Lookstwice

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.