As Large And As Small As Life

As Large And As Small As Life

“May you never tire of waiting
Never feel that life is cheap”
- from “The Gift”, Bruce Cockburn

There are a select few people I have met who I have sometimes thought of as larger than life, their ways of thinking and living, so magnanimous, so out there, so beyond the confines of ego that they seem to fit the adjectival phrase.

But then after years of thinking that, I reflected on the phrase “larger than life” . . . and realized, no, those people are (or were) living life in its fullest sense, and it is the way that we have been programmed to have such a phrase that is the issue; to experience life as having been narrowed, confined, diminished, thus making those people seem “larger than life.”

No one can be larger than life, rather if living fully and in the cosmic-earthy flow, as large as life.

Some people have simpler lives and ways of being, while others are extraordinary, yet one is not better than the other and what I want to re-affirm and re-expand here is the notion of quality and experience of living. It's all subjective to one's circumstances yet it's about living full-tilt, which refers to quality of experiences both inner and outer, and not simply skydiving one weekend and bungee jumping the next.

Since there are plenty of methods for feeling good and being positive, I choose here to highlight a snippet of how things got confined and diminished, so that the awareness itself may help to open up the false boundaries that have been imposed on us.

To a large degree with some exceptions:

- Religions confine and diminish because God or Spirit is considered outside and up there somewhere rather than in you as well as in each and every other living being, including Mother Earth.

- Education systems confine and diminish because they teach to standards and not to draw out the talents and leanings of the individual, or they teach how to make it, to get ahead in the world rather than how to work as a cohesive community.

- Governmental systems confine and diminish because if you don't play by their rules you run the risk of getting punished.

- Corporations confine and diminish because their prime directive is profits.

- The corporate-and-social-medias and affiliates confine and diminish because they narrow the consciousness of the scope of what's actually happening, not to mention the truths, (literally, not to mention the truths).

- “Climate change” confines and diminishes because it distracts from flat-out, full tilt loving the Earth.

- Religio-societal consciousness about sexuality confines and diminishes by over-emphasizing mating or the following of every urge; and the more recent, medical re-configurations to satisfy personal whims.

- Language confines and diminishes consciousness and experiences when noun-based, whereas Indigenous languages are often verb-based, honoring and reflecting the energy or spirit within so-called things, thus respecting life rather than commodifying it — “resources,” “raw materials,” “goods” (which ignore what is “bads” for the environment and habitats).

- And perhaps most significant as one of the instigators of all of this is the Doctrine of Christian Discovery/Domination, of which one of the main impetuses was, “ac barbarae nationes deprimantur (reducing the barbarous nations).” This “reducing” encoded a consciousness whose stated aim was to diminish the lives of so-called barbarous others i.e. non-Christians i.e. Native Peoples. And from the Papal Bull Dum Diversas 18 June, 1452, “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Taking it one step further, this was both diminish and confine in one nasty package! And this twisted system of domination still rules many a court case and consciousness to this day; for more see Original Free Nations.com.

Extremist belief systems – to which the above often participate in to lesser or bigger degrees – more than confine, they torture and cheapen life to a valueless experience because the dominators are “antiplant... antiman... antianimal. Antianimal weapons were aimed at killing entire animal populations, with the goal of starving to death the people who relied on those animals for food.” (Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America – Annie Jacobsen (Back Bay Books, 2014. p. 389).

Historically, the wild bison/buffalo of the Plains were decimated. According to Roam Free Nation, “Before settler-culture, there were approximately 70 million buffalo thundering across what is now North America (Turtle Island). They roamed north into Canada, as far south as Florida and Mexico, east into Virginia, and west into Alaska.” And “….by the late 1880s the total number of bison in the United States had been reduced to fewer than 600” (Wikipedia). “Today, this remaining wild population hovers around 5,000 individuals. If livestock interests have their way, those numbers could be driven even further down by a couple more thousand” (Roam Free Nation). Thanks to the efforts of Roam Free Nation the current number have a chance to increase their numbers.

The current atrocities against the Palestinian Peoples resurface the ugly wounds of “reducing” the numbers of a People, while the “antilife” cold-hearted death-machine reduces to rubble so as to rebuild: “'Cashing in on Genocide': Israeli Firm Pitches Beachfront Real Estate in Leveled Gaza."
What happened to L'chaim?

The above is simply a snippet of an answer of what life/living is, and is not. There can be no single or conclusive answer because the minute there is an answer, life can make a situation that requires a different answer. Yet we have plenty of examples as to how and where life is being cheapened, thus cluing us in as to how and where to reverse course.

Redwood Tree or Ant; humongous ancient Egyptian statue of a pharaoh or an ancient Chinese painting where man is but a speck within the landscape; 65” flat screen or the speck in the eye that keeps you from seeing clearly. As large and as small as life.