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.”

FOUND

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

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

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

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

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

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

NO THEFT

Thank you for reminding me, dear thief

If I have, it’s only to share — you knew that

Of things, there’s always too many

As I learn to own up to my self

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

SLOSH

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

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

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

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

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.

FREE?

“You’re free to go.”

The desk sergeant’s admission to permission rang with more irony than it could have at any other time in his life. He’d been awake all night, staring at the artwork and thoughts scrawled on scraps of paper missed at lockup shakedown pasted to the walls with breakfast oatmeal over many years by the many disorderly shut in this box within the box that no longer wanted them, kept awake by adrenalated rage. … free to go …

He was still angry, a rage whose momentum was of such ancient origin that reason held no sway in limiting its inclusiveness. Sure, last night was an outrage, maybe even the biggest straw, but the camel’s back was shattered and he tasted the bitter bile of knowing how he’d allowed others to hold his life in thrall to permission for its entire duration. The fires lit a realization that he was part of a completely saturated society, born free, being told their obligations for continued permission from the first withheld affection to the first understood, “NO,” and for the rest of their life. He’d always sensed the bullshit behind it but never thought about it beyond going along to get along.

Nobody knows who the first person to get away with assuming the authority to grant permission was, but logic tells us that it must have been in an attempt to change the natural course of events and that every newborn was advised of such authority in ever widening circles every generation thereafter.

Folks reacted to his occasional objections as if he were just a spoiled baby. “You gotta tough it out with the rest of us, heh heh,” they’d say.

It got so subliminally uncomfortable one day that he found the son, the American, the husband, father, bread winner, tax payer, home owner, car driver, insurance buyer he'd earned permission to be strolling along a downtown sidewalk imagining he’d just wandered in from the Amazon rain forest watching all the busy people doing who knew what. In consensus reality he was in the middle of his work day when he’d left his drawing board to get another cup of machine coffee to change the stale taste of cigarettes in his mouth, overheard the same joke Johnny Carson told the night before and just kept walking down the corridor of executive offices he’d occupy someday if he kept his nose to the cornerstone, out the door, across the parking lot to his car, drove downtown, parked and his indigenous self emerged. His spirit was claustrophobic. It needed this tiny act of rebellious hooky to get a breath of fresh air for however long he could endure the next sublimation.

His dissatisfaction with maintaining his permission from the stifling stability of the status quo so frightened his wife she withdrew from his dreams of sailing around the world by returning to her family home and withdrawing permission to be with his children. Talking trash and trashing his letters kept them in the dark about their father forevermore. When he had the simultaneous realization that she was not going to return and that he no longer wanted her to, he quit his job, driving his car and cutting his, beard, hair and lawn.

Sitting in the front yard playing music with friends in his new found measure of freedom one day, a crew cut chap from across the street in the IBM ghetto where he lived asked him, “When are you ever gonna cut your grass?”

With a coda strum on his guitar and a shake of his long hair he chortled in reply, “When are you ever gonna get to see the wind blowing through yours?”

That was three weeks ago. Last night there was a knock on the door. The instant the latch clicked open he was rendered unconscious by the door smashing into his face after its being smashed into by several tons of meat. He woke up on the couch to the noise of a foot crashing through the ceiling from the attic as a couple of hundred pounds of the meat remarked, “Gee, that’s not gonna help the sale of yer fancy house. Heh heh.” They charged him with possession of two and a half pounds of cannabis they had to have brought with them; he’d never had more than a quarter of an ounce at any one time in the four months since he’d first tried it, but it wasn’t enough for them. Getting him in a courtroom was?

You’re free to go. Riiiiiiiight!!!

LAST WEEK OF THE YEAR

late rising at eight

to a morning dark as seven

guided by the light

like the chickens

who greet him

meet him at coop door

run between his feet

for feed mix in the yard

‘til chill chases him back to his pod,

his yellow and sunset orange submarine,

too toasty ‘til he acclimates

then not warm enough.

from the bridge above it all

he surveys her immediate position

along the never dry river of time

outside her surround-around port holes

blocked only to the south:

imac portal back

to the man-made world

saying news he fears to hear

paying dues left by his career

playing diversions still held dear

posting thoughts finally come clear

touching minds far and near

quality beyond the hit counter

variety of insight incited

tethers to the myth examined

patter on soft skin drum heads

looses rhythm in complexity

gains rain’s tapping attention

another frosty foray for feed

for the dry beneath the roost

to their cackle bitching delight

three more dashes during the day

through rain drops

to catch egg drops

beckoned by loud hen cops

today’s done deeds

entered as 169-171 in his egg book

times, dates and mom’s took

along with omelets eaten

friends who got treated

running cost of the feed

being happy where he is

friends know where to seek him

season of return

spontaneous reunion

catching up the years

yarns of daring do

sympathies of aging

venture wiser view

future all too new.

STARRING: HERSELF

Pilar had wanted to be in the movies ever since padre Ignacio had set up the projector in the community lodge. She was one of the few among her tribe who realized the story unreeling before them on the big white blanket was more wondrous than telling it with pictures that could move, stranger than the cloth covering all but the faces and hands of the people, odder than the sounds they made, or where they were, or what was going on. It wasn’t happening anywhere in time or space. Not on the wall. Not in anyone’s memory. It didn’t happen, it was done.

She remembered several years earlier when the huge boat without sails or oars came up the river with those wet crystals that shocked her fingers when she touched them and turned to water when she watched them. That happened; the only thing that happened at the movie was watching the movie that was done.

It was ninety-three years later, rolling tortillas in her booth at the reopened zocalo one morning, when she realized her dream had come true. The process of becoming one of those people who did their life was a long process of absorbing the changes that began with that movie about a world that didn’t happen, but was done with planning for a purpose.

When people dressed as those in the movie began to come up the river to clear the bank where they landed to build huge buildings with the great trees they felled, she watched her people fall for the ice machine over and over again — or disappear into the disappearing forest. When her clan ceased relocating, it became surrounded by other uprooted clans in an area dense enough to make the big buildings go around it.

Last year the people in the big buildings decided to celebrate the wonderful life they carved out of the wilderness by thanking her people with an urban renewal project that turned their east side village square and its neighborhood for several blocks into a stylized reproduction of the native village when she was thirty — a sort of ethnic cleansing. Many homes were purchased and converted into shops selling mass produced copies of clan items. She was paid a commission to sit in a booth in the zocalo rolling tortillas in addition to whatever she made selling them.

And there was the Director of Photography now. In his flip-flops, black socks and garters, Banana Republic shorts, Hawaiian shirt, gimme cap and shades-on-a-rope he was directing the rest of the cast into position around her. When Pilar stopped to watch as his children and wife gathered behind her and leaned their chins on her shoulders with big smiles on their faces, the DP said, “No, no. Keep on doing whatever was happening when we showed up. I want this to be a real documentary. Okay, everyone. Action.”

THE “BANE” OF SELF-RELIANCE?

A post over at Thoughtstreaming was in its usual process of describing what I must assume is the “opposition”, which any blog espousing a political ideology authored by names like Troutsky and Che Bob must, of necessity, have, when along comes this sentence, “Individual as opposed to collective rights and a fetishized discourse on the Founding Fathers and Christianity and self-reliance.” Something clicked into place in an ever present puzzle presented to me early on in my naïve delve into the political blog scene with a comment to this same blog and receiving a most hostile reception for suggesting that I got any value for my life from reading Ayn Rand, obviously one of their code words loaded with ammunition of instant opinions for the combat life seems to be for them.

For me the entirety of Ayn Rand’s works were another version of the theme that inspired Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, singing the beauty of the of human potential and railing against the enslavement of it. That she made super heroes of those who realized their potential by becoming the most ethical architect in all of literature in Fountainhead and were the rare few honest captains of industry in Atlas Shrugged, got her branded by socialists of Trout/Che’s brand as a champion of the real, living, union busting, greedy, Gordon Gecko CEOs who milk their country dry. That she learned her fierce self-reliance in escaping from the collective nightmare of her life in the worst incarnation of socialism to date that was the Soviet Union, only emphasized their reasons to oppose her. That Howard Roark and John Gault had stirling ethics with no room for usury, the bane of civilization against which they and all men rail, just doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a brand easy to singe into the hide of anyone who would rather make it on their own. Methinks they throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

In western society, human potential exists in various kinds and quantities, less by genetic inheritance than by early wiring by the highly variable environment into which an individual is born. The belief system of the parents is either the first oppression or the first inspiration a growing curiosity deals with. Socializing outside the family is the first challenge to the inspiration or light on the oppression in a life full of contradictions to every assumption we make. It is at this stage that all the advice points to making irretrievable conclusions about what is right as a keel to remain steady through whatever experience the future may hold. Some, myself included, were never so sure of the concept of righteousness as to adopt it in any form other than than their own autonomy. I remember instances of great passion in love and war in my life, but none were my attempts to convert another to my ideas as a matter of faith in their intrinsic righteousness – merely food for thought in varying potencies from out side the box.

Although I have mentioned it several times previously, the Hindu concept of Minahana and Mahayana is particularly relevant to this socialist/capitalist argument in that Minahana is the individual, “little boat”, which must be mastered before one is capable of taking an oar in the “big boat”, Mahayana. This has always meant to me the same sort of self-understsanding that must precede indoctrination into the requirements of any culture, whether it is the solitary vision quest of native American adolescents or the walkabout of Aborigine lads, without which their communities held them lacking the virtue of responsibility and unworthy of assuming a role of tribal responsibility. Had either culture met a Marx or a Trotsky they would have laughed at the folly of their rejection of self-reliance in favor of group righteousness.

One person’s passionate belief in their responsibility for the care, feeding and behavior of themselves is another person’s fetishized self-reliance. It seems to me that the socialist abhorrence of self reliance is its lack of needing the group they cannot imagine living without. There are no self-reliant mobs out to take over the government that they want control of, there are no anarchist clubs anywhere. The gun toting, John Birchers against whom they rail are not self-reliant — they want to control the same government the socialists do — smaller government just means they want the orders to come from their own living room.

Well, this is as clearly as I can state my thoughts regarding the methods of painting the opposition with such a broad brush it leaves no room for anyone to qualify as an ally.

NO OTHER GODS

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

Easter Island

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

Tipi, Turtle Island

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

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

Palenque, Mexico

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

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

Machu Pichu, Peru

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

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

Ankor Wat, Cambodia

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

Igloo, Frozen Turtle Island

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

New York, Turtle Island ($64)

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

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

Have a good day and love your mother.

•

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

STRENGTH TO LET GO

When you find things are more enjoyable, not because of anything you’ve done to change them, but because you got over annoyance with the way it has and will always be, one may find a depth of fulfilling pleasure that seems out of reach from any other direction.

After the requisite quantity of lifetime and quality of experience I felt qualified to declare myself among the masters of the earth. I had graduated as a mechanical engineer and been snapped up by the premier technology leader in ‘64, IBM. I had learned to program computers based on the physical requirements of the mechanisms they were to control. Now I worked for the company that made the computers themselves; designed and manufactured the mechanisms that handled the keyboard inputs, the magnetic card/tape recording and printing the perfect text messages extruded from composers’ platens.

Oh, yeah. I had it all. A wife, two kids and an income in such excess of my needs that half went straight to stock that split every six-months. The American dreamer ensconced in the pillow growing softer every paycheck. Nothing could get to me.

Sixteen year-old Robin Graham pushed his 24 foot sloop, Dove, away from the dock in Southern California in’65. Like the proverbial butterfly effect, the breeze that filled his sails blew between the lines of whatever our marriage certificate meant to my wife until it became clear to us both it did not include our cashing in our stash for a boat capable of circumnavigation and a world class education for the girls. When I learned of Robin’s voyage through the syndication of his adventure in National Geographic a couple of years into his five year circumnavigation, that security blanket began to feel like a padded cell and my wife became the warden every time I’d suggest our escape. It’s scary out there.

I settled for the sop of a Cal20 bumping around in landlocked Lake Travis until the fateful day I smoked the straw that broke the camel’s back, and she pushed off to the safer harbor of mama’s wing leaving me to “listen to the grass grow.”

Well, here 38 years later, as it has and always will, the grass growing sounds much more pleasant than me mowing. I have a long way to go in learning to detect and relax wishes to control the course of the inevitables in nature. This is inextricably intertwined with detecting and shedding culturally inculcated “truths” by which I am still tethered to the shore of the myth of western civilization’s destiny to reshape the earth in order to see nature as it is.

I sewed my canvas sail and stretched it out in the breeze across tipi poles taking me as far afield from the American dream as any circumnavigation of a globe being slathered in it could ever take me. Curious as to what one would do for an encore after such an accomplishment by the age of twenty-one I looked Robin up and find that he attended Stanford studying architecture. After two years, both he and Patti, the girl he met in Australia, became disenchanted with a society based on youth swallowing civilization’s myth whole with no experience outside high school (reminds me of me, even after four years of military) and built a log cabin in a Montana forest to raise their daughter, Quimby. We sail the same sea, different tacks.

THE MACHINE THAT RUNS ON MONEY

Civilization has undergone some horrendous modifications since the saw about “…old men plant trees they’ll never live to sit in the shade of” applied, particularly here in the forefront of progress, modernity and god’s will we represent in the western version as the “United Stetsons” (sounds so much more appropriate than “American” which has been reserved for the white folk of the USA by hyphenating everyone else). The corollary to that old saying is now “…old men cutting down trees to pile up money only their heirs will become feckless lolling in the shade of while the rest toil at some level of the mountain in envious worship.” Nothing’s new but the degree of idolatrous saturation among the wannabes. One must become a fugitive from charges of trespassing to just walk away from civilization into the land, every inch of which is owned by someone else.

After a couple of hiccoughs from air in the fuel line the good ship USS USA is again under way with a quick stoke of elephant patties to make up for the depletion caused by a vacuum in the structure of the gas tank. As the bull elephant shit begins to run thin the siphoners will have to realize that there’s a point of no return when the cost they charge for staying healthy and educated enough to be able to scrabble after the change left over when their paychecks return from the IRS branch of the vacuum tube is a losing proposition. The cost of health and education runs the risk of making the rocky paths its pilgrims prostrate themselves along trying to earn enough to pay for the right to climb the mountain too fucking steep to return a tidy profit.

Free health care could be afforded by using the billions it would no longer cost to pay for needless government and insurance bureaucracies to pass judgment on health issues — more than enough. Free education would put everyone in the competitive field of sound advice, where anyone satisfied with being a mentor or being mentored in a particular area of interest would form the essence of how subjects can expand organically due to freely evolving curiosity rather than a stuffing into commercially facile molds. The suddenly retired government and insurance company paper shufflers can finally scratch that itch reminding them how much more than a cubicle dweller they’ve always been by availing themselves of the DIY curriculum being offered in the diversity of curiosity and ideas unleashed from musty ivory powers and the booty full, snidely covered hauls of academia. The only retirees in the education field would need be those that are bureaucratic paper shufflers and the teachers barely doing that much. The students and the dedicated teachers that interest them could form classes on their way to new understandings of the natural world's influence on and parallel to our social interactivity.

The new fields of endeavor and the number of enthusiastic, well educated contributors to them is the benefit we would all receive when the real wealth of human ingenuity freely volunteered replaces the synthetic promissory notes backed by depleted uranium think tanks proclaiming warps of mass deception trickled down the mountain to a fearful, suspicious, avaricious world of wannabes.

FAIR WITNESS

Our matching (mirror image) tattoos of the pond, porch and pets

I have a special friend. If Robert Heinlein were to ask her what color was my porch, she would answer, “It’s covered in creepy vines; on this side.” Her return to residence at the Dawgranch has rekindled a conversation that began around the pond over morning ganjava five years ago and continues each of these days around the everchanging wonder of baby chicks growing to maturity. This blog was begun as an outlet for the momentum the vigor of our discussions had generated when she upped anchor for NYC three years ago.

Unlike blogging to an unresponsive, unknown readership with rare excellent exception, our conversations deal with immediate feedback from the smoke detectors we serve each other as by calling out fuzzy language and logic in genuine efforts to share and understand new and alien ideas. The energy of our exchanges serves to drive my meditation during the times alone. It seems the ultimate value of language is that through the natural diversification of labels and meanings due to early nurturing among local customs, we each bring a naturally different picture of the world to a shared process of revealing the pre-existing theme from which all the varieties arise.

She makes me dig harder to help her get her head around my use of terms like void, infinity, gestalt and the mobius loop. I rail at her use of awesome to describe the commonest of phenomenon, only to be brought up short by my jaded, unwilling-to-be-awed attitude that permits me such condescending snobbery and blinds me to how awesome the mere quantity of the commonest critters truly is. Nature is awesome.

THE URGE TO WRITE

There’s no hot topic about which to opine, no brilliant insight into breaking the spell of the myth that has lead western civilization to abandon the symbiosis man shared with the nature of the planet when it employed totalitarian agriculture to become a malignant parasite threatening the health of the body on which its own well being depends, no report of the bumper crop that keeps me from having to go to the grocery store to supplement my garden.

There’s just this urge to express myself that feels akin to water making its way down the mountain after being deposited by winter in the dormant state and wakened by the returning sun to overfill ancient caverns, stalactited with calcified tradition forcing a seep through the seems of conclusions and the faults in boulders of certainty to reemerge on the surface as the fountainhead of fresh thoughts sifting and shifting the grains of factual sand and rolling the theoretical pebbles along arid arroyos of habit to remerge inevitably with the ocean from which it evanesced in the endless cycle of why and understanding my mind is wont to indulge.

The past couple of months have brought a change in the tenor of my “daily dozen,” as my grandmother used to refer to her solar cycle maintenance routine. Rather than acting from the solitary inspiration of watching the sun being slowly revealed by the rotation of earth’s occluding bulk, I have been turning my back to that relatively changeless event cycle to share the observation of its light revealing six brand new sizes and styles of fledgling feathered pterodactyls every cycle with my equally inspired friend, Erica. As chick fuzz molts to be replaced by the multicolored variegation of the adult feathers the wearers of the costumes retire at twilight larger and more colorful than they awoke that dawn.

While they are young, my caution sharpened by the slaughter of three of the first six chicks by my neighbor's dogs and the ensuing insanity, I seal the babes up in the coop with a door over what will remain open for the adult chickens to roost and lay eggs via the walkup ramp and let them down at first light of false dawn. I sleep in the hammock next to the coop with the sharpest ears these old cauliflowers can sprout and often awake to stray cats’ curious investigation of restless peeps and floor peckings emanating from within. Priest, my faithful companion, has made peace with their uncanny resemblance to the birds he catches and the chicken wire that separates him from them to hang with Erica and me to watch in fascinated wonder. Ella, Erica’s dog, on the other hand, has a lifelong reputation for herding to uphold and cannot sit still if there are less than all in sight and constantly circles the coop and looks up into the top for the missing ones in addition to a periodic check of the pond to count the fish.

It feels much better to express thoughts about my experiences in returning to symbiosis with my environment than my experiences of hearing endless news about the results of the wars against whatever, such as the simultaneous calls for compassion, by the Dalai Lama at Harvard, and for empathy, by Barack Obama qualifying justice, while the politicians translate such feelings as code words for liberal treason. Yeah, no more politics here.

FOUR CHAIRS

Amidst a break while turning compost to add to the transplanting of six artichoke seedlings, I noticed the evolved arrangement of my seat and three others and recalled its progress the afternoon before.


The return of the namesake of Ella Falls to Piddle Pond occasioned a reunion with her family after they ODed on NYC after a few years which in turn meant her mistress, lesser known as Babyldorkgalactinerd, again graced the pondside of which she is the reigning priestess and algae redecorator — hail Eris! My joy runneth over.

A gathering of she and her court, Timothy Cleverporque and Henry DeVino caused a line of chairs to form along the path to the shed facing out into the property where I just happen to be procrastinating the swift completion of a projection I’ve entertained for over a year, my own chicken coop. When I took a break I sat in a fourth chair behind the row, and as conversation became more cerebral and less about events before them in the present, such as my carpentering ingenuity or Ella’s elegance in the sunlight, we turned the chairs around to face in a circle as is tradition in America when there’s a pipe to be passed or conversation to be had.

This morning, alone in the quiet breeze of a sunrise that has been occurring for the entire existence of Earth those four chairs represented the human race turning from symbiotically observing nature as a guide and a prime consideration in our behavior to form circles with their backs to nature’s distractions from plans to assert mastery over it, within and without. Civilization is nature designed by a committee.

THAT CERTAIN SURPLUS OF BEING

I have just finished reading the declaration of yet another among us who survived the ‘trial-by-fire’ that acculturation to western civilization represents to the heretical anarchist each of us is born to be. In his book, "The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia", Sandy Krolick identifies the feral self, which, finding only disciplines designed to either mold or bury it, fades quietly into the background of every newborn.

My friend Peter and I refer to this revelation as emergence from the closed-minded authority of adulthood, all too easily assumed to be the final stage of life, where most civilized elderly stew in the juices of their irretrievable, inevitably premature conclusions, peppered daily by contradiction.

A heart condition that denied him full participation in normal cultural activities growing up provided the tilt to his perspective on life that left him feeling estranged from the norm to which society is geared. His experiences, while completely different than mine, are so similar in their influence on his awakening that I have come to realize why society seems to be composed of vacuous, beautiful, obedient people and the ‘wannabes’ who make them rich and famous. Only a sense of ‘cultural insufficiency or difference’ challenges one’s self-worth strongly enough for introspection to reach the level of grasping one’s own innate value, and a sense of truth that needs no consensus. As Sandy writes, “And if culture is principally oppressive could not this very estrangement hold the seeds of liberation.”

Partaking in the daily life of his wife’s family in the city of Barnaul, on the Siberian Steppe at the foot of the Ural-Altai Mountains, Sandy was taken by the terse stoicism of people on the streets and in the shops, in contrast to their extremely emotional gregariousness displayed at home with family and friends. He identified this dichotomy as he witnessed the in-laws’ lifestyle change when they spent the better half of the year at their dacha in the country and reverted gladly to subsistence gardening without the least care for the urban world.

To explain the transformation in their attitudes he used a term I was unfamiliar with, which I find perfect for his and my concept of the eternal present, kairos, as opposed to the infinitely strung-out timeline from the unknowable future to the forgotten past, relegating the present as a mere stepping stone in a much grander strategy called chronos. The present is the only event occurring, while we dress it in the plans and memories that also blind us from fully, directly witnessing life as it is -- so filtered through plots and remembering. His Siberian friends weren’t so much into rigid plans because “life gets in the way.” They see real risk as reliance on the fleeting convenience of the establishment, compared to any vagaries of a life in symbiosis with nature. He could never have experienced this attitude if he'd remained in the United States where our much shorter history is of antagonism to nature and the indigenous populations living closer even to nature than his Siberian friends.

He definitely identifies the depths to which acculturation can saturate one’s life, realizing that we can “no sooner turn away from this modern civilized sanctuary and return to unbridled nature than we could forget how to speak our native tongue.”

Part of the imbalance he finds is our focus on vision to the neglect of our other senses. When he allowed sound to play a larger part in his perceptions he noticed, as I have, how “conversations around me seemed cluttered with idle chatter, packed with trite clichés and disingenuous remarks.”

I find one small bone to pick with his exposition, however. In order to more successfully turn away from this acculturation he says; “I no longer allowed myself to be guided by the principle deception of civilized life … refused to look constantly, anxiously forward … ignored the schedules created around me and for me … forbade the strictly logical processes of rationality from directing and mediating the visceral immediacy of my life — of what I needed to do now — and my experience of just being.” I find that before ‘just being’ can occur one must also quit quitting — can one just be while engaged in the doing of forbidding? To his claim that by “Abandoning this primeval condition we lost our primary gift of freedom — the foundational power of just being-there, outside the chains of time and the terror of history,” I say, that being requires no power, not even to resist power.

We are in total agreement when, in conclusion, he writes:

“In our current state of forgetfulness and slavery we remain ‘strangers to ourselves,’ having become artful products of an epochal cultural construction. But we are also strangers to our culture because we come to society from richer, pre-civilized beginnings, each person bearing within him or herself a certain surplus of being, a feral core, which does not fit comfortably within any domesticated pattern and cannot easily be assimilated into the typical civilized milieu.”

I highly recommend this book to anyone who stands in that lonely place—having perceived the illusion by which man has flourished for centuries.



If this post seems inordinately articulate I must plead innocence; an interested reader took the time to show me some less stream-of-thought mode of communication in turn for which I hereby credit him, SK, with ghost writing it.

2009 — PLANTING AMONG THE TREES

I find myself resonating between the amplitudes of "we are the ones we've been waiting for" aspect of the Hopi elder's prayer I posted a while back and the always levitating angel of depression, Unremitting Failure, who just posted this reply to such a proposition, if so, "What the fuck took us so long?" I guess it could be attributed to the post election doldrums and pre inaugural speculative crapola that seems to occupy the news I seem to have become more addicted to than is easy to admit. The closest to a justification I can come would be my new sense of engagement, involvement in a what I would love to believe is a national paradigm shift to a greener more symbiotic way of living with the environmental nature of this planet rather than as its exploitive owner. There is no arguing the fact that George Bush slipped into daddy's car and wrecked it because we thought it was on automatic child proof.

So what are my hopes for 2009?

First, I hope we ARE the ones we've been waiting for by educating our children with our own good examples of personal symbiosis with our environment instead of settling for and shipping them off to the Amerkin Extrusion & Molding Company our education system has become in hopes that subjecting them to new improved versions of the Christian-America exceptionality that warped our formative years will help them conform in a less painfully debilitating way than it turned out for most of us to be. As if. Each one of us is more moral than all of us.

Second, I'd like the Secretary of Education to recognize the valuable contribution to be had from the experience of retirees from the steeple chase of a career as mentors to lend perspective to instruction through all stages of education. I am thinking of the organic education system I read of on the island of Tikopi where one is considered a child at play, even while gardening and fishing for food, until one begins to reflect on their lives and become more sedentary and easier, more encouraging prey to the burgeoning curiosity of the children's attention soaking up the reflections and tales of the elders.

Third — after the immediate priorities of ceasing both our criminal wars of occupation and incarcerating the criminals that lied us into and perpetuated them have been satisfied — the problems of oil dependency, environmental pollution, corporate bailout and unemployment may be faced as one front under a Secretary of the Future which employs people in the research and development of alternative energy generation and distribution through established manufacturers now required to retool for non petroleum based energy sources and methods of transmission. I outlined a scenerio earlier about a vehicle powered pneumatically on city streets that converts to a hover craft driven by the electricity drawn from the surface of a solar cell interstate highway system which, since the revolutionary reworking of the nation's infrastructure during its much belated maintenance, supplies enough harmless electric power for the entire planet. No more power lines, the highway is the circuit board/power grid and we are Tron.

Fourth, I'd like to see food production be returned to local responsibility for the dual benefit of increased production and nutrition yielded by more personal, organic, less mechanized, chemically and genetically altered care and a more general concern for the welfare of our environment throughout the population as a guard against renewed abuse.

Then, I guess I'd have to break the habit of pinching myself because my normal environment of something to hope for would have been transformed into a realization of my pipe dreams and carving a piece of wood would be the mere happening it had formerly felt like a distraction from hoping for. Shoobedobedo.

I got myself a voice recorder. It leaves me strangely mute to begin with but doesn't distract me with the aesthetics of my hand writing and certainly is more handy for more explanatory jots than,

A note so pure it sucked the wind out of me

or

A slingshot has more range
Than spit pits of some orange

And they said it couldn't be done!

GRATITUDE

Symbiosis — endless giving, endless receiving

Gratitude |ˈgratəˌt(y)oōd|
noun
the quality of being thankful; readiness to
show appreciation for and to return kindness

Contemplating the meaning of thankfulness on this best of all examples of the history twisting represented by the United States’ various symbolic holidays this morning, I am stretched between the extremes in meaning from the obese boy being glad the bag of ding dongs is close enough to reach without interrupting his computer game to the gratitude I feel for realizing that the entire world is colored, shaped, flavored, textured, perfumed and sound-tracked by whether I feel like I’m getting to enjoy my life or having to endure it; quite independent of preferences about the individual events occurring. Returning to this realization in the aftermath of several complete alterations of material possessions and life style due to fire, divorce and willful adventure always makes me glad I’m glad I’m glad … But then along with all my other neopagan ways, I’m a hedonist as well.

The second part of the definition above scuffs up a handle on gratitude upon which business has a death grip. It is no longer a kindness when exacting excessive profit from the evoked gratitude was the purpose of the act; it’s prostitution of our better, greater selves for the evanescent rush of winning in a society of lesser, more isolated selves. It’s where the cliché, “What have you done for me lately?” originated and is used in one form or another throughout civilization. It is a practice among chiefs of pacific island tribes to become rich enough to give unrepayable gifts to the other chiefs to hold them in thrall to their gratitude. Such an approach makes the giving of a gift only possible to those who truly do not expect one and impossible to give to one who does.

I am grateful for being able to back away from caring where those damned ding dongs are and perceive a movement toward a kinder, more symbiotic behavior among civilized people despite the atrocities committed everyday by people unloading the burden they believe their life to be upon the world they irresponsibly hold responsible.

MENTOR OR MESSIAH?

I’m not sure where this post is headed but I know it must be said. At the same time euphoria was becoming the united state of the liberal minded population of this planet last Tuesday night, a sense of déjà vu began gnawing at the edges of my elation as I gazed through misty eyes at ecstatic crowds realizing a dream of a lifetime. All day yesterday, while puttering in the garden or whittling a length of bamboo, I kept hearing indistinguishable traces of a song from the seventies but nothing more. A while ago I was feeding the chickens and their excitement and ravenous anticipation of and quarreling over the choice parts made the final line to the song come bursting into my lungs as I let go with, “Save yourselves!!!”

After putting up the eggs I came in and began searching YouTube for the exact song from Jesus Christ Superstar where the hero turns to the impatiently imploring throng requesting special favors and delivers that greatest of statements I have ever heard attributed to his wisdom — save yourselves.

Barack Obama is on the eve of quite possibly the greatest change for the betterment of mankind in its entire history if we heed his admonition that his ascendance to the seat of power and the inspiration for change it is for so many is not the change itself. The change must be the better person we let ourselves be by just realizing that it is contributing to the idea of a better world he encourages us to create for ourselves and consequentially, for everyone.

While searching for that particular song I came across others that seemed applicable to President Obama’s situation. In Mary Magdalene’s song I Don’t Know How To Love Him she speaks of having so many men before because she never expected her dreams to come true. Now we will see how well everyone who has dreamt of this time is prepared to act from their better self rather than as they had been in a world whose government didn’t trust them.

The difference here is whether Barack Obama is seen as a messiah or a mentor; whether we sit back and wait for miracles from some mythical creator dude or whether he represents an example of wise competence to which we all may freely aspire. I remember a rant I sent to the local rag during a city-wide argument over public transportation in which I made the same point: merely voting for better service and not voting every day with your ass on the bus doesn’t get your car out of the traffic that is much more the problem than better buses. The fervor that elected Barack Obama president must now get on the bus and remain as committed as a matter of life style — or we will be mything the point again.