Vigil

The dictionary tells us the word light can also mean a prominent or distinguished person. An individual may be the highlight of the party or a people's guiding light in troubled times. Yet on a fundamental level and to warrant their integration into society, individuals must adhere to certain codes of behavior, codes that fabricate a sense of normalcy and institute a modicum of sanity. At its very basic, the requirements of this societal mandate prescribe to each individual the proper management of food, clothing and shelter.

Walls no longer separate the inside from the outside, they have become all enclosing. We live inside the invisible panopticon of our global economy, inside a system that wants to account for all while silencing the many as it plunders the planet to satisfy the few.
Inside this system, populations are farmed with demographic precision. Inside, the individual is housed as yet another institution. Inside these impermeable walls, ambulant facades of being get branded with an insignia, adorned with the colors of a flag and handed an available existence.

But the outside kindles every dream. It is the many-faced unknown, usher of knowledge. It is the other that gives desire its protean wings. Source of boundless potential but also treacherous ground, perilous terrain that is unkind to developers and tourists alike.

While some never venture outside the fortress of their conditioned lives, others come back with a renewed sense of reality, sometimes revolutionary, sometimes so anomalous that it is unwelcome at first. Then again some never come back because what they have experienced is too much for them to contain.

Whether they will be remembered as luminaries or forgotten because lost on a path with no return, stand vigil for all those who break the molds that bind them and, divested of public opinion, venture out to hear the stirring of a silence teeming with life.