You are worth something, dammit

We are all of us doomed to die, and fall prey to the inevitable spectre of cessation; we are all doomed to the fear of loss, to the anticipation of pain and the anxieties of being rescued by the good And we will lose We will crumble beneath pain; we will be haunted in the face of the spectre and cease and be dead

It is our fate

But this is not a sad song It is not a canticle of despair, but of gladness For in the midst of the grim inevitables -- of death, of pain, of losing and of ceasing -- there is a fire that comes kindled by the lightning-strike and your human heart will marvel at it, marvel as something has been given up to you as a gift And you will remember death, and loss, and pain, and your heart shall tremble with the anxious ghost; but you will not fall Not now At this hour you will rage against the inevitables of death, and become life God shall be born in the face of the Divine, and the true worth and fury of being is now hot within you You are alive You are vibrant, and you are full of hope, and purpose and happiness enduring lie firm within your hands

And you will lose: in time your body will quit and the fire will smother and a new sorrow shall fall upon your brow But the odds you will triumph alive, on to fight tomorrow's despairs and rage boundless against death's impatient sufferings, will be reported in the newspaper back-page, crumpled and torn in the side street where the evidence of your passing can be heard for those with care enough to listen to your echoes and see the trailing of your coattail

pay heed to all things only in passing

for there is no thingness to things

but see in these things the accumulation of fundaments accreted into indivisible, jumbled piles --

the things of matter, clumped of the elements of matter; but what of things not of matter? what elements comprise these but fire and wind

fire and wind

it is all rudimentary, after all childish in the end: wind feeds fire, stoking it to roar; fire sends the wind in turn surging

falseness and truth are altogether without thingness (as with all things)

-- but see the circuit to these words:

in a thing immaterial, like a feeling or a thought, there is that which is wind which feeds the fire of action, there is that which is fire which feeds the wind of speech, and there is that which is neither and naught which feeds nothing and the apathy to each;