10.04.09
Hey. What's up?
Only a handful of people responded to the cat getting hit by the satellite. Nobody else thought it was funny, or what?
Planet Nevernight? Not funny?
Didn't get the Indian joke?
Times must be too serious for funny. Winter is taking too long.
ok, then. You want serious?
Vulnerability
06.04.09
A friend and I were talking about vulnerability.
That’s like Custer, before being brought to his knees, looking around at nothing but ‘hostiles’, wondering where his support group was.
It could be a mother and child in a Darfur refugee camp. It could be the homeless and the displaced. I’ve never been in a refugee camp, except for living on the reservation, but I’ve experienced what it is to be homeless in February. Where do you go when you can’t go home? Is Home no more than a function on your keyboard? Is home more than wherever you’re sleeping? Surely it is. Homelessness is vulnerability. Or it could be freedom.
Vulnerability is experiencing a particular agony, and those around you, those closest to you seem unaware or indifferent to your suffering, if there are those around you. Being vulnerable is not having a support group, not having those around you on whom you can depend, or approach for comfort. But that could be freedom, too.
Abandonment, betrayal, deception, and disregard of relationship compose a cluster of behaviors that can create vulnerabilities, the disintegration of defenses, dissolution of sense of self, a personal devaluation, a sense of being preyed upon, cast aside, leaving one feeling barren and emotionally drained, stripped of one’s armor.
“It’s like being in a jousting tournament, going up against a fully-armored opponent in just a T-shirt,” I said to him.
None of this occurs in a vacuum. Vulnerability is experienced within the context of relationships and conditions, a web of interrelationships and connectedness with all those whom you know, either by blood, intimacy, friendships, or associations of proximity. Inasmuch as this may be, one can still be disconnected and isolated.
Losing your job, your house, your home, your family, your lover, your friends, your health, your integrity, your sense of self-determination. Vulnerability could be riding a motorcycle at 100 mph in flips flops, shorts, and no helmet. Walk the high wire without a net. Be hungry, hang on a cross, at the mercy of a rapist or killer. Vulnerability could be a lot of things.
I’ve been adrift at sea in a storm, and help eventually arrived. But while out there in huge waves and out of sight of land, I experienced a profound and extreme sense of aloneness and exposure that could be defined as vulnerable. Does help always arrive? Sometimes it does, sometimes the vultures pick your bones.
The harpist and Kora player pluck their strings. The orchestra resounds. The spider does the same, seeking the vulnerable.
-end
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The uh, Obama team called the other day. Wanted to know if I could help them 'get this thing turned around.' I told them I'd look into it and see what I could do. So, chipper up! I'm working on it.
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