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

On the Non-randomness of Mass Shootings in the United States

 Mass shootings in the United States are not at all "random."  On the contrary, they happen regularly and consistently.  People go berserk not inexplicably, but because they exist in environments with insufficient love, support and meaning.  They exist in environments ruled by market values, by the deification of the commodity and, finally, they exist in environments defined by the commodification of the human soul.  In such a context, people will continue to go berserk and commit such atrocities. 

 Also in such a context, politicians' declarations of shock and expressions of grief ("... we will keep the family in our thoughts and prayers..") hold no actual meaning.  If they meant these words, they would be seeking to transform this country into a place that exists within the larger community of life of the planet and  into a place that values human to human and human to non-human relationships over  commercial transactions.

BEINGS

Not only

HUMAN beings

but

BAT beings

WOLF beings

BEAR  beings

PANTHER beings

BUMBLE BEEings

ANT beings

MAYFLY beings

WORM beings

SWALLOW beings

SPARROW beings

EGRET beings

STORK beings

CRAB beings

CRAYFISH beings

URCHIN beings

CLAM beings

MINT beings

THYME beings

LAVENDER beings

SAGE beings

all  

BEING

transforming  

themselves

across time

and space
like us

Keystone XL, the 114th Congress and the Question of Life

The new Republican-majority Congress has taken office and announced as their top priority the approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast of the US. Why? After all, the project is a demonstrated Life destroyer. The tar sands extraction site in Alberta resembles a bombed and desolate moon. It is devastating the local communities of First Nations peoples who have for 12,000+ years depended on the neighboring forests, rivers and lakes.* The carbon released through burning the fuel extracted in Alberta would bring a concentration in the Earth's atmosphere that would result in "game over for the climate," in the words of retired NASA physicist James Hansen.

And so again, why? The answer, I believe, is more fundamental than an issue of greed or Ayn Randian ideology. The answer lies in a fear of Life. Life – in its abundance, its dizzying diversity, its unpredictability and its beauty -- is something that terrifies them and that they loathe. They seek to kill it. They are more demented and dangerous than we imagine in our naïveté. They pursue the Sixth Great Planetary extinction with great alacrity. They may not fulminate their loathing with the eloquence of Captain Ahab, but make no mistake: they are his kin and they seek to take us down with them to the briny depths.

*http://www.ienearth.org/what-we-do/tar-sands/