Morally Incompetent Ghosts
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Our destructiveness has not been, and is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans don’t have to live by destroying the sources of their life….All of us…can be moved by love of our land…
— Wendell Berry
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“… And the shift was, ‘Wait a second. If I can put Jim Carrey aside for four months, who is Jim Carrey? Who the hell is that?’ … I know now he does not really exist. He’s ideas. … Jim Carrey was an idea my parents gave me. Irish-Scottish-French was an idea I was given. Canadian was an idea that I was given. I had a hockey team and a religion and all of these things that cobble together into this kind of Frankenstein monster, this representation. It’s like an avatar. These are all the things I am. You are not an actor, or a lawyer. No one is a lawyer. There are lawyers, law is practiced, but no one is a lawyer. There is no one, in fact, there.”
— Jim Carrey
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“Maybe like Odysseus, we are finally ready simply to return home…to our love, and our presence. Maybe we’re finally ready to become the creatures that our deepest stories and metaphors have always described, half-heavenly, half-stupidly earthbound, full of wonder and awe, powerful, and vulnerable. Maybe the point of our life’s journey, our spiritual odyssey, is not conquest or perfection, whether spiritual or worldly, but rather this simple transformation into what we have been all along, flesh and blood people in a flesh and blood world, feeling what people feel and doing what people do, returning home to what we are….”
— Roshi Norman Fischer, Sailing Home
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We can live our whole lives as a mistaken identity. We can misconstrue who and what we are. We really believe we are the identity we are given by our family and our culture. It’s so obvious it’s funny. But it’s not funny to be morally incompetent. It’s not funny to contribute to the destruction of the world. It’s not funny to get lost in the million and one distractions. It’s not funny to lose contact with the earth and the stars, to wander in the desert of cheap amusements, hoping for some meaning to it all.
