Coastline Pilot

October 17, 2003

 

Chasing the Muse

By Catharine Cooper  

 

When I was eleven, I spent several of my Sundays visiting each church in our town.  I was on a quest to understand what made them different, and why each of them was so sure that they were ‘the way.’  The hunger of an eleven year old is not to be underestimated.   My personal conclusion was that none of them held a lock on heaven, and if anything, they all ran dead last in their published belief, that in order to reach salvation, I must follow their guidelines.  How could any of them be right, if in their righteousness, everyone else was wrong?

 

The argument holds fast today, as disheartening as I find the situation. The world is more polarized, with the good guys and the bad guys in full abeyance.  Defining righteousness can be as simple as which side of the political fence one sits. 

 

Do you support Village Laguna, or are you a pro-development personality?  Are you crazed enough to align yourself with whacked-out pseudo-environmentalists who torch a housing tract in San Diego County?  Are you pro domestic-partnership agreements or do you struggle with the concept of legal protections for different lifestyles?  “Why can’t we just get along,” as spoken by a beaten black man, should be posted on billboards and run on television commercials.  Everyone is edgy.  The basic component:  respect for differences, has been removed from several equations.

 

Good guys and bad buys make for great fiction and powerful films.  Polarity adds tension to a story and its plot line.  Think of the possibilities:  Cottage huggers sneak under the cloak of darkness and sabotage the steel girders of a contemporary mansion rising from the sacred ground of an eleven-acre lot.  Peace marchers battle pro-war hawks at Main Beach.   A group of fundamentalists wages a legal battle against a gay couple that wants to adopt.

 

I hate it when prejudice rears her ugly head within me.  I like to think that I have moved beyond the interpersonal restraints powered by assumption and societal training.  And yet, I admit that I am uncomfortable in certain ethnic neighborhoods when my language and/or skin color is in the extreme minority.   And I find myself impatient when I must listen to a foreign language before I can request a number from a telephone information operator.

 

At what point do we allow the world to make headway into our preconceived ideas?  Can we stretch our imaginations to embrace that which is different from ourselves?

 

The world is not black and white, as I learned from my journey through religions.  It is many shades of grey.  Actually, it is many shades of color.  We have walked dissimilar paths to arrive here, but for the most part, we have all used two feet.

 

Around you, at this moment, are people you have never met, with belief systems either vastly different or extremely similar to your own.  Like you, most of them have a space they call home, prepare and consume meals, and sleep.  You notice them in their cars on the freeway, or walking down city streets, but unless you stop and somehow engage with them, they remain nameless faces.  Like you, they wake to a new day and fill in the minutes with the makings of a life. 

 

We are more the same – frail human constructs wandering a large water based planet – than we are different.  Yet it is our dissimilarities, our varied strengths that provide for our survival, insure that we continue to press beyond preconceived limitations, and further enhance our collective journey. 

 

Why then, can we not embrace points of view that differ from our own?  Why do we clench closely the need to be right?  Why do hatred and strife continue?  I don’t have any stock answers, but I am interested in yours.

 

 

Catharine Cooper loves wild places.  She can be reached at ccooper@cooperdesign.net or 714 296 5250.