THE LOG OF THE GOOD SHIP, CURIOSITY

She shoves off from the safe harbor of Certainty, enticed by the perfumed air blowing in on the breeze from the Sea of Everything Else to explore its many secret charms her crew intuits inland while absently gazing out windows whenever inside. They are all avid volunteers whose focus long ago dissolved the slats of the bamboo curtains while reaching for the larger picture so far beyond the glass barrier. They sail in defiance of threats like, “there be dragons,” from frightened keepers of the faith in the prophecy that, if order could possibly be indisputably established anywhere, the wilderness outside won’t really matter and will go away.

She needs no recruiting posters. In the beginning so many felt wanted by the vast unknown the founding elders realized they must act to prevent an ldeaspora‘s dissolution of all they were trying to nail down. They relocated the population further inland to a territory they dubbed the United States of Absolutica, away from the temptation of doubt lapping at the entire fractalized coastline, not just their original landing site, Curiosity’s point of departure from Certainty. In recent generations Curiosity’s fleet has begun sailing other ships out of other ports; the happy ship, the Wrong, sails out of the well defended port of Fort Righteousness; the super streamlined yet slow boat, Our Desire, out of Sinisabad; the weird ship, the Anomaly, out of Normalcy; the intuitive ship, Yearning out of Comfort Corners; Question out of Patanser; Beginning out of Land’s End … you get the idea.

Moving to the heartland of the new homeland, clearing the area of wild ideas and building the great isolating wall of definition worked very well during the lifetimes of those who’d remained involved in the passionate debates about the righteousness of every rule laid into the wall and who’d invested energy in the labor of leaving it alone once put in place. It wasn’t too many generations along when the sacred wall, referred to by all as the DICTATIONARY, began revealing leaks spied by inattentive students’ wandering attention during the endlessly boring process of doubt erasure their public schools were.

The process of patching the DICTATIONARY with a new rule for every inventive infraction became a distraction from considering the impossibility of enforcing them, much less the loss to the vitality of the community of its most creative criminals by diagramming their sentences to jail. The prophecy became as threadbare as the emperor’s new clothes when the more imaginative among them recognized the similarity of their culture to the process by which innovative farmers surrounded each budding pumpkin blossom with a mold of the head of the head founding elder to harvest a lucrative commodity just in time to save everyone from the mess of having to carve them themselves and the shame of probably getting them wrong at Halloween.

The experience of being surrounded by so many mirrors reflecting one’s proper image packed so close together, sealed within the fortress walls as they were, stirred the embryo of an irritation within even the most indoctrinated among the orthodox.

Tentative attempts to escape constant reminders of such mindless conformity with forays into the wilderness were always accompanied by a gigantic vacuum/snail device that extruded an asphalt trail wherever it went to transform the land wherever it stopped by sucking it up into the mold of a road crossing with options at each corner from an approved list of necessities including bank, gas station, fast food, car wash, bar, car dealership, church, parking lot and personal technology retailer as a support for the relatively isolated, practically identical rows of individual sets of walls of personal fortress sprawl they named homes.

These adventuresome heretics were slowly granted permission to decorate their indistinguishable homes, built on the design principles of exactitude laid down so long ago, with the blasphemy of modifiers. A dab of green letters and numbers spelling the name and registration of the homeowners on the mailbox in front of one of the standard black and/or white houses was open defiance of tradition. The first person to hang an adjective on the wall in their nouning room caused a stir of controversy throughout the colony.

These outlying boxes remained connected to the fort within fortified capsules whizzing these rebels back and forth along the slime trail or virtually through the series of Ted Tubes from their homes to the trough that sustains them from within the bowels of the fort, the fountain of truth, the reward of a promise, permission to exist. Being natural entities these strangers to a stranger land gradually enacted an innate curiosity as unconsciously as the depth to which their education had buried it, but just as surely — as if "curiosity" or "why" were actual words, much less symbols for concepts they recognized and could discuss.

Ayn ran away from her stifling nest within the ironic curtain because there were no words to express to her parents’ and teachers’ satisfaction the questions she couldn’t ask about a world greater than the DICTATIONARY could behold much less cared to contain. As chance or the salt air would have it, her parents’ home was in the closest proximity to the coast of any of the fort’s outposts so that her flight away from the prosthetics and the walls and the asphalt through this garden of unexplainable phenomena was the first time any of her people had breathed unconditioned air or witnessed the environment without glass protection for three hundred generations … and it led her to a beach.

Ever since stifled reports of her survival in the wilderness without definitions began leaking into the fort, wakened curiosities have leaked out and trickled down to the coast to build this outlaw community of sea farers sailing the Sea of Everything Else and re-porting their ships to share novel words about novel experiences of larger samples of the infinitely big picture of the universe.

She’s sailing under the full moon tonight. Come on along for the endlessly interesting voyage of the good ship Curiosity. Your life will be its logbook, its entries, your direct experience; no hearsay. You won’t need words until you choose to re port.

ANONYMOUS: Mental Concrete Pt. 2

The most beneficial effect I can see the internet having on the civilization it is saturating is the growing realization that truth needs no authority. The first installment of this series, Mental Concrete, dealt with the strategic misuse of stereotypes as demon paint to rally opposition to straw men as sole bearers of a particular all-consuming characteristic that the propagandist opposes that, in reality, is found in everyone to some degree. This time I want to home in on the mentally lazy habit of needing footnotes and degree initials to recognize obvious truth or of being persuaded by them to swallow propaganda.

My strongest experiential connections to other humans (beyond realizing that we are all made of the same cosmic stuff in extremely complex variations as cells in the tissue of the living body of earth) are our love of music, the occasional display of our deep-seated instinct to know right and wrong in the unrehearsed spontaneity of the moment it is required, and the rarer examples of our ability to capture and communicate that instinctual sense alive with a series of symbols as abstract as words or paint. The truth shines through the page whether it is a venerable old acolyte’s hand drawn parchment by candlelight in a musty cloister or the soiled brown paper bag the MD 20/20 came in scrawled by the shaky claw of a junkie by barrel firelight in an alley or the canvas of a saintly artist deliriously daubing every photon of light striking his dilated pupils from that starry night sky. Hell, I’ve been inspired by things I misread – and was no less inspired for finding my mistake. That’s what this post is about. The authority required to be genuinely inspired!

We seem to be so conditioned by our education to respect authority that we are paralyzed without its approval of our behavior and beliefs, religious or not. The internet is instant access to virtually anything anyone has ever wanted the world to see, and much of what they didn’t, for an entire spectrum of reasons. It is possible with very little effort to assemble every word, song or videotape relative to any subject, except those redacted by the government’s black ops authority over anything too amazing for the common man they swore to serve.

With such a plethora of information one may surmise the popularity and profundity of any subject by the quantity and range of the variety of views from every reality tunnel and camera ever applied, with scattered attempts to establish “facts” about the subject denoted by the particular acronymic symbol following the names of that particular specialty of authorityhood who’s word dare not be questioned. A comparison of the great, unwashed, unlettered, anonymous’ synthesis against the officially accepted facts always yields interesting, often intriguing insight into the agenda of such official versions; especially when the difference is great.

The idea of authority in both audacity of assumption and specter of surveillance makes of any system based on it fraught with little Caesars polishing their act, to expand their sphere of influence among the lowly gullible, and their apples for those whose rules school those fools who would achieve their stool with lickspittle obedience. Some shit.

It seems to me that western civilization is brewing a situation where the authority resides in a collective tower of mental masturbation at some floor or other. Authority requires levels; what else is left to achieve when you know it all? Outside that tower is the chaos of independent reality tunnels based on the individual life experiences of people who don’t assume they know anything about how or why civilization exists, much less perpetuates the establishment of edifices and new rules. Nor do they care except when intruded upon in their daily, relatively symbiotic lives in local nature, so far as authority permits.

It appears axiomatic that the strength of influence one assumes for one’s authority will proportionally disable the possibility of experiencing life as it actually is. Authority distorts perception whether the observed even knows authority is there or not. When authority asserts itself, the subject must as well, whether it wants to or not.

Authority is officially recognized and rewarded for accomplishments in furthering religious, political and scientific snow jobs that keep the people praying, obeying and paying. The most ubiquitous source of recognized authority is the initial “$”; able to buy the obedience of political whores betraying their constituents, the forked tongues of Madison Avenue snake oil salesmen on infotainment mainstream media and the guns of mercenary mobs to force fear on the unpersuadable priceless that remain. This collection of stereotypes I just used is marbleized throughout civilization; no one is absolutely evil or without a price.

Ah, well, they litter the internet, those authorities. I try to stay away from them, but I guess it doesn’t even pay to talk to it without “doing” something that qualifies, much less question it any more – to its face that is. I guess I’m as guilty of stereotyping as anyone; I question all authority but that which I perceive self-evidently shining through another’s unqualified behavior like truth on a page. Is it me, or does that sort of authority seem to be most likely found in people who prefer remaining anonymous?

LATEST COOP POOP SCOOP

Dateline: Dawgranch, somewhere along Fetchit Drive this month, six former debutants came out once more in the technicolor parade of Aurucana testimonies to a new level of maturity in pastel shades from lilac to sage. In just the short span of three weeks they have hit the three eggs a day pace of maternal extrusion. I have notified the egg eaters who have taken an interest in their development that they are welcome to help themselves up to the last three eggs in the collection basket. And we’re off …

With any intention there comes analysis of progress according to even the most nebulous of plans; if that intent is of an ex-engineer who enjoyed analyzing data in matrices for patterns, like myself, you employ something similar to the nearly completed first page of egg size and color per hen plus her choice of time and nest for her latest issue.

Humorous anecdotes along the way are referenced by

the asterisks on the first month’s egg chart above.

* Positive identification of the hen and the time: I looked in just as Shiva shuddered her egg out and I heard it hit the box floor. I left her in her post laying trance. When I came back thirty minutes later I learned hers was the second in that nest and there was already a third egg warmer than hers, but I couldn't be surer who laid the second one, I was looking right in her glazed eyes at the time..

** Positive identification of the time: I heard someone call my name several times in a beckoning falsetto. I looked out along Fetchit Drive, got into a brief conversation with Hank of the Hennery and then checked the egg nests since I was out in the sprinkle anyway. There was this egg as fresh as they come — has one learned to cackle my name?

Ongoing research into improved mobility seems headed for the time when I begin letting them free range. With the roost and nesting boxes the only functioning part of the rig, there’s little reason to move the whole thing to greener pastures. Another case of perceived necessity being obviated by inevitability.

•

Addendum: As a sign of the individual shifts to more home based food sources I offer this example in obtaining 100 pounds each of layer mash crumbles and hen scratch a month and a half ago for $25 compared to the $40.50 I paid yesterday for the same thing. The real question here is, is this representative of individuals changing their food source or my local feed store predicting a trend and heading it off like any greedy capitalist would with their 62% increase of the cost gouging those with the intent of going independent of chicken factories? My guess is: the probabilities are against my better wishes.

MENTAL CONCRETE

Frustrating encounters with certain blog buds and commenters recently have brought Jung’s and Campbell’s role of symbology controlling the way we think into sharp focus for me. It seems that no matter how sublime, ethereal, abstract, profound, enlightening an insight may be, the conveyance of the exquisite point of light into this realm of push and shove demand for clean edged certainty, assured by dictionary and blueprints, condenses, compacts all possibility of expressing any thought from outside it into the sharpest relief with the pressure between the press plate and the paper leaving black ink letters in rows as its symbolic proxy. Only the finest poets can build such structures with just the right crack left in to allow enlightenment to shine in —— “that’s how the light get in”.

In conversation, body language does a lot to fractalize the edges of the spoken word to meld the context from which the thoughts arose if they are vivid enough, imbued with the speaker’s spirit, to suspend the hearer’s belief in his own set of definitions long enough to go along to the end. Body language, if the eyes are ignored, can reinforce the tendency of a partisan audience to personify positive and negative abstraction into concrete allies and foes with a certitude only the eyes betray. Some can even lie with their eyes, but only by believing their own lies.

We could light the world forever if we could tap, cross the internet, the energy frittered away in frustrated miscommunications due to the use of abstractions as absolutes such as stereotypes taken as complete descriptions of single entities on the part of the speaker, or when the listener cherry picks the dictionary definition of certain word to refute the entire contextual meaning expressed.

In the first instance the abstract characterization of stereotypes is wasted on those who think in the black and white absolutes of righteousness. If such a thinking process were to hear the term, Jim Bob Lunchpail, they would picture a laborer eating lunch on the jobsite watching the propaganda of the opposing party on TV and swallowing it all, hook line, sinker, sandwich and bullshit; a real living entity; whole herds of such entities; hell, there’s so many we gotta organize against ‘em! That may be what the speaker intended, if he wanted to rouse the Jim Bob’s on his side to go out and get the others in some fashion.

But, as likely as not, they meant to describe just such black and white, with us or against us, lack of curiosity as characterizing lazy thinking wherever, in whatever proportion of whomever, it occurs. This phenomenon is exemplified by such thinking being unable to recognize satire’s mockery of such concretized stereotypes to realize that Colbert Nation is not a right wing utopia, or that Sarah Silverman doesn’t necessarily have a 48” TV as described in her video a few posts back, or that Glen Beck and Bill O'Reily aren't really news reporters, but Bullmoose bullshit dispensers who authored best sellers because right wingnuts bought bulk to get their books on the list; they don't even care if they're read, just so the mindless interpret sales as representing authority.

Sometimes the reaction of such thinking becomes stretched beyond permissible limits such that it snaps back with, “Arguing what truth means is irrelevant. Look up trust in the dictionary. Problem solved." in a comment earlier. To which I answered, with this "this is this and that is that" refusal to understand the context in which a word is used as an indication of what is meant, there's probably very little poetic license with which you won't argue, because that's not how the dictionary dictates it to mean. Pretty sad. Problem perpetuated.

No one IS Jim Bob Lunchpail or his idol, Colonel Bullmoose but they seem like real people to the degree one fits the description themselves. You get the idea. Or not.

SARCASTIC BOMBASTIC DRASTIC PLASTIC

Click on picture to learn what you are seeing

AND THEN THINK LONG AND HARD ABOUT IT NEXT TIME YOU ARE TEMPTED TO BUY OR THROW AWAY ANYTHING PLASTIC!!!!!

While the manipulators debate global warming this unquestionable indication of an unsustainable lifestyle is shoved to the sidelines. We must stop the distraction from life's priorities by big money's quick fix profits exploiting the necessary green revolution

DAY AT THE BEACH

They finally had a whole day together. She’d been planning it for what seemed like a month. Now it was happening. She’d emptied and defrosted the refrigerator last night so that it could air out all day today while they were gone. She’d made an entry on her iPhone list of “things to do on the way back” in the order each place would be passed driving home along the coast road tonight. The list was stored under “lists” for Saturday, August 9^th on her iCal. Life had never rewarded her for her ability to organize it so well as it had since she got her iPhone.

The loud rip of a zipper tore through his dreamless kitten fur slumber brought back the sound of her voice describing what today would be like as he drifted off into the soma afterglow of their love making last night. After slipping his legs into shorts, his feet into sandals and his torso into a tee and sipping some ganjava into himself on his way to the car he picked up his surfboard, sketch pad and easel. He was toking a pinner as she emerged from the house with enough travel gear and beach equipment for a week on the Cote D’Azure.

An hour later, after frustrating logistical debates with the logic of a hybrid car too small to carry anything more than two people no matter how small its carbon foot print may be, they were on the road headed south with the rising sun hitting him twice behind his shades as it separated from its mirror. His surfboard, rather than being the first item to be left behind, saved the day, so to speak. They’d strapped her several travel bags to it making containment splints of her beach umbrella and his easel, all of which they’d tied to the top via rope through the open windows. They’d have to climb through the window if they went so far they’d have to stop before they got to whatever place it was she’d promised would spontaneously catch her fancy on the way.

As wonderfully romantic as her plan to find the perfect, secluded beach from a car traveling on a heavily trafficked road seemed, they settled for the place she couldn’t hold it any longer. When she returned from the bushes all the gear was gone and a furrow led away from the car and over the dunes toward the beach. She grabbed her giant woven beach hat and matching bag from the car and topped the dune to see their stretcher still loaded with the body of baggage but Tim was nowhere in sight. Making her way to the gear in her matching beach shoes in sand that would be tough going even in bare feet, she heard his whoop from a hundred yards out to sea as he surfaced at the same time as a dolphin beside him.

She loved him so much more than she ever could have loved, wanted to love Job. As great as Job was at whatever he was doing or how much alike they were, both qualities made their relationship impossible. They never saw each other; being so dedicated to their careers that her birth control pills were almost superfluous. They both had offices at home, for pity’s sake. It seemed like Tim was always there for her when she needed him.

As he looked up from a gingerly examination of the carcass of a Portugueses Man of War he’d found washed up to the line of sea weed left by the last high tide on his stroll back to Priscilla and the bundle he spied her busy unwrapping and reconstructing into their awning, barbecue pit, entertainment center with boom box and TV.

It was so much easier to love her than it had been loving Ursula. They’d loved each other so completely they became one person, never apart. It was wonderful at first. They couldn’t believe how lucky they were among all the dysfunctional couples they knew. They knew each other so well one could remind the other of intentions postponed or call bullshit on a recollection of a shared experience. No matter how spontaneous they both were about their approach to life, they found their tendency to treat each other’s work on themselves as if it were their own psyche which aroused twinges of resentment that, over time, built a wall behind which they hid thoughts from each other. Although the thoughts were suppressed, they recognized the hiding. They lost their sense of humor and it devastated them both. It seemed like Priscilla was open and eager to share her enthusiasm about her multi varied life to his complete delight during their rare times open in her schedule.

While Tim made several gesture drawings of the beach scenes, Priscilla busied herself preparing tasty tid-bits, which she popped into his mouth upon their reaching perfection. When she got to tossing caviar to the sea gulls halfway though the second bottle of wine, he got out his pastels to catch the feel of the rare scene of her spontaneity in wasting a hundred dollars worth of sturgeon eggs just for fun and the frantic, raucous excitement of the screeching gulls. His gift of groking auras enabled him to lightly brush the heavy, rough paper with lavender chalk around her outstretched body conveying the inebriated elevation of her perceptions and green in the air around the gulls that spoke of the loud cacophony of their cries. It was alive and was to hang in their living room for many years.

In the shade of the awning they made love, the strength of his contentment was a steady stage upon which she danced to her heart’s content. After sharing a few puffs on his post coital doobie she twittered all her friends and he slept the sleep of the gods for an hour or so. He woke with sand stinging his skin and before averting his eyes to open them he knew they’d see surf.

As puny as the surf is on the eastern shore there are occasions of a sea breeze steady enough strong enough to stack up water high enough that he could climb on for a ride long enough to satisfy his longing for Hawaii. He was ecstatic to find that the southerly winds were running the waves about forty-five degrees to the shore line so if he kept sliding out to sea on one he could ride it almost a quarter of a mile while Priscilla ran through the glass thin edge of the same wave as it washed ashore video taping his delirious antics upon the rock steady board.

After three such magic carpet rides she begged him to stop because the light was getting too dim. Her list remained stored on her iPhone while Tim drove past all her scheduled stops on their way home to the tune of her exhausted snoring. He was used to it, she was always exhausted by the time she gave it up to Morpheus. He loved it. It reminded him of what a live wire he’d gotten hold of. She dreamt of an endless summer of him on the board and her running the whole way beside him. She really enjoyed her work, but she cherished these times with Tim in between yesterday and tomorrow. He was always there, seemingly waiting for her, though he’d never call her late.

SYMBOLS FOR CYMBALS

Tap, tap

Gentle rain on my tin porch roof

Thunder growling across the darkling sky

Lightening flashes crashing ears that hear

Whether it’s the weather beating their drums

Or the magic of sticks chopping motion making

An unidentified drummer’s flying discs beat air.

A pair of such metallic shapes kissing

Mouth to mouth resuscitate a memory

Of smoky soft shoe shuffling coolness

At that jazzy scale and tempo

Or boiling blood heated by the tingling

Of the many minute minglings

On the dancing gypsy’s wooden ring

Or at their greatest size

Slammed by hand to yell war

In crowded theaters of Astroturf

Suffering from its celebration

By big brass bands, marching as if to.

If you like your wave lengths long

Change the symbol for the cymbal to the gong

Roger Waters aims at the heart of the sun

Another sweaty J. Arthur Rank wank onset

Suggesting curiosities about inscrutability

Of exotic eastern uses for the high hat —

Cooking pad thai in it one way, it’s a wok

The other, on coolies smackin’ track,

It was hat, imagine that.

Brushes aren’t the only metal

That makes the cymbals sing

When his sword strikes orc shield

Gandalf is the lord of the reverberating ring.

Should that shield be slung,

A horizontal Frisbee guillotine’ll

Cut a headless swath among

Who failed to identify those flying objects

Fantastic millennia before they came in peace.

Upturned to the gentle rain, it is a bath for birds

A respite from foraging furrows in the field

Plowed parallel by such discs strung on a shaft

To raise food to fry in a wok

To eat from a bowl

With chop sticks.

Tap, tap.

FEED THE WORLD, GET ALL THE PUSSY!

NO OTHER GODS

They came with their book and their fire sticks that could strike beings dead from many strides away for food or disobeying the rules they read from the book. The shock and awe that struck beings wherever such magic arrogance intruded its violent version of Gaia into their lives left them fearfully supposing secrets of her great spirit had been confided to these pale possessive people. As the trauma healed, the survivors among my people either became emulators of Gaia’s enforcers by pretending they too owned the part of her body wherever they lived or they moved further from such a dangerous rupture in the rapture of their symbiotic relationship as integral parts of that body.

Easter Island

Within the first new generation a few of those who remained in awe of and proximity to the strangers found one of the books they carried and quoted from as proof of their authority, and began to decipher the markings in it. They learned something more amazing than these visitors’ ability to uncover some of the infinite complexity of Gaia’s body; something more atrocious than how, instead of further revering the whole life of which she has offered them mere hints, they indifferently turn right around and begin using them against her as if only her matter matters and she didn’t exist.

Tipi, Turtle Island

The book turned out to be a fable by the protagonist and His holy ghost writer about the six thousand year history since His creation of Gaia, and the firmament in which she whirls, especially for a pair of little living action figures of Himself to whom He bequeathed it all as stewards of their playground, so long as they never became curious about the endless supply of food that was growing all around them in the garden or the infinite variety of fellow creatures by which they were surrounded. Apparently the creator left His inheritors unable to heed His only prohibition, this one commandment against becoming aware of their connection to their food and endless fun naming everything they saw. The first time they met up with another of the creator’s special creations, the shape shifting avatar of His antithesis, in the form that day of a serpent bearing the answers in the back of the book they couldn’t resist peeking. His wrath has been unbound ever since.

Talk about getting your insurance dropped for the pre-existing condition of having once inhaled in Los Angeles the day before the doctor finally decides to tell you you have a rare disease that can only be cured with an infusion of a billion dollars as empirical proof that there’s no loving creator that gives a shit about anyone —— much less one who thinks we’re all that special; except maybe as the afterbirth of impudent curiosity upon which to further avenge the sin of man’s original awakening. That's small potatoes. These early interpreters learned that the entire six thousand years, ever since that first question, has been saturated with examples of the creator causing disease, destroying entire cities with fire and drowning all life on earth but one mating pair of a trillion species on a boat he told a man to make for his family only. He even tried issuing ten more commandments, just to have more to punish them for violating. Talk about yer exploitive indifference of the elite.

Palenque, Mexico

They found the entire book to be filled with a history of a jealous creator exacting punishment against the punching bags He keeps within arms reach by occasional appeals to their egos promising for their faith rewards of a condo made of clouds and harp playing neighbors — no virgins to deflower, it’s not like that —after he finally grinds them to cringing meal; that they are His special, His most beloved creation and that what was for their own good somehow hurt Him worse than it did them. Ever hear that one before?

When that gospel of fear wore as threadbare as the NSA’s claim their secrets are for national security, some two thousand years ago, the creator wrote a whole new sequel, supposedly non-fiction this time, in which He created an extra super special action figure of Himself who He supernaturally snuck into the human dimension through a virgin wormhole to go out among the not all that special action figures to preach a gospel of love and perform miracles of sharing and acts of compassion right up in the grill of that ageless serpent the creator set out so long ago.

Machu Pichu, Peru

After reaping the karma that kind of peaceful action gets at protest rallies until this day, the creator's latest, greatest got himsaelf crucified, for which He also holds us all guilty, the fable became what is to still too recent a history to deny — The only historical record relative to the the second book’s protagonist's actually existing is the 500 year history of politics over its even being written and the formation of an establishment to enforce its letter: —— a yawning void admittedly filled by religious ad men devotedly putting together the greatest’s hits and pieces from undisclosed sources to smooth transitions between often contradictory essays by his fans and disciples in a brochure targeted at the compassionate guilt market which miraculously seems to appear wherever their search for unwashed heathens to convert chooses to be guided by the hand of the creator. Imagine that!

After due contemplation weighing their own ancestral tradition of Gaia being a consciousness of whose body my people found themselves to obviously be a part, balanced against this cruel myth from which these pale players take the part of their creator when reenacting His good god/bad god routine every day everywhere whether their symbol is a cross or a dollar sign, my people decided that those who could stomach rubbing elbows with the intruders would live amongst them as an exeample of respect for Gaia, just as they always had and still remain undetected as someone needing conversion. It was easy, their lifestyle was too gentle to be noticed by these warriors. The rest would retreat from owned lands to live in full relationship to mother, Gaia. This decision was based on the idea that these pale people are no more than another kind of human being whose ancestors thought survival training must include the nature of Gaia a danger to be conquered rather than revered and respected as fellow elements of her body, as we always have.

Ankor Wat, Cambodia

Now my people are many more, and paler than the old ones of whom I tell today. Our plan is slowly working. For the past six hundred years or so most of our people have gone deeper into the wilderness wherever those symbols start making speeches while the more curious of us integrate invisibly into the wound their culture makes, living as we always have amongst them.

Igloo, Frozen Turtle Island

Over this time we have found an interesting connection to a possible reason for their antagonism toward nature and their penchant for making permanent, dead things out of great portions of Gaia’s living tissue. Believing nature was the enemy who must be outsmarted with clever devices would come much more readily to a portion of humanity trying to survive a sunless ice age for many generations than to the rest basking on tropical shores eating the fruits of the Garden of Eden, living in temporary homes in respectful recognition of Gaia’s hurricanes, eruptions and heavy seas. Not long after they invented totalitarian agriculture, their suddenly exploding population had expanded out of the cold and was building high-rise hotels like walls around every shoreline as a private beach. Oh, yeah.

New York, Turtle Island ($64)

As the invader’s progeny of today notice the color of the people they bother to notice at all seeming to be getting darker, we notice the skin of all the people headed for caramellow as our number grows less from babies than from we who get it and become my people as surely as I have. It is never too late to become indigenous in the community of the mind.

We are where we are naturally, so all we need do is be natural where we are by not acting as if we could possibly own wherever that is — it’s all Gaia admiring herself through myriad eyes seeing their various versions like a good yawn and stretch feels to my body.

Have a good day and love your mother.

•

Addendum: As an unsolicited testimony to the effectiveness of the subliminal influence my people may exert upon the collective consciousness that is Gaia, I swear I did not know until just now, 7:53 PM, that today is Columbus Day. I felt a small sense of anxious urgency to finishing it, but that is pretty common when a post is bound to gore a few oxen.

TRAINING WHEELS

There are times during the maturation of individuals when the devices employed to achieve a new level of personal responsibility and understanding must be shed like a chrysalis to continue progress toward an independent life of informed personal choices. Parents must take the training wheels off their kid’s bicycles once the evolving confidence they gave the child becomes cramped in the restricted mobility that kept them safe while learning. This release from the tether of apron strings must continue throughout one’s life lest the adventure of curiosity’s quest grow barnacles moldering in some snug harbor tied up to a dock made from theories harvested inland and milled to lumber now saturated in conviction as a preservative against the natural changes wrought by the same sea of the unknown the mind has ceased to sail.

The movie Devil’s Playground demonstrated an element to the wisdom of the Amish community that pleasantly surprised and further intrigued me. When the children have completed their required education at the age of thirteen, they are cut loose from all civic and religious requirements and support to go out into the great unknown of the entire rest of the planet equipped only with the experience of their life within the enclave shelter of the Amish reality tunnel.

They are essentially kicked out of the daily life without scorn and may retain their family’s room and board, but may return to the fold only when voluntarily declaring their undying devotion to the Amish prophecy. It’s training wheels removed from life so experience may be tested against the wisdom of their early education with no requirement that it even be applied. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a civilization or religion displaying such wisdom, much less such confidence in itself as justified by the eighty-five to ninety percent who return to the community. This after periods of years out here, unless of course, that early training only created Manchurian Candidates of them and they really couldn’t stay gone. I can certainly relate to their revulsion at in-yer-face capitalism’s disposable consumption culture and preference for life with more reverence for nature. It’s determined the choice I’ve made without a community to return to, although mentors in the community of the mind, diamonds in the rough, tough school of hard knocks and mind locks, are lighting my drop out along the way.

This metaphor of training wheels evolving into retardants of the very abilities they honed if retained beyond their benefit, like any good one, seems to apply to any scale of human activity from learning to ride a bike, to a grad student actually graduating to live and directly observe the nature of her/his field interest in an actual field, to an employee learning a skill well enough to open his own business, to the human race evolving beyond its training wheels — western civilization’s updated version of the creation myth: that competitive commodification of the planet and each other is a natural enactment of the survival of the fittest has been taken too far. We must realize the true meaning of Darwin’s term to be the survival of those sane enough to adapt, to fit into the inevitable, infinitely profound wisdom of nature and the intrinsic sanity of symbiosis with the other parts of this planetary body upon whose health we all, of necessity, depend.

Like the quadracyclist, academic and company man took their new skills to the next level of possibilities, the human race can carry those beneficial skills of science and technology along the evolutionary path of its maturation.

LADIES & GENTLEMEN, A TRUE HERO

Representative Alan Grayson

in the first bipartisan action of the year

Maddam Speaker I have words for both Democrats and Republicans tonight. Let's start with the Democrats. We as a party have spent the last six months-- the greatest minds of our party dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote for health care reform. I want to remind us all... Olympia Snowe was not elected president last year. Olympia Snowe has no veto power in the Senate. Olympia Snowe represents a state with one half of one percent of America's population.

What America wants is health care reform. America doesn't care if it gets fifty one votes in the Senate or sixty votes in the Senate, or eighty three votes in the Senate-- in fact America doesn't even care about that. It doesn't care about that at all.

What America cares about is this. There are over one million Americans who go broke every single year trying to pay their health care bill. America cares a lot about that. America cares about the fact that there are forty four thousand seven hundred eighty Americans who die every single year on account of not having health care. That's a hundred and twenty two every day. America sure cares a lot about that.

America cares about the fact that if you have a pre-existing condition even if you have health insurance, it's not covered. America cares about that a lot. America cares about the fact that you can get all the health care you need as long as you don't need any. America cares about that a lot.

But America does not care about procedures, processes, personalities-- America doesn't care about that at all. So we have to remember that as Democrats. We have to remember that's what's at stake here is life and death, enormous amounts of money and people are counting upon us to move ahead. America understands what's good for America.

America cares about health care. America cares about jobs. America cares about education, about energy independence. America does not care about process or politicians, or personalities or anything like that.

And I have a few words for my Republican friends as well. I guess I do have some Republican friends. Let me say this. Last week I held up this report here and I pointed out that in America there's forty four thousand seven hundred eighty nine Americans who die every year according to this Harvard report-- published in a peer reviewed journal-- because they have no health insurance.

That's an extra forty four thousand seven hundred eighty nine Americans who die, whose lives could be saved-- and their response was to ask me for an apology... to ask me for an apology. That's right... to ask me for an apology. Well, I'm telling you this-- I will not apologize. I will not apologize.

I will not apologize for a simple reason. America doesn't care about your feelings. I violated no rules by calling this report to America's attention. I think a lot of people didn't know about it before hand.

But America does care about health care in America and if you're against it, then get out of the way. Just get out of the way. You can lead. You can follow-- or you can get out of the way. And I'm telling you now to get out of the way.

America understands that there's one party in this country that's in favor of health care reform and one party that's against it and they know why.

They understand if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world, the Republicans would blame him for over-population.

They understand that if Barack obama could somehow bring about world peace, they'd blame him for destroying the defense industry*.

In fact they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon.

But that's what America wants. America wants solutions to its problems and that begins with health care. And that's what I'm speaking for tonight.

* Addendum: considering Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning and Limbaugher/Bletch were out cheerleading the rednecks by noon, Grayson appears to be somewhat of a sage for all his convictions.

YODOODLES #4

Nursing - Alex Grey

MOTHER'S MILK?

This dude was dead serious. Usually, when confronted with the latest outlandish denials of the way I have come to theorize nature operates, I sit back and watch with the amusement only a heretic can enjoy. This guy caught me with no snarky defenses up. He’d taken my favorite theme of Gaia, the being that is planet Earth, and made her the infinite source of what he claimed was the most nourishing of her bountiful gifts. Whereas rivers were her blood system cleansing and regenerating itself through the trees’ bronchial function and the respiration of the evaporation/condensation cycle, he proposed yet another metaphor to go along with that.

With a very calm face framing clear unblinking brown eyes that turned to look directly at each of the people on either side of him and the line of people within earshot of his earnest voice across the long table and announced, “Oil is the milk of earth, produced in response to starving humans.”

Boy those oil companies are good.

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ENDURING IMPATIENCE

No matter how well I have learned to live in the spontaneity of here now, no matter how undistracted I might be by the machinations of the civilization that assumes authority and ownership over wherever I am, no matter how far meditating on the sunrise may take me from the concerns of this body, when I return to walkin’ and talkin’ consciousness there is this momentum of expectation, this anticipation that seems to arise whenever curiosity is active.

It is puzzling to me.

My curiosity is completely informed wherever it wanders or is led so long as it doesn’t seem to stumble and stop to formulate questions requiring verbal versions of where I am. Then — all of a sudden time rushes in as the duration of gathering the precise wherewithal from language’s bountiful garden of verbiage to describe the least iota of the profundity of the implications beheld in that instant of inspiration in the most articulate grouping of words or sounds to ears that may yet need years to hear, if they care at all, is weighed against the worth of its effect on the thinking and behavior of those who may possibly get it as my western civilization trained mind struggles to measure the worth of my time in offering to the world samples of my free thinking as if it were a commodity more valuable than my merely living according to such insights for myself. Sheesh.

Considering the trickle of feedback this blog evokes, I suppose the patience I exert in my desire to pierce the walls of the invisible prison of closed minds could imply a masochist in a hurry.

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Icarus - Nicolas Ainley

INSECT DNA SHOWS THROUGH

I was just watching an episode of David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth and was struck by the similarity of some of the flying insects’ instinctual hiving and semi-dormant pupating within a protective chrysalis for the major part of their existence to some human’s urbanizing and semi-conscious procrastination of a full life within the protective confines of a pay-as-you-go civilization for a major part, if not all, of their cubically enclosed life only dreaming of having the wings effete authority assures us come at the end of employment in the form of a carrot or at the end of life as some sort of angelic Icarus’.

CUTTING ALONG THE SEEMS

I love language.

A word is like a thermos bottle; with no moving parts or detectable brain it is able to accommodate either of two opposing tasks without having a more specific purpose than, “Keep this like it is!” No matter whether it contains chilled perfect martinis or the hottest Kenyan Java the thermos faithfully preserves them just so, so long as partakers appreciate them enough to remember to replace the cap.

If the contents happen to remind the imbiber of a distraction from returning the top, they begin to change from their well-preserved conditions to whatever the ambiance happens to be wherever they’re left exposed. You might still call them martinis but, hot as the Sahara, they’ren’t the same thing at all.

My favorite words are universal metaphors that can hold their own within any context: threshold, culture, duality, consciousness … and like a thermos’ contents, the intended context must be appreciated for the flavor of its meaning to be tasted throughout the repast.

The word that inspired the forgoing distraction is “love.” Love is one of those words whose intended meaning is most protectively misinterpreted by the receiver’s past. My purpose in exploring it here is to praise its most profound, primary function as a plowshare cultivating fallow fields drained of the vitality to transcend the habitual complacency of solitary stoicism hanging on to those lives of quiet desperation.

Love is the cultivator across the scale of the concept of culture, from the onset of embryogenesis in a petri dish, pond scum or a womb, to the sympathy required to begin a culture as small as a mating pair and as large as a civilization … or a planetary body. As a cultivator, love surpasses the initial attraction that results in such new entities, which can be anything from sex to usery to security in numbers. It is the will to abandon the relative security of your status quo for the chance you haven’t “seen everything” just yet evoked by another who promises to reveal more if you will. It is recalling the vitality in the fresh air of unbridled curiosity wakened by one's first breath in a world it felt free to explore.

I have recognized this function of love acting as the great cultivator in the aftermath of certain friendly discussions over the years that grew too contentious to bear perceived proximity, resulting in either yelling because we felt too far away or stomping out because we felt too close. The painful disappointment of such heated impasses is like a plowshare tilling along what had seemed to be the seam of the pair’s indivisible unison, exposing the stuff of wishful thinking sugar coating bridges over unbrookable intolerances. Only love can make one willing die for another, or at least plow up the rocks of uncompromising, unconscious, structural assumptions that enclose our mind’s freedom to love another actual being unconditionally — and live with it happily ever after.

DRAWN BRIDGES

Welcome to my castle of truth built of carefully chosen material from the quarry of human language wherein your sojourn may languish in the warmth of acknowledged consciousness at home within its environs. The bridge you crossed from the land of your life’s experience to this well-defined fortress amidst and against its unknowns must be drawn behind you with the strength of your desire for certitude lest the vagaries of the unexplained destroy the freedom we enjoy within our conclusions to their nagging assaults. Our goal here is to create a reality from our faith that the world is or will become what we define it to be once we all agree on the exact and only definition of each of the words chosen to build these walls…

Beware the loop of Moat Mobius over which you must pass…

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Today the wonderful newsletter, A Word A Day (AWAD), combined two aspects of Cinnamon’s multifaceted theme for the current phase of the Tenth Daughter of Memory writing exercise: Trapped. They seemed to unlock a trap I’d laid for myself by requiring my entry to be in a story about Dick and Jane or the three bears so artfully entertaining in themselves that the metaphor for how we spring our own traps in life I intended is barely bold enough to bear detection. The preamble above is such a mordant meditation on the traps language lays when we trigger them with desire for uniformity to replace variety in the evolution of language.

The first aspect was suggested by the word for the day being: mortmain, n. dead hand, which immediately evoked the trap of tradition as a limit on contemporary thought and thereby behavior. Such dogma and orthodoxy ranges from faith that, if each generation over millennia maintains a behavior whose ritual and purpose they understand less and less, their seemingly impossible prophecy will come to pass, to citizens who believe the words, “…all men are created equal,” knowing full well they were written by the rich white founders on the backs of their slaves and simultaneously trust their rich progeny to not be like that, to brokenhearted divorcees because marriage was 'sposed to work. I'll call this aspect the mortmain momentum trap.

The second aspect is characterized by the quote for the day:-

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them.”- Nietzsche.

It represents the neomortmain traditions we've invented for ourselves since being educated to bury such unruly spontaneity as treating each new day as if it was a new day. I'll call it the memory momentum trap within which we paint the vastness of the universe as it exists in the present as a mere sliver squeezed between the bulk of our retained memories and our impatience to be rewarded for bearing them. Acquisitive people cannot spare the time to be inquisitive about the source of the loot and so are trapped by minimizing the present, the only time or place anything exists.

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Unlike the limited ingredients of a Big Mac, I AM one with everything, even the Big Mac. One cannot build a bridge from here now to here now without employing the circular logic that creates the greatest distance between the same point. This is the function of Moat Mobius, by the way. There is no bait but our desire that imagines a separation, designs a bridge then draws it. How artistic. If there is no preexisting gap, bridge is the new wedge.

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“This is not a pipe.” — René Magritte