MY EFFORTS TO PREPARE my family for a worst-case Y2K scenario have been laughingly inadequate. I bought some extra supplies from our food co-op. But what to get? I have a finicky 9-year-old boy and 5-year-old girl. What would they eat after civilization falls? I bought a big cardboard box full of peanut-butter oatmeal cookies.
They hated the cookies.
I bought a case of cilantro-favored garlic salsa, thinking that would be a nice treat in the coming Dark Ages. But I haven't yet bought a case of chips to go with them. I had better hop to it before the inevitable run on grocery stores in the last days of 1999, or we'll be eating salsa out of the jar for dinner next century.
My wife hated the salsa.
I figure, though, that after Civilization As We Know It Ends, and the local 24-hour-Kroger store goes dark and is ransacked in the Great Food Riots of the Winter of '00, they'll come begging on their knees to me for a little salsa. We'll spread it on the oatmeal cookies for some variety.
I also bought several extra boxes of scented votive candles --- raspberry, vanilla, hyacinth, cinnamon --- from the K-Mart near the Kroger's. If the lights go out as we move into the 21st century, I will chase away my kids' nightime willies with a cozy, candle-lit home right out of the 19th century.
AND IF THEY STAY ON? Well, I burn through candles at a prodigious rate in my regular home meditation practice. My extra Y2K candle-power is stashed to the side of the carved wooden Buddha in my study and behind the big green porcelain Buddha in my shrine space in the basement bedroom (not too far from the salsa and cookies down there). If the globe's techno-nervous system survives Y2K without a nervous breakdown, and the lights remain burning, I'll still have a use for them.
Of course, if Y2K does bring down the house around my neighborhood and around the planet, that also means I will be meditating in the dark, since my meditation candles will be needed elsewhere. But that's OK. A Buddha statue lit by the dancing shadows and flickering golden light cast by a candle is delightful, inspiring and comforting. But the candle cannot illuminate the darkness deep inside of us, those overcast, obscure or coal-black places, out of which so much grief, suffering and confusion come winging like a rabid bat into our daily living. For some of us, only meditation, regularly undertaken and reliably returned to, can illuminate that darkness with any measure of reliability and sureness.
THE HULABALOO ABOUT the momentous change from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000, makes it seem as if all Time were converging at a crucial point and that we have reached some pivotal juncture. In this spirit, some folks will out standing in dark fields, eyeing the sky for flying saucers and the coming of Interplanetary Brotherhood. Lone rangers with dire, survivalist tendencies will hunker in remote, fortified bunkers, one hand caressing their extra stocks of canned spaghetti, the other caressing a rifle butt. Drunk on religion, some will pray on bended knee in anticipation of the Rapture. A thousand times more that many people will simply be drunk.
TO PAGE 2: An Aeon of Aeons...
