
Re-read Ishmael recently. There's a lot in that book that makes so much sense to me. It wasn't so much a life-changing book as a life-clarifying one. As the narrator is told, I, too, have felt the prison bars of our culture around me -- Ishmael just helped me name them.
Takers are the ones who have eaten of the tree of good and evil.
Leavers are the ones who live in the hands of the gods.
We're revolutionaries, the Takers are. How dare God ask us to live like animals? We know who should live and who should die. We will not yield.
There are counterrevolutionaries. Jesus was one.
Just as God takes care of the sparrow, he takes care of us. But we are not willing to let ourselves be treated as sparrows, because we are innately better.
Oh, Lord, what fools we mortals be.
I actually do live much of my life in the hands of the gods, of life. I must make concessions to survive in the culture I inhabit, but as I say -- I'm not good at taking care of myself. I live day by day whenever possible. I trust that the world will work, because I trust that it is a perfect system.
Every day, the sun rises, and the world works.