Inspired to post by seeing On the Verge (or The Geography of Yearning) by Eric Overmeyer at the Commonweal Theatre, a local treasure.
On the Verge is most definitely a dirigible of cool whipped delight with CoolCat wordplay, unless you’re in another decade, but always witty. Highly recommended.
Our lives journey in untold directions: outward, inward, geographical, temporal, psychological, upward, and depthward. Yet always moving and moving into what we cannot know. Sure, we guess, ponder, estimate, calculate, imagine, worry, and predict, but never really know, even when we desperately want to know and convince ourselves we DO know. But we never really do.
We often call it ‘the future.’ And many of us know how bad that is going to be. Climate destruction. Recession. Worsening sexism and racism. Fascism. We have the evidence. It screams at us from many sources and reverberates in our craniums and curdles in our hearts.
Yet, we cannot know. Cannot really know. However, this play reminded me that we can always touch the beauty of the human spirit — compassionate, creative, peaceful — now. Whatever I am on the verge of I can serve this Buddha-Nature without belittling the climate science, responsible government, and well-grounded activists. If I do not serve this best of what our species is capable of, I am likely to support what I deplore. The journey can never be us against them or me against everyone else, for that attitude degrades steadily and pollutes everything it touches.
‘The future’ may not be so dreadful when we remember what is most meaningful. We may make our peace with terra incognita.
May On the Verge help you there. Many thanks to the Commonweal Theater for another delicious production.
