Too much thinking on a rainy day...

My feet are wet and cold and there are only sad songs on the radio, endlessly whiny guitar ballads with 80s synthesizers. The Zoka's in Tangletown is filled with white people with mac notebooks and everyone is wearing jeans and flannel or fleece and wool hats and I'm second guessing my love of Seattle because for God's sake, could at least one person in here be original!? Not some green, uber trendy, nerd with a gray messenger bag and a membership to REI.

I digress. It's one of those rainy fall days, where the sky is a void of gray and white and all the streets are soggy rivulets decoupaged with dead leaves. And I know I am on the verge of some cosmic quantum leap. I have all the pieces of what I need to know to figure this thing out, but nothing is fitting together, and there is no manual for how to become a better person or how to live in your highest good. But I keep getting distracted by this everyday reality.

And when I look around, I know that every single person here has a soul, and a dream, and a purpose and that we are all at various stages of our journey, but I can't seem to feel a compassion for them. I can't seem to keep from conceptualizing them as "them", and I'm not quite sure if it's because I've grown up learning how to be in opposition, knowing that I would be "othered" and beating "them" to the punk by at least defining my own "othering". I have learned to be proud of my individuality, of the components that help me define or more accurately, describe this person I am in the here and now, but I don't know how to claim myself in unity. If millions of Buddhist or even Muslims or Christians, or anyone set of people who have ever claimed a concept of God, aren't wrong, and there is this all encompassing divinity that fills the universe....and it's true that I am a part of it, a product of it, a being made from the substance of this thing most easily titled Spirit....then why is it so hard to put aside my identity and embrace all people (even the ones I really don't like) as one, as a part of this whole.

And if I wake up one day and am suddenly able to do this monumental thing, then what? Will everything change? Will I? Will my greatest good be achieved? Will yours?