ladder

The other night i had a phrase that kept running through my mind as i slept. Finally i couldn't stand it anymore and got up to write it down. i needed light to see so i went into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet and started to copy the phrase out of my head and into the journal.

It was storming that night. Lots of rain, thunder, lightning and wind and i started to write.

Something has happened, i wrote, there is hope because there is a fissure in the cosmos. The world has stopped shedding tears and now it is time for action.

i admit i do have very strange things pass through my mind when i am unconscious.

Just as i finished writing the above a huge wind blew up and knocked over the ladder. The noise was so loud i jumped.

After the ladder fell, i thought about what ladders do.

Ladders are used to reach impossible places. When a ladder has been knocked down reaching that place became more difficult but not impossible for the ladder could always be re-set.

I also thought about where i was when it happened and what i was writing. i was sitting on the crapper the place where our internal garbage is gotten rid of.

A few days passed, the storm continued to build and i looked up the definition of ladder in the dictionary.

Ladder: A frame work consisting of two parallel sidepieces connected by bars or other joining pieces spaced and parallel to each other so as to form a series of steps to go up or down.

The sidepieces actually aren't parallel in the legal sense for they begin to converge as they reach the top of the ladder. It is the connecting bars that are well spaced yet united that are important to reaching that impossible place.

Usually when we discuss topics that are controversial people talk of building bridges to overcome the gap. Bridges just let you get from one place to another they don't actually close the gap they just allow you to go over it. Essentially allowing each side to remain the same. Traveling back and forth but never converging.

With a ladder it is one way up or down. When you use the ladder to reach an impossible place you can then fix it and return to your grounded spot. With a bridge you don't fix anything you just allow the flow back and forth over the gap but the gap remains. And so it seemed to me that using the term "ladder" as a metaphor to understand how we can go about fixing a difficult problem might work better than the word "bridge."

I guess in some ways this all relates to the dream phrase. We need action to work on problems we have created around the world be they wars or market melt downs. Bridging the gap won't work anymore we have to try harder. We have to use our ladders and try harder to converge in order to fix our mounting problems.

On another note.....isn't this a great mushroom?