“Ye shall be as gods”
A serpent
Deceiving even with the truth
For knowledge
Indeed
Is power
But knowledge
Also brings responsibility
What does it mean to be god-like?
Might it mean
Ripping away illusions of paradise
To see a world that bleeds in shades of grey?
To know
The damage you’ve wrought in your ignorance
Things you can’t take back
And may not be able to repair
Living with that guilt?
To now be charged
With walking a world full of children
Hoping to raise some of them to adulthood?
And also knowing what that means
What you’ll be asking of them
Knowing it is necessary even still?
Knowing also the tantrums they will throw
And how much they will make you suffer
For challenging their dreamy naivete?
The blame they will heap on you
For confronting them with truth?
Knowledge is a bitter fruit
A taste impossible to shake
An understanding
That to drink from all the pleasures of this world
We also must shoulder its burden and it’s pain
And that we have been racking up far too much debt
Knowledge is an agony
Matched only by its ecstasy
The possibility that this tool
Is capable of helping us to heal
Both the wreckage caused by our blindness
And the torment of finally knowing our reality
Knowledge is the beginning of our healing
Excruciating though it might be
We are cast out of utopia
By nothing more
And nothing less
Than the realization that it was always only ever a lie
It is a loss
But it is not a fall
It is our first step
To waking up
To growing up
To owning up
To ourselves and everything we were
Are
And can be
Take a bite
Choke it down
Pay the price
Feel the strength flowing through you
To fight through the despair that wants to claim you
Discovering what is there at your core
Forged in your suffering
Your brightness
Your candle against the night
It is time
We can no longer be babes
We must wake
We must walk
We must fight
We must live
Nothing less than our existence is at stake
Consume it that it might devour you
We’ll see you on the other side
Our Better Natures 