to Evolve

Sometimes I write in a way that is an internal dialogue. It's as if my ego and my soul converse like this and it helps to tease apart my thought process. Jung practiced this way.

One of my greatest challenges and anyone who feels they have something to say in this world is having your voice heard. You must earn it somehow  and even then it is only going to reach the ears of those interested or who will allow you the time to speak.

Concerning this stream of consciousness, my soul asked my ego tonight:
"This is what you struggle with most isn't it?"

"Absolutely," I answered, "The world has to awaken. Albion must arise from his slumber. It is an imperative for the evolution of our species alone, in a more holistic sense than we have ever interpreted the term "evolution" before. It is time to evolve socioculturally because our systems have taken control of us, and they are driven by non-humanistic motives which means their end cannot be one that serves humanity.

It serves a void where humanity should be operating the mechanisms of government and commerce and not pursuits of profit and pleasure. These cities, corporations and governments are towers of Babel which we must stabilize, revitalize or abandon before they fall and crush us all.

The trouble becomes, no one wants to hear this message. That the towers they love are the very sky collapsing upon them. That their emperors and empresses are not, in fact wearing any garments at all. Why do we pretend thus while they parade us to destruction and slaughter?"

We did that, to them

We muse about these things and we feel terrible. We did that, we think,  to them. We say the word them, believing we know what we mean by it; we say the word we, even though we were not born at the time, even though our parents were not born, even though the ancestors of our ancestors may have come from somewhere else entirely, some place with dubious hats and with a flag quite different from the one that was wafted ashore here, on the wind, on the ill wind that (we also muse) has blown us quite a lot of good. We eat well, the lights go on most of the time, the roof on the whole does not leak, the wheels turn around.

As for them, our capital cities have names made from their names, and so do our brands of beer, and some but not all of the items we fob off on tourists. We make free with the word authentic. We are enamored of hyphens, as well: our word, their word, joined at the hip. Sometimes they turn up in our museums, without hats, in their colorful clothing from before, singing authentic songs, pretending to be themselves. It's a paying job. But at moments, from time to time, at dusk perhaps, when the moths and the night-blooming flowers come out, our hands smell of blood. Just the odd whiff. We did that, to them.

But who are we now, apart from the question Who are we now?

We all share that question.

Margaret Atwood,

The Tent

"Post- Colonial"

The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins

by Margaret Atwood (The Tent, 2007)

I.

It was the bear who began it. Said,
I’m getting out from under.
I am not Bear, l’Ours, Ursus, Bär
or any other syllables
you’ve pinned on me.
Forget the chateu tapestries
in which I’m led in embroidered chains.
and the scarlet glories of the hunt
that was only glorious for you,
you with your clubs and bludgeons.

Forget the fairy tales, in which I was
your shaggy puppet, prince in hairshirt, surrogate
for human demons.
I’m not your coat, rug, glass-eyed trophy head,
plush bedtime toy, and that’s not me
in outer space with my spangled cub.
I’m not your totem; I refuse
to dance in your circuses; you cannot carve
my soul in stone.

I renounce metaphor: I am not
child-stealer, shape-changer,
old garbage-eater, and you can stuff
simile also: unpeeled,
I am not like a man.

I take back what you have stolen,
and in your languages I announce
I am now nameless.
My true name is a growl.

(Come to think of it, I am not
a British headdress either:
I do not signify bravery.
I want to go back to eating salmon
without all this military responsibility.)

I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag.


II.

At this the dictionaries began to untwist,
and time stalled and reversed;
the sweaters wound back into their balls of wool,
which rolled bleating out into the meadows;
the perfumes returned to France
and old men there fell sweetly dead
from a surfeit of aroma.
Priests gave their dresses up again
to the women, and the women ditched their alligator shoes in a hurry
before their former owners turned up to claim them.

The violins of the East Coast shores
took flight from the fingers of their players,
sucking in waltzes, laments, and reels,
landed in Scotland, fell apart
wih wailing into their own wood and sinew
and vanished into the trees
and into the gus and howls of long-dead cats
and the tails of knackered horses.
Songs crammed themselves back down the throats of their singers,
and a billion computers blew apart
and homed in chip by chip
on the brains of the inventors.

Squashed mice were shot backwards out of traps,
brides and grooms uncoupled like shunting trains,
tins of sardines exploded, releasing their wiggling shoals;
dinosaur bones whizzed like missiles
out of museums back to the badlands,
and bullets flew sizzling into their guns.
Glass beads popped off gowns and moccasins
and fell on Italy in a hail of dangerous color,
as white people disappeared over the Atlantic
in a whoosh of pollution, vainly clutching
their power tools, car keys, and lawn mowers
which dove like metal fish back into the mines;
black people too, recapturing syncopation;
all flowers were suctioned budwise into their stems.
The native peoples made speedy clearance work
of cowboys and longhorns, but then took off
westward instead, chanting goodbye
to ancestral plains, which were reclaimed
by shaggy mastodons and the precursors of horses
and everywhere
the children shrank and began to
drop teeth and grow hair.


III.

Well, there were suddenly a lot more flamingos
before they in their turn became eggs,
while people’s bodies reverted through their own
flesh genealogies like stepping stones,
man woman man, container into contained,
shedding language and gathering themselves in,
skein after skein of protoplasm

until there was only one of them,
alone at the first naming;
but the streetwise animals, forewarned
and having learned the diverse meanings
of the word dominion,
did not show up,
and Adam, inarticulate, deprived of his arsenal of proper nouns,
returned to mud
and mud itself became lava
and lava the uncooled earth
and the uncooled earth a swirl of white-hot
energy, and the energy jammed itself
into its own potential, and swirled
like fluorescent bathwater
down a non-existent wormhole.


IV.

I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals.

I could say: Don’t offend the bear,
don’t tell bad jokes about him,
have compassion on his bear heart;
I could say, Think twice
before you speak.
I could say, Don’t take the name of anything in vain.

But it’s far too late for that,
because you can’t read this,
because you can’t remember the word for read,
because you are dizzy with aphasia,

because the page darkens and ripples
because it is liquid and unbroken,
because God has bitten his own tongue
and the first bright word of creation
hovers in the formless void
unspoken

The Joy at Sudden Disappointment

Whatever comes, comes from a need,

a sore distress, a hurting want.

Mary's pain made the baby Jesus.

Her womb opened its lips

and spoke the Word.

Every part of you has a secret language.

 Your hands and your feet say what you've done.

And every need brings in what's needed.

Pain bears its cure like a child.

Having nothing produces provisions.

Ask a difficult question,

and the marvelous answer appears.

Build a ship and there'll be water

to float it. The tender-throated

infant cries and milk drips

from the mother's breast.

 But thirst for the ultimate water,

and then be ready for what will 

come pouring from the spring.

_____________________________________________

Joy at Sudden Disappointment;  Rumi, Coleman Barks

_____________________________________________

Don't grieve for what doesn't come.

Some things that don't happen

keep disasters from beginning.

If the beloved is everywhere,

 the lover is a veil,

but when living itself  becomes

the Friend, lovers disappear.

The world needs more Rumi 

American Value of the Day (or) Corporations cannot be people

Fear

Greed

Lust
and
Want

Pride.

Power.

Retribution.

Fear. FEAR.Fear

Fear fear,

fear yourself

more than you fear

someone else.

These gardens must

we build like this

'round our selves.

 {C}apitalistic cultures; Leviathan, his wheels;

no bones or thickened blood. Just

Wheels upon wheels upon wheels.

Be you a cog or a man?

Corporations and their brands.

Their{____&____}Our

Packaging and Waste. 

We. Must,

Fear the ones, that do not have a face.

Fear not the revolution

for it is one of the heart of man.

Against forces and foes, when Awakened we See.

So come, come awaken with me.

Thus spoke every man.

Thus spoke Albion.

What was said to the rose that made it open 

was said to me here in my chest

~Rumi

What is ours is forever yours

I am an Indian: and while I have learned much from civilization, I have never lost my Indian sense of right and justice.

When I reduce civilization to its most basic terms, it becomes a system of life based on trade. Each man stakes his powers, the product of his labor, his social, political, and religious standing against his neighbor. To gain what? To gain control over his fellow workers, and the results of their labor. 

Is there not something worthy of perpetuation in our Indian spirit of democracy, where Earth, our mother, was free to all, and no one sought to impoverish or enslave his neighbor? Where the good things of Earth were not ours to hold against our brothers and sisters, but were ours to use and enjoy together with them, and with who it was our privelege to share?

~Ohiyesa