Within the darkness there is always light.

Out of our greatest moments of discomfort come the epiphanies of joy.

For some reason this NaBloPoMo has appeared to taken an introspective turn. It appears that my mother and my aunt and even my husband (and my friend Debi in another non-direct way) have all reacted strongly, to one extent of another, to a recent post. They have each made an extra effort to talk to me about it (though some more overt than others).

Since I know most of them get an email with my posts, I wonder how purposeful any of the things I have written down have been. I *think* that I have been putting down things that have crossed my mind rather than create a series of statements meant to solicit some response.

I don't know, I am very consciously thinking of them as I write this and am deeply concerned that they might take this wrong or make inferences that I think I am not prepared to deal with. What is interesting is that I am very aware of them this time. Usually I can pretend I am putting things out there for a blind cohort of people that come across my blog because of some unfortunate keyword... But these things are public, this is not my grade school diary that had a grossly ineffectual lock and key that protected my thoughts and meanderings. So, I feel guarded and am trying to get to the meat of the thoughts going through my head today.

And so I begin...

I hate Descartes.
and it is because of this turn of phrase:
je pense, donc je suis  

or as he later coined it in what I believe was an move to appeal to some sort of even broader scholarly audience:

Cogito ergo sum

I suppose that my biggest complaint is that any one individuals  "thinking" is the root of things "being". And while I have entered into epistemological arguments about this... what disturbs me the most is that Descartes claimed religious devotion and that I think this disproves he felt so.

The central piece about notions of the existence of some God is that there must exist an element of faith in thinking. The faith is secondary to a being. It is the premise to believing something like God exists.

Descartes moved that (something I would call) important aspect of faith, no longer was faith a requirement to existence but merely thinking it was enough.

God is (insert any variety of adjectives and nouns) and VOILA it is so.

God [a priori] (in any way one wants to claim) requires the thought [a posteriori], that I cannot deny. But it is not the origin of God. And that is my problem. God is unknowable. My thinking about God is merely an interpretation of something that just is, absent any of my required thought.  It is with this that I can confidently argue that even an atheist like Richard Dawkins actually believes in God. It is his thinking (and what I call his atheist dogma) that changes the word into other things, but he has faith in something... call it science, call it mathematics, call it reason.

So, this brings me to something Squink said out the blue this evening:

Everything has a purpose, so anything without a purpose doesn't exist.

~ Squink

This gets much closer to the root of "being" than any of this notion of Cogito ergo sum does. It takes into account purpose, be it to be a messenger of some divine gospel or even of some mathematical or scientific construct. It becomes previous to "thinking" and causes "being" to become about our role.

A role takes into account a whole, which brings in an idea of a collective so in space it can be those forces that holds our universe together or on earth about our relationship with others and the space we inhabit.

When Squink and I talked about what he meant when he said it, I asked what would the purpose of moon dust be? And we talked about a variety of things... one of the ideas that I took away is that purpose can be unknown and that it is not about one individual experience. I may not know what the purpose of moon dust is, but I do know it is not directly about me.

So, this brings me to my purpose. I don't know what it is. It is probably not something grandiose but it is a part of a whole, it has a role in a scheme of things that might be religious or science based but that are a part of something so much bigger that I am not able to comprehend it, it goes beyond what I can think.

And this brings me back to my navigating through life with these feelings about being stupid.

My dear loved ones who worried and reached out. I love you all for doing that. Thank you, you made me feel a part of my community. I love you for it. You brought me joy through my great discomfort.

And yet, I hit publish still feeling vulnerable and stupid.

NaBloPoMo 9