I’m tired of fighting. I wish I didn’t have to fight.
I wish I could live in my little corner of the world and create love and books and resumes and be a dad and a husband and a neighbor and nothing else. I don’t want much but I’ve come to notice that so many other people want it all and if I don’t stand on my ground with both feet every day, they will gladly take it from me.
Worse still. I may be tired but people around me are dying and the ones with the blood on their hands are wearing suits with little flag pins, slashing lives with pen and paper, perfecting their lightning, and calling it work when, in fact, it’s violence.
And I can’t reach them, not with phone calls nor letters nor dollar bills. I don’t have enough of any of these to earn attention.
So I wake up every day tired — tired when I look up, tired when I listen in, and the only hope I can muster is that the little friction I create on the ground will generate some light and heat for the day to allow people I never meet to see things differently and to care about keeping others warm.
And on good days, I have moments where I believe that our little fires on the ground, wrapping around the earth, will become a single blaze that will outshine the sorcerors’ blinding light coming down past the stares of our indifferent gods.