Dear Cory:

Is nothing sacred?

— Scared of the Void

Dear SOTV:

Thank you for your admirably concise question.  In Cory’s youth, your question was usually rhetorically posed to chide someone – usually Cory – who was deriding so-called received wisdom: something deemed worthy of respect, such as a version of history, capitalism or Easter.  These days your question has a rather wistful aura, surrounded and stunned as we all are by shifting values, rampant self-interest, and destruction lust.  So many empty words, so much deception, so little to believe in.  What should we hold sacred in this swirling garbage gyre afloat on waves of shallow motivations?

Dividing things into the sacred and non-sacred is binary thinking, a way to control and influence.  Remember when stores used to be closed on Sunday, to defend the sacredness of Christianity?  Now we hold commerce to be more sacred than Christianity, so the stores are open.  Cory would like to propose to you, dear SOTV, that we consider another binary:  either everything is sacred, or nothing is.  Further, Cory recommends that you drop the binary and consider everything sacred.  Everything we see and everything we are comes from stardust.  If we revere all of creation, we can maintain a sense of awe, excitement and appreciation of the mystery in which we are all immersed.

As Cory looks out from his apartment, he sees a plastic grocery bag caught in a maple tree.  It has been there since last autumn; it is now spring so the bag will be hidden by leaves soon.  This bag is made of two things, fossil oil and heedless, wasteful consumerism.  The oil comes from ancient plants on our sacred primordial planet.  We may not like the plastic bag as a particular manifestation of sacredness, but it helps to keep its origin in mind if we are not to become insane or cynical.  And we might even try retrieve and recycle the bag so it can enter another manifestation.

As usual, Cory can’t resist a slight tangent, speaking of bags.  Consider Saccorhytus coronarius, now thought to be our earliest known ancestor of 540 million years ago, a tiny bag with a huge mouth but no anus (the flow-through idea hadn’t evolved yet; everything came in and out of the mouth) .  Since that humble start, evolution has given rise to our own extraordinary complexity and consciousness; we can revel in it.  What could be more sacred than our planet and the life it has brought forth?   Cory frequently marvels at some of his very own parts as well as those of others.

The sacred is respected.  Excluding things from sacredness can encourage us to pillage and destroy  them, as is all too evident around us.  There are signs of hope:  consider what Eric Chaline calls the new church attendance: going to the gym.  While gym culture may be somewhat contaminated by vanity, competition and body judgment, the care of our body and exploration of its capacities constitute progress toward expression of the sacred far better than does sitting bored in a church pew while being hectored about some antique morality.  While on the topic, Cory feels a compulsion to remind his stalwart readers that the word gymnasium means “to exercise naked”.  By happy coincidence, nude running around is a core mission of Cory’s host site’s manifesto which contains aligned approaches to sacredness and inspirational images.   Naked exercise fosters body acceptance, and when done in nature, increases contact with the sublime textures of life.  Would you not wish the soft kiss of moss on your genitals?

Fear not, SOTV.   The void, as mentioned in your signature, is created by the words and ideas of people, generally those people who want to sell you a product or an ideology.  Void partakes of the binary full/empty.  Cory gently suggests that with nature there to be experienced through your marvelously evolved orifices and organs, including your naked skin, the sacred is present, complete and ever full.  It awaits your attention.   Just don’t allow anyone to erode your natural sense of wonder, which is the portal to the sacred.