Duality as Continuum (or, Beyond Polarity)
2 min readOct 12, 2023
For every evil there’s a good. For every Hitler
there’s a Gandhi. I used to think that way.
I was born to a couple, unravelling. I was
sent to live with a religious aunt (her husband,
not, but I never asked him). I stood in the middle
and rejected both ~ the addictive chaos and the
straight-jacket “Truth”. “Now what?” the young
girl asks, and I have spent a lifetime on the sliding
scale of morality, guiding her to goodness.
First I had to have my own addiction, in order to
overcome it. Then I had to go to other churches
(sadly, they didn’t have “The Truth” and were going
to hell). Then I had to rectify my beliefs with my
experience, my thoughts with what I’d seen and heard, my feelings with my ambivalence and weigh where I’d come to balance between the two extremes.
Finding the middle was hard for me. Every issue brought dichotomy but now I eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full and find God everywhere I look and rarely look in churches (I do miss those great organs, and the twinkling eyes of the elderly, old as the building’s foundation).
I go to the pond as Thoreau went to Walden. To explore, invite, escape, and I can’t imagine my life without it. To make friends of wild swans, to be accepted and included, is a trust, a gift, an unspeakable joy. They have chosen me
as friend, and I have never let them down.
Somewhere between the mayhem of alcoholism and the dry platitudes of religion, I have made peace with the past, and refuse to pit anything against anything, anyone against anyone. To see both clearly, you must have lived it all.
LBM 10/12/2023
