Our Purple Home in E-flat Major
By: Rev Dr Sparky
Tags: Spirituality, Life, Election 2020, BlackLivesMatter, Humor

Image by Free-Photos on Pixabay

Our Purple Home in E-flat Major

Come to your senses

What if you could hear colors? What if you could smell a sound, or see a piece of music like a vision? Then you would either be a full-on mystic, or you would have synesthesia, a rare condition in which a person’s responses to sensory input are involuntarily crossed. Synesthetes may have two senses crossed, or several, or, rarely, all of them.

Now what if it were World War II, and you have synesthesia, and a photographic memory, and you’ve been recruited to spy for the Allies, to win the war against the Nazis — yes, that’s right: you would be Alfred, a character on X-Company, a three-season drama about Canadian intelligence operatives (so, you know, spies, but very nice spies).

I tell you all this because once, in a thrilling episode, Alfred’s fellow spies save his life by sending him a secret signal to rendezvous at home — just by playing an E-flat chord on the accordion. You see, they knew that in Alfred’s rich sensorium, the chord E-flat major was blue; and blue, for Alfred, was the color of home. (I don’t know what the accordion signified. Take the train, maybe?)

Anyhow, Alfred walks out of Nazi headquarters, hears the E-flat major chord, and knows just what to do — he gives the Nazis the slip and meets the others at home base. (I think he puts on a blue suit, but I may have made up that part.) That’s how powerfully our homes are built with the memories of our senses.

Our most important ideas are held within our senses: What color does the fragrance of your home sound like?

someone’s blue house. photo by PhotoXCapture on pixabay

‘Tis the season of the senses

Right now, the season has begun to pile on extra sensory associations during the shortened days leading up to the holidays we’re supposed to go home for — although we may not be able to actually go anywhere, and there may not be any actual holidays ahead if you are someone with no actual job from which to take a holiday.

But still — we brace ourselves for the olfactory assault of pumpkin spice, followed soon by the crimson tickle of cinnamon, pine, and peppermint; the gray nubble of the sweaters; the bright mauve bells of the carols — oh, we love it, or we love to hate it, because it all evokes our infancy and our connections and our comfort.

But this year, many Americans (at least, the white, cis-gender, comfy, half-educated, MSM-watching consumer Americans) felt their safe illusion of home itself — the homeland — to be threatened by a big jolt of truth.

Some people had believed firmly that America was a big, rambling, comfortable mansion, welcoming to all. But now they’ve just been informed — so they say —of awful rooms in the basement and the outbuildings, where life has been dully unfair or sharply horrible for other people, for decades or centuries.

This summer and fall have been the best of times and the worst of times, depending on your point of view: Black Lives Matter initiated a righteous new movement for justice, but only after tragedy and not without cost. It’s a good thing when more of the formerly formerly complacent begin to see the sickness in our country’s social contract, a sickness that had nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with racism and privilege — but seeing it and fixing it are two different things.

Now, some are afraid that this contentious election may make things worse for everyone — I’m not going to go into it; you either believe that or you don’t — so that even the most self-absorbed of us have taken time from binge-watching Stranger Things to cast record numbers of early votes.

And, humans being human, we usually need a personal motivation to get up off our couches and go do something truly rigorous, like turn in an early ballot or stand in line at the post office (eww...).

In this case, the motivator is fear that strikes us, literally, where we live — we’re afraid of losing our homes, or, worse, losing the sense that we are deservedly safe and comfortable in those homes. We may even be worried about actual civil unrest in the coming weeks, which touches our primeval fear of being invaded — maybe by the people who live in the red houses — which elevates our pulse rate far more readily than the fear of other things that are really more likely to harm us.

(Honestly, we’re pretty comical. We’re terrified of a home invasion, when we are far more likely to fall on our fannies in the bathtub or T-bone an SUV because, like a dope, we just had to read that text. You know who you are. If there’s any justice, the dope in the other SUV would also be reading a text.)

Today, many white, cis-gender, middle-class people are experiencing a new, existential fear: that everything they believed to be true about this country, and our place in the world — that it was a fair and civilized society — has not been true for everyone.

Oof da.

Moreover, it appears that conditions may be about to get much worse around here. For all of us.

Oof da, indeed, you guys.

photo by Annie Spratt on unsplash

Most white people wanted to believe the US was a place where all people were welcome. They’d point to Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,” says Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty.

Now, some cynics are pointing out that maybe those “tired and poor” were only welcome as long as they could be bought and sold and worked and used up and then tossed aside. Some white people don’t like it when we say that.

And now… time for a rational democratic process?

Anyhow, we have a pivotal election coming up right in the middle of the Hallmark card season. Yikes. And even though I grew up during the Civil Rights era, spending my youth in appropriate youthful idealism, I’ll now need to spend my second childhood hoping for another go at the very same values: equality and affirmation for people of color; care for the earth’s ecosystems; repudiation of the extractive expansion of the US military presence; affordable health care; a spiritual transformation; and yes, dammit, a pony if I want one.

And please: stop whining that “we can’t afford” health care or reparations— not with what we spend on things military each year — not to mention junk food, pornography, beauty products, and God only knows what all. (And you can put me down for quite a few useless items myself. I’m not proud.) And, oh, yeah — solidarity with the poor. I’m not blaming any struggles I’m having on the other struggling folk, the way the powerful powers want me to do.

But I’ll fight the fight again, because (a) I feel guilty for losing focus during the intervening decades, when I was having fun rearing awesome offspring and studying stuff, and (b) despair is still a sin and a luxury we cannot afford.

Seen on a sign in the streets: “I can’t believe I have to protest this sh*t again.”

i was at this rally, in austin; january 2017. https://flickr.com/photos/8386148@N06/32427290416

So: plug in the gratitude diffuser

If you have a reasonably safe home to go to — and I hope you do — do remember to summon up some gratitude. It’s the very best defense against that pernicious free-floating anxiety and anger that’s abroad in the land like Satan in Job 1:7, going “to and fro in the earth,” all bored and looking for victims, until he bets Yahweh that he can torment Job until Job loses his faith.

I’m not sure about that Satan character, but I know I don’t want to call attention to myself by being either too smug or too fearful. And in this century, we really can no longer afford to be cowering in caves, waving torches reeking of animal fat and imagining that saber tooth tigers want to get in.

I don’t give advice often, but I will share some things I find helpful in calming my ancient fears.

I don’t have a weighted blanket, but I sleep under some heavy old-fashioned cotton ones, and I think they do the same thing. It’s a good idea. We are all short of hugs and touch.

I’m not watching so much MSM death-spiral-news anymore, because it upsets my equilibrium. I read some independent journalists who keep me less agitated but better informed. Also less television in general. I already have insomnia, for crying out loud.

I’m keeping more canned beans around the house. You know what I mean. Just in case.

And I am studying the ways of compassion for when we are past the election. Criminals should go to jail. The victims of their crimes — that’s the country, all of us — should be rehabilitated.

I’m tired of red vs. blue. None of that will matter — our precious ideologies; our privilege; our positions — if we continue pillaging the earth and turning it into machineries of war, year in and year out.

Someone’s red house. photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash

My walls are “repose gray.” My ancestors’ walls were magic.

Some 17,000 years ago, probably by the light of burning animal fat, our ancestors painted mysterious, artful paintings on the walls of caves — no one knows why.

Maybe those paintings were their home security system —because a large beast, lit by flickering embers deep in a cave, might seem to be galloping toward an intruder, mightn’t it? We’ll never know.

But if we can’t be better, we may end up living in caves again.

But if we don’t want to jitter ourselves back to the Stone Age, I suggest we start taking responsibility for living with intention and calming our own fears. Then we can tell our representatives that we are done being divided.

We are done protecting privilege.

We have come to our senses, and we will begin the work of repentance and renewal.

Purple homes, for our purple mountains’ majesty.

That deep longing for home is all the sweeter because we know we aren’t going to be here forever. Animals may not know that, but we do.

All this life we have going on, with its sweet touches and bright smells and colorful songs — it’s our home for now.

But it may not be our destination.

The Great Good Place that calls us? The sea? The stars? The Void? We each have a true place somewhere, and our souls are desperate to find it.

Meanwhile, we must be much, much kinder to each other. Because really — we’re all just walking each other home.

image by ddzphoto on pixabay

Find the Rev Dr Sparky at home at Real Life, Real/igion… and follow the publication to sign up for their occasional newsletter, Real/igion for the Rest of Us.

Keep the faith, good people.