Lookstwice

Thoughts on ‘Community’ and the ‘Hopi Survival Kit’ and ‘Animistic GODS-OF-PLACE’ and whatever other Assistance needed to get our collective asses thru this Collapse of "Civilization".

    I have no confidence in the ability of this system to fix our situation, thus my feeling that there is no future to look forward to.  There is no program, no politician, no technology, no religion to cure what ails us.  I seek a solution of the spirit, not for a better ‘life after’ but to handle the ‘life here & now’ better… Because day-to-day, earning yer livlihood… Well.  It ain’t pretty,  it’s - at best - a ‘controlled folly’.  To live life the way the wasi’chu have decreed, but to know it’s a lie and a path with no heart, is a folly, a fools life.  To walk in balance on that razors edge, and not go crazy, is a controlled folly. To me, ‘crazy’ in this sense means that you buy into this doomed world-system, hook, line and sinker.  Crazy as the wasi’chu define it simply means that you’re of little or no use to them in that system.  You’re a broken cog, a misfit gear.  I call that kind of crazy simply ‘broken‘ (as Watchman Nee defined it in The Release of the Spirit), and its a good thing. Then you’re ready for the spirit to live thru you.  You don’t want to, or can’t, participate in the lie effectively anymore.  The Truth must be lived instead.

    So the truth is, I don’t think I can live like this much longer.  Of course, I know none of us are going to be living this way very much longer, but not necessarily by choice.  For most of my life (certainly the ‘adult’ portion) I’ve known I didn’t really want any part of this system I was born into.  I couldn’t find a lasting way out of it tho.  I’d have my hands around a certain sense of freedom, and then it would slip away.  I know now that my intent was misplaced, divided by the cultural programming that everyone is talking and blogging about these days.  Trying to live a personal story/myth that runs counter to the ‘prevailing cultural paradigm’ is damn-near impossible.  At least without community it is… and I left the Native community I was living with to see if I could ‘walk between the worlds’ and not be eaten alive.  Heh… wonder if I was tasty?  I’m definitely diminished in some sense as I age and feel ‘parts is parts’ nibbled away with the time. 

    So, these are some of the mental gymnastics I’m going thru to ‘get ready’ (how absurd) for the collapse.  I’ve been aware that it’s coming for a long time, and up until very recently thought that I still had time.  Well, time is up now folks.  Take stock of your situation, and see your next move. 

"The complexity of life is a label we must wear
Snarled the vision of the dreamer
Condemned by his own dare
As a child I asked the questions
But only for their sake
Believing there were answers
Become my one mistake

"The holy morning paper
Slaps the steps at dawn
America’s doors open
Let’s see what’s going on
Confusion with our coffee
Fear and frosted flakes
The dollar takes another dive
Another bubble breaks

"A Shuffle offstage - a change of scene
The expose of the american dream
Watergate burglars comedy relief
Laugh at ideals survivng our grief
It’s fool’s gold for gilded fools
Playing gaily with twisted rules
Hail to the families in their tv rooms
Suicide, genocide, abortion, cartoons
Terrorism, violence, starving refugees
Conscience crucified, reality recedes
Nuclear tyrants, computerized plan,
Holding hostage everyman

"It’ won’t happen - 1950
It may happen - 1965
It will happen (Sound of an Atomic explosion here)
JUST DON’T THINK ABOUT IT !!!

"From dust to dust
Our lives fades away
We are the winds empty sighing
Vanity, all is vanity
All but the cross, all but his dying"
    - "American Dream" by Glenn Kaiser

This old song from the Rez Band has been coming back to me more and more often.  I hear Glenn singing it in my mind as I drive to work in the mornings, and it seems much more relevant to me than it did in the early 80’s.  Maybe because it’s looking like the idiot-monkeys may use an atomic weapon to usher in their new world order.  While we sit idly by sucking on the "glass teat" of TV.

   Every morning, as I’ve done the past 2 - 3 years, I start my day reading the uncensored news & views online.  I have nothing new to add to the daily litany of woe that we’re all witnessing.  We don’t have enough time left to fix our fuckup (civilazation) of the last 10,000 years.  We have no future.  I have no future.  (There was a future scheduled.  I was taught to expect one as I was being schooled in the ways of this ‘civilization’.)  But, each day I read the news.    Now, understand, I read both sides; not just the "doom & gloomers".  Often there are valid points made by the "hip & hopeful, believe in our ingenuity and ultimate resourcefulness" crowd.  Often there are valid points made by the "we’re the sane & sensible ones and you’re all just paranoid" crowd.  BUT!  The preponderance of the evidence points to the need for an "agonizing reappraisal" at the very LEAST, and NOT just "business as usual".  And I strongly suspect the reappraisal to bring us as a culture to the conclusion that it’s too late.  We have no future.  I have been advised by those who love me and those who don’t to not pay any attention to the shitty state of the world - and certainly not to speak of it!  "After all," they say, "What can you do about it?  Nothing, right?  So, it’s pointless to let it worry you so.  Just tend to your immediate orbit of friends and family.  Take care of today."  They don’t say that "tomorrow will take care of itself" though… they don’t believe in that lie anymore themselves. 

    I read the blogs every day, follow the links, and check the sources as much as I can.  Some things brought out of the dark and into the light are to be doubted and taken with a grain of salt.  Most are as sure as the sunrise, and spell out our demise to a greater or lesser degree.  Many, many times I cry quietly sitting at my desk at work during lunch, reading about the way we have totally screwed ourselves.  There’s no real hope present in any of this for me or any  of us.  I live "one day at a time" like my love keeps reminding me.  

    I stay afloat by telling myself that "I prefer the perception of Be-ing to a concept of a self" as Dr. PeSheWa of the Native American Church imparted to me years ago.  I meditate and medicate.  These things help.  There is no cure, because the ‘dis-ease’ isn’t inside me.  I can align the systems within my "self" to carry my Be-ing-ness thru this maelstrom as a standing wave and thereby experience a large degree of coherence and harmony.  I don’t feel guaranteed that this will bring eternal cohesion to my Be-ing when I passover to whatever awaits after I die, so this may be a vanity as well.  But it keeps me centered, and sometimes even serene in the here/now of this unbalanced life.  This life is the only undeniable certainty.  We’re dust filled with breath… is the breath eteranl sprirt?  A spiritual pursuit aimed primarily at the ‘afterlife’ (pie in the sky, by and by) and used to control the population is no answer to the litany of woes in the song, or on my news feed.  (The cross may not be vain to the songwriter quoted above, but it’s so obscured by the lies of religion that it’s inaccessable.)  I need, we all need, a god who is right here, right now.  Not one to rescue us with miracles, but one that is present and available to tune us up for the life and death struggle we are now beginning. 

    Open your door and walk outside.  Is your god there?  He is, but he may be buried under concrete, not yet risen from the dead… We need him or her back.  That Other that is with us "right where we are sitting now" is full of LIFE.  

My aim has been to try to sort thru the feelings I am experiencing when facing these converging crises of our times.  My inspration to do this is the excellent movie WaWtG, which is highly recommended to awaken you from the matrix of our collective insanity. The folks who made the movie, Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson, have done a great job in distilling the mess we live in to a "red pill".  Viewing it is like lancing a boil… you know it’s going to hurt, but the pressure’s off and healing can begin.

My attempt to chronicle my journey to living a new "story" has been (is) uneven.  This is certainly no reflection on the movie, or even my intent, but is rather a symptom of our fragmented culture itself.  It’s difficult to say the least, to decide what to put up on the website, and what is irrelevant.  I’m having to "prune" back.  And then there’s the concern that what I do blog about isn’t presented completely enough due to the editing of thought processes involved in getting there.  Who wants to know all that inside stuff, anyway?  Or who needs a blog about blogging?  Apparently me…

I’m holding down a job I have to be paid to do, working on a relationship that I value highly, and at the same time am trying to rise above the confusion and distractions we’re all bombarded with every day.  The temptation to forget about this is huge… Just fall back into a deep sleep and wait for the end of the line.

Sometimes it seems hopeless, but I won’t back down from this. I may be a Contrarian, but I’ve placed my picket pin.  It’s fuckin’ important, especailly to me, that I come up with a focused and centered mode of being for facing doomsday.  And, make no mistake, we ARE grinning into the face of our demise, like a bunch of stupid zoo monkeys.  I have no solutions, except to face it.  I often think of enumerating the problems on site, posting links, etc.  But those are so easily found elsewhere. Every once in awhile, run across something new in the continuing downward spiral: Multiple Studies Reveal Dire Meltdown in Arctic… The northwest passage is reopened for business. The monkeys are already squabbling over who has rights to it, even tho it’s yet another sign of doom.  What’s wrong with this picture?!

But mostly, I’m just Pacing my Cage daily…

"Sunset is an angel weeping
Holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
Make out what it’s pointing toward
Sometimes you feel like you live too long
Days drip slowly on the page
You catch yourself
Pacing the cage

"Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend
Today these eyes scan bleached-out land
For the coming of the outbound stage
Pacing the cage
Pacing the cage"

- Pacing the Cage by Bruce Cockburn
 

Sometimes, nowadays, I feel like Billy Pilgrim in "Slaughterhouse Five." Slipping sidewise in time… Or, maybe more accurately, a skinwalker.

Trying to pin down the truth of what’s goin’ on inside ain’t as easy as I thought it would be. There are tidal forces tugging at a soul daily, and which story does one choose to be in agreement with? It has to do with internal vs external locus of control.

The distractions of culture attempt to lull me back to a sense of complacency. But that isn’t the source of my serenity… It is the escape from - or at least lessening of - cognitive dissonance that has helped me to find some peace & balance. Learning to "walk between the worlds" as the shaman taught me I must. Recognizing that my involvement in the coming traincrash is a "controlled folly" and NOT letting my involvement (my seat on the train?) be the source of my locus of control.

When "life-changing" events occur in your life, (such as being de-programmed by "What a Way to Go"), a stranger will take up residence in your skin. Until you acknowledge the change and sit with the stranger and get to know yourself as you are after the events (read: trauma), you live in cognitive dissonance, in denial, in extreme neuroticisim (where’s the prozac?), addiction (choose yer poison, paisan). Sounds like most of us… if we’re honest. We all usually prefer the shallows to the deep. It’s uncomfortable to face all that truth.

As you awaken to realize that the programming of culture (TV, school, TV, church, TV, etc.), has been keeping a stranger alive inside your skin for all your adult life, and that your locus of control is "out there" somewhere, what do you do? Prop up yer psyche & hope for the best?  Well, there are examples all around of the dominant paradigm failing in peoples lives. Those are the "losers" of this culture. And losers of other cultures. And refusers.  It does help me to try to payback, and pay forward… appeals to my Contrarian nature.

So the question is: in the midst of cultural collapse, how does somebody go from being one person to being another… And what’s the process of becoming another person that you wouldn’t even recognize? For good or ill, transferring the locus of control seems to be pinpointed. For a start… for a frickin’ focus point.

This Moanday morning, before getting in harness to go to my cubicle, I checked out the blogs (as usual).  I’m blown away once again at the frankness coming down from the mountains of NC. Tim on the What a Way to Go site stoked my fire this AM.  And now, as I strap on my feed-bag at my desk, I have to reflect:  We’re the Boomers, the flower-power, revolutionary, change the world, totally different generation.  The Hopi even have a prophecy about us.  WE weren’t buying the "establishment" lie, right?  Except most of us bought into it just enough to make us sick, and then had to stay with it so we wouldn’t lose our insurance. And now time is running out, and the lie is being revealed on all fronts. Collapse is here, now, one household at a time.  I’m one or two paychecks away from being on the street, and I have been living that way for years.  I’ve had folks move in with me that would have been homeless otherwise…  And are forever wounded in their souls by the betrayal of Empire.

Weren’t we going to change the world?  Are we too distracted? Is the programming too strong to break?  Or are we just too lazy?  It’s only sensible to plan ahead seven generations, but we only live for today. We need a new/old vision for how to live - one that has worked for millions of years.  How ironic! We’re going thru the same kind of cultural collapse that was perpetrated upon the natives of this land by our ancestors.  Divine justice for "Manifest Destiny" perhaps, but how can we justify not caring about the life we leave for our own children?

It’s hard words, I know. And we do care, sure. But do we care enough to change minds, one mind at a time?

    My girlfriend came back home this past week. We are working at finding a balance to our relationship, to live with the reality of what is happening in the world situation all around us, without letting it steal our joy in each other. I have been dealing with the feeling of teetering on the edge for so long, and she is teaching me to enjoy the day for its little pleasures. Today I have felt serene for the first time in… ages it seems. 

    When I try to think about the latest bit of disturbing news about the long emergency, and then consider how I feel, and how to blog about that, my head just spins. I want the peace without the denial. In truth, there’s no peace in denial for me, only cognitive dissonance.  What a way to go…

    During the past few days I’ve come up with a dozen things to write down here.  I couldn’t get any of it to gel in a satisfying way.  I certainly don’t need to reiterate the crimes that are being perpetrated all about us, that info can be accessed all over the web (but not on the nightly news).  Things are speeding up to an omega point, as Koyaanisqatsi made me feel in a visceral way years ago.  But this is where I am right now, today.  At peace but not blind.

It’s been a very eventful week, and I’ve been too busy to post. After I get it organized in my own mind, I’ll put it up here. I’ll say this: We who have pushed away from the shore are in the crucible of change.  This is an initiatory rite of passage for humans, if we choose to see it that way.  And I do.  That story is preferable to the one espoused by the dominant culture.  That story is headed for the disaster at the "end-of-the-line."  Hey, the age of koyaanisqatsi is coming to a close!!

Very much in tune with the theme of Koyaanisqatsi, and a recurring and accelerating theme in our culture’s collective experience, is the feeling of impending doom.  There’s an acute awareness in my life right now of how things are teetering on the edge.  The edge of what is ill-defined, because the crisis that are converging are multiple.  One source will espouse the hobby-horse of the police-state, while another talks only of peak-oil or global warming.  With so many woes gargling in the choir, the cacophony can be deafening.  And the mind seeks to find a common thread in it all, a melody to bring harmony to the mess.  Well, (mixing my metaphors here) looking at the mess will never make it into a pretty picture.  It is what it is.  The harmony of life must come from outside the dying culture that we are prisoner to.  It can’t be alchemically transmuted into gold, that time is past. 

With a grateful nod to Steve Martin for providing the title of this post.

 My purpose in starting this blog was to chronicle my state of being after watching the movie "What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire" by Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson (http://whatawaytogomovie.com).  The subject of the movie is nothing new to anybody who’s been paying attention to the world we’re living in.  But the way the material is presented produced a phenomenal effect in me.  A deeply emotional response that made me feel alive for the first time in years.  Why?  It tells the truth in a personal and personable way from an experiential level… and that’s how we’re all dealing with it anyway, ain’t it?  Or in denial about it.

*I’m trying to figure out how to make this a "sticky" so that it’ll always be on the homepage… until then, I’ll just post it here.

    I wanted this blogging thing to be simple, eh?  I also wanted it to be coherent, and make some sort of difference in people’s lives… Just like my blogging "heroes" that have sustained me the past few years.

    I sit down here to write, and as I think of what I need to say my spine seems to freeze as despair crawls up from my belly. How to begin? I should state the purpose of the blog, of course. Should give some background; let the reader know who they’re listening to. I’m not thrilled to be putting any traceable info on the web, but it’s way too late to worry about that… for all of us.  (Can you tell I’m reading John Twelve Hawks second novel right now?)  So, let’s be confidants, and in the manner of a confessional I’ll publicly write it down. Warts and all.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

    On the morning of August 12^th, before going in to work, I watched the first 17 minutes of the movie "What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire."  It brought tears to my eyes, but was also a release to my spirit. It was a recognition that the time of the Lone Wolf was over, and I must reach out somehow and lend a paw…

“Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
    -W.B. Yeats

I was born in the buckle of the Bible-belt (BJU territory), and it was thought that I’d grow up to be a preacher.  But there is some "wild" blood in my veins.  Maybe it’s because my maternal grandfather is Native American, or because my soul was enmeshed in the community of life, like any child.  Also, there were situations in my childhood that made it attractive to hang onto that consciousness longer than most.  (And as the years piled on top of me can we say “cognitive dissonance”?)

“I was raised on a pothole street
Amid dreamy trees and vacant lots
Open fields’ running back of the fence
I saw faces in the clouds
I sat and watched them pass
I was always hangin’ out in the leaves of grass

“I was king of the world then
I held court over wonderland
A jungle lord wildly content
I swung from limb to limb; I swam the seas
And wild beasts, they were my friends
It was meant to be”
    -R.B. Morris

    So, I watched the rest of the movie.  It was an emotional release to see and hear our situation spelled out so graphically, so on-target, so personal.  I looked at my lover, my friend, and preached at her about our situation in the world now, and what’s comin’ down the pike.  Not news to her, she agrees totally that it’s apocalyptic times (TEOTWAWKI), she just thinks that there’s not a thing we can do about it.  That it’s going to be worse than we can imagine, and we are looking in the wrong direction.  Y’know she could be right, but if you see a hurricane coming, you run away from it.  It can’t be helped if you don’t know that you’re running toward earthquake territory.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

    Of course, she left me.  It’s been a couple of weeks now, but I talked to her today, and I hope she’s coming home.  Laws-a-mercy.  I have to find a balance.   I  have to find the Center… ah, there it is. 

    In the pothole, a weed is growing.  Life lives.

Hello old friend, it’s really good to see you once again…