Parable 1 - convenience is quicksand

Convenience is quicksand

A gateway drug, inviting you down the path of objectification and exploitation of all beings.

Efficiency must not be conflated with convenience; efficiency begs strategy and intention, while convenience shirks them.

Alignment, too, is distinct. The ways the universe speaks to us, in whispers and winks and nudges and wake up calls: what those guides share, and following those guides, is flow - not convenience.

The difference here may be one of the most elusive, but it may, too, be one of the most potent.

In this painfully digital day and age, knowing the difference between proceeding with the first link that appears on your colorful screen to meet your needs, and pausing gently to inquire with the gods, goddesses, and goddexes within and without us for guidance, insight, input - these are the crossroads moments of integrity of our times. [1]

Urgency, a (white) supremacist principle [2], rob’s us of these moments of pause needed to evaluate our experiences & truths at the everyday crossroads of our lives.

Capitalism, exploitation, the masterful voluntary relinquishing and involuntary seizing of our minds and attentions comprise a related obstacle in this current world - the reckless adolescence of the digital age. We strive to orient our eyes and bodies, striving to protect a sense of hopefulness, to a future era of maturity.

~

Convenience is quicksand.

It’ll be here tomorrow, in time for the party. Alluring.

Someone, somewhere else that is certainly not here, holds their lumbar, low back in pain, filling your box with whatever accoutrements feel entirely requisite to your fulfillment. Someone, somewhere else than there resituates their ankle brace before they hop out of the truck with your goodies in tow. No faces nor their expressions of livingness and human experience - irises, brows, voices, breath - do you ever have to see or hear or hold in your heart. “1-day delivery”

The kids love strawberries. Vitamin C is important. The soil is fatigued, nearly barren save the one, over engineered, highly replicable, prized “crop” being grown in rows out of it. Sprays, granules, heavy-handed genetic modifications. Toxicity in the eyes and hands of those who grow and pick them for you. “Fresh strawberries in December”

“Tell me the recipe for meatballs” echoes in the kitchen and living room. A prompt and obedient reply arrives from the left hand side of the shelf, disembodied, but somehow resembling life as much as any metallic cylinder can.

More coal makes its way down the conveyor belt, falls into the inferno. Heat is captured as fuel itself, power. Behemoth ships carrying drills the size of human homes install wind turbines while displacing the homes of crustaceans and water critters with steel, concrete, and decades of vibration and disturbance. Side effects linger, for durations and at intensities and with detriments whose limits are as of today officially unknown, though many of us have a sense of knowing. Per usual. One day we will know, with the capital “K” of official knowingness. By then, too late.

Electricity travels miles along cables and fire-prone power lines to a warehouse. “Computers,” a term with an entirely new meaning over the last 2-3 generations, and then again in the last generation nearly obsolete and certainly out of vogue. They consume this life force energy constantly, executing the formulas of convenience with abandon, and without defiance.

You make the same meatballs as everybody else does. 4.8 stars, after all. Variety withers in the clutches of convenience. Your neighbor has a recipe for meatballs from their great grandmother. The proportions aren’t exact - the meatballs come out a little different every time.

Last season’s frozen strawberries would’ve worked, too - blended, baked. Spinach grows in windowsills, citrus is in season - vitamin C is not so scarce. There are organic u-pick strawberry fields, but you’ll have to wait until May.

The local thrift store has a beverage carafe - a bit smaller than you had envisioned, you’d need to refill it a couple of times throughout the party.

Con venience:

Perhaps the biggest con of our time.

[1] This was written in winter 2025, before the artificial intelligence flood. Its adaptation to current times and to future current times is likely to be unavoidably evident, though I do intend to develop variations in response to the Homo sapiens species’ evolutions over time. I dream of a future where this piece is not applicable to the culture and practices of the times.

[2] Okun, Tema. https://www.sbctc.edu/resources/documents/about/edi/white-supremacy-culture-tema-okun.pdf