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.

NEW POST — LAST POST

The crudity and bad taste of the mixed metaphor joke in the last post is the liquor all the vitriol of the past five hundred some odd posts too often railing against western civilization and christian evangelism has boiled down to.

There's another great line from A Streetcar Named Desire that comes to mind more often than Blanche's "…it must be the vapors" and that's "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers," So I've decided to begin anew to find an outlet for these things I feel urges to express from a new point of view.

Serving people to people daily, one McNugget at a time

Instead of bitching about the macro malice of the shearers of the sheeple, I'm gonna get up inside the grinding machine and look at the grease of good graces that keep the sheeple people despite their demographic bar codes pitching the selling and buying of each other to each other — the kindness of strangers. Catch you on the flip side I hope.

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.

TO BE A CHILD …

That first gasp of air … what did I feel? Was it the sudden chill on my damp naked body no longer sheltered by the womb? Was it a startled flash bulb consciousness of everything at once and therefore aware of no thing?

I have looked into the just-opened eyes of a newborn and recognized the ancient observer behind them calmly unwrapping this new instrument to begin sampling the experiment of life this time around.

With all functions set at default, sensitive components begin reporting changes registered as pixels in the hologram it forms of where it is. As reports accumulate, similarities adjust settings to better collate them to estimate the probability of permanence in this constantly changing time and space; the framework of reality upon which existence learns to gamble its future.

These are automatic, involuntarily unfolding functions evolved genetically into increasingly more varied, complex beings with no other detectible purpose than to continue, nor limit but infinity. This body, this instrument, in terms of the individual psyche, is what I think of as the Id: the genetic memory of instincts to eat and not be eaten for survival of the individual, instincts to mate and co-create for thrival of the species, intuition of the purest sense of right and wrong.

It’s all hunky-dory, suckling and pooping along, until it’s just not enough to satisfy the sated survival instinct; no lack of food or fear of predators, but … what’s that over there? The emergence of curiosity, the instinct to grow beyond the givens, discovers a difference between reports of changes within (hunger, heartbeat, breathing) and of finding limits to careless freedom without (bumping into crib, mother’s weaning and scolding for pooping off limits).

My most vivid recollection of self/other awareness was of the change the echoes of my crying returned from the walls when someone came to check on me. This primitive echolocation gave quality to my depth perception as my eyes learned to focus at different distances before it dawned on me they might be approached. Such preverbal understandings form the avatar, the ego, a hologram the instrument builds of itself in relationship to the now exterior reality within which it appears to act.

Early on I recall imagining a game being played between myself and the world where I had a cardboard replica of what I wanted to be perceived as being (the ego), which I held before me as I walked about. In turn the world erected cardboard facades like movie sets ahead of me and struck them when I passed, ala The Truman Show. This personal myth was reified whenever adults tested the validity of my mask with their questions and obviously invented most of their answers to mine when they couldn’t remember what they were told back when they still had questions. Observing my parents perpetuate the Santa Claus myth long after I’d observed the reality taught me to be a life long skeptic.

Ego develops when curiosity is called on to explain the avatar’s place in the causal myth of whatever culture is asking. There aren’t enough whys, wheres, whens, hows or whos to conclude a purpose to the living universe without first inventing a timeline whose direction is determined by assigning cause and effect to the constant change life always is, no matter what we think of it. As the child seeks to achieve validity within its sphere of activity, the responsibility for being able to account for itself to a perceived social environment often takes priority over the id by claiming and basking in praise it does receive, and denying by masking from scorn it might, from an audience that rarely cares as much as it does about itself.

In seeking validity from ones culture the ego can actually lose consciousness of the unique, natural gifts of the id leading to fear of being left alone bereft of anyone to obey and unable to entertain oneself with creative, original thinking since abandoning it somewhere in childhood in the process of converting curiosity’s question marks into culture’s periods.

In this Freudian drama, the superego would be the unifying curve between them attempting to maintain the yang of the ego-avatar’s artificial doing in beneficial, dynamic harmony with the id-body’s instinctual being throughout a life of cultural training to exploit the difference for advantage over others in a competitive ethic.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is usually understood to mean giving others treatment you want, precluding the reality that two unique beings rarely want the same treatment. The benefit of the dynamic the superego maintains depends on the ego’s symbiotic attitude towards perceived otherness by realizing that beneath the cultural, exterior doing lies the common guidance system of the id’s instinctual being.

It is impossible to come to a conclusion about an infinite, living universe without completely extinguishing curiosity — customarily associated with death or belief.

FUCKING UP A WET DREAM

I stole the following anecdote from a clipping found while tripping through Stumbleupon and post it here as the epitome of every contact western civilization has ever had with indigenous people, still living in symbiosis with nature.

Indian Chief “Two Eagles” was asked by a white U. S.  government official, “You have observed the white man for 90 years. You’ve seen his wars and his technological advances. You’ve seen his progress and the damage he’s done.”

The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, “Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?”

“When white man find land, indians running it. No taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work. Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex.”

Then the Chief leaned back and smiled, “Only white man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that.”

DRUM CIRCLE

The elusiveness of truth is the impossibility of describing the reality of the living universe no matter how vast ones realization and vocabulary may be.

The reason no one can “tell it like it is” is because “IT” is too infinitely large, complex and ephemeral to begin speaking about the truth before it’s different. To get around this, language separates “IT” into little “it”s: subjects of frozen specimens of instances, mini-truths like bugs plucked from nature, stuck with a pin, studied, named, added to the language and extrapolated back as a set of truths, or rules, comprising a fixed pixel in individual and cultural pictures of a nature yet to be realized.

Further diffusion of even these specifically defined word/mini-truths/rules comes with the infinitely varied evolution of each individual’s perception mechanism tinting meaning and blurring even the description of an event by many witnesses beyond recognition between one extreme and the other.

Great social change gathers around the most basic, least misunderstandible expression for the overwhelming rejection of the status quo being profited from and enforced by a word-controlling establishment. The strength and gathering momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it best expresses the solutions to the system against which it rails by General Assembly, evolving an entirely new model for social behavior among their many dissatisfied factions that, as separate causes, merely wanted to drive their version of the old model.

Together these volunteers, standing off millionaire’s minions sent to silence and erase them, make the sometimes loud dissatisfactions and as yet unexpressed, great expectations of this awakening giant resonate throughout the world in a visceral connection through the truth of the tune, no matter what language sings the lyrics.

A drum circle. A drum sphere.

THEY KEEP DRAGGING ME BACK …

I guess the best I can hope for in my quest to get back to the garden nature has always been, since well before the first civilization convinced its members they owned and/or owed for any of it, is to become independently feral. I brought this here intertube portal with me to the woods through which to check on the always-encroaching proximity of the civilized sprawl I intend to avoid, like any problem one must get away from to think rationally about.

This Occupy Wall Street movement has attracted me almost as strongly as the lack of such active awareness in western civilization drove me away to my tipi in the first place. When I think of how best to contribute to the …

…I’ve been stuck on the next word for two days, during which I watched the entire N17 day of action streaming from http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99 until an estimated 35,000 protesters filled the Brooklyn Bridge from both directions at the peak of an adventurous day with the earnest reporter, Tim Pool. I still don’t know the next words to describe what it is I would be contributing to and, I suspect, neither do most of those people dedicated to freely holding forth en mass about the same injustices that 99% of their fellow citizens daily grumble about, shove down and chase with antacid and sleeping pills before bed just to cling to lives of still hired wannabes watching that goal at the top of the heap moved further away by millionaires’ minions sent down to truncheon the nasty away from the nice; worried how they look every day.

What draws me to the movement seems to be the same feeling of escape from the invisible prison I’ve been blogging about for five years.

I suppose the word I was looking for next above would be …awakenings. Awakening to the positive possibilities of changing society from a life long contest of amassing the greatest profit with the least personal investment into one where old men plant trees under which they won't live to enjoy the shade. Awakening from the nightmare of a nation of petroleum junkies robbing neighbors for their stash to harmonize directly with the solar source of energy that originally gave life to the decayed matter soup over which we now squabble. Awakening to the lethal cesspools we’ve made of our water, gas chambers we’ve made of our air and poison deposits we’ve made in the earth. Awakening to the millions of jobs created in the effort to replace our sooty chimneys with symbiotic sharing of ambient sun, wind, geothermal and tidal energies amidst which we’ve failed with oil all along.

It’s bigger than the economy — the economy is based on creating the problem. It’s bigger than jobs — the jobs are to keep the status quo. It’s about a whole new way of life with the health of the planet our primary concern by realizing our welfare depends on how symbiotic we can be with nature — not on how we can enslave it.

… 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…

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

Tipi Fini

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TO NATURE, CIVILIZED MAN IS THE 1%

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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 …

FINAL RESTING PLACE

While living among the pines of a forest east of Austin in a tipi I'd made of heavy canvas sailcloth and cedar poles thirty years ago, I began working on an all wood version. I abandoned that start to the silver fox family living under the hill on which it sat, but it never left my mind.

Those  memories and a growing dissatisfaction with occupying a defunct RV whose warranty must have expired the moment it was driven off the lot prompted me to renew efforts to bring the idea into reality, first in Illustrator for the planning stage and then in Home Depot for the physical realization through shop tools and material..

Planning stage

TIPI

The initial parameters were to use 4'X8'X1/2" plywood sheets to cover the 16' diameter hole I'd dug earlier, in which to raise tilapia for consumption here at the the Dawgranch, before I discovered the intrusive government regulations into private fisheries. These resulted in 12 triangular panels leaning toward the center around a 15 foot perimeter, more than enough room to do anything I've ever done indoors.

I ripped twelve 2"X4"X12' boards with two 13.1° cuts on the outer edge to accommodate the plywood sheet's lying flat against both cuts of the two 12' 'poles in each frame.  This made 6 complete wooden frames which I then linked with struts cut the same as the ones within the completed frames, resulting in the complete skeleton of the finished form hovering over the hole.

twelve foot rips started at the west end of my porch-cum-woodshop and finished out the east door

single frame in a jig to build all six

One frame launched and another one on the way

KIVA

Putting the floor of the tipi three feet below the ground is an adaptation of the cliff dwellers kiva to the plains tribes' tipi. On the good advice of my rock mason friend, Cyrus, the hole was enlarged a foot or so beyond the intended living space diameter and a foot deeper than the floor. Eleven 4"X4"X4' posts were sunk a foot deep in concrete and spanned by 1/2"X3'X4' plywood walls at a diameter of 170". Outside the walls and at least a foot below the floor level was filled with 12 tons of one-inch river gravel to serve as a drainage barrier against the occasional flood that has approached within a foot and a half of the top of the wall several times in my seven years living here at the Dawgranch.

Cyrus increases the diameter

Cyrus and Jose set the wall posts

The digging of the hole and setting of the posts (above) I ceded to fitter men than I to complete a job in one week that would certainly have taken my feeble frame at least two months in the constant 100°F+ drought we experienced this summer.

Wall wrapped in three layers of tar paper

Gravel filled into the outside of the wall holding cinder blocks spaced at 4' and level with
wall as footings for the bottom of the twelve foot frame sides (tipi poles)

COVERING THE TIPI

Instead of buffalo hides, I spanned the poles of my tipi with Autumn Orange colored plywood panels, the North, East and South tops of which hinge out to be horizontal rooves extending four feet beyond the base to form porches in the summer, to be eventually screened in. In the winter these panels will be snugged in and the small smoke flaps at the top will be closed on the windward and opened on the lee side for a draft to pull the smoke out when the fire pit is used.

Triangular frames linking around the kiva perimeter.

Smoke flap windows around the top

YURT

To cover the smoke  flaps I devised a 45° conic cap that hangs over any open ones, designed on the same principle as the 60° tipi, but made with lighter 1"X2" strips and 1/4" plywood. After it was in place it occurred to me that I'd incorporated another indigenous home design into the mix, a yurt.

Peak Parasol

Looking north through the south porch-to-be

Smoke flaps and Parasol in place.

And now I have moved in so far as I have finished facilities to operate in the style to which I have grown accustomed. I have yet to build the kitchen, fire pit and winter sleeping loft (7' ceiling over the kitchen).

Computer station "Outback"

At home with Monty and Hettie

"How to stop pervs from stealing your naked pics"

Seen on msnbc's lineup of today's news articles, this headline is possible only in western civilization. It made my spit out the cookie I was eating to guffaw, it had such a level of self-inflicted oxymoron about it.

CHECKING IN

Just watched Stephen Colbert interview Al Gore, who stressed that it was our wars over keeping oil that kept us from affording a technological replacement for the internal combustion devce that causes climate change. Good reasoning, Al.

The other night I watched an msnbc special, on the changes in America in the ten years since the excuse for the longest of those wars, during which intrepid war correspondent Richard Engle remarked, “Lovely New York water, heh, heh, heh,” as he was being decontaminated after exposing himself to the poisonous Hudson river in which he’d joined the “new” NYPD searching for terrorist’s bombs along the banks. Good priorities, Richard.

Here’s my point. Al Gore has stressed climate change as his focus for action to return to a more symbiotic way to exist within the natural curve of the planet by citing temperature trends and more drastic weather patterns. It’s not that I deny climate change is one of the symptoms of the industrial-age human alienation of themselves from the planet which birthed them, I don’t. But of all the symptoms it remains the most debatable and debated boondoggle in any effort to lessen our footprint. Climate change is evident in geological and biological records occurring in natural cyclic patterns throughout the history of Earth, which tends to be deniers strongest argument. The strongest argument for climate change is measuring how extreme the weather has gotten in the recent past based on the ignorant hubris of civilized humans to continue to build “permanent” cities on the coasts (the land left after the last chunk quaked into the ocean) and rivers (the trickles left since the last “no ice anywhere” period) because, miracle of miracles, earthquakes and hurricanes cost more in lives huddled in more high rises every year.

Just like Richard Engle laughed off the admittedly deadly pollution of the Hudson river while demonstrating the efficiency of the NYPD to keep the homeland free of theoretically possible terrorism, Al Gore pushes the theoretically most debatable of the many arguments for getting off of fossil fuels while the horror of our pollution of water, land and air remains undeniable and undiscussed, — from the Hudson river to the burning kitchen faucets near fraking operations.

What the frack.

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?

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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.

WHO ARE YOU?

I love the rain! ptl for the sweet sound. on way back from dropping kids @school I see a little boy in front of my house walking IN the street and not on the sidewalk high-stepping it in his rain boots thru the puddles unaware of much else. made me smile. Finally.

Its amazing how the down to earth, simple little things warms our hearts and brings us back to a reality check of our lives. How care free a child's life is when they don't have the weight of the world on their little shoulders. That's what our heavenly father wants us to be like, if we could just let him carry our worries and our cares. Easily say than done sometimes. Love you little sis......Have a Blessed day.

Pretty much all my relatives back in Mississippi, and places of refuge therefrom, sprinkle their Facebook communications with little “ptl”s and bible quotes. It is the only direct exposure to Xianity in my life. Realizing they are no different than the overwhelming majority of people who primarily identify themselves as non-hyphenated-Americans, I have been searching for the crossover between who I have come to know as an inner observer reporting the gestalt of my sensory perceptions to a consciousness for whom we all serve as eyes on the material manifestations of nature, just as our cells report to us, and the omniscience projected upon an external being that created the universe and is in control of every instant. My problem has always been with the established religions externalizing the genius with which individuals are born and on which they rely when selecting the particular character of their version of some god out there.

Being unaware of or ignoring the ultimate responsibility for what one chooses has allowed individuals to commit atrocities by merely going along in the anonymity of the dominant mob with only their inner observer to weigh the difference between reality and one’s version. The sweet exchange I quoted above between my  grand-niece and her friend seems almost like the crossover I seek when little children are said to be “what our heavenly father wants us to be like” as if aware that, having taken the entire culture based on gaining permission from others upon their little shoulders, people have unnecessarily complicated their lives with smoke and mirrors.