The Pacing Panther in the Shabby Cage

 It’s not your fault that you were born into a system that your biology did not evolve to accept: the stress, the isolation, the fear that seizes your solar plexus as you see time gallop swiftly away and your feeling you do not have enough time to do all you must do. The rage that ricochets within you – resembling those clips you've seen of the inner workings of the atom, with protons and electrons whizzing and colliding - a rage that surges in you most as you work a job that offends you on multiple fronts. 

You understand that your job, in some way direct or indirect, is furthering the assault on the planet.  You feel humiliated to know you are so much greater and more vast than the idiotic assembly of actions your job encompasses.  And finally, you sense that the entire notion of working to “get ahead” - as the US President constantly puts it - is mad.  Get ahead of whom or what? Your fellow earthlings?  Your friends?

Yourself? The present? The natural world and its perfectly calibrated cycles?  It seems the proposal of a moron or a criminal.

You are the pacing panther in the shabby cage, but with the added insult of having to hear that the cage is not there - and that, therefore, your stress, isolation, fear, and rage are the result of an illness you must harbor.  They are not. They constitute the life force extant within you -  the trajectory of 3.5 billion years of life and of what Arthur Schopenhauer termed “the will to live.”

Two Kinds of Learning

The point of schooling in the West is largely to teach children how to bear doing things that they do not like doing. It is a quality they must possess in order to work a job they will more than likely dislike when they are adults. 

The educational experience of children in  traditional hunter/gatherer societies does not consist of this.  Child rearing and education in such societies - as the psychologist Peter Grey has been pointing out in his wonderful series of recent blog posts for Psychology Today -  is, in fact, as distant from this teaching of children to suffer through tasks which they loathe as one can imagine.  The words “freedom” and “exploration” more properly describe the development process children experience in these societies.

I imagine that this is because the ability to daily suffer through tasks one finds loathsome, in environments one finds hideous and alienating is not an ability adults in traditional hunter/gatherer societies desperately need.  In the mass society of the industrialized West, conversely,  it may be the most crucial quality for an an adult to possess.

GMO'S, Mass Society and Our Place in the World

Genetically modified plants represent the continuing effort to convert the world into one gigantic consumerist science experiment. The pursuit is insane. It is the imposition of the soulless dictates of mass consumer society onto the DNA of our fellow organisms.

Contrary to the claims of the priests of mass society, homo sapiens evolved within the larger Community of Life of the planet. Our persistent denial of this fact and our persistent placing of ourselves in some realm superior to our fellow organisms now spells our doom. Precious little time remains to disavow ourselves of this notion.

A future founded upon the radical manipulation and desecration of the natural world is a future that creates its own demise.

sweet home

4 dudes

on stratocasters

take turns

soloing

in front

of a giant

unfurled

confederate flag,

notes

and phrases

brought west

from africa 

on clandestine

ngoni

and
mbira