Brandishing One's Bandy

We can be adrift without empowerment. Empowerment gives us a dictionary. Ontology precedes epistemology. It can be off putting not to know another's meaning. Yet giraffe-like stretches of the Lamarckian instinct lies deep in the bones, in the molecules, in the cells, in the atoms. In every tiny bit, like a hologram, lies the whole. We reach up and back for the stars from which we come, or indeed, to echo the poet, what's a heaven for? And in wanting to see more, to know more, to be more, is our very evolution. So it is written, so it is observed, so it is in our very being, intentional or not. It is the intentional who push at the edges of... blah,blah, blah!

"Must you be so... academic?"

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry; just be... like everybody else!"

Silence.

"Like everybody else?"

"Like normal people who see and speak and listen and enjoy and talk with everyday words, leastways, so that everybody else can understand. What's the point of, what was it, 'spontaneous combustion'? Who's heard of that? Who are you trying to impress?"

Silence. I am back at boarding school, the senior boys surrounding me. I've just finished reading the essay I wrote for Pienaar's homework assignment. He wanted me to read it aloud to the group in the study. He loved it. Going to get me an A+, he beamed. But it was Broeke who lit into me, venomously. Broeke did not appreciate any pretensions, precociousness, or persons with a predilection to prevaricate. Even my accent was far to pompous for him. Alliteration and metonymy were lost on... Er... Broeke wanted to keep things simple.

Empowerment has many guises. Our interest in a recipe allows for reproducing the meal. Our knowledge allows for identity with classical or contemporary allusion. Our delight in any art form is added to by our identification with it, or even not. Integration as a concept essentially is about the inclusion, absorption, acceptance, and assimilation of everything else. And in that last phrase lies the rub. Everything else. The degree to which we are discomforted by anything else determines our degree of being integrative, and taking things personally, or judging another's behavior, let alone brandishing one's bandy at the expense of others, are limit-ating, debilitating forms of being. So to be or not to be, indeed. Necessary to us all are the boundaries betwixt a thee and a me. Yet at which polarity of opposites do we draw the line over which we will not cross? Forcing another not to cross it is not always easily accomplished. It is within ourselves that real empowerment is wielded. We are it. We are responsive or we are reactive. We are...

And insomuch as you've kept reading this, you're being integrative. Broeke would have given up on me, long ago. Ha! And then again, where might one such as he be at, now?