Empires will evolve, crumble, scatter, shift, flowing. Beliefs will change and shimmer in the bouncing light.

We think that this group of people conquered that group, or these people’s ideas won out over those people’s ideas, but the truth is more complicated. Look back a little ways down the family tree and someone’s hand was forced–your forbearers too were won over by this and that culture with this amount of pleasurable, relaxing, safehavening seduction and that amount of blunt force. And both individuals and groups are actually open spaces where ideas and feelings collide: wisdom is growing kind enough for the heartofthematter to conquer, colonising the landscape with enough compassionate, honest, aware ideas and sentiments to fend off the marauders–hate, envy, greed, fear, boredom, pettiness, meanness, half-assedness, dishonesty, and the like–and allow the Light to fill the space and light the way.

The besouled will slide from one loci of thoughts/feelings/actions to another, always surging up and crashing down and drifting up and drifting down on waves of their own collective making.
Or so I heard one day in line at the drugstore, waiting to be ushered to the cash register, watching the clerk–with his long face and tall strong teeth, his roll-top forehead and square, forward-leaning jaw–nod with big eager, milk-soft eyes. “Oh yes, some people are just so blessed! I just never get over how blessed some people are!” The customer was legion–every age, every shape, every color, every accent, every worldview, every mood. Sometimes the exchange lasted longer than others, but always the need for a fair progression and smooth operation carried each purchaser away quickly and cordially, small plastic bag swinging with their speed and rhythm, perturbing it perhaps but every so slightly, imperceptibly, perhaps–who can say?–inconsequentially.
Who did I hear it from? I thought a little bird told me, but voici the chain’s spokesman:
“We can unequivocally state that company policy has no place for birds fluttering and hopping about, defecating in their bowel-less, random, drizzling way. We can further confirm that after extensive review of security footage on the day of the allegations, there were absolutely no birds in the unfortunately unfairly slandered store. Finally, we consider customer service our top-priority and shining glory, and birds giving customers wonky, impracticable, and confusing ideas about the deeper nature of things have no place in our store. Unless, of course, the customer, who in all our reflections must and does always come first, enjoys the companionship of the feathery vermin and/or self-identifies with the philosophical positions, in such instances and to such shoppers, we say this: we are with you, we support you, and, you now maybe many of us agree with the bird and its chatter–why I wouldn’t be surprised if that bird and it’s attitudes influence our business practices.”
So, who knows?

Bartleby WIllard