NATURAL TREASON

This post is a two headed snake or two snakes I can’t tell apart. I realize that my posts don’t wander very far from the theme of returning to symbiosis with nature as a cure for our history of antagonism toward it and to thereby, hopefully mediate the impending karmic comeuppance on the social, economic, political and environmental scenes. This time I had two posts working simultaneously when I realized that the derogatory reputation of the peasant in modern life was wrought by the same evolution that made our tools our masters and we their slavish morons. I will leave them as separate posts for the perspective I gained when I realized that the government has become so corporatized that mere thrift is anti-American and barter is downright treasonous. You don’t have to march in protest to be a terrorist anymore, merely living without paying the price that is being protested is enough.

FOOLS FOR TOOLS

This is a fable about the evolution of the tool from ingenious idea to master of morons. I have a friend with whom I enjoy metaphysically absurd, free thought speculation and hip-shot future history type conversations. Over lunch at Cisco’s several years ago, Bill intimated as to how at one point in the evolution of their genetic hybrid of themselves and the planet’s indigenous ape population, the creators of this man-thing found, on one of their sixty-three thousand year rounds of their projects throughout the galaxy, that these creatures had developed awesome mental powers of telekinesis and were levitating huge boulders in construction of a perfect pyramid. Feeling that they were advancing too fast and ignoring too many other aspects of physical reality on this laboratory of Earth, they introduced the wheel. Humans have been lifting and pushing everything ever since and only dream of levitation now.

This fable isn’t that far out. But then maybe it will be by the time I finish putting it together. It has something to do with how anthropologists get notoriety for either observing or teaching animals to behave in a way they can construe as human. Although they may also observe more interesting intelligent behavior alien to any human parallel and even be able to get out of the box far enough to figure out how such strange activity fits in the overall scheme of the life of the subject, it gets buried beneath the furor over the mirror of ourselves. The field is of keen interest to me and might have been my life’s work had I realized its potential earlier in my life.

Boy, there’s a statement you can only hear from someone feeling old. In any case, old enough to ramble on about my theories and memories of their formation with only occasional twinges of being senile and irrelevant to anyone else. Anyway, I am pursuing a career in anthropology, just not in the misty mountains of the Congo or the musty cloisters of academia. Like every other new interest that comes along since I graduated college, I make use of the only real lesson I learned about education in those four years; the knack of learning, by adding it to my home schooling curriculum for as many hours as my curiosity requires. My anthropological fieldwork includes eleven humans, eleven dogs, five cats, seven chickens (at the moment) and numerous species of wild birds, insects, reptiles, mammals and fungi here on the veldt east of Awestun, Tejas on the banks of the Colorado River.

Be that as it may, my observations in combination with information about other’s theories and observations only slightly dilute the possibility that everyone just likes a good story and really couldn’t care less whether it is to be believed or not. I’ve had it with believers anyway. So saying, he launches into this piece for which the introduction seems overlong.

Words were an early tool of mankind to further elucidate and articulate the specificity of our bitching about whatever seemed somehow wrong with the way things were, are and always will be. To this day, truly happy people just sit and grin and make music. The words happy people do use are meant to convey a feeling beyond words to people who cannot think without them. In this way, any idea of value to others may also be an unnecessary superfluity to yet others, like high rises to gorillas and me.
The benefit of an idea to the essential requirements of life determined its independent arising and eventual saturation of the culture …up to a point. I am kinda vague about where that point lies but it must be the degree of how much the idea required its enactor’s direct involvement in the immediate results of its use. As an evolutionary example: a man wrestling a deer to the ground and cutting it’s throat to gain a meal is more directly involved in the results of using his tool than if he had killed it with a bow and arrow from a distance, but more directly involved than one pulling a trigger from a yet greater remove, who himeself is more involved than one shopping at the butcher, who is more aware of the killing involved than the one ordering a red meat rare filet mignon at an upscale restaurant, who himself is infinitely more directly involved with the results of using his fork than one pushing a red button to slaughter cities full of people he never met and will never eat.

This is where I was, when I began working on the peasant post below and came to realize it was the same subject.

PEASANT: RESURRECTION OF A MEME

The Peasant Dance (1568)

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569)

It’s high time for a reevaluation of the unjustly pilloried peasant in the scheme of social values in modern life to bring it full circle out from the thrall of responsibility abdicated to oblivious authority.

Ayn Rand’s tale of Atlas Shrugged told of corporate giants withdrawing their genius from the commonweal to found a hidden community away from the inevitable collapse of common society thus bereft of them. As a budding freshman engineer in 1962 on the way to an eight year career with IBM, I was enchanted by her championing the responsible individual dedicated to creating a better world as distinguished from the indistinguishable morass of moronic leeches whose addictive meddling in acts of genius kept their blue print Nirvana from fruition.

The fact that her heroes were quite scrupulously ethical served to justify her raising them so far above the rabble she modeled after the communism she had just escaped in Russia. She was my introduction to social sciences beyond my loss of patriotism through four years of the leatherneck life. To the proto-yuppie I was fashioning myself to be at 20, her philosophy was like a light in the long night of collectivism during the cold war.

Experience of years in the real world of unscrupulous corporate greed began betraying the reality of Rand’s heroes and of being supervisor of assembly lines made me reassess the rabble I had assumed manned them. I have been deconstructing that myopic view from the pedestal that I inherited as a white, male in the US ever since, and may die before I’m done. I have learned in the 36 years since contributing to the corporate dominance of modern life that one must get in touch with one’s own essential core of being to have an inkling of where others are coming from.

I make this statement in full realization that, although I am a unique individual, I am a combination of the same natural stuff as everything I observe and am, therefore, not exceptional. The view from atop Ayn’s pyramid of unregulated capitalism observes only dependent peasant beggars among their unexceptional inferiors. I have come to see peasants everywhere, plying their various skills and services with and to whatever level of ethics and competence they choose and for which they will enjoy or suffer the natural results.

Seeing as how some of those peasants consider themselves superior authorities on life and some of these peasants do fit Ayn’s collective masses and prefer to rely on that authority than their own, we have remaining an entire unconsidered population of folks who are glad to be the peasants who defy the odor and ordure of both the control freaks and their sycophants and remain their own authority to exercise their creativity and skills at a more personally responsible, more effectively involved level in the sphere of their own local community where faith in being fairly represented in a huge, remote society is obviated by their acquaintance with whomever they deal.

The latest example of the efficacy of the peasant is a finding by a study of the world food crisis demonstrating that a ten acre farm tended by a single farming family for consumption and income is likely to be ten times as productive and nutritious than any ten acres selected from a giant, mechanized, agribusiness farm. Give a man food today and you will be feeding him forever, teach him to grow his own food and he might feed you someday.

So long as individuals’ wealth was an equal share of the commonweal from which they drew and to which they contributed, respect for the nature that supplied them and for neighbors who helped in stocking remained naturally symbiotic. Once totalitarian farming increased the birth rate to an acceleration reliable enough to justify growing and stocking more than enough food and the inventing, manufacturing and warehousing more tools and toys to allay fears of deprivation or inconvenience, the necessity for social contact with more than one’s places of getting and spending tokens diminished social concern for the commonweal to the resented enforcement of religious and legal regulations. Nothing is done to heal the rift with nature.

The most effective tool in the history of mankind’s ingenious abdication of individual responsibility to external authority in the developing the thingathon western culture has become is the creation and selling of innovative necessities of life. The most insidious aspect of such evil genius is that the transformation was done less through the manipulation of Earth’s resources to manufacture endless assembly lines of crap than through the manipulation of the insecurities of the gullible compliant clients from which tokens are extracted at the rate of 10,000% markup per mark.Why else would Bush’s first message of advise after 911 be, “GO SHOPPING,” to cope with our grief?!!?? WTF

CHILD CARE

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy.
I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.'
In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
-Bertrand Russell

When parents condition the behavior of their children the initial attempts are, one hopes, introduction of perceived benefit. In further confessions of a faithless hope fiend, one wishes such benefits are real instead of expedient saccharine lies; ala tooth fairy. Anyone who really watches their children listen to their words knows they have an innate bullshit detector, which may not reach untraceable critical mass ‘til their teens, though begun in the first year. Against all hope of fooling their children, all too many parents, rather than realize the capacity of children to act maturely when treated honestly, revert to the same tactics as religion and governments use when the façade of duplicity wears thin; by asserting assumed authority, “Because I say so.”

I have always taken that sort of attitude to indicate that the child’s curiosity has surpassed its parent’s own curiosity, stamina or patience. I have a friend who tells her toddling son the names of man-made artifacts; which had names before their physical existence. She lets him name the natural objects for himself, knowing there will be plenty of time before he must socialize verbally in the general public for her to explain the difference between his version of what he experiences and her own in such a way that makes her a benevolent example of the “otherness” to be found in society. That each of us has our own personal reality tunnel is the natural product of varied personal experience. Mistaking one’s own reality tunnel for a truth so universally superior it justifies intrusion on any other is the grit in the social grease. She takes it, at this point in his development, that all the things that have similar sounding names constitute his version of a species and, curiously, the homophones all kinda’ look alike too.

If the concept of external authority over ones personal life seems too incomprehensible to the developing worldview of our toddlers to illicit sufficiently immediate obedience to its dubious benefits punishment may ensue. Crafty controllers know that proper application of deprivation, or in dire cases in combination with physical abuse, will usually get the whiney little brats to heel — “Now see what you’ve made me do?” After a few such sessions the pliable clay of their loins will have become so gullibly brainwashed with fear that the mere mention of getting out the belt or no keys to the car or any other godlike threat will have them jumping into the master plan mold. Parents often excuse such treatment of their loved ones as preparing them for the real world — not for their protection, for their production!!! WTF

Within the family a child may have to go through the same sort of transference of guilt as enacted in both the biblical account of man’s banishment from Eden for being intelligent enough to question God’s omnipotence and the Bush administration’s banishing as terrorist anyone intelligent enough to recognize implosion of three buildings and see through the ensuing opacity of their government’s transparency in the death of more than Sodom and Gomorrah combined in the name of mob rule, er, ah, democracy.

Asking, or even expecting, government authority to solve the problems inherent in such unwarranted authority can only make sense to its brainwashed victims and is tantamount to asking them to raise our children to be more uniform clones for us because they know better than we do. Punishing our children trains them to become the worst part of civilization.

WAR OF WILLS

All beneficial change in society occurs in reaction to nature’s exception to satisfaction with the sense of status quo. As individuals and as societies, humanity must learn to once again recognize and reharmonize with nature’s ways as the prime motivation, the predetermined path for free will action. As Einstein believed, “I question all theories, my own the most.” All theories are about the nature of the premise. It is nature that offers us the questions, and curiosity that keeps the options open. Nature does not deal in neat facts or irrefutable truths despite the multitude of conclusions prematurely reached by the incomplete and impatient theoreticians.

Civilization, I suppose, began as an attempt to overcome the loss of loved ones to starvation due to occasional seasonal lack of natural food when hunted and gathered as individuals. In choosing to join the coming together of a quantity of people larger than birth families, lack of space to exercise one’s free will became the basis for outbreaks of violence among members blaming each other for their own agreement to sacrifice free will to the idea of cooperative benefit.

Once the need to crowd together for cooperative getting of food was invalidated by the idea, that man was separate and above the bountiful environment upon which his life depended, leading to the advent of totalitarian farming to the destruction of vast areas of biodiversity for monocrops of a favorite few foods, the population of the fed-beyond-their-capacity swelled faster than their bellies, as any species would given a surplus of food. The new reason to sacrifice the choices of free will were to remain close to and in the good graces of the place where the tokens to be exchanged for food may be earned through any number of things one could make or services one could perform for people who were somehow accumulating tokens without making or doing anything but handling tokens.

As technology improved, spurred on now by the getting of tokens rather than the direct getting of food, farming required a smaller portion of the population until a vast majority of humanity had no essential reason to notice nature even exists other than as a thorn in civilization’s side. I say good on nature for that thorn, may it always grow through the cracks and let air out of windbags.

So today we have a world where virtually all the tokens are in the hands of their manipulators' attempt to pyramidally minimize their membership while maximizing control of the flow of newly earned tokens to their coffers at the top. The peasants, the skilled and creative base are too busy earning tokens to keep up with the baffling inefficiency of civilization to makes us all Joneses or live up to any other of its myriad advertised dreams or to realize that heads of corporations cannot shrug them off — the cold sweat of the addicted peasants is the life blood of that Atlas pusherman. Can you kick the habit of supporting your own worst enemy?

Everything manifested by the authorities is geared to keeping the peasants distracted by a thingathon of plastic status symbols that, while doing nothing to overcome the manipulating oppression, may get one eaten lastest if one can fool enough people into believing to feel secure.

This little rant is based on the idea that each of us is a walking contradiction of the peasant’s DIY skills and street smarts and the yuppie’s sell-out to the baker for a slice of the pie we could bake for ourselves. There is no leader gonna come along and restore our personal responsibility for ourselves for us, so if the national scene is gonna change its contradictory nature it will be as each of we pixels take back our whole range of colors in an act of free will to harmonize with the predetermined, inexorable way of nature.

WATER TELLS

One drum sounding out her parting footsteps faded behind Tedgery as she approached and stopped when she stood at the edge of the vast featureless desert the tribe called, the Beherarnonz Avoid. She felt she was standing in the line of a wall separating everything and nothing. She was aware of the breeze carrying the constant buzz of insects and the aroma of the flowers in the field she had just crossed behind her, but before her lay a sameness of airless dead silence that sent a chill through her groin both terrifying and challenging her to go forward.

Her imagination and curiosity had been her closest allies and the causes of all her troubles with clan elders until she encountered her spirit guide, who knew a good deal more than the dog and stick fetch routine of her more playful friends. With the trilogy of her creative imagination, unquenchable curiosity and the natural wisdom of genetic memory represented by her spirit guide gurgling advise in the grottos of her inner ear she felt ready to die or any other experience. She had to find those warrior farmers before they found her people.

As she stepped off of the last blade of the grass meadow onto the trackless surface of the desert she felt what others had described as a form of vertigo which made them throw themselves back onto the land they came from and the home they knew. The sensation she experienced was a rising of the horizon to the south, which her spirit guide showed her with its constant level to Gaia, that she was perceiving her mental attitude change about the changelessness that she found herself at the center of the moment her second foot hit the ground.

•

Trekking south she realized that the voice of her spirit guide needed no concentration on its gurgling to understand its meaning. She knew her thoughts were from the water because they were wiser than her experience had led her to be as it clearly told her:

“CHANGE. Without it there would be no evidence of our existence. Like drops of water on hollow wood a tune is played to each ear with the meaning of each note set up by the one before, flavoring curious anticipation of the next. The life of the universe, the signs of its consciousness, manifests enough natural examples of change for even the slowest, dullest collection of sensory perceptions among the infinite variety of such entities to notice it is alive — at least as alive as what it recognizes as life around it.

The present is the nothing before the big bang of everything — there is no change within the present — there is no within to the present — all change is a function of remembering the approach to or anticipating the leaving of the present with the poignancy of reality appearing to be more intensely solid in blurred smears of acceleration as its irresistible gravity swallows the past and spews out the future as time’s black hole evades direct experience, there being no change within. The present is the undetectable twist in the mobius strip of time.

In the present one is simply what one has become through whatever experience brought one here with the potential probability that enables for the future. This is the state of is-ness at the heart of the deepest meditation where no change can occur because there is no time, no action, no thought, no growth or decay, nothing to be conscious of but the falling away of the phenomenological world and the sensory needs of individuality from the void of pure pre-existent being.

Observing events closest to the present on both sides by casting the past in the role of the establishment; the human need for security, and the future as heretical anarchy; the human need for growth, we can see time is bound to uproot the inflexibility of our world view and the quantity of the universe we admit to view. The only destruction wrought by entropy is to human ideas of permanence. Being alive, there is no permanence in the established eternity of the universe.

The past is mere memory leading to now
The future is potential probabilities leading away
Both only realized in the changelessness
Of the infinite present
Squeezed to a non existent nothing
By emphasis on the bookends
Not the reality of the book

When the thoughts quietened, Tedgery had the impression she could walk for forever, whatever that meant in this timeless place. She wasn’t going anywhere anywhen. How long had she been walking? The uphill mental impression of going south began to take on aspects of going toward the light and expansion of newly realized situational information.

Only when her second foot stood on the man hole cover next to her first step away from her homeland did she get the fleeting glimpse of the seed of time the present is; drawing in composted nutrients of past experience and blossoming constant potential in life’s ongoing experiment. It passed her consciousness as quickly as the readjustment of her mental level to her environment. The odor of the steam coming from under the metal plate she was standing on was making her want to puke, so she ran over to a low ledge along the wall of a screamingly loud canyon to try to get her bearings in this strange place, while stuffing her experience in the desert back into the to-do pigeon hole so she could.

NATURE CARRIES ON

While grinding out the next episode of WaterKnows I have few words to spare for the drab, parched ides of August scene here at the Dawgranch, but here's some pictures with enough color to make up for the thousand words I can't muster just to keep the channels open.

A brief shower from the latest hurricane evoked these beautiful fungi presaging the color of the sapling Pride of Barbados shrub to grow in the stump with it.

The goldfish follow you like they haven't got a friend in the world. Little beggars.

And "finn"ally, a far from idle August wearing gurnsey leg warmers for his constant kick boxing workout. A happier-to-be-here human I've never known.

WHAT'S WITH CLOTHES?

Noticing our parent’s dismay displayed by any number of reactions adding up to “bad, icky” referring our newborn ability and assumed freedom to shit anywhere causes us to develop socially acceptable sphincter control able to hold it through a sufficient number of poopy checks to now enroll in Where To Let It Go 101. Even though we have graduated from the leg bowing diaper wad our parents, usually mom, strapped on us like a gasket on a valve to prevent the soiling of their sterile world, we get the dubious reward of having to, er, ah, getting to wear big kids clothes.

I let that slip of “having to” wear big kids clothes because I realize that, while the child feels a sense of accomplishment in the new found freedom of replacing the crap catcher, with which they were literally saddled, by two or three thinner layers of kids clothing, there is also the collateral damage, traumatic experience of accepting, just to secure parent’s fragile, fickle, fake good graces, the fact that wandering back out in public after an excellent demonstration of your “where to let it go” skills as naked as the day you were born is as “bad, icky” to the adult eyeball as getting baby poop on them was to their tactile and olfactory sensations.

Kids are into belonging to everything their parents are into, which is a kind of ethic for a fragile, still gestating self esteem; easily controlled by the punishment of withheld affection, never mind screaming, slapping or worse. Just as one is becoming aware of emerging into a world full of artificial prohibition against acting naturally we must also deal with the embarrassment we are supposed feel (or cause, I’ve never figured it out) whenever we are seen naked in public. It has always been too damned abstracted and reassembled by the puritans to matter to me. Embarrassed for what — for living in a society where your unclothed body shocks the robots with the naked truth; for ballsy confrontation of their prudery; for those prudes’ embarrassment; for something innately repulsive about my body? WTF.

Anyway, I have almost always worn clothes in public, and get naked when alone or with friends who aren’t the public, just to keep the peace and so have some experience of the use to which this artificial embarrassment has been put.

The weirdest of my theories is that clothing is partially responsible for overpopulation just by the artificial sexual arousal the embarrassment is mistaken for in this world of hidden bodies in the same way a running faucet can make me want to pee. I realize that a shorter life expectancy is one factor in indigenous culture’s maintaining a relatively stable population and civilization’s excessive food production is the primary contributor to its overpopulation, but the incentive to engage in the old in-out by the merest glimpse of anything near that dear forbidden fruit is exponentially intensified for clothed societies. Couple this titillating enticement with the Pope and all the other prudes forbidding sex education beyond abstinence only to children pumped up on the sexy new style for twelve year olds and you have another considerable factor in overpopulation and unwanted children.

I’m kinda’ like the natives of North America about clothing, keeping a warm body in the winter and grass out of my ass in the spring is all I require. If I ever move again it will be to warmer climate because, to me, cold is the only natural pain both genders may suffer through no fault or super delicacy of the afflicted unless one may be considered clumsy for getting caught in a snowstorm. Not only do hot and cold air mixes stir up some bizarre variations on the normally pleasant climate of Gaia, I have another theory about the mixing of the thawing Neanderthals and the equatorial baskers after the last ice age being the natural motivation for the conflicts across the planet of artificial, industrial, capitalistic western civilization exploiting the parts of the world where the people have always been content to live in it pretty much as it has always been.

I have five pairs of shorts as my only clothing for nine months of Texas weather and a closet full of shirts, pants, sweats and coats which I pile on as the temperature falls off. Like the people already here when western civilization stumbled upon them while prospecting for moolah, if I must wear clothes I make them unique symbols of their owner. Although I don’t wear hides of food I’ve hunted or shirts I’ve crafted for myself, the few shirts I do wear into civilization or in the winter would be returned to me by anyone who knew me for one season; beautiful abstract Hawaiian motif colors or my new favorite t-shirt with a picture of four rifle armed Native Americans captioned “HOMELAND SECURITY Fighting Terrorism since 1492,” given me by my dear friend and embedded NYC correspondent, Babyldorkgalactinerd.



That t-shirt has involved me in the most meaningful conversations on the subject of the present administration and the eroding of the Disney version of American history with complete strangers from “illegal” immigrants here to do Whitey’s icky chores for more money than the mayor back home and Evangelicals handing out screeds on the true meaning of fourth of July and Jesus. It doesn’t go unnoticed. So, in addition to the necessity of preserving warmth and sanitary sitting, I must also include the artistic celebration of one’s spirit as beneficial results of wearing clothing.

On the other cheek, I can testify to the experience of becoming 80% more aware of my environment when living naked for a year and a half in two different tipis and 60% more sensitive in the past four years living here at the Dawgranch in only shorts. Without having to report, “You are wearing clothes,” being the day long message from my now shuttered, environmentally sensitive cells, I have experienced their stopping me in my tracks on a stroll, turning, and looking straight into the eyes of an otherwise invisible rabbit with no idea what I was doing until we met. Clothing's effect on the nature of the body is a pretty good metaphor for civilization’s effect on the nature of Gaia.

This post was initiated by my dawn celebration of the horizon’s undressing of the sun a couple of mornings ago, when my neighbor came out to tend to her garden to the east of me in her white linen night gown.

Excuse me; I think I hear some water running.

WATER KNOWS

Tedgery knew it was time to leave home before it was too late to do anything about the threat only she saw coming. Her family tried to understand and hoped her departure would find a place she belonged and people who might understand her crazy ideas. It was all they could do.

All of the people achieved adulthood by learning to be able to live completely on their own through the ancient tradition of vision quests. As soon as the children’s impatience to be treated as adults achieved a certain intensity they were given permission to live alone, using all the considerable survival skills already acquired by that age, so they might seek their very own nature guide for help with questions so deeply personal there were no words to answer, away from the company of people. Through alternating fasting, prepared medicines, quiet meditation and singing and dancing the seeker concentrates on finding a wisdom greater than her/his experience about the nature of experience itself, embodied by an avatar of nature: a bear, wolf, eagle, ape, deer, tree, thunder or sunrise. This passage into adulthood is a tradition intended to introduce an individual to their ingrained genetic memory, the knowledge of nature’s ways common to all its variations without the distraction of the individual differences of the variety.

Having a nature guide benefited both the individual and the tribe. All parties recognized an individual capable of living alone in symbiosis with Mother Gaia as having fulfilled the primary responsibility of being useful to oneself as a beneficial part of the body one’s environments is. Each is utterly alone in that responsibility. The tribe recognizes that such a one chooses its company out of a sense of their kindred spirits as opposed to fearful dependence on its protection. Those completing their vision quest serve as good examples of its benefits to developing generations helping the tradition become a natural way of life

Tedgery’s vision quest failed the first time she sought her guide. After eight days of anguished failure to conjure a believable avatar she drug her exhausted body back to the empathetic arms of her clan. Not finding one’s nature guide was always appreciated as a sign of one’s integrity in not making one up to avoid the stigma of failure. Those that invented their avatar were more obvious than they ever realized of themselves and therefore less dangerous than they might have been in a society where appearance means more than substance.

On her second attempt two years later, Tedgery had concentrated with an intensity that frightened her worse than the figments of her heightened imagination as they tried to lure her belief in them by claiming to need it to become real. Her experience of friends and elders who had achieved unity with spirit guides taught her that they were indivisible once they had accepted one another. She knew, even before meeting her own mentor, that its voice would not require belief any more than its guidance could ever again be ignored.

After five frustrating days her body announced it was quitting such behavior and led her to a quiet brook and laid her on its bank to sleep from that afternoon until the next sunup. Long before she opened her eyes her curiosity about the song all the people in her dream were singing in beautifully layered voices resolved a quiet chorus into the gurgling of the brook as it swept her hair along the bank upon which she lay. Somewhere between the dream and the normal waking reality she understood the vast wisdom in the water’s words drawn from its experience of being a part of all the variations along nature’s curve boiled down to simply remembering that everything is a part of the same nature whether one agrees or not. Agreeing with the way it is just makes life more harmonious. As her nature guide has been gurgling in her ear ever since, water takes the most attractive, least resistant path in traveling everywhere being everything, as will the water she is long after her body no longer contains it.

Upon returning to the family a tribal ceremony was held where she told of her trial and its lessons, which in turn earned her an honorary name, Goeswell. To her people it came to mean she-that-never-has-problems-and-can-solve-yours. As admirable a being as that name seemed to indicate, Tedgery soon learned she had not represented her guide properly because she had begun to have more and more confrontations with the immovable certainty contained in tribal traditions honoring mortal confrontations over possession of those things more beneficial to all when openly shared. Above all the other traditions, she held highest her loyal defense of the beloved kindred she called home and now she saw she may have to abandon it to save it from itself. Or herself.

Her gurgling nature guide had shown her how the tribal council’s refusal to drink of the fresh new ideas bubbling from the wellspring of she and her friends youthful curiosity when it filled the bowl at council meetings was a sign that a larger understanding was being born that must learn to flow around the rigid traditions forbidding new ideas so that they may be slowly absorbed and eventually dissolve the resistance. While maintaining the tribal ways of relating to Gaia, Tedgery found their rigidity was prohibiting more experience of nature’s ways than they revered.

Just the other day her friend, Klatoo, was prohibited from illustrating an honorific history of the seven northwest tribes until he purchased the tribal symbols of the Chippiwamu, Cucumexon, and the Blackwater clan of the Usuki tribe. The question of ownership centered around an old tradition based on maintaining symbiotic relations with the rest of the world by prohibiting ownership of any living part of it unless gathered at season’s final ripeness or hunted for food. All life was sacred.

Such remnants as inedible parts of animals and fibrous parts of dead plants, as well as certain rocks and minerals served as material from which tools and crafts were developed by all the people. Initially they were implements to help with the getting, preparing and eating of food created and used with an honor for the spirit of the living material as a token of respect for all of nature and as thanks for the utility through whose service it lives so artfully on. Artifacts thus created also served as an example of the unique character and history of their creator and her/his signature technique or style of decoration so that they were less possessions than identifying symbols of the creator. An exceptionally skilled painter could paint the tipi cover in the symbols of a friend’s design, who in return could make a tipi cover to fit the painter’s poles in trade. All this brought good health and harmony to the people. The only thing that resembled competition among them was friendly comparison of the beauty and grace with which the identifiable overall style of each tribe represented their respect for the mother, Gaia, at annual gatherings in her honor.

In the lifetime of her great, great, great, great, great grand mother, a gatherer from the Monsandow people had been given the honorary name, Growsit, when she began gathering so much extra food for her family that none of her whole clan went hungry during lean times and the men began having to hunt less. Before she died she had shown each family in her tribe how to nurture small gardens in clearings to propagated food they had ‘til then only gathered wild where it grew. In the beginning the gardens helped expand the interest and awareness of the interdependent relationship of the people to nature’s bounty through symbiotic respect as they learned when to plant to get the most fruitful crop in the season where their parents used to trek the wilderness to find sometimes too little.

Within her great, great, great grandmother’s generation a coalition of tribes way off to the south began to eat all their food out of the same garden tended by five farmers from each tribe. Their notorious disrespect for Gaia in burning off acres of forest and killing all the natural inhabitants to fence away growing plants and build huge lodges to store the excess harvest for their exclusive use was overshadowed by the belligerence they began showing toward their neighbors and wandering nomads as their well fed, growing population began to feel as cramped in their traditional homelands. In much the same way, the surviving exiled field mice, when more and more new brothers and sisters appeared fighting them for the excess grain spilling from the silos, wished the humans would build another silo.

When she was born the farming culture had reached the edge of the great desert where only the nomads could survive — and then only long enough to cross by balancing the weight of trade goods against water between oases. With the aid of her nature guide’s understanding of thirst she estimated it was a matter of a hundred years before the swelling population and insatiable greed of the farmers bridged the divide and infected her people with such harmful disregard of their environment when they no longer needed to know or care where their food came from. The elders said she was an alarmist. How can anything so good for the people be bad for Gaia?

She knew if she could learn the answer to that she might be able to return to the tribal council with an understanding based on experiencing the effect of this farming thing on the people and the body of Gaia. To do so she would have to cross the desert, a brave adventure for someone whose nature guide is water.

love and gratitude

And yet, here she is.

DO I DARE TO TOUCH AN ASS?

When asked by a pretty girl for a pat on the ass for luck,
what does the Puppet in Chief do?

Man's got no soul.

METABOLISM — NOT JUST FOR DINNER ANY MORE

We are what we don’t shit.
—— Peter Bretz, Philosopher, Moviemaker (1938 -)
•
What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger
—— Friedric Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

As I have learned to do from commenters’ taking a word out of my context and running off to feed it to their herd of cyclopses, or wherever it is they go with it, I looked up the word metabolism just to be sure there weren’t meanings hidden in the thesaurus or wikipedia which would tend to lead my reader astray. Well, folks, I was flabbergasted to learn that the use I have often put it to lies only peripherally relative to its strict definition: the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life. In other words, eating and defecating. The stretch I make with it is born of the necessity that no synonyms exist covering the sensory processes with which we feed perception of existence to our developing wisdom to be both digested for its mental nutrition and shat for its useless repetition of familiar information and gestated for birth of new ideas.

As a mechanical engineer I often relied upon a Wollensak high speed movie camera to capture and slow down the dynamic process of single keystrokes when testing the Selectric keyboard. Thus expanded I could examine and compare the relative harmony of purpose and the cacophony of unwilling inertia to the particular jostling choir of parts involved in, say, typing a question mark by watching the operation with a synchronized audio recording in an anechoic chamber keeping track of the ten thousand feet per second of film that burst through the camera. I developed a system whereby I could match the peak sound waves on an oscilloscope to the natural frequency of the offending part to indicate a way to not only quieten the overall machine but correct the misuse of the screaming part being thus worn out. These techniques for peeking outside normal human perception serve our sensory system in the same way certain nutrition serves to expand our experience of metabolic breakdown through our alimentary system. Playing the film back at normal projector speed expands the duration of the split second operation by three hundred times the time it took so that watching a sturdy little one eighth of an inch thick slab of steel quiver and quake like Santa’s belly as it rings out a gong louder than all the rest with a peak ten times higher than the rest of the group was a trip that has led me to ponder this phenomenon of expanded sensory perception ever since.

Ah, there’s the gateway to drugs now — curiosity, take a bow. Sprinkle a little prohibition on it and you have a gourmet’s especiale for the appetite of any healthy curiosity. This experience and the curious cafeteria conversation with fellow employees’ being so confused about what has happened to their teenagers since we all transferred from Lexington, KY to Austin certainly lead to my opening the gate. Being in Austin made it quite convenient, but I digress, heh, heh.

Normal human perception is said to have a lower limit of one thirtieth of a second, which prevents our realizing the existence of any entity whose life span is less than that unless aided by such devices as that high speed camera. The upper limit to our perceptions is our death — or our antsy attention span, whichever comes first.

‘Course
there’s
a taken
-to-be-
normal
blind spot smack in the middle where
the curiosity is forbidden, for only fear
of god
knows
what
reason.
But we
shan’t
tread
there
today.

Several years ago a friend turned me on to David Attenborough’s Private Life of Plants: Six hours of video employing the extreme patience of time lapse photography allow access to a virtual and literal secret world normally perceived to be anchored and static unless blown by the wind. One sees a delicate tendril of a vine scan the surrounding space for a toe hold which, when secured, becomes a fast anchor for the slender cord to muscle up its tiny bicep and twirl a double ended helix to shorten its span and draw the main stem up with it and tossing in the best shock absorber money can’t buy, as a natural bonus. I watch chapters every so often just to remind myself that I must slow down more to catch up to nature.

I’ve posted about noticing a lifeless clod of garden soil rise and roll several inches from the unfolding of a squash seed leaf seeking sol as a calibration on how slow I’ve actually become when all of nature’s variations do not distract me from their theme but rather focus me on its immensity and karmic consistency.

Another measure of this is taken by how friends visiting from the “real world” of the city seem to arrive with the metabolism of a fly on a flit. They normally depressurize and mellow out before zipping back up in their isolation chambers for the return trip, but it always seems too soon. There may be a touch of the ol’ absence and the fonder heart schtick in there as well. I know I appreciate visits more now than when I was more convenient to drop in on.

I am for any method of expanding my consciousness of and rapport with more variations of existence by any means short of altering the natural existence of the subjects observed. Yes. I am for any technology from better tele and micro scopes, high and low speed cameras, infrared and ultraviolet exceeders, to chemical and naturally occurring organic mind expanders, solitary meditation and group music production so long as it is free of exploitation for private profit; a motive that always results in eventually bending truth to its purpose.

These photographic and audio recording techniques are only rumors of tips of icebergs in fields we haven’t even discovered the possibility of existing much less developing sensitivity to. Besides the sights and sounds dilated by time already mentioned there is size; from quarks to the body whose double helix DNA is being revealed by plotting galaxies such as distance; from the core of our being around the universe to the back of our head, temperature; from dust at absolute zero to no one can define how hot, density; from a vacuum to a black hole, and on and on.

Somehow I understand, rather than standing on the shore looking at pretty shells while the entire ocean lies before me as some old wise guy once described his life to be, I am discovering the colors that go with numbers inside lines already etched in a genetic memory inherited from infinite existences experiencing the same nature in all parts of the universe. Maybe.

PLAYING THE GAME

Sitting here turning tiles and cards in games on the computer as my mind wanders where it will. It seems to be the place I sit to meditate on the effect of laws in the micro of the game and the macro of civilization. The garden is for meditating on nature.

I have become familiar with the results of enough various choices in both Mah Jong and 3-up Solitaire to enjoy the facility with which I navigate to the conclusion, avoiding traps and noticing every quirky option. I am not even sure I am playing the games as they were designed to be. I just know that I am doing everything the computer lets me do to get as far as I can go. What’s so great, what’s so worth posting about, is it no longer matters whether the conclusion is a cleared board or being stopped by an unbreakable lock.

This may not seem like a big deal unless you can relate this to the macro part of this metaphor and my inability to cool out and do less than rant against the monumental debilitation of individual human thought wreaked by following the edicts of external authority by abdication of personal accountability to oneself and the security of anonymity amongst the mainliners. Yeah, unless you can relate to that …

The way my mind works, or malfunctions for those of you who indisputably know how it’s supposed to work and/or think, I am able to transfer through apt metaphors lessons learned in one variation of the Tao into another manifested variation, in much the same way that the functions of friction and resistance in mechanics and electronics share the same effect with a myriad other fields across the universe both manifested and energetic.

So now I’m cool with the brainwashed portion that remains of everyone who has ever sold themselves out for shiny beads and fifteen minutes of fame. Until I was thirty-three my fence was damned near as brainwashed as Tom Sawyer’s was white. Then the cook took the children back home to the Chef for her old fashioned recipe and I had to learn how to feed myself for the first time. It’s been a long, strange weaning and there are still some insidious apron strings yet to be discovered, but I’m losing karmic weight. Going organic in every phase of my life, or learning to, has shed a lot of pounding headaches.

With this new attitude about the sheeple, I can grant that, except for the republicans and fundamentalists, no one is 100% offering themselves up willingly to the Matrix and most only serve it in plausibly deniable positions like the clerk typing requisitions for depleted uranium ammunition with no inkling of or responsibility for its eventual use.

About a year ago my angst about the ills of civilization began to take over my most lyrical moods of praising the benefits of natural symbiosis and universal connection so I began a separate blog, Canary in a Cage, to handle the venomous vitriol that the political, environmental and energy crises brought to a head. It didn’t help keep the gut wrenching concern from poisoning my best moods.

So now, when I get those OMG and WTF moments about events within the zoo of civilization I’m gonna treat ‘em that way; as if they were entertainment by another species living in a world they created through the proxy of an imaginary god and are fair game for satire, snark and scripts for the Daily Show. I won’t separate the civil from the natural subjects this time, I will just take on an extremity of this new way of looking at playing the game with the aliens in the zoo and having fun stretching the possibilities within the cages in my new persona. Like an aboriginal Australian who announces to the tribe he has reached a new outlook, I am taking on a new name; gregraetgar shall henceforth be known as Yodood.

For folks who think they cannot exist without a belief system, Yodood’s philosophy is very simple really; life is an ever changing, growing story about existence in a universe whose nature permits everything. Yodood, that’s me, believes that if the story is of a universe as malicious as the atrocities committed within the mythical world of civilization, I wouldn’t want to exist in it. A couple of posts back I discussed having or getting to live one’s life. Knowing that being glad to be alive is the only state of mind from which ones actions can be of benefit makes it a piece of cake to edit the story by keeping the “have to” parts in the western civilization pigeon hole along with any good it may have manifested. In this way the natural world remains a place I get to live because civilization, while permitted by nature, is a perpetuated mistake I don't have to live in.


So now I can play the game of “civilization” with a detached facility I had ‘til now not developed and shall relish all the days of my life. Yet another graduation in a career whose only evidence is my wake. Prosit!

WOMEN — GOTTA LOVE 'EM

WHOLLY PART OR PARTLY WHOLE?

It seems to me that the most important problem with living in our modern culture is figuring out what part of the bloody rigmarole is our cup of tea and what bits to avoid like the plague. The spectrum of mankind runs from those living in such close symbiosis with the nature of earth that the need for western civilization’s trappings has never occurred for they’ve yet to be “discovered”, through those to whom those same trappings are so desirably convenient as to volunteer a life of suffering for them, on to those who presume to own and deal out such goodies waving their warrant from god while herding his sheep into a planetary sweatshop — for him, of course.

Living in symbiosis with our environment is an act of acknowledging our connection to all of nature’s manifestations as co-evolutionary parts of the entire universe. Denying this has no effect on its truth; we are always a connected part, just cut off from the benefits and plagued by the conflicts.

The history of western civilization is strewn with annihilation or enslavement of the unconvertible, destruction or mutation of the inconvenient and domination and exploitation of the irresponsible. The history books about western civilization are fables made from cherry picking perusal of recorded observation by authors with an axe to grind, be it glorification or excoriation, clarification or obscuration. The myth that keeps on pumping the hot air into the bubble of our culture in the west is that mankind is either the god given recipient of earth as clay for sculpting god’s image to the theists or at the pinnacle of evolutionary wonderfulness as proved by the reduction of the planetary biomass to whatever the hell we want to eat and ourselves, to the godless capitalists intent on accumulating the last, biggest hill of beans.

So my ponder this morning is, are we as organic a part of larger beings as our cells are of us and their atoms are of them or, are we creations of a god who blessed us with life and ownership of the world but cursed us for questioning his authority by eating the fruit of knowledge leading us away from the garden into independently thinking up the hell of civilization as our replication of Eden?

The latter does have a ring of natural karma for denying the former, but I guess that is just my resonant frequency. I know I have the rest of my life to learn how deeply imbedded the theistic culture’s program has gotten up to now and how to unwarp my potential from antagonism toward it to symbiosis with nature. Each withdrawal of my energy from harming the whole of which I am a part also reclaims that for which I abdicated responsibility to external authority making me more me more whole as well.

Nature is very forgiving. Karma lets you fuck up ‘til it kills you — or grabs your attention — which ever comes first. Civilization has rules to prevent upset of its tenuous obscuration of the natural stage upon which its disastrous scenario is played out in emperor’s new clothes.