Missile

OMG!

I was startled to run across this photo of a downed missile in Israel.

I don’t know what size I expected them to be, but the soldier standing alongside it was dwarfed by comparison.

I read about countries exchanging missiles, and after a while it slips into another of those pieces of news that I see so often, if I don’t pass over it, maybe I picture it like puncturing balloons.

Benign.

That thing looks anything but benign.

I have just written a piece which will go out early next week, about our being mostly distracted as we go about our day. Rarely turning aside long enough to focus on the moment.

I suggested that, for most of us, there are two moments in which we get beneath those distractions and pay attention with our entire body/mind.

One is making love. The other is making war.

Never having been in combat, what I know from those who have, is that, in the heat of the moment, if not paralyzed by fear, one’s energies are fixated on the well-being of one’s comrades.

I am grateful to have experienced the other focus, and can attest to it being that rare moment in which the usual self-concerns fall away for an ecstatic sense of being one, with the other person, and even with the universe.

Wouldn’t you think choosing between the two would be easy, obvious? That the old, Make love, not war, would cut deeper than cliche’ in a species with a stake in its well-being?

Somehow that missile makes clear the size of our determination to self-destruct.

I pray to be disciplined enough to spend my remaining days, lending to love energy. How many of us would it take to make a critical mass?