SLOSH

If my cells didn’t have walls to contain and separate their 60% water content, I would slosh to the detriment of any precision dexterity my clumsiness now enjoys. Humans are cells in the living body of Earth, the civilized of whom are being continually convinced that solidarity of belief in the myth of our stewardly ownership of Earth’s material property granted us by its creator serves us better than we can serve ourselves as separate, self-responsible entities free to behave spontaneously as the variety of our experience and instincts contribute to evolving wisdom.

The notion that “might makes right” guiding imperialism throughout history has been translated to “quantity dictates quality,” by modern society’s attempt to appear more reasonable than those other barbarians when getting one’s way. Thus we have worldwide recruitment, drafting, colonization and occupation of adherents of this religious faith or that political certainty to amass the quantity required to dictate the quality of life for all.

Such aggregations slosh rather than function with any detailed concern for local precision. Breaking up such groups, so large no one knows everyone, into tribal communities of kindred spirits capable of survival alone would be like trading in a waterbed for one with a million innersprings keeping local disruptions local; each lending stability with its independent flexibility rather than the destructive momentum of closed minds in solidarity unable to stop the slosh of obvious corruption.

My favorite wishful thinking is about the day in each person’s life when it occurs to him/her that the billion dollars for wars on other countries and bonuses on wall street are the candy spun by corrupt leveraging, hedging and theft of the essential value in his/her own labor being paid too poorly, spent too dearly, and decides to go to work for themselves, grow their own food, consume no products of exploitive corporations, form internetworks of kindred spirits living off the map and out of the system without a revolution — the paradigm shift of a good idea independently recognized and enacted without disruption of the bad idea — just withdrawal of a hope fiend from the habit of the hope filled. Sisyphus Shrugged.

Blue Planet Men

DAWGRANCH: SPRING '10

After an unusually cold snap for winter in my neck of the woods defrocked several plants that have stayed green year round 'til now, I am glad to post evidence of the resilience of plant life in the greening of the pond, garden and indigenous foliage.

Happy Earth Day!
Hope you didn't drive anywhere to celebrate.

PACHAMAMA

The other day a friend showed me a source of my frustration with the lack of response to my rants about civilization's rape of the planet and the complicity by indifference of consumers fueling such deadly aggression.

"I give you a ride to town and have to listen to your hatred of cars."

Snap. I all too rarely spotlight heroes on the positive side of ending the corporate globalization of capitalism and its commodification of everything. Well this morning Amy Goodman, my clearest information about current events, is in Tiquipaya for the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth hosted by Evo Morales, the original leader of the indigenous population's oust of Bechtel's claim on the water of Bolivia and now its President, who said in yesterday's opening ceremony,

We are here because in Copenhagen the so-called developed countries failed in their obligation to provide substantial commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. We have two paths: either Pachamama or death. We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!

The clip I have embedded is an interview with an attendee who articulates the spirit of the gathering and speaks of an entirely new form of culture whose respect for Pachamama (a Quechua word, not derived from any colonial language or myth), Gaia, Mother Earth is restored to the fore as it has been preserved by the indigenous peoples despite colonization by western civilization. I intuit this gathering may well be that ground swell of good examples required to effect a true paradigm shift for the very reason that it comes from nature, the nature of people, and not the lifeless priorities of corporate states juggling the bottom line. Maybe.

HOUNDED

When I was very young I thought I went on forever. Bumping my head on the crib seemed no different than sticking my finger in my eye; it was all me. The same part of me that offered a breast to suck later shoveled spoonfuls of prechewed food into my sucker. Having learned where my sucker was I became very adept at tasting every part of me I could manage to bring to it.

It was long about then that I became aware of a mischievous part of me that would make various other parts angry with me. I became very uncomfortable because I didn’t know how to make all of me feel good again. The more I seemed to disturb those parts the more they seemed to withdraw from me and I came to see that the misbehaver and those he ruffled were not really me. He became my naughty companion, Drill, and the parts he annoyed turned out to be my parents. The only reason I even recall having what they called my imaginary friend is my parents recalling my bringing him home to share it when I was called to lunch.

Drill was my favorite playmate for adventures in the deep ravine behind our house and might have continued to be if he hadn’t talked me into eating that strange smelling skunk cabbage we found one spring. My stern grandfather who always wore a vest was visiting when I came in with some leaves for everyone to enjoy. He made me drink several glasses of soapy water to make me expel that evil poison and when I puked he said it was the cure working. The combination of the traumatic physical sensation of transiting from groovy found flavor to soapy induced vomit and the mental confusion of such skewed logic from such an authority figure made Drill disappear forever. He didn’t go far, just out of sight.

His cantankerous mischief would show up whenever I began to wonder why the big people like my parents always got their way whether I liked it or not. Like talking me into eating poison, Drill would make me stomp my feet, slam doors, throw things and find a place to hide to get away from such tyranny. Instead of such behavior helping me feel good again it always brought the wrath of the big people down on me all the more. Just like my breath after eating skunk cabbage had offended them they said my bad behavior was due to my “unruly instinks”, so I figured we all knew it must have been Drill making me do it.

For many years Drill hounded me from behind the scenes whenever I would bump into authority imposing corrections to or limits on whatever I happened to be doing. School seemed like a gauntlet determined to rid me of Drill’s disruptive influence with discipline so counterproductive it only got his back up to the degree that I dropped out of high school with several hundred detention hours remaining to be served. Determined to shake my nemesis and become a good boy who could pass any test authority could put me to, I volunteered for membership in the institution I was convinced offered the most effective discipline available in the process of making one a real man.

Four years later, when my enlistment was up and he felt it was safe to come out of hiding, Drill’s persnickety ways prevented my remaining by dangling an opportunity to go to college where people got their own authority to run things. Somewhere during the course of my courses in college and promotions in the lucrative job it landed me I began to understand that Drill was far from being my antagonistic nemesis; he is the instinctual being I had been taught all my life was a nature to be dominated; he is the me as I was born and cannot help but be.

The person Drill hounded throughout his life was the person culture convinced must obediently seek its approval to be valid; the person for whom instincts were counterproductive to the purpose of becoming civilized. My experience of attempting to create and maintain that exemplary personality at the expense of the rich council of my genetic memory has stood me well in recovering my early intuition that my connection to the world goes on forever.

Now feral, it is culture by which I feel hounded, but only when I let it in through the doggy door of the intertubes.

IMAGINE THAT …

There is a land that thrives on the profit from production and celebrates the convenient use of real, verifiable weapons of mass destruction that constantly kill three times more of its own citizens every month than were victimized in the world trade center on 9/11/01 and exploited as justification for an, as yet ongoing, vengeful genocide of over a million residents of two countries not at war with it. In this land twenty-seven thousand individuals kill themselves using these weapons every year, taking fifteen thousand collaterally damaged innocent bystanders with them every year, and knowingly release a chemically poisonous gas as an afterthought killing an additional sixty-three thousand by respiratory failure every year, year after year like clockwork, give or take a couple thousand rounded off and rubbed out statistics. The lands being reduced to rubble in retribution just so happen to be rich in the energy required to maintain the suicide/murder pact agreed to in the land that loves cars. Imagine that…

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My friend Rita began losing her eyesight and muscle strength as she grew older to the point that when she plowed into a curb one day I had to tell her she should stop driving, to which she replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t get hurt, I have this big old Cadillac to protect me!” I’m so fed up with the leaf-blower version of responsibility so rampant within my culture I feel like publishing an angry post about the hundred and eighty pounds of rich, black, fertile leaf mold I just harvested for the spring garden from the pile I raked last fall — with the rake I walked three miles to Callahan’s to purchase — but I can’t. Just thinking about learning to live the alternative to cultural crises calms me down.

CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT BOX

So vast no where or when is without
No being too small to enlighten from within
Signs of life; cycles of blood and breath
Signs of consciousness; hunger and curiosity
Signs of intelligence; finding theme in variety
Signs of love; celebrating theme with variety

Water seeks the lowest places on its way to the center
Turned back at the bottom by hot farts from the core
Boiled off at the surface by hot farts from the sun
Oceans are the dressing in a spherical heat sandwich
Sloshing to and fro keeping up with Sol’s sway as the Earth turns away
Streaming steam into cool shadow’s shaping of it clouds
To rain upon parched land, gathering again and giggling in puddles
Running off in rivulets to creeks and culverts, cascades and canyons
Rills and rivers, chilly spray from spring shower shivers
On water’s way to the center.

Curiosity urges observation to get to the bottom of the question
Foiled by language turned speechless too close to the truth
Crushed by granite authority demanding jackhammer proof
Observation is the white filling in the consciousness cookie
Reflecting on one’s perceptions of seeing and being seen
Dissolves hard edged objects into fuzz-fringed fur balls
Nodes in the energy field of now’s network stretching to connect
With other dimensions and frequencies, traditions and heresies
Crossing other variations melded in meditations
On wisdom’s way to the theme.

Born to seek the longest path of least resistance on our way to dying
The observer we’re born is rewarded for causing smiles
And tamed with shame and blame for causing frowns
Newborn mind is molten mettle minted between god and country
A coin tossed between the certainty of faith and the logic of law
Lands sometimes on a cutting edge exposing where lies lie
Duplicity exposes the mendacity of sanctity and legality
Debilitation of leaning so hard none can walk alone
Shucking the prosthetic environment of culture’s crutch
On our observer’s way to enlightenment.

If civilization is a lemon
Let learning from our mistakes be the lemonade we make of it.

HAWK EYED

The constant screeching of the predator birds

Demonizes their prey with provocative words

Feeding their babies who feast on such fishes

Feast on the faith filled’s most fervent wishes

Feast on sheep drowsing in gullible herds

The constant screeching raises the pitch

Blaming painted enemies for theivery by the rich

Lying about what our troops do

To an “enemy” just like you

Keeping a news fed nation’s trigger finger on itch

I see it on the street when e’er I go to town

Hawk eyes glaring from beneath many a frumious frown

At life long fellow neighbors

Who dtd them no harms or favors

But always wore that terrorist’s gown

The white wash of what just leaked

From the ass of the eagle beaked

Condemns them all, demands recall

From innocent nations held in thrall

By corporate nations until oil peaked

BEGUILED BY NIGHT

This is part of a larger video about the pond, but it's here because I've always been beguiled by night

Fascinated by sunrise, I sit my seat in the garden shed well before false dawn creeps across the land where I live. As Earth rotates Priest and I inexorably east, the materiality of the atmosphere’s rare air high enough to see over the now silhouetted shadows catches glimpses of the radiant energy source and transmits them down to us as a gradual approach to full daylight.

Well after it is bright enough for me to write these words, Sol himself appears in piercing shafts of light, unabsorbed by the hungry leaves that recently grace the filigree of winter’s black branches with clothing of spring foliage, to strike our eyes with shocking directness despite the gentle announcement of its coming. These rays of pure white energy from that fiery orange ball are parsed into the daily spectacle of their sparkling spectrum as they strike the shiny slime trails of slugs’ overnight devouring the remnant meal of chicken feed and the spherical Pink Floyd prisms of dewdrops condensed upon the leaves of the garden vegetables.

Bemused by noon hour when shadows are their shortest, my flute and I respond to the spontaneous symphony of nature’s voices in a harmony unrehearsed, though variations of nature's theme are repeated every day. In a response learned in early chickhood, my fowl family returns from scattered scratch, scratch, peck, pecking for the resurging burgeon of insect life to be found over their eight acre hunting grounds, to enjoy the tattered tortilla’s I strew for their midday snack and a headcount by the mother hen I've become.

Intrigued by dusk, my seat in the shed transports me into the turbulence formed by the heated air of the day being cooled and driven upward by the cooler darkness of earth’s shadow overtaking us at the insensible pace of a thousand miles an hour as the light wanes as it had waxed in the morning. As if by precision meters, the girls return at a time varying with the length of day to roost for darkness’ duration.

Beguiled by night, my imagination is unleashed to create realities of invisibility to posit materiality behind the reflections of man’s puny lights off of beings found during the day by their shadows. Toads gather in the pond for bufo orgy time, filling our ears with roars belying their tiny size as they procreate polliwogs in a plethora of ova contained in ribbons wrapped around the stems of papyrus recovering from recent frostbite depletion them selves. The scent of a skunk, approaching with a curiosity equally beguiled by night, grows from my nostalgic fondness for its freshness to an odor threatening my gag reflex and fades again as she passes on. Priest is sensed more than seen as his paler shade of dark brushes my shins and hops into my lap for the umpteenth mutual appreciation moment of the day.