Martín Prechtel - The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

Like smooth water-polished pebbles, set like jewels in a bracelet at the bottom of the river of the collective human soul, there are noble and profound human beings whose radiance and value are unknown even to their closest neighbors. People whose depth and nobility of soul live unexpressed inside situations that are for them so unnatural, oppressive, and beyond their control, that as individuals they intentionally obscure their own spiritual majesty with a theatrical veneer of the same banal drivel that surrounds them every day to avoid the pain of being mocked or trivialized if discovered by the heartless and uncomprehending.

By doing this they inadvertently subsidize the mentality that oppresses them, adding further still to their own false belief that they are alone and that there are no others like them. It takes courage to be what the world needs, but the world never seems to change when you are alone.

The truth is they are definitely not alone, for the river of life is jammed full of such unique jewels. We only require just a little more light, so anyone with a heart and even just a little vision can see that, though these kinds of people are not in the news or on talk shows, they are to be found in every cultural crack the world over, faithfully panting over the trails of their lives in situations they neither believe in nor belong.

Born already capable of real love, of turning their constant awareness of lifes grief into a god-nourishing beauty with the way they would rather live out their everyday existence, their huge desire to praise life by just the way they live with an innate sense of wonder for the earths miracle of life remains backed up and rusting away on the rail siding, while on its rails of unjustly claimed priority, civilizations absurd imperative goes rushing past in its never-ending state of emergency.

These amazing individuals have their greatness suspended like emergent butterflies entombed in the clear plastic of the surrounding cultures infatuation with endless mediocrity held motionless by a stratified business culture of mediocrity managed by clever thieves who know that the love, grief, generosity, and well-developed sense of lifes wonder of such people do nothing to maintain the necessary state of constant desperation and urgency in a population terrified by scarcity or of being left out of the herd, for lucrative business to expand.

These small-minded cowardly trends of certain national cultures, political institutions, big business, and people have lost the plot of what it has to mean to be a human. They have lost the taste buds and the nerve endings of a natural sensual human as given to us by evolution, filling their insatiable paunches and quotas without any hope of ever getting full, much less fulfilled. Capable of tasting only a superficial smattering of what they devour, as the world they consume goes gulping down the untenable gullet of scared greed, they live eternally dissatisfied, always in need of something else.

Cowardly because they cannot live unarmed and unparanoically, supplanting the normal deliciousness of just being alive with a stodgy predictable existence that spares no expense in the maintenance of a bristling array of self-preserving power in every conceivable form in order to be equally feared and survive their own neighborhoods of equally armed and feared corporations, nations, entities, and people just like them.

But more to the point is, if any of this madness is going to change, then it is of greater pertinence to realize that each one of us, in a way, is a nation unto ourselves, and that as a nation we do have the power to change. Inside each one of us, sitting like a well-worn jewel in the clear-running river of our own soul, present right here today, there is also a deep and noble human being, unknown even to his or her closest neighbor: that more external outer layer of ourselves who has become a personality of the surrounding culture, instead of that true individual, a person indigenous to our own deeper spiritual landscape.

The fact that commercial culture always panders to the lowest common denominator of awareness and taste should not stop us in our personal revolution to become real human beings. If there are enough of such humans, then collectively, real cultures worth living in, cultures that dont depend on scaredness, scarcity, and sarcasm, could actually begin to cultivate themselves into motion. No longer needing someone elses rails, we could get off the siding, the plastic could disappear, the butterflies could be released, the river could light up.

This little book is meant as a companion of encouragement, a little extra light for those deep and noble parts of all of us and our cultures, who think they are too small, alone, unsupported, and unseen to make such a motion out loud.