that when put together will give us a good idea of the territory we have wondered into, and the treasured pathway that will lead us out of here.
And just as in the greatest of the legends, it’s a matter of life and death. The century we have just survived has given more than enough evidence of the terrible price to be paid if some people follow the wrong path to their future and in so doing drag a lot of victims into an earthly hell. In the territory of the Real, the deadly wilderness is always just a few steps away in the future.
Right now, looking at our future is like looking at a field of rough-grown brush, tall tangled weeds and wild, overgrown thickets. We thought of this, our inheritance, as an arable farmland, but when we look at it we realize that we haven’t done the work to keep it in good order.
I’m reminded of a story I read in elementary school, about a bird that nests in cornfields. Two adult birds were watching their young and one says that maybe they should take their families and leave because she heard the farmer say he’d ask his neighbors for help and bring in the corn crop. The other bird, wiser in the ways of the world, says not to worry. Days later, when nothing has happened, the first bird says she heard the farmer say he’d call his relatives in and bring in his corn crop. Again, the other bird says don’t worry. Finally, the first bird says that the farmer said he was going to bring in the crop himself. The wiser bird calls in her young and announces to everyone that now they have to leave, that the corn would be cut at last.
Like the farmer, we have to start the work of clearing the land ourselves. We have to use our brains and what we can read and hear and write to clear our thoughts, to clarify what it is we need to do to reclaim our land.
America is worth it.
Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo - Wordpress, , CORSARI D'ITALIA, Democrat=Socialist, The World According to Carl, and DragonLady's World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
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