What are we doing?

One day I just won't do this anymore. Call me a self-hating blogger. Considering the amount of time spent surfing during a typical week, my headstone will read "nina, Blogger", that is if I get a headstone vs. an Amadeus paupers' crater. And yet, that would not be a bad thing. It would be a terrible thing to be buried in steel and gilded plastic. AGHHHHH. The contents of such expensive, claustrophobic casing doesn't allow the body to break down naturally into the process required to complete the journey above ground as one rejoins with Mother Earth's system. How thrilling it would be to have memory during the process and find myself a lucky acorn fallen into some undisturbed pasture in wet weather. And equally as wonderful, to be carted away in a horse drawn wagon, clip clops in the mud on a dark rainy day. I hope to watch it pass in the mist.

We're right where they want us and we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, at home, with our valued family values and spoiled pets which have a cute way of being beloved boats with holes. We're watching a million channels of all corporate marketing models - all the time TV and pouring our angst into blogs on our breaks from the blitz. The calm before the storm? Not if you actually read entertainment newslinks as if the protagonist was your next door neighbor. You reported him, huh? Who goes to theaters anymore? The convenience culture has squeezed itself into a home appliance. An electric wok. Ah, you might put away that electric can opener sitting over there on your granite countertop (cough cough). Its a little much for more than a few fragile megachurch enthusiasts.

After a post has been up say, around four days, I'm doing something else - and why not? I know and you know there is something terribly unnatural with the totality of life consisting of technology. When I get busy with the new horse down the road, making friends and feeding carrots, its ludicrous to break away just to open up the plastic box again. There is no end to the things I can do around here, like pondering the sage.

I found out tonight that horse is named Chip. nice. He could have been my consort in a past life. An older Appie, his spots moved to his face and trunk as he matured. We'd been calling him Freckles. Those spots are Dalmation-like, my favorite pattern. This is a guy I can talk to. I am quite serious, he pulls the angry whinny thing if I don't visit daily. Here is how I got him on my friend list: I brought him some 3rd cut Timothy hay I keep around for my elder Guinea Pig. Its hot stuff, Alfalfa hay is about as exciting as it gets for horses, the hay I brought appears to have affected him like fresh Coconut water and herb would effect us.

There's been a lot of talk about California legalizing pot. Its made it to the voting ballot. Heh. You are free to interpret that cynical Heh any way you want. Prediction: In less than one decade, it will be as common as viagra ads, with similar concerns tranched inside the romance scene.

A few years ago, some officially sponsored hikers found what was officially claimed to be the official original sage in one of our biggest official southwest deserts, apparently it was massive and did what sages do, spawned seeds in a circle around itself which prompted all the spawned little sage-lings to sprout in the same fashion until a mammoth circular ocean of sage spread into the foothills and up and down the mountainsides. Now, millenia later, we have sage canyons and sage flanks. Sage is THE moisture stealer par excellence, more brittle and hardy than competing species, and usually wins the competition for water unless a bulldozer comes along and flattens the land for development which is known as disturbing the land. Disturbed land can be good, as in dozers carving out firebreaks in grassland, evacuation routes and encircling wildfires as parts of containment strategy. However, disturbed land also creates habitat for unwanted species, such as fire ants who have taken to building underground tunnels floating a pavement ceiling, curbs and man-made structures, i.e.; home slabs, barns and outbuildings, strip malls, whole towns, extended cities underneath cities and suburbs, exurbs all the way into out there, deep into fallow pastures and rugged terrain far from the elbowing crowds.

The squirrels enjoy every area where the ants haven't built, employing a similar system of underground connections including personal sleeping pods connected to the great room. They are equally as industrious as the ants. There is life moving around, building, foraging and populating just underneath a thin layer of dirt and vegetation, all of it in competition with each other for survival. We're not really counting the birds' nests in the grasses, but we are counting prairie dogs, moles, voles, mice and gophers, centipedes and other underground/burrowing species.

Peak oil and the financial collapse don't really matter to survival. Throughout the world there are some cultures who have never experienced the glories of the industrial revolution and at the rate they are being eliminated, they never will. Surely the Yanamano tribes of Rio Amazona and its tributaries are on the to-do list. Anyone and everything not enamored with debtors' fever and petro sludge and its by-products, is being annihilated if not by spills and blowouts, by takeover, or as in COIN, counter insurgency i.e.; merger/hostile takeover. If the Earth hangs on another century, Saudi Arabia has potential to be the last standing superpower running this show (perhaps they already possess that distinction? There are many good arguments for thinking that) with backup from Russia's and Bolivia's fresh water resources. So who are WE? What ARE we? These are bold, sweeping questions, but as usual, I'm not concerned with the day to day, tomorrow and tomorrow creeps at this petty pace political details, rather a bigger picture taking into account what really matters for humanity's survival, beyond convenience and the remote control weeding out of everything standing in the way of the reach of Corporatocracy. What happens on the ground is how it is, that much we're forced to divine on our own. Obviously, there is nothing we can do about it either, no matter how many online links to anthropogenic mass destruction, extinctions, slow death, displacement, loss of livelihood and morality's demise. As many of you have commented, "What can we do?" The Earth is never still, cycling through stages of development on a timetable of its own, of course this latest turn of events would come about, and we, along with all life, will adapt as we are doing without realizing it. We are not conscious of the movement of the Earth as we live upon it, either. Learning creates change, educated change and because we have so much occupying our minds, it seems barely noticeable, if at all. Try to keep in mind we are still coming out from under having our brains malfunctioned in Bizarro World. Nothing happens all at once - and something is always happening.

I didn't read the news today, oh boy. I don't feel like messing up the morning with catastrophic horrors and scary tea parties. The news is just more torture, designed to threaten and phobiatize readers. You get the feeling its a softening up the target as if EVERY ONE in a decision making capacity knows exactly what you know and manipulates fact to fit agenda so that fact is falsehood. Try justifying your way through that. Its not easy unless you are Thomas Cromwell, First Earl of Essex, or fortunate to have some out-of-the-blue, blessed sartorial moment of truth in which clarity of thought prevails. Until such a moment occurs, all of us live in a subliminally depressed state of partial awareness knowing some things, the remainder elusive. That we do not know more is guilt inducing in having placed trust in beliefs that show themselves to be wishful thinking. In times like this, it is comforting to bathe one's being in bolanath's grandmothers' healing Net of Light.

While pondering sage oceans it came to me the reason we fail as a species is buried guilt. "So what?" we say, guilt is for criminals who deserve and receive justice, end of story. This gets confusing because media's definition of guilt is reserved for those who commit acts of wrongdoing. Our language partnering with pundits has co-opted depth of analysis, for example, the concepts of justice and wrongdoing. When I think of those words, it always brings Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery (p. 1948) to mind. As long as white people harbor guilt, the lotteries of life continue, suspended in wait are the crowd pleasing stone throwers eager to bury their bredren. The Wahabbi stonings are just us, or the former us before self-education, out in front of the frosting and lace put on justice and wrongdoing. Since the western world carries mountains of buried guilt for having massacred, executed, tortured, threatened, renditioned, lied and stolen property throughout recorded history, the western majority cannot and will not tolerate the weight of that guilt and must dispose of those free from denial of stoning or distortion of intent and action. In other words, if you speak what you see, you are not tolerated because you are naming blame, not owning blame. The real blame then remains stuck in denial aka defense of imaginary concepts such as states, borders, rules on movement, being in love with ideas of division which have no basis in reality. One Love.

Into this world we are born, little sagelings thirsting for survival, spawning and sprouting our ways though time, a blink in the eye of our planet which somehow survives us, minimalizes us, we are Aborigines looking into the sky waiting for God's care package to this day.

Behind each seed a string of seemingly small, but meaningful actions taken, involuntarily, and worse, actions not taken at all, guilt builds for participation in the competition for survival in nothing more than an ego construct. It would help if we just dropped the pretense and spoke in semi-monosyllables, to ourselves and to the Universe. I'm sorry. I love you. I never wanted to hurt anything, nothing! The real wrongdoing here is how few get that AND live it. You think the SCOTUS can fix that with justice?

... All language is a system of symbology, that is, sounds strung together that mean something relating to the external reality we experience.

This symbology is unique to the individual person due to the fact that all of our individual experiences are normally unique events relating to the individual, with same exceptions. But, in almost all cases, the interpretation of those events will be different than other individuals sharing the event. This has been tested over and over again to the same conclusion. .... murph

The list of ego constructs grows in perfect proportion to humanity's helplessness. To acknowledge disingenuously or not to acknowledge at all is the greatest wrongdoing throughout history, our existence predefined for us, soap operatic in scope and lack of something real, where does one draw the line? Is anyone angry? Or, are our laptops the epitome of the addicts' compromise? Slowly, ever so gradually, we arrive at this point each in his own time. Tattered, torn, straddling the the chasm between the real and the great lie, we participate in slowing adaptation which spreads the guilt around enough to keep the big lie going, and growing, a little longer.

artwork: Fritz in Hibernation
transparent watercolor inks on Arches
18" x 24" | 2005
concept c. Helga Sermat