Having finally been removed from the hearth in the living room, last Halloween's pumpkin slumps in a corner of the cactus garden, beginning her inevitable return to the earth.  Squirrels scatter the seeds.  Wind tosses the cottonwoods.  Heat dances.

Left to its own devices, the world at large is not such a terrible place.  In fact, it is the canvas of the nagual - the manifestation of the unknowable into brief glimpses of that which may be touched, experienced, savored for a brief moment like some rare and fleeting blossom.

And yet... as I moved through the morning going about various errands required by living, I find myself confronted with the other side of that coin.  At Wal-Mart, I realize quite abruptly that I am surrounded by drug addicts, junkies, thieves and worse.  I observe one man distracting the cashier so that his partner in crime may steal a carton of cigarettes from behind the counter.  The woman in line behind me - covered with sores indicative of a meth-amphetamine addiction - rails at her teenage daughter, "When we get home, you're going to take those pills."  Bottom line, gleaned from eavesdropping:  the mother has put her daughter on tranquilizers because it is convenient for her.  One drug addict spawning another, with the only difference being that the pills being forced on the child are "legal".  The woman picks at her sores, her eyes wild and bulging from the speed, her feet shuffling, unable to remain still.  Blood trickles down one arm.  "You've always only got something negative to say," she tells the girl.  "All you ever do is complain.  That's the problem with you!"

The girl meets my eyes, then looks at her mother with a combination of sadness and defiance.  "The problem is you," she says quietly.

Two aisles over, a toddler throws a tantrum because the parents won't buy him whatever trinket it is he is so coveting.  The screaming is like a cacophony of bloody murder... yet it's all just a child's displeasure at not being able to "have" some physical item to hold in his hand for a brief time, the tonal imbedding itself like some hungry demon which is really just one more program.  Want.  Need.  Greed.  The programming starts at birth, of course.  Just a different manifestation of addiction. But no matter...

As I leave the store and return to the serenity of my 5 acres here in the desert, I find myself wondering how much longer I can stay here.  How long will it be before the junkies and the fiends and the thieves target my home and simply come in to take whatever they can carry to be sold at the local swap meet to pay for their habits?  One more fix.  One more snorfle up the nose.  One more needle in the arm.  Then it's on to the next house, and the next, like a swarm of locusts consuming everything in its wake.

I should point out that I live in what is considered to be a nice community.  Therefore, it occurs to me that the problems I observe here in this microcosm are really only symptoms of a much larger disease.  This isn't some isolated pocket of the inner city.  And the junkies aren't impoverished minorities who might decry that they have been predisposed to drug abuse because of their unfortunate upbringing.  No, these are just ordinary folks who have become so soul-sick, so desperate in their hearts and minds, that they turn to this lifestyle as a substitute for living - and as much as I would like to believe otherwise, I suspect it is an epidemic of far greater proportions than we have been led to believe.  And I know it is the result of a society that has lost its soul.

As a warrior-stalker, I have no more compassion for these fools than I would have for a scorpion.  By their own choices, they have made their reality and are now the victims of those very choices.  As don Juan told Carlos, any human being may become a wo/man of Knowledge.  And I do believe based on my own experiences, that all of us are given that opportunity many times throughout our lives.  We choose to either embrace ourselves, or to embrace the distractions of the world until we become just another glazed-eyed zombie looking for our next fix.  And it is a choice.

I ask myself what I have learned from the morning's lessons.  I am left with a sense of disgust, ultimately - and that is something I do not necessarily like about myself, something that requires further stalking.  On the one hand, I couldn't care less if every junkie on the planet were to drop dead tomorrow.  The "disgust" comes from the awareness that the self-destructive tendencies of the junkies and the drunk drivers and the addicts of all descriptions seem to become everyone else's problem.  The drunk driver doesn't usually just wrap himself around a convenient tree and die alone.  He usually takes a family of four with him, and in all too many cases, he is the one who lives to tell the tale.

As I contemplate this in a light trance state, the voice of gnosis says, "This is the nature of the dis-ease - to consume the awareness of its victims until no cure is possible." Harsh prognosis, but undeniably true.

Perhaps the lesson is simply this:  awareness of the disease may be the only protection a warrior has against side-effects of the virus.  Knowing the world is a vast asylum for the terminally-ill, the stalker breathes the same air, relying on her own personal power to render her invisible to the disease and the dis-eased.  For now, that is my Intent.

*****

All material in this blog (essays, rants, images, poetry, et al) is copyright © by Della Van Hise, and may not be reprinted elsewhere without the prior written permission of the author.  This includes all print and electronic media, including other blogs, other websites, and so on.  Thanks for respecting copyrights.