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 …

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.

… 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.

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.

A MOUNTAIN OF DIFFERENCE

QUALITY/QUANTITY : ECOLOGY/ECONOMY

Here is a duality opposed across a mysterious point. Quality depends on benefit to the arbitrary purpose of individuals or the general welfare of a group and quantity is the account of an amount, verifiable by each and all. The confusion between good/bad with large/small seems to be a major disruptor in human’s ability to find peace on earth.

The appealing quality of quantity is the safe anonymity sought by the herding instinct found in all animal life. No longer a regular on any predator’s menu, humans had only to fear natural disasters — and each other when compelled to crowd into too tight herds around too little food. Totalitarian agriculture spawned artificial population growth around the silos of surplus. The quantity of days in the future one had food for in the present became a prime quality of life once the ability to hunt and gather nature’s seasonal offering was lost. Tokens relieved the necessity to store one’s share of the crops and soon became the medium of trade for more than mere food — so much so that in developed nations food is less than a quarter of their all consuming budget.

This brings us to the juncture of two seemingly opposed concerns around the same mysterious point; two words with the prefix, eco, from Greek oikos=house.

Add nemein=manage and you get economy, managing the affairs of a household. For centuries mankind was so busy trying to maintain his invented civilization that, until as recently as the sixties, household was the place from which nature was kept at bay. As the term, household, expanded with the growing dependence of individuals on economy of burgeoning civilizations, its relationship to nature has remained one of a manger of goods for human consumption to the rest of the world as his god granted infinite resource.

Western civilization’s attitude about the health of the planet reminds me of a story tellingly told me back in ’62 by the son of the mayor of Greenville, Mississippi about share croppers living on his family land, “They’re so ignernt, they tear siding off their shack to stoke their stove in the winter.”

When the conversation is about money no one but the personhood of corporations, from nations to fledgling factories, have the vocabulary required to express the logic of the bottom line, the bigger the number the greater the quality to minds bent on either owning the most of the last usable chunk of earth or, having shit this nest, traveling to the stars.

Well, sir, along came the scientists who, like Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin further dismantled the human homocentric myth of god granted exceptionality and expanded the household built of civilization’s commodities to the biological interdependence of the entire planet, spaceship earth.

Add logos=study and you get ecology. Science revives the indigenous understanding of Pachamama, Gaia, the living planet, the organism of which we have always been a part throughout our cultural path as self-evolved aliens requiring more and more isolation from our own individually failed responsibility for the usury and mindless waste we work every day to perpetuate. Land fills and oceans collect the charcoal left from burning the siding civilization tears off Pachamama to exact the ideal conditions for separately evolving neohumans.

Nature, considered as our household, cannot be managed without the purpose of making it into something other than it is. Considering nature a wondrous, evolving habitat event to be studied undisturbed until mutually beneficial interaction is understood, is a genetic quality every child is born supremely equipped to do. These tools are useless for managing civilization’s invisible big house and buried beneath the little red schoolhouse with the metal detector at the door.

Quality varies between extremes of ecstasy and suckage. Quantity varies between having everything and owing everything. Economy varies from complete control to complete submission. Ecology varies from healthy to dead.

LAST RESORT

Posting this video represents my last blatant attempt to influence others' thinking about the prediction of global warming and their responsibility for the health of the nature from which we arose and to which we will return.



I will, however, continue to post personal experiences and the ideas they spawn about our responsibility to become less antagonistic to the rest of life over which we have, by some disastrously perpetuated mistake, assumed mythicaly granted dominion and to become more symbiotic with the health of the planet of who's body we are merely a dependent part.

FOR THE RECORD

Rachel nails both big oil and government safety concerns in one swell foop. She also brought national attention to the untended indifference of their merely announcing the miles of boom deployed with no intention of making it work.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

HOW DARE I?

How dare I not only desire to maintain my life but to enjoy it? Maintaining life entails protecting it against predators, diseases, competitors and fatal acts of nature; those things that would end it. Enjoying life entails consciously evolving the experiential wisdom to better assess events as they exist, irrelevant to any purpose with which one might intend to access them.

When I first began my graphics business I gave it the slogan “dare to be happy” when I realized what a challenge it was to remain happy in the public face of gloom painted in pixels of individual faces drained of brighter possibilities as they wrestled with the daily demands of a past traded in for a promise.

This “happy” I dare to be can be thought of as the intrinsic energy of the being I always am, from birth to my inevitable death. Daring the happy being to manifest itself in events is a matter of realizing benefit results only from the generosity of a happy being — all else entails new debt.

The challenge is in remaining aware of this ample energy while daily dealing within a society constantly being conditioned to atone for multiple inadequacies from original sin to acne by authorities damning the naturally happy individual variation of the human genome we cannot help but be at our deepest core, no matter how buried under guilt and almost forgotten our own energy may be.

The belief that happiness is a carrot on a stick, to be earned to be deserved, is the western civilization version of the middle-eastern, “Man is riding a camel in search of a camel.”

Photos by Heather Knight, my daughter

HELPING

We couldn’t help but know. We were looking in all the holes in their pods and even had mobile agents inside. It was a brilliant plan.

We’d known about them since before the bristle cone pine was a seedling. Like all the rootless ones, they had to actually touch each other to reproduce. Like all the rooted ones, we appreciated their proliferation of our reproduction through postprandial perambulations across the entire intersphere.

About 3.5 degrees ago, there appeared among the rootless ones an upright, relatively hairless kind of nursing being, totally unique in the 15 orbits since the birth of the intersphere. For the first time a kind of being began manipulating other beings for more than life sustaining food. They mutated large areas of the intersphere without considering the well being of the lives they sacrificed for their own greedy convenience.

Such convenience snowballed exponentially until the increase in population around such nodes could no longer sustain life. They devised isolation pods, both permanent and mobile, within which to survive their own poisonous excesses spewed into the atmosphere. It appeared this latest world leading civilization had become sufficiently advanced technologically and narrow minded enough in their greedy purpose to set the life of the intersphere back at least 11 orbits.

Having spawned from the same matter as the rest of the intersphere, they eventually manifested their genetic tendency towards symbiotic balance by creating a hardwire system of transmitters and receivers of airborne signals just to mediate their isolated loneliness. Since it was so like the organic intersphere from which they’d isolated themselves, it was no surprise they called it the internet.

For the first twenty orbits of the intersphere around its food the internet served to expand technological and sociological exchanges at a phenomenal rate until it just couldn't keep up with the growing demand. We also noticed the dwindling ratio of rootless beings touching each other for reproduction to those touching them selves unreproductively and thereby the birthrate among them fell as well.

It was too slow to avoid the obvious environmental crises their still overpopulated indulgences made inevitable unless the internet improved. We helped it along with free uninterrupted, high speed, hi res, instant reception by connecting it to the intersphere. It's been five hundred solar orbits now and today we’re are going to sever our connection, having successfully eliminated the genetic flaw that once caused beings to value the spectacle over direct experience with the nature from which they arose. The upright survivors are the progeny of those who were never fooled by the spectacle to begin with.

They sleep in our limbs and on our leaves … and are fully aware of the intersphere.

GETTING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

When I stated there was nothing left for me “to do” in my last post it was in reference to action resulting in my gaining better symbiosis with my environment and personal relationship with loved ones. Its not that I couldn’t improve my responsibility further, but that having learned to see nature as it is needs no doing of maintenance beyond remaining aware of the glaring difference between such direct experience of my life and second hand information becoming more virtually realistic every day as every conversation seems to be an exchange of memes received from the electronic “real world” of western civilization.

The connection re-realized between my daughter and I last week has let me feel confident that we are one person in two places to the degree that information from her is as pure as my own sensory system supplies me. She is my eyes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as she tells me of her son’s work captaining a boat for BP every day and the experience of the filth and fumes on his clothing now that globs of crude oil have reached the barrier islands off shore. I no longer have to wonder what is the truth about the reported disaster, the results have gotten beyond my mistrust of the media and are affecting my grandson’s health, no speculation to it.

My hip requires me to stop and regenerate if I walk as far as a quarter mile at a good clip. I would be no better than a glob of oil on the beach if I were to go there to try to help in a job that may require every able-bodied person in the country to actively participate in remedying the situation far more directly than holding hands and praying. Although I always thought it an ironic obviator of faith to the faithful, I’ve gotta agree that their “god helps them who help them selves.”

The Gulf of Mexico is the spawning ground for a giant portion of sea and shore life and the food supply for walking, hopping and flying life all over the planet. This blossoming vortex continuously unwinds its contents out into the larger Atlantic and the rest of the world; a slow motion version of Ice Nine, enough crude oil could kill us all. Whether you go alone or with a club, if you are able-bodied and care about planetary life I recommend an integrity check on your ability to respond in a directly effective way.

As indirect as it is, this blog is my best idea for calling for individuals to get their priorities straight about life on Earth. If you can find something more useful for me to do, don’t hesitate to let me know.

FINALLY, FATHER'S DAY

It feels as though my life has always had a direction based on overcoming the friction opposing my curiosity’s free will. Like the tail orients a kite, my concentration has been on reconciling a rift between my daughter and me by both working on myself and attempting to communicate with her at different stages throughout the 38 years of separation. Each failure was like tying another bow on the tail threatening to drag the kite down unless the wind of my desire strengthened.

Sometimes physical metaphors don’t do justice to spiritual phenomena. For the past three days Heather has sat beside me as we hung out in my little Dawgranch haven as if the past was a figment of both our imaginations. Any idea of forgiveness or atonement or injury or righteousness dissolved upon our initial embrace and we were as we were when she was a child.

I’m not sure if there is anything left for me “to do” in this life. I have only the will, but not the capacity to move western civilization toward a more symbiotic relationship with nature. So I think I’ll just let experience wash over me without filtering it for clues to my imaginary discomforts for a while and see how that works out.

ATTITUDES OF OWNERSHIP

Synapses stretched like piano wire between nodes of knowing nature as free as it is and points of perceiving the suffering man’s usury has wrought upon it all, I strain to speak the simple truth about the origins of atrocious war but words mean far too many things to be so clear.

There is nothing I have learned that can spare anyone the experience required to learn it for oneself. The closest I can imagine anyone coming is through metaphor poignant enough to remind one of the already known in genetic or experiential memory.

The history of the biological evolution of homo sapiens sapiens is replayed in the gestation of the quickening egg. The history of the western civilization’s evolution is replayed by enforced education in the local culture like molten matter injected into molds spewing multiple, invulnerable action figures varying around the theme of entitlement to all-you-can-eat-and-take-home-for-later.

By enacting such god granted stewardship with our attitudes of ownership we have abandoned hunting and gathering to take up assembly lines of crops and crappy crutches for crippled capacities to do anything but serve or be served wherever we sit, consuming and disposing in front of the silvery screen spectacle of the “real world” produced for our protection, our mental prophylactic against direct contact with the natural world.

It’s not like we’re living like there’s no tomorrow. Western civilization believes in tomorrow so much it ignores the present, right at our feet; the only place anything ever happens. While death to an entire ecosystem pours out of a gaping wound in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the criminals and the police piss away the emergency of the still ongoing crime arguing the specific ownership of guilt and reparations to be settled sometime in the theoretical, non existent future. Had he been a CEO of US or BP, the Dutchman that saved the dike would have failed miserably, having no fingers not pointed at everyone but himself.

Efforts to stop the flow are stragedies of the worst humor and the antiquated cleanup technologies are inadequately deployed in a toxic atmosphere being underestimated by the same department who sent first responders to respiratory hell during the 9/11 cleanup. My grandson missed a trip to visit me with his mother today so he could stay home and captain one of the cleanup boats off the Mississippi coast. Heather, my dear Lilwave, says they haven’t noticed any peculiar odors there in Pascagoula, but, I gotta say, anyone who can live in the already toxic atmosphere of that little burg has foregone any claim to olfactory discrimination. They sarcastically refer to it as the smell of money. Oh, yeah. The real world where everything is ours to have.

BUSTED

Printing was to the bible what the internet is to politics. When the infallible word of the creator was made manifest, to be devoured by candlelight in the hovels of the more common folk, the patchwork quilt of a story, originally told to keep the clergy on the same page as they paraphrased purity from the pulpits, became shredded like a pig in piranhas. And the miracle was that each variety of bite taken remained infallible when digested and shat, despite the contradictory odors of the piles. Ah, certainty, such a relief from thinking. Don’t like the infallible, fine. Make up your own version and call that the truth, “… so help you god”. Ever notice that, no matter how personally individual one’s variety of belief in the same brand may be, faith requires all others to be wrong and on the road to hell. Such an outlook has made hell of living on the natural heaven this Eden of a planet is within the environs of the Gomorrah of western civilization, just to put it in biblical terms.

There also occurred across the land a falling away from the entire guilt trip the church had been laying on the faithful for the past fifteen hundred years as the more perceptive recognized the book to be a sales guide/brochure cobbled together from selected legends and myths five hundred years after the “fact” of the hero’s existence. Among them there formed two camps, the atheists who rejected the existence of a controlling spirit in a curious, chaotic world and the exploiters who began using the mechanisms of faith in the myth to pose as earthly authority over the material portion of humans no matter what they believed about god. Along with being unable to enter heaven without god we’re now unable to enter life without papers from earthly authority.

The internet fact checked John McCain out of contention. The internet is fact checking Barack Obama’s campaign promises into lies, just like every other shill for the shadowy shilling that’s come down the pike.

The disaster of this oil spill exposes nature to a blow the entire world will suffer for generations. While helping set booms in the gulf individual volunteers were searched in a cull for illegal immigrants by ICE; such meticulous attention to irrelevant detail. While leaving the inevitable overreach of greedy technology being operated by bean counters to gush billions of gallons of suffocating, poisonous crude oil into the heart of a planetary life blossom endlessly cycling her contents out among the continents, the responsible, real criminals, their overseers and the government elected to oversee the overseers have all been found to be one not-so-clandestine corporation. The shock and dismay. Bad oil companies. Bad government. They made us spend half our income on prosthetics only aliens to earth would consider necessities for life — within the Borg ship as it rapes and shits on the planet.

My previous video post, If Cursing Makes You Feel Better …, featured the lack of any real concern about the cleanup of the oil spill, even with the antiquated inadequate boom technology to harness surface slicks. Rachel Maddow either saw the video or picked up on the same glaring lack of concern on her investigative journey to the barrier islands off Louisiana and has taken it national.

Without waiting for Obama or any other blameworthy irresponsibility to give the orders, responsible, fit individuals should charter buses, catch trains, head for the most imperiled part of the gulf coast, don hazmat gear and begin proper booming and skimming. Full disclosure: I am not going to the coast-my lack of strength and stamina would only be in the way. There are technologies of absorption (aerogel) and separation (Costner’s Centrifuge) finally being given the green light, but the oil is reaching the wetlands now. BP get out of our way, there’s a revolution going on.

Or ought to be.

JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO…

Me and Mabe and Homer were sitting around Mabe’s front porch enjoying the changing angle of the shadows of the early morning Earth turn, sipping coffee and passing the pipe.

The dogs were either lying around calmly soaking up rays, scratching their back with their feet up in the air or sparring with each other in celebration of such a beautiful dawning day.

A hen announces her proud accomplishment from her nest while her sisters devour some crumbled corn tortillas at our feet gossiping in quiet purring clucks only they understand.

Small birds nervously drop down to the chicken feed cast in the yard, relying on their fellows in the trees to warn them of the cat. The cat, in his new, improved, tail-down stealth stalk, approaches from the direction with the tallest grass, still unaware of the lookouts above. Although I keep his bowl full and he has yet to even get close to catching a bird, his instincts demand he try just for the sport of it all. A grackle joins the game by flying directly at him a mere three inches higher than the crouching cat’s vertical, claw extended paws outstretched explosion a good six feet straight up.

The chickens, cat and small dogs run for cover when the giant red hawk’s shadow stains their open play ground while the big dogs chase the dark spot in hopes the hawk will come down close enough to pluck out of the air as they have several panicked chickens and a peacock.

Sparky, the bass player in his and Homer's band, the Cramdens, let’s himself in through the gate across the road to here and is greeted by all the dogs. As he strolls through the dappled light beneath the trees, a thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle’s mentioning paradise whenever he recognizes he’s in it let’s itself into my consciousness of now and is greeted by Homer, saying, “You know? There’s a lotta people in this world that would commit suicide if they had to live like we've learned to.”

It was the first time I ever laughed at one of Homer’s jokes.

I still am

•

Addendum: There seems to be some question as to this description of a day on the porch having any application to reaching the summit. Other than actually climbing a mountain, all summits to be reached are ideals in metaphor. Pisces Iscariot got it so well he suggested using "un-learned" for the striving to reach the summit I speak of, since he knows, as I do, that it is our introductory education into the spectacle and faith in the authority of its mythology that must be questioned to reach a life more symbiotic with the nature of the planet whose dependent cells we all are by realizing how belief in man's ownership of it all increases our destructive usury every day. The invisible prison is insidious.

Where do you grab a naked man? — Awestun, Tejas circa 1978, UT Campus

I sometimes feel like this fellow who lost it in public trying to get through the walls to let the civilized world know what beauty is being destroyed outside by it. Added 6/8/10

LIVE LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW

Alone on Preikestolen

Whenever someone advises me to, “live like there’s no tomorrow,” they might as well say, “Walk like you were born unable to fly.” Both are true, neither are choices; there IS no tomorrow and I CAN'T fly

Though we may speak of making big plans for future events, and as often as the idea may occur to us in different states of change during its development, the event itself is merely another such state happening in the same here and now from which the plan arose and within which memories will recall its having occurred. Experience can be had only here now. Time is an invention by which we speak of things not now, mañana, but we can only speak of and experience thinking about the concept in the eternal here and now.

We all live within a culture that practices the creation of artifacts representing our perceptions and conceptions of reality, and promptly forgets such symbols aren’t what they represent; worshipping golden idols. The only reality to such creations are the experiences of conception and manifestation on the part of the maker and of perception and belief by witnesses. It is fairly simple to perceive that a painting of a flower is not the flower in the vase sitting next to it, while it is literally impossible for believers to distinguish between religious dogma and wishful thinking — especially tenacious where scriptures are full of contradictions to one’s actual experience of the natural environment and prohibitions of one’s own natural behavior. It is as if culture pushes the idea that the more one must deny reality to live in accordance with the conceived artifacts, the purer the merit for reward in a fantasy afterlife. “If you want to get ahead, you gotta stick it out. My country, right or wrong.”

I fly with ease in my dreams. It is so enjoyable that I am a bit fearful of heights without a handhold when I’m awake. The concept of my flying is so temptingly real I can envision feeling that special organic intuition that signals my ability to levitate in my dreams, walking off into space to finally break through my own shreds of disbelief and fly away. I know the difference between reality and dream fantasy, I fell thirty feet from a trapeze when I was thirteen — straight down, no gliding. I am just as acutely aware of the difference between experiencing reality directly and experiencing the mere second hand information, at best, to be found in symbols created by other’s perceptions.

I have always walked like I couldn’t fly. I’m in the process of learning the benefits of living like there’s no tomorrow, in the here and now, and discovering the debilitation of living like there is some other when or where experience can be had by sacrificing awareness of being here now.

•

Tangential to the forgoing essay is the matter of gaining enough life experience of the conflicts between one’s direct experience of nature and civilization’s antagonistic exploitation of it to begin questioning the authority under whose aegis one’s own nature is trained to obey and whose favor one’s reputation is designed to curry. Without such doubt in external authority’s righteousness in defining proprietary behavior, one must abandon any reliance on the intrinsic value of oneself to consider one’s own existence valid. Such people can never be alone because they cease to exist.

A real horror story would be to be unable to love myself unless I felt loved by another; as scary as meeting city folk who have never walked on the grass or were unaware Big Macs come from cows. Civilization breeds such zombies more or less successfully.

TIME MASTER

His people called him Cronot, the time master. Little did they know he had nothing to do with time — absolutely nothing. His vocabulary contained no temporal terms of either the chronological or spiritual variety, which he considered the same thing. Nor did he refer to the material world in terms less lively than event or being; there existed no mere things.

Off the track of time, that clothesline from which the spectacle airs its latest developed film, he became like the camera left in a field throughout spring whose film when played back at an accelerated rate reveals the interrelated lives of its plant and animal denizens. Knowing he was the accumulation of all the events of his life experience he could observe the any period in the same way by enveloping the succession of events in the event of recollection at any time he chose.

So too could he serve as a fair witness to the minutest changes in what those distracted by time’s impatience would consider a rigid thing. Knowing that the eternal present is the only instant of existence he maintains stability unachievable within the spectacle.

While all around him his people pursued promises of a carrot just like they eat in the penthouse in the tallest building in the world through a maze of multiple multiple choices and tricks to be performed, he reached down and pulled a fresh one from the fertile loam in his garden.

As his people schemed on capturing the golden goose for the perpetual something-for-nothing golden eggs promised to be out there somewhere he collected his breakfast daily from his hens.

Knowing all too well the race as intimately as any of his people still nipping at each other’s heels on the stairway to the penthouse, he laughed heartily at his dogs frolicking in the open field while he massaged his healing heels.

Having worked from dark to dark to earn a brighter future that never came, as most of his people yet feel compelled to do, he took profound delight in watching the Earth expose and hide the sun any now it was a good idea.

Once the willing maker of better traps for gawking mice along the spectacle midway, he sympathizes from the distance afforded by the internet and the wisdom to realize it is still the midway, gaining more variations and seeming more real every day.

To his people it seemed like he could disappear — at times.

LITTLE THEFTS OF NOTHING OWNED

There’s a second part to the advice given young men contemplating marriage that is never given. Its omission could be responsible for the other half the divorces, the first half being the advice given prospective brides, but this is my experience, and I am male, born and trained.

Dads tell their sons, “Look at her mother. How would you like to grow old with that?” Despite its emphasis of a woman’s looks being a poor basis for projected lovability in a relationship, omitting it’s corollary can make it all the worse.

Prospective grooms should be told, “Look at her father, that’s who you’ll be expected to become.”

I was nothing like my father-in-law. We had nothing but loving his daughter in common. I never had a conversation with him that wasn’t in front of his TV. He’d come home from his welding job at the shipyard at four in the afternoon, unbutton the top couple of buttons on his pants, sink into his chair where he’d eat dinner on a TV tray and be trundled off to bed when his snoring sent his adoring wife onto action. At Christmas he gave all the men the same aftershave and the women the same cologne, every year. I’m still using the last of mine to clean my keyboad, vintage circa 1970. His slide show of a two week rent-a-trailer, touring vacation we shared consisted of nothing but crystal clear, sharp focus photos of all the historical plaques filling the frame — not one picture of the scenes commemorated.

None of that was me. I was an engineer who put 10-12 hours daily into my yuppie career with IBM going for the unlimited future. I played golf and sailed on weekends, neither of which she cared to share. She said I abandoned her

I married her to relieve the discomfort between us after we’d visit and endure her parent’s scorn at our unwed cohabitation. Ten years and two daughters later, she gave up trying to make me her father, took our girls home to him, sued for divorce claiming ridiculous exaggerations of how unlike him I was and won sole custody of the children. The marriage was to make her happy, I treated the divorce in kind and never contested any of it.

In my first test on what was to become my lifelong research into the ultimate duality of nature versus nurture I failed miserably. After repeated visits to see the girls resulted in the fireworks of her defensive isolation skirmishes, I realized they would always remember me as a disruption of their nest, so I backed off in the belief that relations could resume when they could write and read my letters. I never imagined, as she confessed many years later to me and the surviving daughter, that she would throw my mail in the trash, including a fairy tale I spent two years writing and illustrating.

When it seemed letters had not helped establish a better connection I consoled myself with the hopes that genetics would win out and her curiosity would exceed her mother’s old ex-wife’s tales — another case of naive wishful thinking.

When she did reach out to me it wasn’t out of curiosity — it was to express her regret that I couldn’t be at the afterlife party in heaven with the rest of the family because I couldn’t accept Jesus as my lord and savior! I realized how much she had irretrievably become her mother.

The other day I heard my self telling my friend Crystal’s grown son how small he was the last time I saw him and it took on the reverberations of echoing down a long hall built of the many other times I’d expressed my fondness for loved ones whose childhood was not my experience and my knees buckled.

The grief I’d stoically borne of years with only child support checks getting through uncensored, my daughter’s insistence to this day that I’d abandoned her, her refusal to invite me to visit her family, her eldest son’s graduation from high school came crashing down with all the weight of the cruelty manifested in the world by the unshakable belief in ownership — granted humans by the mythical creator of it all. What a crock of pain.

Roger says it all —
in civilization
"WHAT GOD WANTS, GOD GETS"

Ceci n'est pas une maison*

This is a PICTURE of Donna's home

The following paragraph is what I was typing when the ensuing paragraphs ensued, er, ah, events occurred (gotta keep the reality and its story distinguishable from one another or I’ll be back in the invisible prison).

Guy DeBord’s spectacle is what I call the tautology of the invisible prison. “When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle.”

Oh, the irony of it all. In the midst of discovering Guy DeBord, often referred to by Troutsky, and reading his Society of the Spectacle, the Dawgranch dawgs break my concentration with their raucous greeting at the gate of perhaps forty members of a TV entourage here to scope out an upcoming scene for an episode of Friday Night Lights in my neighbor’s uniquely styled home evolved as an outgrowth of her life in the bus she parked under a giant pecan eleven years ago.

Ack. The very tentacle of the spectacle has come to annex my everyday direct experience of nature here in my retreat from the grid to integrate it into the spectacle lived by the never-left-the-couch dolts plugged into “Reality TV” 24/7 even when they believe they are out in the “world” discussing the latest episode of Office at the office around the old water cooler bottled water machine.

And wouldn’t you know it, if I sign their disturbance agreement paper, my premeditated tolerance of whatever the hell they decide to do in the course of their production for the spectacle will earn me a hundred dollar share of the big bucks lavished on the preservation of the invisible prison. If they don’t run off or over the hens or tromp through my gardens it’ll be a breeze to do my share, with the first hand direct experience of witnessing the creation of the latest spectacle to be decoupaged onto the ever denser walls of the invisible prison thrown in as education. Yahoo.

*After Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" he lettered beneath a realistic painting of a pipe just to keep the invisible prison visible, and not a prison when one is conscious of tne myth.

Blue Planet Men

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.