The Doomers' Grace: "Eat, drink and be merry."

[GliderGuider]

How many times have YOU heard these words, dripping with contempt? "Well, if it's basically all over, what do you suggest we do? Just eat, drink and be merry???"

As though celebration, gratitude and enjoyment were somehow ignoble in the face of this terminal awareness.

Up till now I've responded to the contempt with a pusillanimous, weak-kneed re-framing: "No, no, no! I think we should eat drink and be mindful!"

As though celebration, gratitude and enjoyment were somehow ignoble in the face of this terminal awareness.

Up till now I've responded to the contempt with a pusillanimous, weak-kneed re-framing: "No, no, no! I think we should eat drink and be mindful!"

But now I hear a much deeper, more joyful, much less apologetic voice rising out of the maelstrom of emotions:

Hell yes, that's exactly what I think we should do! Eat! Drink! Be merry! Tomorrow is inevitable, but always uncertain and unknowable. Today is not. THIS is the moment to sing our praises for all that we are, all we have been and will be. This is the moment to reach out and join hands - with each other, with all living beings, in ecstasy, in grief, in the full broken-open awareness of What Is - and dance like no one is watching.

There is NO nobility in the shriveled, desiccated Puritan soul-desert; no redemption in the hair shirt, the sackcloth or the ashes. It is an insult to all our blessings if we turn aside from the joy in these final hours.

There is a gift here for each of us, if we can simply set aside the shame long enough to reveal it. As we open this gift, tenderly and reverently, perhaps we can open ourselves in the same way. Perhaps we can watch in wonder as the first tendril of joy trickles across the threshold of our consciousness - widening and deepening into a singing river as we surrender to it. Until it becomes a raging, exultant flood of union, a tide that washes us home within ourselves and within each other. Until the grief is utterly transformed to love.

Eat, drink and be merry? Fuck, yes!!!

[Starboard Tack]

1. Of course we should eat, drink and be merry.

But not in celebration of yesterday, today or tomorrow, but because life should be celebrated and enjoyed to the full. There is no shame in that. As hard as humankind may work toward destroying our planet, I doubt it will succeed, however close it gets.