Take #9

And thus it was in blinding fog, mist, icy temps and the occasional downpour, life became unglued from its routines, its simplicity, its familiarity and warmth in a swiftly moving beam reach, heeling port towards an unchartable course in uncharted waters.  We can, when called, gather an invisible interior crew together for the heavy lifting, just follow the light.  The problem came when the headlights went out and I followed close behind a truck ahead, using its light, certain the Force would not let me down, which it has not, not when you are guided by the Force to start with and do not deviate from its intuited direction.  It is when we move around ignoring the voice we get into trouble, hassles, meet with unpleasant circumstance which has a way of tying us up for sometimes months, even years, decades, expensively, foolishly, so much time wasted on the disappointing, increasingly disastrous outcomes interacting with Wetiko complexities, intersecting with the cubic corners in the shadowy recesses of the poisoned hybrid mind, that could have been so easily avoided had we paid attention. They enjoy making it impossible to pay attention.

I don't exactly know anymore what to call the Force.  Some speak of the Divine, the Ineffable, the Creator or God, but beyond doubt, there is something there, greater and more of everything we will ever be.  This Force I am speaking of has it over Everything and we can only work to allow ourselves to be a willing vessel filled with this Force, hopefully receive direction, insight, answers, connections, talents and send it freely outwards as close to what we receive as possible, although it is completely impossible to recreate that which flows through the human vessle.  We will never be pure enough in this journey, in these bodies, clumsy with shabby excuses and justification.  If we purified everything about ourselves, we wouldn't even come close.  To accept our failing is to accept the guidance of the Force knowing we will never know anything absolute until the Force has chosen to accept us into the Human Realm. Always, in the process of ignoring the higher spirits, we end up in circles going nowhere.  This is why people fear the unknown, taking leaps at all, preferring to re-chart the old familiar easy courses, arriving at the same isolated destination repeatedly, lifetime after lifetime, hiding behind patterns that never worked in the first go-round, deluding themselves that somehow the ship can right itself while the great Sea of Humanity swallows whole the mast.

There has never been a single time I feared the leap.  Early on, likely during Chess, I asked my Father about his experiences at sea. The game paused as I was awed by stories that would make a nonbeliever's hair stand on end.  The Square Circle is appropriate today.  His Hellcat left the carrier in bad weather, not much time passed before he was lost high above an ink black ocean and mentally reviewed his flight manual.  He said he flew in a square circle for hours lowering and raising altitude as darkness blocked out his view.  Just before his fuel was exhausted, he spotted a pinpoint of light far in the distance and made it back to the flight deck safely.  He never panicked, never doubted, always sure with himself and his craft, guided to a safe harbor by a higher Force.

One technique that helps us survive whatever harm comes into our path is to pre-condition yourself for the experience.  I used to imagine in heavy weather during long cruises out of sight of land, without charts, bum radio, exactly what might occur if I lost my first mate overboard.  Mentally take all the steps required for a safe rescue during the worst possible circumstances.  As if you were blind, feeling your way as you went along, reaching for the helm because you memorized every navigation aid aboard and activated all the correct steps insuring safety leaving nothing to chance.  Heh, so I insisted on our adorning harnesses roped to the foredeck, forged onward under bare poles, preventing having to execute the Square Circle under the duress of darkness, overwhelmed in the noise of angry seas, or suffering a broken mast from a mainsail ripping jibe. 

Our photos today are general purpose, some California unseens and some Arizona unseens.  They have meaning to our essay as you desire, or not.  You should be able to enlarge with a right click to open link in a new tab.  Each of them is a part of an unfinished document -  from January to the present, Twenty Twelve, a sort of digital diary of highlights, when I remembered to take the camera, because the camera lives with my art supplies and the photos were not the only highlights.  The most consistent highlights I keep meeting are acts of human compassion, the number one emotion separating good from evil and its disease-compromised followers.  It does exist, its alive and well, you get the feeling in this town real fast that everybody knows and no one has any idea what to do about it.  That's because the mob was once KING here.  Long time residents know the drill. Extreme Wal*Mart cheap technology and undersized underwear appears to have dulled overt awareness however.  The illegal family man with toddler on shoulders was losing his pants showing full crack and red silk knickers weaving into Wal*mart's Ballroom Joblot as I pretended not to look.  I take that back, it was Wal*Marts Stadium NASCAR triple blowout joblot.  Their veneer plastic lawn funishings Halloween costumed as Teak @ $15.00 US gives you a clear view into the lifestyles of people whose awareness is, let's say, not keen. Nor should it be after the harrowing leaps all of them have taken for ... for what?  Keep it to yourself.  There are two sides to every story is the saying which we can rework to say each person comes at it from a unique perspective.  My father's words "Everybody has a story."

There is a block of text in the lower left margin on this page worth reading and reading often, especially when you are considering leaps and tying harnesses to yourself.   May you listen clearly to the Force whispering in your ear and guiding you through every hour, every day and night.  We are in full-on crazy time now.   We knew it was coming and we could not pin point the visual although omens often showed themselves.  Once again, we have all the answers within us, we must learn to recognize them and act appropriately.  Second chances in this journey have already been taken, third, maybe fourth, fifth and sixth chances, but that is all in the past.  This time is here and now, and you know the ropes as well as the crowd in this city knows the drill.  Our country and its idealistic ideals, the base, our lives upended, as an entire civilization disintegrates before our eyes, it seemed impossible to continue such an extremely dangerous, unhealthy, threatening course, every decision the wrong decision against all forms of life in existence on the Living Planet.  But roll on it does, exactly as the giant rubberhog tires on the 'Cat garbage compactor roll and grind, a two-story tall, massive death machine, pressing into miles of hills and valleys of the LA city dump, twice as high as myself ... I was driven to stare at it.  The Security guard asked me if I wanted to ride on it which I did and climbed into the front, squeezing against the inside window while the operator in back of me pressed hard into the continuously renewing sea of styrofoam, hairpins, toothpaste tubes, plastic shopping bags, half-eaten, loose and maggoty McDonald's kiddy meals, high chairs, mattresses, TVs, saran wrap, plastic bottles, crushed milk cartons with sideways straws, broken carseats, cheerios boxes, socks, cartoons scraps and gnarled  logos of the trash legal Personhoods litter over the planet in glee oozing though the dark spaces between each recognizable item in rivers of bubbling dung.  I apologize for not owning a digital then, much less a cell phone video cam.  Doomers would appreciate how fortunate I felt for the experience.  The highlight, of course, being sworn witness to the carnage in real time and fully explanatory, an undeniable truth in 3-D, flesh and blood in-your-face.  Few things on our journeys are so well defined. 

See lower left margin T'ao Ch'ien. "... ever away into this hundred-year life and beyond, my story and I vanish together like this."

the carpet too, is moving under you

...You must leave now
Take what you need you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep
You better grab it fast... 
Bob Dylan

According to recent weather updates, from the extreme eastern regions of So-Cal, up and across the Southwest and throughout the Great Plains region, ballooning north, south and east, on into whiny Manhattan and the Great North beyond, a two by four is attempting to awaken the slackers.  I say whiny Manhattan because only in Overpopulation would New Yorkers be moved to speak up about their streets.  (Ever tried to cab cross-town midday?)  It used to be that losing one's vehicle in the snow was so freekin' normal you just got down to business and found the right lump.  Personally, I enjoy those kinds of activities. They're sort of mysterious and compelling, a game you usually win, the somewhat slim chance of loss drives you to win.  Its not addicting, it is the rarity, not your every day miracle, although to car thieves and the underground parts industry, heavy snow, mass disaster in general, is miraculous opportunity.

We who still have functioning electrical power know already how weather is poised to be Egypt's alternate story.  So many questions, so much hurt, too many people, no solutions.  Of course, there are big solutions available, but after all these long years of hearing about peace and stability, ever ask yourself what that really means?  It means free and unfettered reach to do as one pleases.  It means purchasing a situation where the world's populations silently turn over every resource the energy whales require without uttering the slightest dissent which is impossible given human nature.  You cannot remove the small portion of Earth upon which a man stands without him falling down.  You cannot take away his right to stand up and yet this is what is going on wherever a foothold can be bought.  Once again the markets rear up in defiance, Moody's downgraded Egypt and the markets were shut down hoping to quell the flight of liquidity which will only worsen when they reopen.  This is how the world works and their last hope at that unfettered free reach.  It works sometimes, in some already barren, beaten down places because people need to eat, but considering the unrest in Egypt was called for by a 28 year-old girl using Facebook, the youth of this planet is about to put a stop to all the whipping humans experience worldwide simply trying to survive. Jah praise the yout.

... Egypt and the country's military have grown accustomed to American support and will want the money to keep flowing. It is the flow of this money that ensures the purchase of the replacement government. Because the US dollar is the world reserve currency, the US government has financial dominance and the ability to financially isolate other countries ... Paul Craig Roberts

Enough of that.  Inevitable is inevitable.  Anyone reading this far is prepared to think on their feet, right?  Don't let me be a downer, but the fantasy is never the reality. And no doubt a part of you was positive you were exempt.  No little person is exempt, you should know that by now.  There is no WHO fanfare concerning this disease, no Rumsfeld vaccine, not now when everybody is wiping the sleep from their eyes.  They may not yet have the details in order and maybe they will never see the whole picture, but people naturally question and wonder - how it ever got to be this way.  It is due to the selective bulletins, the omissions, the twisting of evil into the language of altruism, that chemtrails are suspect as well.  And now HAARP.  When was the last time anyone revealed what's up on Diego Garcia?  On days like this, after hearing Hoseme try to see out his term by watered-down compromise, everything is up for question.  The disease is collectively so much farther along than you or I could possibly imagine.  These are people from another parallel having invaded ours and now insist on sticking around and driving humanity into oblivion.  They wrecked their original parallel with this behavior, no lessons were learned, that mindset is unable to perceive lessons.  They exist to destruct.  They are completely immune to pain or suffering.  They look human, but that's just a trick of blending into our parallel to better spread their psychosis.  You might say this is nonsense, but what is happening throughout the world is equally as nonsensical.  In order to understand, you have to forget everything you ever thought previously and get weird.  Nothing logical is logical anymore.  Every road a cul de sac, a detour looping from nowhere to nowhere.

I don't want to waste our time talking about them. It gets too heavy, too distracting, too quickly, it will kill you if you allow it to through mere overload of evil costuming itself in western dress, pearls and Jane Harmon's platinum frosted do.  When you are dragged to the doctor no one will believe what happened, blaming your condition on your shabby lifestyle and lack of mandated health insurance.  Never mind you were occupied by force far away from any choice on your own where you cried out for assistance time and again and no one in a position to help ever heard a peep.  In fact, your peeps were stifled intentionally for statistical charting purposes.  You existed nowhere on any chart published by any entity, without apology you do not count because if you did you might be heard and they can't have that.  I do not expect lasting change for the Egyptian people or for anyone actually. Humanity is up against too many stacked decks and shifty characters pulling out all the stops.  There is no such thing as a half win.  The people standing up have our admiration and our support, the problem is too many things have to happen before there will ever be a genuinely united win, we are not the deciders of fate at this moment, the deciders are still casting fate.  Just how much casting takes place is revealed more literally by the hour.  Financial weapons of mass destruction are the first and last resort in deciding fate and will not give up, hardened as they are, just as the truth behind that 2001 moment of reckoning will never be brought to light.  Its all related, one action leads to another and ripples out into the atmosphere poisoning survival of the species.  Were we born into this world only to die correcting it? If you are passionate about your life experience, that may well answer the question of life itself.  Why are we here, now?  We could have been reincarnated into any previous or future time and would we find the same situations, patterns, repeating as cells split, multiply and split again?  Is it all merely science?  If it doesn't work out in Egypt, where will it work out?  And what will it take?  I realize we greatly credit Orwell already with wisdom and vision beyond the typical mind, but likely he saw this day coming in a way few, if any, have ever willingly put to paper.  It is unusual no religions have sprung up around his insights, perhaps because it isn't exactly lucrative, although Orwell's observations came to pass while a so-called civilized world went along with it, willingly, even greedily, begging for more. Apparently no one wants to create a magachurch dedicated to the police state although it still could happen, if, and that's a big IF, there were time for it to happen.  At some point, climate chaos takes over and all the plans of the Wetikos will be buried under the scramble.

Allow me to briefly move away from the horrors and misery imprisoning little people everywhere.  The Mustang princess Stella, is back from boarding during those climate chaos rains that muddied up her apartment.  They plaited her mane  She's grown the most amazing winter coat, its fur.  Imagine chestnut fur with her blond mane and two white diamonds on her forehead.  I'm going to be the official photographer when she goes into labor.  Yes, of course, I will post the best ones.  Chip, the Appy, went to a relative's farm which is very cool, his old stomping grounds.  It seems with animals especially, we have to recognize that we will miss them, but love is wanting the best for them. 

Gosh, I almost got away from the Wetikos there.  I'd so rather involve myself into what's happening with the animals.  Its the animals' non-verbal communication and their appearance, its spare, its exactly functional for exactly what each animal requires and no more, no shoe fetishes, no preening in the zeitgeist pyramid, its a lifetime of come-as-you-are.  Now to get back to the dark side ... oh, let's not.  Its an important move to dedicate some portion of your day to your animal family including livestock.  Take them herbivore/grazer treats, hays, carrots and apples.  Never doubt your friendship.  Be as affectionate as possible.  Just like any friendship, go slow and see how it develops.  This can all be simplified by just saying use your manners.  If you don't have manners, I can't help you.  I probably could, but I wouldn't want to. 

Between the the catastrophes of climate change and Egypt, that should be enough, but its obviously not.  It never is now.  This is real, my friends.  Multiples of happenings growing towards some distant, final crescendo.  I don't know about you, but I grab the good stuff where I can.  If there is something beautiful taking my full attention, so be it.  We are typing on varying sizes and styles of little boxes that can give us any detail of anything we'd ever want to know, anywhere, what is far more fascinating and real exists outside, offline.  Kindle that.  In your life, are there not moments of clarity every now and then in which you see yourself?  There is no technology, at least not yet - which means never, that can bring that around.  Wherever there is revolution, the people in revolt have gone deep within themselves, each one of them, to recover spiritually for without awareness there is nothing.

The schedule jumps forward

The schedule has moved up because Wetikos are ignoring the signs due to fear of massive and unprecedented potential for loss.  Can you imagine that?  What is happening now was supposed to happen beginning next year according to prophecy, but alas, its too late.  I regret to inform you loss is the name of the game.

I don't have the patience and you don't have the interest to go over everything that has gone down since our happy new year began.  I was aghast to see such clamor over the latest of so many clamored shooting sprees when there is no clamor at all as usual on the ridiculously expensive, legally approved shooting, bombing, burning and assassination sprees of the resource rip with the exception of a small handful of writers much of whose prose I am not exactly in a position to swallow verbatim since generally they don't pass the leaky wikileaks or the nine one one litmus tests.  What it is that we get is never the real thing, but a facsimile of agenda then widely reported in the form of weakened facsimiles of already slippery facsimiles, i.e.; long on speculation and short on fact eventually morphing into whipped cream riches for an already generously enriched security industry.  Shall we talk about the weather instead?  The exceptionally brutal la nina is supposedly responsible?  For crying out loud.  Georgia has always had ice storms.  Georgia has not always had two thousands daily flights cancelled holding up the machinations of the system (spelled lost profits and pronounced as inability to make loan payments as per agreed schedule).  The real weather appears to be walloping the Wallabies today, yes, even as Pakistan is turned to fade, tomorrow, who knows where or what technology enhanced PA systems will bring forth.

The hibernators inhabiting my region are not hibernating this year.  For whatever else is unnerving, this is yet another sign, one within my view as living, breathing real phenomena of something happening that is definitely not normal.

Actually, its those birds falling out of the sky, (the Red Winged Blackbirds tribaling with their bredren, the Cowbirds, and immigrant Starlings with jeweled Tudor feathers), and the genocided fish stuffing our waterways, strange things that definitely leave pundits rushing for their notes and coming up clown-faced.  We'll be seeing stranger soon enough having entered into this gruesome phase of the revealing.  Can anyone in any location reading here say with absolute certainty the weather we are experiencing is what it is supposed to be based on how its always been since we arrived on the scene?  That it is normal for birds and fish to check out en masse?  That Queensland and Brisbane are on not well on their way to breaking Katrina's record death toll and diaspora?

There are lists around, you've seen them, taking  us through all the horrors from last year into this one.  It  is amazing to me how few mention Haiti, as if everything in Haiti is just lovely.  No cause for concern.  Besides, its all happening faster than anyone could possibly have imagined and the spotlight is on Australia now anyway, Haiti, you'd better be taking care of yourself, not that you haven't already been doing that for a few hundred years.

... It is as if “until it happens to you” that the climatic extremes don’t carry any true weight or meaning. As long as the trucks continue to run and stock the supermarkets and big box store shelves, we simply don’t care how we have treated the planet, or what sort of horrifying inheritance we have given to our children and grandchildren. ...  Admin | Survival Acres

How soon before you are sharing a makeshift pup tent you don't own because you lost everything, looking for the relief workers bearing MREs or standing on the rooftops in gated communities waiting for helicopter rescue?  Any day now my friends, it could be us, it could be anywhere at anytime.  Don't take my word for it, just look outside as the freezing rain turns to hail and still the chemtrails leave ugly ribbons across that clear blue sky quickly turned to thick, darkening snow clouds.  You wonder funny things then, what ifs and so forth.

No sooner did we leave one tragic subject another rises on its heels, keeping us in a constant state of mental occupation, a state of terrorized occupation.  As always, when we are under occupation, a small voice in the back of our minds asks underneath this one and that one, what else is going on?  The thrust to keep us from asking that exact question is on like never before.  We are not to know, under some unnameable threat of some unnameable harm to unknown citizens, some of whom can guess what may be taking place.  It does appear however, at this time in the history of civilization we are revisiting every reason we should never have gone where we find ourselves today.  It is a sad fact of life on Earth that some of us are open minded and some of us are too scared as opposed to being too ignorant, to accept reality on its own terms rather than constantly twisting it into something in which you have a personal investment.  Sure, the ignorant have big numbers, but how ignorant is someone really when no one can miss the events of the present blaring from every bullhorn on every corner of the planet?  You'd have to be all the way out there heavily abusing opiates, fully into your fries and fried pies to remain ignorant for long in the revealing.

Now I am just like you, another watcher, another concerned little person subject to the same incessant diminishment of life's quality.  And surely it makes you feel awful, especially when all people just want to feel safe, free in their homes and communities and at peace with everything and everyone else.  Don't look for corruption to fade away in the snow and ice, they are already showing us exactly how the revealing will be handled.

It won't be handled.  It will be denied to the last man.  Corruption is here to stay for the duration and guide the suffering with excuses and falsehoods.  As the planet becomes a nonstop horror flick, the foreclosures in disguise will continue until there is nothing left anywhere.  The closed mind denies everything until their dying breath.

The closed mind emerged from the womb a sort of shapeless cellulose sponge absorbing the machinations of ego constructs never challenged, educated in complete expectation of being served a birthright of convenience and unoriginal, incomplete thought processes in which use of the physical body supplied was thought an inconvenience.  Picking up the mail last week, I overheard two cellulose adults in line, speaking loudly as if softer speaking would not create the desired impression on their unwilling audience, saying something about as soon as whatever happened she would get a new SUV.  This flew past the ears of twenty five or thirty onlookers in classic frayed farmhand overalls and beaten down workboots which tell you the socks probably do not have any foot covering left.  Onlookers who have already sold their livestock because they cannot afford to feed them any longer.  Onlookers who once ran small shops and businesses who absolutely can no longer afford the fees the state requires from small business and lost the last shreds of revenue to the energy gluttons with card bearers only refueling stations.  The strip malls are empty save the dancing illegal waving his hot pizza sandwich board at the intersection.  The biggest drag in all of this is they will take us down with them - all the way from repairing our own workboots, mending our socks and digging our own graves. 

We are in the thick of it now.  Its all unfolding as we grip our chairs, belted in for the long run, a few thousand years of peak die off to come before one beautiful day it will be different, cleaned up by the Forces where all killing products were lost to resource theft and disease vanished because the official sample keepers lost their vials of stored plagues when the earthquake hit, when the bars to the cells crashed down and Guantanamo simply slid over the mid-Atlantic states into Canada before sinking into a rusticle-covered grave somewhere near the Titanic's crypt.


Last week I wrote  everyday we play musical chairs, let me change that to musical deck chairs because the shoreline is receding making way for the tsunami as we speak.

Even if you did everything right, it was impossible really to back off completely from use of some material, likely a plastic water container or a commercial soap boxed in cardboard and shrinkwrapped, or from the idea we might offend others with our natural scent and sprayed our underarms with an aerosol deodorant.  Even during the flu last December, Dublin Mick and I, thousands of miles away from each other, both took our doctor's orders seriously and ingested pharmaceuticals. Even the lonely woodsman far from advertising's grip makes a trip to Wal*Mart for airtight containers every now and then, I know, I've seen it.  But that's not happening anymore, we ditched our involvements and got right with the Earth, yet sometimes we slip, its designed to be unavoidable.  The trick might be to stop blaming ourselves, but to get on with our survival skills, perhaps write them down, be sure to show them to the children, someone has to carry this knowledge into the future if mankind has a future, something we will never know unless we are reincarnated into whatever species comes about as a result of ... the revealing.


The coming months are almost guaranteed to be a downplay of the present, even they know its over the top already, but if you ask you will find you are in the company of Wetikos who refuse to lose.  So don't waste your energy, instead get that Tao in hand and make peace with the present while you can.


rusticles photo: c. google images

from dust to dust: broken and breaking

... The first U.S. census, in 1790, recorded four million Americans. By 2000, this number had grown to 281 million. It is expected to reach 310 million by 2010 and 439 million^[17] by 2050. ...  Demographics of the United States


 By the time my homesteading chores for the day are done, the light is gone and evening wrapup chores require my presence.  I've been keeping up in moments grabbed between one thing and another and the mood for something more stimulating vanishes behind everything that is broken.  My news for you in general is nothing will change, what you see is what you get and worse, what we don't know is already playing out and not yet sugar-coated sufficiently to enact at full throttle, but give it time.  The days are like an old calendar from early cartoons, flying off the pages, one after another, faster and faster, D day for change has come and gone so many times and still nothing changes for the better.  The wars are never ending.  The monetary crises, world wide, continue, falter and stand again for repeats until everyone forgot how it got this way in the first place.  If you read the items on my blog list over there on the right, daily, you're seeing things much the same way I am.

Among the things that are backwards and upside down, we do not know when we have it good and we also do not know when we have it bad or recognize in all its totality every step down into the cellar of life where choice and simple contentment don't exist.  How many foreclosees do you think are saying to themselves on this very day "Gee, we never should have left that little apartment with the low rent."  Too many human beings are simply unable to read the tea leaves, pay attention, interpret the omens, trust what they see with their own eyes.  Certainly, that would free up evil to do exactly as it pleases without interference as is happening in full color 3-D wherever you look or don't look because who really wants to believe the situation will never get any better before our time is up?  That's where religion comes in, candidates and celebrities, the political and the powerful - as a diversion, a grasping at hope, the heroin of placebos and as John Micheal Greer points out "lullabies" sung to us while evil plots to rule the Universe.  He was speaking of green self-help books, but of course, those are only profit-venued substitutes applying themselves to the popularity of mass paranoia.  When the situation began to crack, most of you reading here today were already aware of it and what did you do?  Vote?  Made a drive-thru deposit into your bank account?  Filled your sheath of prescriptions? Waited in the Wal*Mart cashier lines? Even as the black boxes did what they wanted, still you secretly hoped, following the dictates of your representative-self?  Even though you'd read the tea leaves seemingly accurately, even though you'd been online well over a decade or more ... searching, reading, commenting, obviously little if anything you thought you'd learned stuck.  Maybe you said to yourself "Something is missing, there must be something else?"

We have a few FYI items that I have not seen on the news Lullabies & Possibilities pages.  And, by the way, going to the news sites is more than surreal, it isn't news, its suggestion -  "likelihoods" or "possibilities" that will never happen such as the administration considering the public's outrage over body scanners (How is it there are no scanners at the DC or Miami airports?) or Tom Delay spending a century behind prison bars or else its just more mergers and takeovers acquisitions of the small swallowed alive by the big.  Possibility, the iffy preposterous proposition, is what we read and call news.  Not even your everyday little people thug crimes are genuinely newsworthy because the officials in charge refuse to divulge what they know fearing damage to their case.  Where in the news is there any mention the deadly Cholera epidemic in Haiti is rumored among the Haitian people to have been brought to their disaster-aftermath suffering by peacekeepers when the bacteria never existed previously in Haiti?  The rumor grew legs through official investigation of damaged waste pipes delivered into Haiti's water supply and a sometimes contractor who made cleanups once, when tents were erected and once again, after the rumor broke.  And another, especially weird item rarely brought before newsreaders' eyes, equally unfathomable and disturbing in its implications, political and otherwise, Afghanistan is one of a tiny handful of countries with the highest fertility rates on the planet, matched by Niger.  Watch out Niger.  We are to surmise, none of the above matters now.  If it was not on the news, it isn't real. 

Since we started looking, its always been obvious we have too many people on this planet.  It reminds me of what can occur when you are caught in a stampeding crowd, anything can happen.  Sure, you are fortunate to escape with your life intact, but later on you begin to perceive that everything changed and it isn't going back to anything you ever knew.  We are now literally strangers in a strange land.  This is not helped by certain bloggers who put up scare links that lead you to stories that mention only a vague possibility referring to the original scare headline you followed.  It is worsened faster than the situation worsens by itself to have some think one thing, others think another until there is no cohesion to what we know or don't know.  Doing that is abetting evil.  For what?  To increase readership who will buy into their blog ads?  Well, hey, then say so up front so we stop wasting our time.  There is not much left that has not been tainted.  Maybe a few uninhabitable spots somewhere on the globe where no profit is available, but will be when a technology comes along that mines money from frozen dirt.  Although, there is now a start up attempting to bottle glacier melt.  Note I say "attempting", as in "possibility".  Yet, what is really happening is hidden in plain sight.  If we go back in time, how many know where Karzai came from?  How can these world leaders allow themselves to be jerked around while their countries are bulldozed by drones and Abrams tanks and 99% of their already indigent population has no idea why?  Meanwhile in the superpower, everyone you speak to hasn't any better grasp on the situation, either.  You have to wonder how the meetings between these leaders unfold.   Do they speak to each other daily?  Hang out together during the off times? Who is working for whom?  This is ludicrous, isn't it.  A fake leader shows up three times at peace talks and vanishes with his personal appearance cash.  Little people like us (and the victims) cannot understand what passes for leadership now.  Its too ugly, too cheap, too far-fetched and always morphing into lame paperbacks with cumbersome finales.  All of it a monumental waste of humanity, an erasure of all that came before such world leaders egotistically make their mark only to see that mark liquidated under the next generation of world leaders.

Honestly, how can we count our blessings on Thanksgiving as the annihilation of humanity/animalia/natural resources/environmental catastrophe escalates on the bloodiest, most unimaginably brutal scale ever while financial wars take down what remains standing through globewide economic shock?  What blessings?  Piece by piece, brick by brick our lives are being intentionally dismantled as has happened throughout history it is happening now in the centrifugal force carny ride of overpopulation and growing ever larger by the minute.  This much is easily recognizable in spite of lullabies. 

We are, for the most part, good people, well-intentioned and ineffectual against the tides.  Our flaw is our goodness. History was his/her story, not ours, but examine the parallels to your own existence and that of how our planet is disintegrating and it begins to form something solid verging on truth.  You can spend the remainder of your journey seeking an answer, but the truth will hide until you are ready to understand.  There is something bigger that we can't see now. We are too easily distracted and the distractions are incessantly increasing by design.  We get in the way of that which we seek.  If the reality of what is happening suddenly came upon us, we would be unable to hold the thought, perhaps we are not supposed to know because such understanding is too cruel, too cold and holds no lasting appeal.

Everyone likes to have something to look forward to, but what happens when there is nothing but exponential evil to come and you know it?  What then?  You simply continue exactly as you are, priced out of existence, elbowing for breath, lost in a sea of threats and dire possibilities, but at least you are alive, or are you?  At some point, you will consider that issue, the severity and rapidity of the worsening crises demands you examine everything.  At this point in the revealing, what else will present itself?

I don't expect everyone to read all the links, but if you do not visit them, you do your intellect disservice.

an evening in the Revealing

It is disturbing to see what is happening with the elections coming up on my geographic horizon.  The subscription TV which the fireteacher pays good money for out of his hard-earned chipster cheque is showing Arnie Terminator/Twins flicks through the night, every night.  Hey dudes, where's my Battle of Algiers, my Wild Pacific, my Spike Lee post-Katrina documentary?  No question over which side the satellite hovers.  How much did THAT cost?

And just where was Arnold while Georgio Armani Angelo Mozilo displaced the citizenry of our nation, quickly bleeding across the oceans destroying the peace of mind of westernized peoples worldwide?  (Think on that name: country-wide for a minute, ah such grandiose fantasies of pre-Elizabethan professional executioners have nothing on what heights are reached in our new millennium. (In fact, the Elizabethan age was one followed by many years of peace and prosperity, it is well known the Virgin Queen loved her people more than herself.)  It wasn't so long ago we had Gray Davis as governor who apparently bombed with the populace despite Enron's miserable  meatless ending.  The press ran Gray through the shredder under pressure from the you-know-whos. The press runs everybody through the shredder now since its their job to shred regardless of pressure. You see, they learned their lessons well.  For shame.  The truth is nobody can run this place, or any place, definitely not Meg Whitman, heh, just wait till she meets up with the local fruits & nuts overpopulating the west coast or worse, has to balance the state budget, the classic gubernatorial demise.  As soon as budget time rolls around, the shredder starts humming and it hums along through years and years of tears.  And, yes, Whitman's already denying her personal nannygate, exposed by none other than her X'd illegal immigrant housekeeper, but what really got me was something she said quite a while ago which was "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman."  She really said it.  Everything that came after that might as well have fallen on deaf ears, the blow was struck, the character naked for all to see and mind you, do we really want more X or "on leave to serve at the pleasure" CEOs in government?  No thanks, Meg, I won't be voting.  I will be among the millions all of you and yours lost with your expensive press-released, personhooded campaigns blessed by our highest court.  We have been burned so many times in state and national elections why ask for it outright?  Hey, gimme more idyllic penury huh?  And a little less room to just be, why don't ya? Fruits and nuts don't eat.  Yes, I know, voting is my Constitutional right to exercise so I exercise my right to protest by withholding.  The question is:  Do we prefer a candidate who lies all through the campaign or one who lies all though his/her tenure in office?  That's like saying we have a choice, isn't it, paper or plastic...
Oh well, nina, you could vote for Brown, right?  No.  His aide (um hmm) called Meg a whore.  I guess its the dirty politicking, the displays of concealed corruption and vast amounts of money spent on self promotion all the while attempting to hide one's true character.  All that money could be put to SUCH good use on improvement of the state and country and our species' survival.  For shame, again.  Are these people human beings or holograms or socio-hybrid aliens?  You tell me.

On my sojourns through God's Kingdom lately, the landscape is littered with peeling, weather-beaten campaign signs.  I try to get away from it and go deeper, farther and leave it behind where the neighboring mountains appear grey-green at the base, a lighter green-grey behind it and a higher, pale lavender grey-green ridge in the far distance.  Mist rises from the base of the far lavender ridge graduating to deeper grey at the top where it meets the clouds.  The mist means fog is coming on which means summer is over, winter opened its window and frost lies on the ground at dawn.  Its just a quick slide into wood gathering, stacking, hauling into the fireplace from there, although we never got started so early before.  I keep my eye on it.  First snow is always on Thanksgiving, but this year it could happen any day.  The Elk began bugling at the end of August.  That never happened so early before either.  Actually, this is a wonderful thing because the cold, wet night air (humidity) limits the probability of wildfires.  Lastly, as was the case in 2009, the Juncos are late by many weeks. The weather conditions must be just right for them to make the journey south and apparently, it is not.  I think in my mind its the air quality.  The belching filth of big agra is easily mistaken for fog coming through the passes.  Indeed, it is that surreal.  It was not always that way.  I remember.  I made notes in my Smithsonian guides.

The housing, foreclosure, low - if any - new home sales crisis reminds me of the GOM crisis.  The blowout preventer was broken as it was broken in the market crisis, or the credit crisis, or the ... etc..  Sort of like 911 too, each crisis militarily industrializes afterwards.  We keep having 911 disasters with eternal effects upending the previous story.  We know from reading stories there must be an ending somewhere, but there isn't.  Most everyone is still living the old story whether they are an unrepentant shopaholic or a Nigerian child selling sodapop in the mud to the pipeline police.  Even when attempts are made to reform corruption, the corrupt make the new story instantly throwing everyone and everything into deeper, darker, more terrifying and uncertain futures and still the story goes on.  The ever-changing, ever-enlarging story is a way of life now, as if the anomalies of the present are all that ever was or will be.

The courts are already backlogged, imagine what sheaths of complaint are hitting the desks today from all those who were foreclosed and evicted or threatened with the process, and all those who bought those foreclosed dwellings, ahem, illegally?  What a scene: the angry millions forcing their ways through the McMansion doors demanding their homes back from alarmed young couples feeding baby number one in the breakfast nook?  What are they gonna do in this economy, double up? Oh why not, they'll learn to get along just like we do, but they won't be happy about it until they win their lawsuits.  As we watch an entire new industry is being born, the graduation of Robo Signers to Paper Seekers tasked with unwrapping all the CDOs and sifting through xeroxes of xeroxes to find something that is probably lying under the mattress in Polanski's chalet if it actually exists, legitimate titles of home ownership and legitimate titles to commercial properties that is, not the mattress.  We only know one thing for sure at this point and that is: Everyone has again stepped on yet another rung of the Apocalypse ladder where nothing is what it seemed and all hell is breaking loose from the shylocks to the cowboys on bar stools looking for love in all the wrong places. There's a big range in between consisting of the colorful variety of Planetary Citizens.

There are many things I can handle as weird and strange as some things are, because I am not in that world. It does not concern me or the immediate members of this existence.  The man, me, the Guinea Pig, the Dogs, these are the beings whose interests are my interests.  The relatives and our children are the collective ribbons that complete the package.

Have you ever thought about being a survivor from a shipwreck, floating on a very small section of what is left of the lifeboat's hull, whom out of all those faces treading water would you reach for? 

On the other hand, when it comes to causing deliberate pain to our people in the larger sense, it burns, it scathes, it maims for life and kills as it does all victims whether they know what is happening or not and this is not acceptable.  One day its a feeling, then its a blurb at a news site, by evening the blurbs have their own wiki page.  And then, like the dark season, suddenly its upon us full steam ahead and we rearrange our existence again.  Suffering can be very good when you can, if you can, compare it to other states yet that also is being denied wherever possible.


Cufflinks photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images N.A.: Angelo Mozilo, founder and former CEO, Countrywide Financial Corporation, testifying during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing ... examining the compensation and retirement packages granted to the CEOs of corporations deeply involved in the current mortgage crisis.

As the Hourglass Empties...

Hi five. We've got bholanath on Mridang , Su-Nami on Wind Chimes, Scappy on Mandolin, me on Thumb Piano and freeacre working up some organic munchies in the kitchen. Charles is on the roof adjusting lighting [watchit!], so slip on your darkers, striped sweaters and get out those cigarette holders, its Poetry Night:

THE LOON

On wooded height the slanting light
In glinting, gleaming radiance falls,
And softly sifts throught opening rifts
That cleave the fog-bank's hazy walls.
The splendor thrills from purple hills,
And lights the grassy circling swell;
But, hist! awake! From off the lake
The loon's wild cries, with sprite-like spell,
"Ke-woi-o! Ke-we-oi-o!"

In bluest sky the fleece clouds lie,
In floating fancies slow unfolding;
The village spire is tipped with fire
Reflections bright from golden moulding.
While close around, in slumber bound,
The roofs of modest mansions rise.
The silence breaks! From off the lake's
Unrippled reach, the loon's wild cries,
"Ke-woi-o! Ke-we-oi-o!"

"Oh, tell my why," I weary cry,
"A world so peaceful, fair, and pure,
Must still be rife with crime and strife
Why sin and sorrow must endure?
Why labor's slave, whose spirits crave
Such beauty, ne'er can steal a glance?"
My sole reply, the loon's wild cry,
Again returned in echo's chance,
"Ke-woi-o! Ke-we-oi-o!"

George Charles Selden 1893

INDIAN SUMMER

At last there came

The sudden fall of frost, when Time

Dreaming through russet September days

Suddenly awoke, and lifting his head, strode

Swiftly forward--made one vast desolating sweep

Of his scythe, then, rapt with the glory

That burned under his feet, fell dreaming again.

And the clouds soared and the crickets sang

In the brief heat of noon; the corn,

So green, grew sere and dry--

And in the mist the ploughman's team

Moved silently, as if in dream--

And it was Indian summer on the plain.

Hamlin Garland, (1860-1940) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, and Poet; active social reformer, especially concerned with Native American rights

Part XXII: Hiawatha's Departure

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

At the doorway of his wigwam,

In the pleasant Summer morning,

Hiawatha stood and waited.

All the air was full of freshness,

All the earth was bright and joyous,

And before him, through the sunshine,

Westward toward the neighboring forest

Passed in golden swarms the Ahmo,

Passed the bees, the honey-makers,

Burning, singing In the sunshine.

Bright above him shone the heavens,

Level spread the lake before him;

From its bosom leaped the sturgeon,

Sparkling, flashing in the sunshine;

On its margin the great forest

Stood reflected in the water,

Every tree-top had its shadow,

Motionless beneath the water.

From the brow of Hiawatha

Gone was every trace of sorrow,

As the fog from off the water,

As the mist from off the meadow.

With a smile of joy and triumph,

With a look of exultation,

As of one who in a vision

Sees what is to be, but is not,

Stood and waited Hiawatha.

Toward the sun his hands were lifted,

Both the palms spread out against it,

And between the parted fingers

Fell the sunshine on his features,

Flecked with light his naked shoulders,

As it falls and flecks an oak-tree

Through the rifted leaves and branches.

O'er the water floating, flying,

Something in the hazy distance,

Something in the mists of morning,

Loomed and lifted from the water,

Now seemed floating, now seemed flying,

Coming nearer, nearer, nearer.

Was it Shingebis the diver?

Or the pelican, the Shada?

Or the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah?

Or the white goose, Waw-be-wawa,

With the water dripping, flashing,

From its glossy neck and feathers?

It was neither goose nor diver,

Neither pelican nor heron,

O'er the water floating, flying,

Through the shining mist of morning,

But a birch canoe with paddles,

Rising, sinking on the water,

Dripping, flashing in the sunshine;

And within it came a people

From the distant land of Wabun,

From the farthest realms of morning

Came the Black-Robe chief, the Prophet,

He the Priest of Prayer, the Pale-face,

With his guides and his companions.

And the noble Hiawatha,

With his hands aloft extended,

Held aloft in sign of welcome,

Waited, full of exultation,

Till the birch canoe with paddles

Grated on the shining pebbles,

Stranded on the sandy margin,

Till the Black-Robe chief, the Pale-face,

With the cross upon his bosom,

Landed on the sandy margin.

Then the joyous Hiawatha

Cried aloud and spake in this wise:

"Beautiful is the sun, O strangers,

When you come so far to see us!

All our town in peace awaits you,

All our doors stand open for you;

You shall enter all our wigwams,

For the heart's right hand we give you.

"Never bloomed the earth so gayly,

Never shone the sun so brightly,

As to-day they shine and blossom

When you come so far to see us!

Never was our lake so tranquil,

Nor so free from rocks, and sand-bars;

For your birch canoe in passing

Has removed both rock and sand-bar.

"Never before had our tobacco

Such a sweet and pleasant flavor,

Never the broad leaves of our cornfields

Were so beautiful to look on,

As they seem to us this morning,

When you come so far to see us!'

And the Black-Robe chief made answer,

Stammered In his speech a little,

Speaking words yet unfamiliar:

"Peace be with you, Hiawatha,

Peace be with you and your people,

Peace of prayer, and peace of pardon,

Peace of Christ, and joy of Mary!"

Then the generous Hiawatha

Led the strangers to his wigwam,

Seated them on skins of bison,

Seated them on skins of ermine,

And the careful old Nokomis

Brought them food in bowls of basswood,

Water brought in birchen dippers,

And the calumet, the peace-pipe,

Filled and lighted for their smoking.

All the old men of the village,

All the warriors of the nation,

All the Jossakeeds, the Prophets,

The magicians, the Wabenos,

And the Medicine-men, the Medas,

Came to bid the strangers welcome;

"It is well", they said, "O brothers,

That you come so far to see us!"

In a circle round the doorway,

With their pipes they sat In silence,

Waiting to behold the strangers,

Waiting to receive their message;

Till the Black-Robe chief, the Pale-face,

From the wigwam came to greet them,

Stammering in his speech a little,

Speaking words yet unfamiliar;

"It Is well," they said, "O brother,

That you come so far to see us!"

Then the Black-Robe chief, the Prophet,

Told his message to the people,

Told the purport of his mission,

Told them of the Virgin Mary,

And her blessed Son, the Saviour,

How in distant lands and ages

He had lived on earth as we do;

How he fasted, prayed, and labored;

How the Jews, the tribe accursed,

Mocked him, scourged him, crucified him;

How he rose from where they laid him,

Walked again with his disciples,

And ascended into heaven.

And the chiefs made answer, saying:

"We have listened to your message,

We have heard your words of wisdom,

We will think on what you tell us.

It is well for us, O brothers,

That you come so far to see us!"

Then they rose up and departed

Each one homeward to his wigwam,

To the young men and the women

Told the story of the strangers

Whom the Master of Life had sent them

From the shining land of Wabun.

Heavy with the heat and silence

Grew the afternoon of Summer;

With a drowsy sound the forest

Whispered round the sultry wigwam,

With a sound of sleep the water

Rippled on the beach below it;

From the cornfields shrill and ceaseless

Sang the grasshopper, Pah-puk-keena;

And the guests of Hiawatha,

Weary with the heat of Summer,

Slumbered in the sultry wigwam.

Slowly o'er the simmering landscape

Fell the evening's dusk and coolness,

And the long and level sunbeams

Shot their spears into the forest,

Breaking through its shields of shadow,

Rushed into each secret ambush,

Searched each thicket, dingle, hollow;

Still the guests of Hiawatha

Slumbered In the silent wigwam.

From his place rose Hiawatha,

Bade farewell to old Nokomis,

Spake in whispers, spake in this wise,

Did not wake the guests, that slumbered.

"I am going, O Nokomis,

On a long and distant journey,

To the portals of the Sunset.

To the regions of the home-wind,

Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin.

But these guests I leave behind me,

In your watch and ward I leave them;

See that never harm comes near them,

See that never fear molests them,

Never danger nor suspicion,

Never want of food or shelter,

In the lodge of Hiawatha!"

Forth into the village went he,

Bade farewell to all the warriors,

Bade farewell to all the young men,

Spake persuading, spake in this wise:

I am going, O my people,

On a long and distant journey;

Many moons and many winters

Will have come, and will have vanished,

Ere I come again to see you.

But my guests I leave behind me;

Listen to their words of wisdom,

Listen to the truth they tell you,

For the Master of Life has sent them

From the land of light and morning!"

On the shore stood Hiawatha,

Turned and waved his hand at parting;

On the clear and luminous water

Launched his birch canoe for sailing,

From the pebbles of the margin

Shoved it forth into the water;

Whispered to it, "Westward! westward!"

And with speed it darted forward.

And the evening sun descending

Set the clouds on fire with redness,

Burned the broad sky, like a prairie,

Left upon the level water

One long track and trail of splendor,

Down whose stream, as down a river,

Westward, westward Hiawatha

Sailed into the fiery sunset,

Sailed into the purple vapors,

Sailed into the dusk of evening:

And the people from the margin

Watched him floating, rising, sinking,

Till the birch canoe seemed lifted

High into that sea of splendor,

Till it sank into the vapors

Like the new moon slowly, slowly

Sinking in the purple distance.

And they said, "Farewell forever!"

Said, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!"

And the forests, dark and lonely,

Moved through all their depths of darkness,

Sighed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!"

And the waves upon the margin

Rising, rippling on the pebbles,

Sobbed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!"

And the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah,

From her haunts among the fen-lands,

Screamed, "Farewell, O Hiawatha!"

Thus departed Hiawatha,

Hiawatha the Beloved,

In the glory of the sunset,.

In the purple mists of evening,

To the regions of the home-wind,

Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,

To the Islands of the Blessed,

To the Kingdom of Ponemah,

To the Land of the Hereafter!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spent nearly a year and a half on Hiawatha, finishing in November of 1855.


THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.

photos:
Beatniks c. google images
Loon: c. google images


[About that absurd while box below, heh, your guess is as good as mine. N]

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