The orange tabby, Hamilton Tigercat, 40 years old in cat years, neutered and plump, is walking with a limp, favoring his right rear leg. He still goes about his business, but with a hitch in his gait across the open front yard. I’m sure the eagles, owls, hawks, crows, ravens, and turkey vultures have noticed a certain lack of grace.
That’s what happens when our wound, our weakness shows. The rest of life turns and watches, because in our void, life will continue wielding its brush. It is eager to reassert the force of beauty, harmony, success.
Of course, that impulse requires deadweight to cull, disease to reclaim, entropy to wipe the canvas clean again, or delete certain pixels in favor of a different arrangement of colors. The so-called perfection of beauty, always fraught with critics and competing tastes, subjective to the core, itself must give way to a greater perfection.
The limp is not tragic, at least not to the bird of prey; nor is it a sign of weakness of the whole system.
Are death, decay, disfigurement, disability not necessary fulfillments of life’s mandate of constant turnover?
Might even “evil,” too—that most subjective and opposite pole to beauty and love and compassion—be considered a necessary character in the cosmic play?
Doesn’t compassion require a suffering soul to console?
Maybe evil is just a convenient tag that the creative side of life calls the destructive side of life.
Are Shiva or Kali, a volcano or hurricane, evil because they destroy?
No, they are just the names we give to entropy. Order calls entropy bad, and vice versa. Really they are both part of a greater order, a greater entropy, an eternal dance.
Beauty calls ugliness bad; health shuns disease; the businessman shuns the leper.
Each tribe calls its own “the People.” Everyone else is less than.
“Only the strong survive.”
Until they, too, start limping.
