Back roads-eye view

On his way home from the jobsite, the fireteacher was passing though a hundred miles of bad road, lonely stretches of weeds, no dwellings, the occasional Sage families, around 6 p.m. Up ahead, he saw the taillights brake on a farmworker's pickup. The driver dumped something on the road and took off. The fireteacher slowed to look. There was Louis. When they got home, I was called outside and yes, it was an instant bond. At first I thought he looked like Peter Lorre, but that's all changed now. That night, Louis and I chatted in a shaft of moonlight from the tallest window. We talked about his suffering through abandonment, he wouldn't have lasted an hour out there, about what he might have experienced of life so far, especially as an unwanted pup on the verge of adolescence and assured him he was home at last. We've had a great time together ever since. He sleeps on the end of the bed already. He shines on a leash. Comes to his name. Its a lock. A win-win. I live in a houseful of males. That includes the Guinea Pigs. Louie's story is a metaphorical parallel to landing in Shambhala.

I hardly know what financial terror driven drivel is supporting the Illusion this week. It runs together like tears dripping down the page, smearing distinctions. It is stunning to me that there are not nearly as many intelligent people around as we would like to think. I had a few encounters with merchants over the past seven days and have nothing good to report. Ahem. While it was always grueling to go into town, these most recent sojourns have been less than chilly. Workers at every place I visited have lost their smiley face. They are able to glaze their ways through routine mechanical tasks, but they physically turn away when you look at the receipt and your stomach drops twenty feet. Its the same with the auto mechanics to the framers to the supermarket cashiers. Each of them lost in a paranoid thought bubble in a ballet class. You do not want to hear about all the nickle and diming going on out there, I'm sure you see it yourself as you start juggling which priorities you can live without. But why do these hourly rate types sink into stupor? And there is a difference between these workers and the salaried who exist in a leveraged universe currently in freefall ... They have always done the best they could in most situations, see themselves as good persons, going along with the program in a timely fashion only to arrive at this moment in history, juggling their own priorities, maybe they can slide another month on the rototiller ... some days they wonder what is going on when there is time to wonder. Except when the card goes in the little reader, then there is a spark of real communication, a shared knowing, but it passes quickly into bagging and what Admin at Survival Acres means when he says BAU, business as usual.

I know we like to wonder into the future, always thinking a little ahead, asking how this multiplies, perhaps it extends indefinitely, gradually worsening. At some point, there are no corners left to cut. Here we are again, why is all this happening? Resource depletion. Too many of us. These are the great Energy Wars trickling down to a hundred miles of bad road, lonely stretches of weeds, no dwellings, the occasional Sage families. Its a long road.