Junkie State of Mindlessness

I've noticed that all the lessons anyone claims to have learned from hurricane Sandy were about needs to reinforce and improve infrastructure against obviously worsening, hostile climate extremes now admitted to be due to global warming, with no mention of how it is just such attempts to isolate ourselves so antagonistically from nature that pollute and heat the planet upon whose health we all depend.  Seems to be an unwillingness to hold our own, individual addictions to artificial convenience responsible for our natural, karmic discomfort at the threat of having withdrawals that foster the destructive attitude of "going along to get along". Let's get them there gas guzzlin' generators and cars fueled up and running as soon as possible.

Authenticity

The only authority I respect lies within self-actualized beings representing themselves genuinely rather than through manipulative illusion or honorary delegation.

For many years I regarded paintings of dogs playing poker as cartoonish silliness until I caught on to a deeper humor ranking among the greatest surrealism of all time; there’s not one bone in the body of a dog that can bluff! Dogs are the epitome of self-actualized beings within the domestic scene. Every being in what we consider natural wilderness is authentic.

Such examples are fewer and further between domesticated human beings not already culled and locked away in burgeoning jails and mental institutions. In four years of college I had only one teacher whose authority I recognized because he taught Strength of Materials wearing the dusty clothes he wore while walking a cantilevered I-beam on a construction job he was working on just before class. He brought interest in tension and compression to life more by his body language than the desiccated text ever could.

Some claim acquired authority based on books they’ve read, degrees they've been awarded, marks they’ve made, gods they've worshipped, clubs they’ve joined, elections they’ve won, money they’ve got or plans they’ve hatched for our future. Western civilization is based on such claimers successfully awing the rest of us. Those remaining outside this bond of gullibility exude the authenticity that escapes those testimonies to elsewhere by genuinely representing themselves; self-actualizing before one’s very eyes without needing to claim anything.

Note: This is a republishing of my latest post on the new blog, "…kindness of strangers," in a blatant attempt to get old readers to follow this link back to the future of this page.

BROTHER DAVE, JUSTIN WILSON AND ME

A little boy walking down a dirt road dragging a chain encounters a cigar-smoking, Cadillac-diving, gold-toothed fat-man who growls, “Where’s the post office, boy?”

The little boy says, “I can’t understand you, Sir, because your car radio is making a noise too loud to hear your words.

The fat man mutes the radio and replies incredulously, “This song just won the Grammy’s for Theo, what kind of hick are you?”

The little boy says, “My Grammy’s back at the house and she wouldn’t call that a song, much less music.”

With the hurt tone of one insulted, fat-man whines, “I don’t suppose an atheoist like you would know where the court house is?”

Little-boy answers, “Never heard of the dude and don’t know where the court house is.”

Fat-man says, “You probably don’t know where the highway out of this God-forsaken place is either — and why you pulling that god-damned chain anyway?”

Little boy looks fat-man straight in the eye and says, “Did you ever try and push one of these things? … besides, I’m not the one who’s lost.”

NATURE IS NOT A MACHINE

I’ve become quite divorced from the printed word since I moved to the woods, what with the internet, to keep me appraised of the alert level back in the intensive care units commonly referred to as cities, and Netflix, to show me the latest paintings rendering the ongoing saga on the cave walls. I’ve even backed away from the written word, sparsely maintaining this blog and barely reading others out of a sense of futility in dealing with western civilization’s mechanization of nature.

I mention this hiatus to emphasize the inertia being overcome by my growing fascination with a book I’ve been circling since it was published: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. His investigation, into the evolution of human eating habits, and mine, into the evolution of human culture from symbiotic hunter-gatherers to fast food fed corporate nations exploiting citizens like so many feed lot cattle, find the same truth at every turn.

I was struck by the metaphor for the corporatization of all phases of daily life Pollan creates with this eloquent indictment of agribusiness’s expedient substitution of synthetic chemicals for nature’s time evolved cycle of soil:

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As (Sir Albert) Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake all we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation for a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to the plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to pesticides to fix his broken machine.

When I first read the foregoing I entertained an overlapping image of public schools’ expediently injecting the establishment’s code of behavior into each crop of children whose obedience leaves no time for independent symbiotic experience of the nature they are being systematically taught to impatiently exploit. Once the children become educated cogs in the machinery of western civilization, one step follows another, so that when the synthetic laws containing them make them rage against their fellow man and more vulnerable to psychotic meltdown, the establishment turns to prisons, insane asylums and the death penalty to fix its broken machine.

The living universe is too complex to be reduced to any lesser metaphor without its quality giving way to simple quantity; a good story giving way to dogmatic, evangelistic truth whose deniers become punishable. Nature’s one ball of wax.

… OF A MORNING

Chickens fed hen scratch and layer crumbles, dogs treated with biscuits and a petting of their night dew dampened coats, coffee brewed, joint rolled — sitting outside for sunrise with Hetty and Monty at my feet and Priest in my lap. Overcast, a silence only moist air can bring, damp notebook pages to write this on. No birds, no sun, no shadows in the diffused light of reflected dawn. Congestion, settled deep during overnight shallow sleep breathing, is tickled into begging to be expelled by the catalyst ganjava breakfast is to respiration of bodily fluids and inspiration of mental acrobatics like this…

•

Civilization is based on the premise that nature is under mankind’s stewardship as a gift from a creator of it all.

Tipi Fini

•

TO NATURE, CIVILIZED MAN IS THE 1%

•

There are no injustices within Western Civilization for which the corporate greed of the military-industrial complex is held responsible that are not exponentially more atrocious when considering the effect of Western Civilization on the health of the nature within which it exists to exploit and the sanity of the contributing individual human exploiters.

The blight that ghost towns like Detroit appears to be is actually the process of each area’s escape from man’s stewarded gulag as it returns to the nature within which it has long been forbidden to thrive. 

FULL CYCLE

The theory that the entire evolution of life on earth to the present is reenacted by all beings during their gestation from the first cell division after conception to the emergence of their modern form from womb or shell I’ve heard bandied about in many contexts. I have to admit such comparisons are quite plausible throughout the wide variety and scale of life forms covering the surface of this being of which we are all cells, Gaia, Pachamama, Mother Earth.

Like any theory that keeps kicking around in my ponderings it has given rise to tangential extensions into nearly as many contexts. The earliest of which concerns the idea that, given that extremely abbreviated experience of earthly evolution to the present in gestation, the period of a modern human’s life from the first perception of sunlight to the last appears to be a reenactment of the continuing social evolution of mankind from the first opposable thumbs to finding fulfillment living out their lives in cubic, air-conditioned isolation chambers viewing the natural world from which they arose as an enemy to be conquered and exploited by pushing buttons with stubby little fingers to make that now alien, civilized world better, more heedlessness of the harm done to the planetary health none can survive without.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Lest I get carried away into my old crackpot notions and forget the latest idea that made me abandon my sunrise vigil and drove my stubby little fingers here to the keyboard once more; it occurs to me that, having come to an understanding of the paragraph above, I have been slowly but surely returning to the preverbal existence of early man by my age alone. Over years of abuse, from screaming jet engines to southern sheriff’s saps, my ears now seem only to hear vowels and tunes, with consonants and lyrics quite indistinguishable. My eyes seem only to see landscapes and geometric shapes in the foreground, with leaves and letters on those shapes quite indistinguishable. I may not pick out your train of words, but through the dance of your body English and tune of your voice I can follow your train of thought as a metaphor with interchangeable variables. I may not be able to see your facial features at a hundred yards, but if I know you, I will recognize your walk and mood.

When I couldn’t read the blackboard from the back of the 6^th grade classroom my vision was suddenly made more particularly articulate by being fit for glasses. I slowly began to rely on the written signs all around me and ignore the reality going on all around them. The authority of the written word, from “Keep off the Grass” to “Top Secret”, became sacrosanct; immune to any experience in the contrary. I became an avid reader in search of ethical heroes and scientific discoveries to challenge and/or enlarge my own heroic theories and burgeoning desire for the reward of fame and fortune in those books or imagined of their authors.

When I moved out of the city to the Dawgranch, I stopped wearing my glasses because there seems to be nothing so specific needing to be seen as is found in the traffic of speeding cars and urgent signs of the city. At the pace of nature everything is as articulate as their proximity requires my attention without fear of damage or delay. The once hawkeyed sharp particulars in the distance have returned to being part of the natural landscape I‘d learned to ignore.

When the cubical dwellers visit me I know when to celebrate, sympathize with or object to anything they say by how they dance and sing, no matter what the song and dance may be about.

HOW HIGH THE SKY?

Do my cells Know what I make of them? 

Each one painting its canvas, a pixel in the hologram I call existence.

 Do they know their lives are my sensations?

Brain meet Nebula, or is it the other way round

The aches and ecstasies passing through now like weather

inspire my will to look beyond my cells with an awareness,

Double Helix Nebula at the heart of the Milky Way

a being of which I have always been a cell

whose health suffers and celebrates as do I —

in response to its cells, 

we Earthlings, 

we Solarians, 

we Milky Wayans …

A DAY

Everyone was flirting with everyone without anyone coupling — so overwhelming was the joy of feeling kinship to a body greater than the sum of it’s parts … the rooster on the land to the east pierced the marbleized reality of the dream with a predawn declaration of existence. Without stirring his dormant frame he chased down tendrils of imagination gone wandering unfettered by sensory guidance into fantasies soon forgotten for their very novelty and rectified them with his memory of where he’d fallen asleep.

The cool April breeze through the open window by his pillow chilled the light perspiration on his body as he kicked off the sleeping bag and swung his feet over the side of the bed in search of his sandals.

Orienting himself upon standing, he foresaw his trip to the toilet to pee and then to the chicken feed bin to scoop out the morning’s ration for his brood as surely as the existence of those locations … no plan from the past or prediction of the future, but acquiescence to the inevitability of the constantly ever-changing present.

As he sat in the mist dampened lawn chair awaiting their arrival, he could hear the stir of the hens’ awakening and fussing over their order of exit from the coop. As they had since they were chicks, Dax came out first followed by Shiva. By the time he got the scratch and crumble spread all five of the Aurucana hens were enjoying the initial pecks of their daylong predation of bug life within the fence lines, interrupted only by returning to the coop to lay large pastel green eggs.

As they followed their interests elsewhere they were replaced by the indigenous birdlife dropping from the sheltering canopy of freshly leaved limbs. There were grackles and tits and waxwings and a variety of doves from the pigeon-sized white wings to the tiny turtledoves all dining so respectfully that the density of their population couldn’t be distributed more evenly over the area of the food grains by mathematical calculation. Nor could a stopwatch split the instant a silent signal sends them flying uproariously back into the limbs.

The distant tree line lowered itself to reveal the blazing source of his planet’s energy with a power that forced his arm up to shield his eyes against its glare. The garden at his feet was in stark dark green silhouette enhanced by the glistening whiskers outlining backlit stems and leaves, gleaming refractions through dewdrops and sparkling reflections off the shiny surface of the ripening fruits. The foliage and homes around the clearing brightened with occasional sweeps of the spotlight reflection of the low sun off the three spinning cds he’d hung from twine to frighten birds from ripe fruit. He could tell how many hours from noon it was by how far the sweep of the spots of were on the ground from the center above which they spun in the breeze — as if someone needed to know the time out here.

He reflected that this was the most promising spring garden in the seven year history of his conscious responsibility for completing his own food chain by organically growing and harvesting both his own sustenance and its sustenance, compost. He’d begun that journey over half his life ago when, at the age of thirty-four, he’d realized he’d never fed himself beyond learning to use a fork to scoop in food prepared by a related woman or mess hall and campus grill cooks. It had been a revelation that might never have occurred to him had his wife kept on cooking for him. Sadder, but wiser, he thanked her for leaving.

In his self-styled brand of perversity, he considered his seat in the garden shed his gym, where he got in condition to keep pace with nature, an exercise sorely neglected before he began realizing everything he’d been taught was wrong. He was prone to sitting and gazing at the daily doings of critters, plants and clouds with a pleasure enough to balance the frustrated boredom behind a world full of eyes gazing longingly out of classroom and office cubicle windows.

When the muse beckoned, he played his bamboo flute with the symbol for Om etched in Sanskrit just below the mouthpiece, reminding him to seek the resonance he felt throughout his entire body when intoning the syllable with his voice. On occasion, his untrained fingers danced across their holes with serendipitous, spontaneous syncopation to tunes neither the flute or he had ever heard with such delight as to take away the wind for the next note leaving him with an ethereal buzz and Cheshire grin for hours after.

The email bell on his iMac notified him of the client work that maintains his slowly accumulating bank account toward the day when he can erect his own portable home off the entire grid, save the intertubes. This peephole back to the greatest show on earth also kept him apprised of what he saw to be the weight of western civilization’s commodification of the entire planet straining the limb of human existence as it walks away from the trunk of natural planetary evolution. Becoming an example of the alternative, symbiotic with the nature of the planet way to live is his raison d’etre.

He spent several hours refining details of his design for a twelve sided, sixteen-foot diameter, plywood tipi to ensure low cost (common materials) and ready portability (twenty minutes from pickup bed to erect either way). He’d outfitted his porch with woodworking tools to insure the precision cuts required of efficient multipurpose structure parts. He could see erecting it on the other side of his garden in the summer and moving in by fall.

He purchased a movie from iTunes called Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton because he wondered how this talented young actor would channel Walt Whitman, his favorite poet. Much to his delighted disappointment, the grass of the title was Cannabis Indicus and Ed Norton was twin brothers channeling both halves of his own life at the same time.

With a grin on his face and adventure in his heart he returned to his dream out in the full moon-lit hammock, knowing he’s have to get in the sleeping bag along about three in the morning when the temperature dropped and chased him inside.

WHO AM I?

'




Am I the imaginer of these thoughts expressed by the master of the minions flexing their laryngeal caverns to shape intelligent howls of the exhausted wind rushing for refreshing out there as meaningful bumps in the air?

Am I the imaginer of intelligent meaning to such vibrations as impinge upon and are reported by the sensate cilia of separate surface cells containing me and the beating of two drums deep in their separate caverns of my ears?

Am I the imaginer of my self as a biologically symbiotic body of cells that serves as one of myriad portals through which the infinite curiosity of the living universe observes and ponders itself?

As I do me.

Imagine that.

Is my name Mobius?

IN THEIR OWN WORDS!!!

Well, well, well. Here it is folks. In their own words, the Xians interpreting their god to prefer people over the planet he supposedly created for them to be stewards of. I have made reference to the corruption the title of steward undergoes when manipulated by corporate commodification, but this video says it all.



Did you catch the twist they spin?

Humans, along with all other living beings that arose from the ongoing life of Pachamama, the earth mother, depend on a symbiotic relationship to the health of the planet that is our home and upon whom our own health depends as a simple fact of nature.

Being so exceptionally special in the eyes of the creator they imagine runs the show and who they believe gave them earth to do with as they please, this cult of reality deniers would have the entirety of nature dry up and blow away because their heavenly father wouldn't let anything bad happen to them, His Special children. Can you see that what they are saying was choreographed and scripted by corporate America to pave the way to further rape mother earth for the love she always gives willingly? They try to deflect this by saying that the threat is to Xianity not to their bank accounts. Anything as vulnerable to new ideas as they claim their belief system is only points out the total irrationality of their claims requiring the wishful thinking of staggering leaps of blind faith.

This may be my last post on religion. At least until some group of kooks out does this bunch.

WHO ARE YOU? Part II

In response to the curiosity expressed in her comment on the previous post, this post is for my maverick Grand-niece Racheal Kellie Cooley, the only of my kinfolk other than L'ilwave to respond to this blog. 

"Faith is being sure of what we hope for 

and certain of what we do not see."

I couldn’t agree more with the quote, it describes exactly what I take each of those words to mean and the meaning of their being next to one another as they are arranged.

But I sense there’s a world of difference between what you feel about those words and how I read them. The fulcrum of faith in each phrase: “sure of” and “certain of”, are like tombstones marking the death of curiosity, just like the quote several posts back about, “children begin school as question marks and graduate as periods”.

Using “question mark” for newborns is as close to spirituality as I ever get when I examine my own motivations, the rest is just logical metaphors as a way of making sense of all my curiosity has revealed to me for myself. When I say we are all eyes on the same potato, the potato is as close as I get to describing what I hear others refer to as god.

It all begins with the definition of THE universe as being all there is. Imagining an intelligent being made of all there is leads me to realize it has nothing to observe but itself — talk about self-aware! But who is the universe gonna ask, you might ask? What do I ask when I want to know what’s going on? My primary source of information is the perception of my individual cells keeping data about the physical world hologram I call my mind updated every instant. I can ask the world what’s going on if I want the opinion of others to supplement my perceptions, but by the time they begin to answer they are no longer talking about what’s going on, but what is no longer going on, and since now is the only time existence ever occurs it takes all my attention to my perceptions just to keep up observing reality.

My metaphor is that the entire universe is alive and every part of it is reporting what it sees just as my every cell reports to me, I pass it on to the silent observer I know sees through my eyes, the potato, god.

There’s a whole other part of my cosmology about scale & mobius loops and the evaporation cycle of ideas, but I want to get back to my view of faith, hope, and certainty just to narrow a conversation about the universe down to the unarguable truth that each religion in history has claimed it alone possesses access to (all lebentybillion of ‘em).

In my cosmology, certainty is like what civilization does to our awareness of nature. It puts on shades, sticks in earplugs, turns up the air conditioner, steps on the gas and in every way possible makes the natural occurrences of the day helpless to update the mind of the hopefully, faithfully certain that certainty lets us be sure that whatever we want we’ll get no matter what shitstorms such hopeful certainty plows up in the natural world it contradicts at every turn.

The reason peace on earth exist at all is that from the core of every being the observer looks out, curious about itself. Although the world it observes is the immensity of itself it has become so absorbed in the observing, it must be reminded that the world is not out there by pairs of pairs of eyes recognizing who it is that’s looking out of both — cosmic love and the reason we are conscious of and curious about existence, if there must be a reason.

Yeah, I don’t have a certain bone in my body but I have accumulated enough experience to understand I have been up to any now in which I find myself without steeling myself against contradiction, in fact I welcome it. New varieties of contradiction only tend to broaden my cosmological theory. I don’t consider religion to be a part of or a contradiction to my theory because it is based on the very non-existence of wishful thinking that requires faith in the unarguable certainty “about what we do not know” for hopeful wannbes to declare the only permissible truth is theirs, end of story, period. Signed, sealed, delivered zombie ant.

That’s why I loved your exchange recognizing how mankind could be as our heavenly father intended, curious about the world they still consider to be themselves and are not yet aware of the otherness civilization makes of nature.

Nature reminds civilization of the stage upon which it plays at being God.

THIRD (IM)PERSON NATION

Being the being we were born to be

takes a far back seat to 

doing the being for others to see.  

The imbalance in the dynamic of nature’s dual cycle engine: eat or be eaten, is the result of having no awareness of the observer within who, from the first opening of each newborn’s eyes, silently watches civilization enacting a mythical script with antagonism towards the natural stage upon which it plays.

All beings display self-awareness by remaining alive. Remaining alive accumulates experience with kinds of food and kinds of predators. The consciousness of a being must make sense of this experience to supplement genetic memory with updates on the present to prolong its life. Making sense of it all could be seen as each being‘s personal narrative, the efficacy of which is attested to by its length.

Unlike their fellow beings, humans have managed to inject a mythical story into the experience of its progeny that transforms the organic eat/eaten dynamic into a mechanistic pass/fail exam with no predators but one’s betters. Being given no credit for the innate intelligence of the observer much less time to become aware of and develop natural curiosities and capabilities as even human parents allow in the wild, the modern human infant is drafted into becoming a civilized adult upon its first inappropriate defecation, having eaten its first meal, the first step in its journey of isolation from nature as it occurs within and without.

When rewards for obedience to others’ nonsense have greater value than remembering it is a game we have a choice in playing, we are civilized; habituated to the game of conquering nature — one we cannot win. That we cannot win is being shouted from minarets and state houses by outraged throngs of people, from poisoned seas and polluted air by the planet. We must cease our antagonistic story of human superiority and become more symbiotic with the body from which we arose lest she shed us, like the diseased narrative we carry by telling our children how we’re supposed to live.

Having western civilization’s myth piped in from every experience involving people since I was born, it seems a bit arrogant to me that I can claim to now see through it to the way things are, to see what the myth is about after its wishful thinking and “facts” are gone. Either I fell for it, or my way was paved so long as I chose to go along and fill in the proper blanks, because I found myself on my own for the first time in an earnest, trouble-free, thirty-four year life; no one left to fail or be failed by. The combination of new experiences and perspectives I’ve had off the leash since make me unfit for leashes evermore.

In the mechanics of story telling there is the trilogy of first; (I), second; (you) and third; (him) person narrative. In the mechanics of Freudian psychology there is the trilogy of id (instinct), ego (actor) and super ego (conscience). Both fields deal with strictly human interaction because nature reads no books or enacts no moral purpose for a conscience to attend. But they are useful to demonstrate the manipulation of human instincts wrought by adherence to the myth by one’s own personal story.

Let’s let “I” be the first person narrative of the “id”: the point of view from the primal observer, the instinctual, genetic memory with which each being is equipped at birth. Then we can let “you” be the second person narrative of the “ego”: the point of view of the seen, being an observable object out there in the mix of nature and society. And lastly, we might let “him” be the third person narrative of the “super ego” judging the effectiveness of the ego’s act in attaining from others it’s personal purpose. Notice the hierarchy of transition from natural, as born ability to live in nature alone at one end to purposeful dedication to the authority of others in the mold of the myth at the other end.

In nature the id serves as a perfect guide to the ego's actions putting it in the way of food and out of the path of predators to attain the longer, harmonious life desired by the super ego. In civilization the id is a dissident silenced by the ego lest it spoil the performance of licking the boots of whoever plays the super ego to be pleased in its story.

Currying approval of the public has such a priority over knowing oneself in the reality of nature that, for many, solitude seems a death trap and in nature, filling the trap with tigers. In these days of wall-to-wall communication solitude must be sought out by painstakingly turning off every device in the house, not that there are that many who would. In nature, approval amounts to not being eaten and having what we eat nourish us. Among men, gaining approval and, ideally, authority, motivates every activity indulged beyond the daily bread — and it’s an arbitrary game — in which eating alone is pitied and not playing makes one the enemy.

Even the games played within civilization reflect its myth of overarching administration by gods or governments and the possibility of sainthood, president or celebrity for the most dedicated to making their version mean something to the most people, as if truth could be created by man, just as he attributes such abilities to gods and their books. Like gods, the pantheon of mini-stars of excruciatingly varied forms of vicarious entertainment have idolizers in virtually every smelly locker room, reeking pit stop, perfumed crotch pit, Oscar walk, radio talk, podium and pulpit — thereby sustainting their reason for living around betting on what happens next on their version of the soaps because it has more meaning than what they do between shows; their own existence.

THINK TANK SANK SUNK

This is an explanation of the simple fact that 

children enter public education as question marks (?)

and graduate as periods (•):

SHUN THE HAND

Storm against

The bars and stars

You pledged allegiance to

In the molding of your schooling

You are not

Fodder for the warring steel

If you can grow your own next meal

The unfolding of your schooling

Powerless

Against the razor steel

Peeling whiskers from your chin revealing

That Windsor tether to your schooling

Rise up

Dilate the cage of your crumpled form

When you face the truth you’ve long ignored

Since the scolding of your schooling

You are

The key to the cage

Not in rage but the will to disengage

From the emboldening of your schooling

Free

To walk away from your servers

Costing more than that tie could ever earn

No longer tethered to your schooling

This is what my asylum echoed while I was reading Bite the Hand, by my friend Pisces Iscariot at the Far Queue. We're saying the same thing from our own unique reality tunnel. Vive l'varietie

… from the asylum of my natural mind

Commenting on the end of Countdown a friend lamented, “I don’t trust CNN these days.”

I couldn’t help but reply, “Trust?”

“Any of them?”

“These days?”

“Read Peoples History of the United States, check out Democracy Now! But don't lay trust on anyone but yourself, and don't do anything until you can.

Sorry Steve, those weren't really orders from me to you, just a brain fart about how trusting externals is the source of all misery and the company it keeps. It was the things that helped me realize why love is a source of pain when gratitude for feeling it at all is not enough reward and requital is demanded, like a whore taking payment — burdening loved ones with trust breaks better bonds.

I’ll go blog now.”

I guess I get a bit worked up around words like trust, faith, hope, prayer, wishes because I have seen through Maya’s veil to behold her natural beauty and realize it was all a vale of tears over such illusions woven so finely the world appears against us when we don’t get our way, as if it’s supposed to care because we wish it. The veil covers up the beauty of the present with the clothing of the past tailored to ellicit obedience from the future. What a fine tuned grinder the innocence of now is put through to accomplish tomorrow’s menu. We never see life as it is as we focus on the parts that fit our purpose and get blindsided by hopes become wishes become faith become trust become assumption become expectation become fact until — wham, a contradiction become powerful on the momentum of a life of denial.

All these ephemeral illusions to the power of just wanting something, from a dolly to a place in heaven when one’s done with making Hell of Eden, weave the world within which civilization believes nature is chaos to be conquered and put to work. Being warm and dry with food on the table is never enough for people believing in gods who create worlds by merely willing it so.

I am learning to love life more by freeing it from the fragmenting duality of expectation and let the story unfold as it will, despite my running narrative. I’ve learned the truth about trust is that the external object of our faith is not the determiner of our satisfaction, but the scapegoat for our own judgment of how reality can be made to work for us as opposed to learning how it behaves with or without us to better work with it.

The confusion introduced by my education delayed a realization of how the idea that existence has a master plan, a preexisting purpose, limits the comprehension of the universe and behavior by a far larger population than merely the creationists who swear by it, as mankind destroys the only specimen we’ll ever have on the assumption of knowing why it exists before having a clue as to how it exists. Getting clues from purposeless observation seems to lead me into endless fascination. Purpose observes through a pinhole in a cell wall gleaning anything that might be construed to be fact in the ongoing fairytale of mankind’s godlike “conquering” of nature.

… NOT MY OX, YOU DON'T …

There are fixes … and there are cures. 

The wretched excesses of our source of wealth being a growth industry became an undeniable blight on the American dream when the cheap litter of the disposable economy settled like leaves in suburban trees and lawns and awoke comfy family’s sense of outrage enough to become a national disgrace. There was enough momentum; had we wanted to cure the problem by clamping down on products and packages to either be biodegradable or recycled through the manufacturers, we might have done so. Here fifty years later it has become apparent we should have done more than plant a tree, a shrub and a bush and don “Don’t Mess with Texas” bumper stickers.

What did happen? Eeewww, get it out of sight. The dumpster and bulldozer industry flourished and the ugly truth of our disregard for Gaia was swept under patches grafted over her skin or injected into her circulation system at sea ——anything to get and keep it out of sight. That was the fix.

I have been aware of most such faux fixes intended to keep down awareness of inherent skullduggery ever since, from the purpose of the NSA, the Warren and  the 9/11 Commissions to the excuses of the oil industry swallowed whole cloth by petroholic nations.

What prompted this post was an interview Rachel Maddow had with Paul Rieckhoff about the New GI bill and the influence his veteran’s group IAVA has had in its passage. In speaking of plans for next year, he mentioned addressing the alarming suicide rate of veterans. Wham, it hit me again.

Suicidal or otherwise mentally incapacitated war trauma victims are the canaries in a mine who are being treated as aberrations rather than the tip of an iceberg just so the mining industry can go on. Why would veterans want to cure the cause of the suicides’ problem, when they and so many that have gone before them have all been so thoroughly, obediently invested in its perpetuation. Our wars, food industry and gluttonous litter are to be kept out of the sight of polite society lest we glimpse the Ugly American.

I thank “God” for requiring the kind of faith that believes such cosmetics are both a necessary and an adequate cover — “He” makes them so obvious to we of little or none.

Often, what must be cured must have a fix on to survive.


The fix for Wikileaks' heroic exposure of national disgrace is to band together to criminalize the people's hero and perpetuate what he sought to cure.

NATURE IS NOT VICARIOUS

Civilization morphs human beings into human doings. This morphology has advanced to the stage where, to experience the feeling of “just being” in our daily lives requires the doing of, not only getting chores out of the way to make room for it, but scheduling the time merely to do the sitting and observing the world from such a relatively inactive proximity to being … with purpose.

Squeezed as our leisure is between the purposeful doings of maintaining and advancing ourselves within civilization, it cannot be considered a waste of time. An overwhelming portion of human doings are devoted to providing the world's doings to be watched during the leisure allotment. An overwhelming portion of human leisuring is spent observing these artificial doings rather than first hand accounts of natural existence. It makes them feel relatively good to not think about what they do otherwise but not enough to quit doing it for good. The victorious, vicarious fan switches off TV and schlubbs back to a life of quiet desperation.

Two separate human doings have crossed paths in my attention in such a way that it evoked this post. One is the demonstrations of solidarity displayed by both fans of “350” and protesters of the BP oil spill. The other is an attempt to get all human faces off facebook to protest child abuse. When I noticed the second doing it hit me … some actually believe nature is as vicarious as they are if they think demonstrations affect the nature of the environment or the nature of the humans against whom they rail.

No matter how many people participate, no matter from how far out in space it can be seen, not one particle of pollution per million or one bad parent per 7 billion was removed from the natural environment by flying and driving to however many solidarity demonstrations we may ever dream up or childhood cartoon animals we post as our portrait. Exercising individual integrity and responsibility for the smallest footprint by being symbiotic with Gaia is the only doing that matters.

I am reminded of times when a show of hands is requested of an audience in response to questions of morality from the podium are posed. 

SEEDED

The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul.

 -Khalil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

I am an event, part of an eternally changing instant. I trace patterns of similarity in events and feel the comfort of snuggling into labeling such likenesses with words used by some of the events similar to me. I am curious about my relationship to other events and ours to the ever changing here now of the present.

I perceive that the pattern of events events labeled human, by learning words to define similarities out of the variety of the whole, tend to become habitually dependent on the relatively inertial stability of confining curiosity to traditional labels as some form of impeccable logic by infallible authority in the tautological world of language.

I perceive that the most devoted to precision in this word world can no longer think without words or hear the less articulate. With language as prime stimulus for response these events most resemble sound activated voice recorders, silent unless spoken to or button pushed. Much like editors, their worldview is a collage of clippings of reports of hearsay from authorities outstanding in their field. Ideas no longer arise from the preverbal depths of their genetic memory. They can no longer sit still, alone, away from all signs of man’s existence without it being a test of endurance until they can find events they know the name of or someone to listen once more. Instinct and intuition have been demonized as the work of Satan, or worse, anarchy.

Without words, such hopeless addicts might never be led back out of their invisible prison by inspirational crumbs left by earlier departures in sublime poetry, song and tale about their very struggle to return to the clarity of our predefined nature, that focal point from which all perceptions, interpretations, patterns and words, emerge and remerge — precisely, here now.

It's the path I'm on…

FOUND

“… children guessed, but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew”.
——e. e. cummings

This morning my friend, Nikki, posted just the right thought to trigger my return to this blog after a month of Scrooge-like stinginess in expressing the wealth of inspiration I’ve experienced.

The people and property adjacent to my stomping grounds within the Dawgranch have changed, and with these changes a more communal atmosphere seems to be brewing among folks who had seemed to be content minding their own business over the six years I’ve thrived here.

I had to comment on Nikki’s post, …”adulthood is a phase of forgetfulness, enhancing our appreciation of nature when we re-emerge into children’s guesses with such wisdom.”

Fences were torn down, abandoned gardens were weeded, the sounds of hammers’ banging home nails on Homer’s recording studio remodel of Donna’s bedroom and back porch rang out in random overlay of the bird song and dog bark spontaneous symphony of nature, all the dogs and cats and chickens and people mixing like never before. My inner child sees the realization of utopian dreams more possible in the offing than any time since the games I’d played with other pre-school children living along the deep, verdant ravine we made our world - away from adults and world war two. We’re back to gentle guessing, with the acquired wisdom of experiencing the fallacy in the certainty required to make of this same nature a soulless commodity for the machine that shaped us to be eager cogs from the first day of public education.

Who Knows? Time will tell and there’s more of that than anyone here seems to need to know what to do with. Maybe (RIP RAW).

WHO ARE YOU?

There seems to be two basic categories of attitude about one’s life held by my fellow humans. We are either organs integral to the living organism of the planet from which we arose and without whose health we wouldn’t exist or voracious tenants in a supermarket shopping carte blanche as granted us by the big spooky propiator in the sky.

The undeniable reality of our arising from and decaying back to the earth defines and qualifies our belonging here as earthlings. Belonging to the obviously artificial creations of civilization, nation, religion, corporation, et al ad nauseum has obscured the undeniable truth of our primarily being cells of Gaia, exceptional only to ourselves and the creatures we’ve domesticated to think like we do.

I experienced this difference in full force when I dropped out of my yuppie career with IBM and left their compound to integrate into the beautiful village of ’72 Austin. It was like a military base’s relationship with the townies, temporary and disinterested, another stop along the way. We as members of wastern civilization have a industrial/military complex about our existence on earth resulting in its commodification and destruction.

The global warming debate is a distraction from the undeniable poison and pollution our way of life injects into the circulation of the planet allowing oil profiteers time to suck the last drops from the most remote location, environment be damned.

You can either drink from the stream or a plastic bottle, still your choice.