Elevated Position, House Of Slaughter

I come from arrogant stock. I was given that directly by a boss many years ago who reviewed me, told me I was pissing his crew off even though I was qualified to say the things I said. I was a design group leader and had earned my position by my experience. But I was getting the team close to rebelling against me and my boss pointed out I wasn't so well placed as all that. He called me arrogant. It was true but so foreign a concept to me that I could hardly understand. I was just crushed, almost quit over it. I do shame really well and work hard to never put myself into a shameful position undefended, but this time I had stepped in it unconsciously.

I know through and through that I suffer from the delusion that if only I know it all I can save myself. I also know that self knowledge is virtually useless in most cases of salvation. There is a big difference between delusion and actual power. Knowledge is power, it is said, and that is true but if there are delusions present the chances of dismay and disaster rise to intolerable levels.

Humility is essential. Humility means being right sized, someone said that. Here is a poem about resentment.

Elevated Position

How can you be so?
Rude is what you are to me!
You give me answers
As if I asked those questions!
As if I don't know what's what!
As if I'm not king
And you're not a commoner.
As if I'm still lost.

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Life eats life. There is no getting past this. Not at our place in the food chain. There are critters on the planet, really small and hugely numerous that feed on raw materials that are not alive as we normally think of alive, or nearly so, but they are at a distant place in the web of life. I am radical about this. Where I see life I also see sentience. I suspect the whole universe of being alive in some sense that we haven't seen yet, that there is a within or center to things that lies very deep along a hidden line, that the difference between living matter and inert matter is a kind of emergence of sentience along this line. Just my opinion. But I am indeed committed to a spiritual life that includes that kind of thinking. In that case life even eats the deep life potential found deep within an inert material.

Notice please that I tried to avoid hierarchical words about the food chain, and I am serious about that too, ever since I read the ethologists like Loren Eisely and Lewis Thomas who have been careful to point out that the human viewpoint on things may contain delusion in it, what my dad was fond of calling the illusion of central position. In many living systems hierarchy and levels of control are strategies. This is far from actually calling the web of life itself hierarchical and better trained people than me question the assumption natural to us that we are at the top. Instead perhaps we are off to the side ;) Hmmmm. Arrogance again. Who wears the crown of creation?

This House Of Slaughter

It's in the middle
Of nowhere, reeking of death
After all these years.
Cruelty feeds us all, yes.
Make peace here, now if you can.
This house of slaughter
Made the best beef steaks nearby
Juicy, full flavored.

The herds remember.
I was driven to slaughter
In a former life,
So I remember.