sharp left for roots

After a visit from my sister whom I had not seen in five years, I'm exhausted and re-energized. A great time was had by all, topped off with a day long hike up the peaks sharing my spiritual world. Better company I've never had. Because of our DNA, we were able to inspire one another reaching greater spiritual insights than we make alone. I'll be mentioning some of them as we go along.

We live as long as we are supposed to, according to the Creator who sees fit we live long enough to see our children into adulthood. These fine machines, our bodies, exquisitely fine tuned, built to last you could say, are richly composed of exactly what we need for our Earth experience. Wondering why such magnificence actually lasts as long as it does, the answer is of course to nurture our offspring as all living creatures do, especially visible in the Avian World whose babies quickly often outweigh their parents and still must stay with them to learn those important birdlife defences and survival strategies during which many tests and trials are passed through under their parents' coaching. Let's say you had your first child around twenty-five, you would want to be able to provide lifelines when that child is twenty-five, as well as to his/her offspring. For example, the Western Flicker, a year round geography-specific Woodpecker's children and the Western Blue-jays' offspring are adult sized birds when they start coming around to feed here. You could confuse the adult with the child except for the open beaks squawking in voracious hunger same as they did, half their current size, in the nest so recently. The Flicker has a lifespan of + - ten years which tells us it takes several years for these birdlings to grow capable and hip to their own survival. This is the reason the nonmigratory stick around the same neighborhood they were taught to forage for their needs. Nature has it all taken care of. Once it was a rite of passage for humans, too. Some of us are operating in a pattern similar to and based in wildlife's pecking order- as we should. However, as we're all too aware, party-balloon growth and pyramids of systems heaped upon failed systems make the majority of westernized Homo Sapiens abandon the pecking order in favor of convenience: an adjective rooted in rejection of Nature's and God's intents brought about by outside-in materialism vs. inside-out awareness. Are we clear?

The above is a nut shelling of the kind of concepts we kicked about. Heh. Meanwhile, I peeked in here periodically to keep up. All who sent email with links, I appreciated it and visited every one. Mon Dieu!

Every day, we are presented with exponentially bizarre twists and turns in our Maseratis doing the break-neck Monte Carlo straight into the abyss. If you didn't see this link - and you should, its simplified for easy understanding of the ongoing Depressing Redistribution Rip. (Thanks Ran, thanks Gonzalo, thanks Charles)

In this environment more and more bloggers are putting up at least one essay questioning the utility of their presence on the web. It appears to be a phase, we doubt the efficacy of posting, rightly, it has no impact on reality. A humus pile a laptop does not make, neither is it a necessity to take your cellphone on a hike into God's heavenly home. I doubt any mountain critter is impressed by a cellphone. Such a thing does not exist in their reality. If you must prepare yourself to meet God, perhaps it is the wiser trek to travel where you'll have nothing to fear.

Maybe we have to ask what is reality anyway? It is our turn now to man the helm, as adults, literal orphans in matured bodies. If we did not succumb to corpodictocracy, we've had to create our own and live 24/7 in support of whatever reality we make ... in addition to the harsh reality on the ground. Daily the two trains meet. Even out here in the mountains, as rural as it is, the train is traveling through our lives, there is never a single day its reality does not impact ours. Even at this very moment, just over the laptop, vegetation abounds but there are no Honeybees and far fewer bugs (how awful for our avian bredren). The Fireteacher is recovering from overdraft hell despite working nonstop seven days. The family visit while a beautiful respite, for my sister culminated in that now common experience of airport hell, jogging ahead on the moving sidewalk making
connections, hauling the hefty carryon, coughing up $25.00 to store a single bag in the belly and $6.00 for a vending machine-sized bag of pretzels compounding the punishments of shoeless lines submitting to security scans which I hear went bonkers as she, a guitarded artist, was carrying "found" hubcaps on which to paint her astounding unschooled "primitives". Those former burger flippers have no interior resources enabling them to grasp her reality. If they were not sifting through the sandwich bags of toiletries, they'd be in Afpak today eyeballing the poppy fields between memorizing paragraphs in their McChrystalized COIN bibles. Last Sunday, while we were on foot, taking in the majesty of western heights and cloudless skies painted in rich cornflower blue, we came upon two women leading horses. (This scene could have been reversed, it could have been us leading the horses and them walking as we discovered the two women were also sisters. I wondered if we somehow crossed into a mirror.) It came out the smaller horse was recovering from severe starvation, dehydration and malnutrition that happened during a horse-boarding experience where the stable owner was called to war suddenly leaving a corralled domesticated living being without knowledgeable caretakers, on her own, like us, flapping in the wind. One of the sisters, her owner, has been working to beef her up and she was looking good stopping to bend for flake after flake of beautiful light green hay. May blessings from St. Francis find their way to that sister. A flake of hay, by the way, is a full patch pulled off from the bale.

As I mentioned earlier, train come, whistle blowing in the distance, regardless of what, where and who you are.

The boomers don't know what to do except grab any straw that looks like a return to Consumer Fantasia. Grabbing and desperation is not sustainable nor a path to peace. We've been at this game long enough to have picked up a few insights in that department, have we not? Review your days, add them up in neat columns of importance relative to this journey we call life. Did your ancestors greet the day with the ringing of the cell, creating conversations sold to the highest bidder which is whomever reviews our conversations looking for that special someone who refuses to board the train? As your day progresses, do you wander into the central living space only to peer into a box of opinions and models portraying the maturing human whose wrinkles you can remove or intensify with the mouse-pad. After brain wracking to recall at least three approved passwords, coffee flavored with high fructose and syrupy white non-dairy "creamer" here you are, the whistle grows louder, the train is nearing, the microwave having pasteurized your individual size packet of instant oatmeal into steaming hot rubber mush. Wooooo oo woooo. Ch, ch, chug ... up the track... wait, its pill time. Line up the bottles, one of these , one of those, heh. Did we ever need so many? Do we need them or do they need us? By taking them we grow dependent on them, I have not seen the Western Flickers ever pick up pills, but I have seen humans clinging to their overflowing medicine cabinets, steering their Maseratis at mach nine into expanded illness sooner or later requiring multiple, invasive tests, hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, fully accepting a diminishing quality of life as better than no life at all. Every time we see this, we know it could have been different, don't we. I have taken many a shower visiting friends only to have to work my way through vast accumulations of consumer products before finding a sole bar of soap.

What we find most heartbreaking is the number of friends on the train to nowhere. It happens often and never fails to disappoint. You say something that reaches into the soul of the other and meet them at the level it counts. Everybody feels good. Later on, it comes out, that moment was reality for you, but temporary for them. This happens unfailingly over the construct of money. Money is racist, like credit ratings. The cocktail car for one, louvered boxcars for the rest. Ch, ch, chug ... Woooo oo woooo ...

Whatever else family does to and for us, the inheritance of IQ is on your side. Not only is it helpful to speak with people who know your patterns, you know theirs, most importantly we know why such patterns exist. These things can be discussed into resolution with mutual understanding and trust, and do not demand context as it was shared from day one. Even the only child gets busy building a lifetime family of friends. The wise parent creates opportunities for this to take place as we are social animals after all and have more than enough room in our hearts to embrace and nurture others as we do our own.

There is a spring in the jungle that feeds a lagoon in which everyone gathers at various times throughout the day peeled down to their skivvies and bathing their bodies. The dreads have locks twisted in piles on their head or shake them free of glistening drops making rain on us. Mostly, nobody talks much, we're bathing after all, under giant cascading Dasheen umbrellas surrounding the waterfall. We might be Gilded Flickers in our natural habitat, free of constructs, doing what living species do without careening trains and whistles, without product logos, petroleum based body lotions and RFD tracking. The medicine cabinet exists in the lush foliage and the elders confer with the little youths while you dunk your head under the waterfall and after, rub down with Baba's coconut oil. Exuberance is a natural state as is spirituality and its accompanying insights (inside-out vs. outside-in), often someone is thumping out a rhythm on the boulders and nothing but God and sun and love is real.


Dasheen
a member of the Taro, tuber, African "FooFoo" family, large leaves sprout from the rootball, a common staple, starchy vegetable, grows under dirt "beetstyle", tastes better, nuttier and less mushy than potato. Peel, cut chunky and boil, salt and butter. Turns speckly grey after cooking. Thrives in high humidity, daily rains. Dasheen leaves often measure anywhere from 1 1/2' to 3' or more across. In the open markets, Dasheen rootball looks like a brown, hairy coconut. Mostly free as it grows every where conditions listed above are present.

Photo Credits:
Western Flicker c.google images
1937 Maserati at Monte Carlo c. google images
Boxcar c. Danny Robie
Jet Airliner #35 c. Josef Hoflener 2009
Dasheen c. google images