The Spectrum of 2010 for a Live Dot in the Universe:

A Community Organizer's Musing

Year 2009 is like a fast train that’s getting blurred and then getting smaller and smaller. Like a dot in the universe, I kept trying to think like a river, a forest, a highway, a homelessperson, an unemployed parent, a single mom, an abandoned lover, a disturbed student,a responsible leader and many other roles. There were so many mornings that set me out to the highway running on my head with my legs flailing like bamboo poles avoiding human predators. There were many nights too that I was an owl pretending to be a puppy in the lap of an animal activist. And there were many weekends that I spent pretending to be a still water with a paper boat on my head.

The beauty of the human mind is that inside it I can be everything at a snap of a finger or be nothing but dust or grime at the speed of thought. The human condition in one’s thoughts is so malleable I can create countless worlds which I can decide to inhabit or leave at will.

The year that is fading now was a desert with no oasis in sight. I created the camels and the travelers who were as thirsty and tired as I was and we found our common space where to share our longing for water. In my deserts, the travelers were creators of larger landscapes without water and we pretended we were whales helping fishers lost at sea. But even at sea, water was as illusory as the fleeting tingle of the “fullness-moment”. The heart of my fellow travelers were like huge containers that never got even a drop of sea. I had the same huge container mimicking the howling wind and aching for rain.

And then a tear fell from my tired eyes. A drop of tear is water. I can drown or float in it. The past year was an underground river nobody knew. My river was vast and deep and what made it less dangerous were the warnings written on the riverbank of memory. I dared the river without vests. I am good at brinkmanship, I told myself. You only sink or swim anyway.

Now, here I am figuring out my coming train ride. What lines and circles and shapes will come out of the dot that I am? What reinvention will I set out to do not just as a community organizer working to help build people’s self-esteem but most of all as a human being helping people find the pure and quiet river inside themselves?

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE WHO’LL BE WITH ME IN THE NEXT TRAIN!