The Long Ride Home
RIP~ Ron Warner….
June 11, 2011
Today is Ron Warner’s funeral, he died last week, I found out last Sunday morning while I was in Tahoe. The long ride home gave me pause, I had some time to reflect on my cousin. I wish I had taken the time to know him better. I was deeply saddened, knowing that he had endured numerous sincere and ongoing hardships and that he died alone (heart failure)- my deepest hope is that he was happy - perhaps he had a chance to talk with one of his kids, or maybe he had found some moments of internal peace in this often cold and dark world.
Given my limited insight into his situation, I wondered if he found it exhausting to live in a world where we are constantly being measured and reminded of how we are judged by our actions? worse yet, distilled down to “we are our actions”? Such facile simplifications display an abysmal ignorance of the ordered complexity, the ineffability of life on this blue-green planet suggesting that the appraisal of a human life can be encapsulated by various results mediated through rational, scientific metrics. We have gifts, dreams, intentions, and potentials. Our hearts are porous and malleable with an inscrutability that transcends the presumed world of criteria and certitude.
Is there a place where we are loved and accepted as we are, with the knowledge that we have a destiny- not merely to be reduced to our performance? it would require the capacity(imagination) to do so, found within an alliance that values the slowness of affinity. It will cost us to appropriate the gift of KNOWING another; the displacement of, in favor of the deadening ubiquity of culture is to languish and becomes the privation of ourselves; to attend to a soul is to not be efficient.
I saw Ron on very few occasions during our lives and sadly, we lived merely 20 miles apart, I’m told he was a good man who loved his family and an excellent father who was doing what he knew to do to engage in and navigate through his politically tenuous terrain. Perhaps he was able to draw from a numinous interior space; a place where joy can reside in the flicker of the smallest of flames. As he is in eternity, so he is in my heart- affirmed, accepted and whole.
