SERVICE

 

From The River Why, by David James Duncan:

"The late great Oregon poet William Stafford once wrote: 'we live in occupied country, misunderstood. Justice will take us millions of intricate moves.' I agree, and I also feel that the courage and energy to go on making such moves requires intricate moves to protect one's fonts of energy and courage. I feel, for example, an inner cogency in silence and solitude that gets buried or lost when I fail to ignore the smoke and mirrors manufactured by centers of political power, especially Washington D.C. So I boycott the stuff we call 'news.' Instead of gathering politicized information, I spend time shedding it, tuning in a Nameless spark instead. this spark may or may not change the world. But what I have seen it do is pierce it. When the light shines out in the darkness, the matter of this world is pierced so deftly and completely I'm sometimes left wondering whether matter isn't just spirit in a denser form. So even when I'm being a so-called 'activist' - even when I'm clanging alarms about mutant salmon for instance - I'm no longer trying to make 'news' or change the world: I'm trying to be true to what pierces it.

"I want to know just as surely as any Buddhist monk or Sufi sage that we needn't worry about justice, that on the streets of the Hidden justice lives as surely as does love, that karma is as real as falling forests or burning cars or inconceivable blessings we ourselves pull down on our heads with our own words and actions, that there is no way to escape justice by lying, shredding documents, telling half-truths, or living hypocrisies, for there is no such thing in the soul's realm as smoke and mirrors, we can only reap what we sow.

"And knowing justice is inescapable, and not in human hands, I want to ask, finally, Why judge? Why hate or rage? Why not just serve, wherever and however and for as long and as gratefully as we can, step by step, heart to heart, move by intricate move?"