the song remains the same

My heart goes out to all those little people in the East who had no idea what was in store on the climate front.  If you've experienced a disaster effectively first hand, wildfire, flood, hurricane, tornado, the countdown preceding, the immediate and long term aftermath, you might realize your experience is in great part dependent on media.  They are the real first responders in that whatever the meteorologists say to the copywriters and boxed Family of Talking Barbie Dolls© shapes your experience in much the same way a Marshall Amp shapes sound waves within a concert hall.  I have family involved, scattered up and down the east coast, all of them were impacted, they saw worse during the power-out, but it was important to stay in touch.  What I read, heard, saw on the web was nothing for them, just a good old SOFL windsoaker.  We've driven through floods, had vehicles smashed by falling trees, stood in line with the urban ghetto for bags of ice from kindly Alaskans, lived for weeks to the soundtrack of chain saws and the scent of charcoal grills wafting up from balconies below. There are people who have by coincidence (synchronicity) experienced more than one headline disaster at a time. This happens especially to people who were on the edge before the disaster/s struck.  There are long chains of events leading up to Emerge and Sees that continue to link into deeper and further despairing events and inescapable cycles.


That is what happens when the self-representatives of men and women attempt to bond with one another against the will of the true self, attempt to outdo one another building more and more extreme systems with subsystems responsible for upkeep which are contracted out to unmanageable groups of outlaws and gangs with subgangs and wannabes dealing drugs, organs, poisons, weapons, clones and robots, security apparatus, torture manufacture, entrance and assistance in all varieties of the low ritualistic entanglements of enablers and shils.  In other words, an empire made out of cotton candy and styrofoam, subject to the elements, subject to the bob and weave of a Rube Goldberg miracle machine on a magic carpet ride.  Now you see, they face a most difficult dilemma.  What they have built will destroy us all.  To halt the machine is to lose the very carpet upon which they so grandly soar.  Like all who think they are immune, is no disaster great enough?  No.  Their disaster is not your disaster.  Their disaster is the disaster of losing the persuasive power of economic stability.  To abruptly stop in their tracks and push for a turnaround like yesterday, will never happen.  They are going to ride the carousel until they can't.  They will show their faces in helicopter flybys and declare whatever needs to be declared to get the printing presses grinding and a small percentage of victims of disaster will make out like bandits, heralded heroes, while the rest live out their lives in increasing discomfort and disorientation as their everyday surroundings grow totally unrecognizable, demolished, rebuilt to reflect the upgraded security enhancements of cotton candy, sold, bought, altered, eminent-domained, burnt-out, empty-lotted, turned into chopshops and tow yards and reborn into yet another gated tract housing foreclosure nest, strip mall or industrial park. 


Mother Earth refuses to allow herself to be made into a laughing stock for the Universe.  She has objected all along, but the fools aren't cooperating, they make Her a lie.  Dire omens are present and growing.  Ask yourself, is drilling, fracking and polluting the atmosphere "pro-life"? Few people really got the message, the fools ridiculed and ignored them and kept pounding their death agenda which is undergoing structural repairs to this minute when actually it is THE opportune time, none better, to get REAL.  People will listen to real.  That is all they know anymore, the bs was wiped out when the power went down and the waves smothered the only homes they've ever known. So deep and thick is the lie, so covered and falsely recovered is the fiction, today, they are scrambling to cast their votes for more of the same in the hope and belief that something, oh please something, someone, somehow will magically replace everything lost.  


Our lives are like a ball of string, or yarn, a tapestry if you wish, with an obscure fraying end here and there.  If you pull the right thread, you can suddenly unravel the whole work.  Of course, it takes certain circumstances for the right thread to show itself.  Most people wouldn't know this unless they found themselves coming out the other side of whatever they previously thought of, without thinking about it, as home.  And home can be anywhere really, being enclosed in stucco and drywall isn't all there is to it.  For those from Breezy Point, NY, an entire community begun in 1909 by firefighters and their families, burned to the ground as Sandy wound inland, home can be a day long family picnic in some secret glen of Central Park before nightfall takes them back to the ceramic tiles and stainless steel of the shelters.  The shelters' heating bills alone must be enough to erect a spanking new townhouse development with cul de sacs named after the 9 alarm fire crew. Ah, but it is more than home that is dismantled when disaster strikes, isn't it.  Its all the self-insulating mini-systems you had going on - to survive as simplified, generously and error free as you could manage knowing all you knew and know, having the feelings that you do and embracing without realizing it, the effortless silence that fills the peace.


There will be no end in sight to the disasters.  Just growth and frequency.  Your survival clearly depends on your own self-reliance.  It you should pull that thread, the dangling end, be sure you are at home with yourself first so that whatever is happening can be managed rationally.   This would be employment of the Zen principle, that all mental and physical energy is focused on the task at hand and the short and long term effects of  your efforts match your intentions.  There are many kinds of disasters as we all know too well, great victory lies ahead for the survivor that is consciously responsible for the outcome of his or her journey.  Situations don't just happen to you out of the blue. 


I've spoken about this before in some of the missing posts from this blog from 05 to 08, we have patterns.  Stop reading this now and sit back, review your life and note the threads weaving through it and the boxes of memory snapshots reminding you of those times.  Tie them together and note the similarities between each, maybe different landscapes and geographies, different ages, different people in the foreground, but regardless of each image's individuality, they are the same.  You were on your way to something and something happened and everything changed.  Later, when you looked around, it seemed different, somehow better or worse, but it was actually more of the same.  This increases naturally as we close in on the present and especially intensifies in 2012 where westernization and its profit margins rake its fouled fingers across the Universe.  Does anyone even know how to prepare for that which they do not know lies ahead?  


We can only prepare our minds and bodies, taking your truth from patterns of your past and apply it to your preparation for what is to come.  It is not hard at all, and for many it is impossible.  *Know thyself.

*attributed to Plato, but documented by Socrates, Plato's scribe.


An interesting side note I'm sure my readers will appreciate:  Following a recent discussion concerning prevention of disaster fallout, I sent a brilliant family member the following article:  Hurricane Sandy's Lesson for Flood-proofing a Subway to which she replied:   

"Well this shit can create the missing jobs. It all has to be done and since it is currently fubar, now is good.  I have always thought manhattan –lower manhattan seemed vulnerable."

Indeed.  The-missing-jobs.  Vulnerable.  If the shoe fits ... that shoe can fit many sizes if you know what I mean.