Democracy was a good idea. Abject terror and militarized terror protection/response seems to be the more pragmatic choice of most everyone today. Kill first, kill second, then kill again. Some, then, have an election the prelude of which is years of teasing populace into believing their cardboard choice matters.
Meanwhile, yes -- meanwhile.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
(--from poem, Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver)
When nascent democracy was overthrown by capitalism and then by corrupt capitalism, that was subsequently overthrown by terror capitalism.
Detention and assassination, torture and beheading, drones and predatory surveillance have replaced voting booth and town meeting, prayer in mosque, synagogue, or church. We have devolved into a video game template of contemporary culture where anyone disagreeing is mowed down or black-hooded away, whether on American streets or Afghanistan, Iraq, Syrian roads. Police become infantry, infantry become sniper assassins, sniper assassins become private contractors, private contractors become owners of politicians, politicians become marionettes in barker sideshows Punch and Judying each other in bad parodies pretending to conduct the people's business. And the people? The people are too cynical, too frightened or too uninformed to recognize the strings, the rifle sights, or the tampered voting machines walling them in.
This is not your pious lenten meditation.
It occurs to me that faith in civil governance, like faith in anything resembling hiermos gamos (a Jungian alchemical union of opposites) has wilted like unwatered house plants.
When people no longer see something life-giving, they join the impulse to kill quickly that which is dying a painful death. ISIL wishes to hurry their version of apocalypse. Fundamentalist Christians join their Islamic and Jewish cousins in attempting to rebuild temple or hurry Jesus' return. Right wing legislators work to prove incompetence of government by stripping it of useful benefit and handing power over to private practitioners of corrupt capitalism.
Both fanatic and mystic cry for divinity to appear. God, Allah, Jehovah, Father, Mother, Brahman, Christ, Krishna, Tao, Buddha, Anyone -- the cri du coeur rises from despair -- for help, for sanity, for an end to the absurd ignorance cloaking human decency across the planet.
It is lent. Nothing we know makes sense. What to do?
What form of emptiness, what kind of prayer, what act of sane retrieval is there that will eliminate insane murder and derision? What will replace our fatal antagonistic mortality of division with a new mind of careful attention to supporting one another through the difficult task of becoming human and moving through the fears and terrors of our current evolutionary stumble-steps? Will the latent chrysalis of hidden transformation be allowed to find its way through to emergent new phylum of being-in-the-world?
The written material in back of church in Fort Kent yesterday urged prayer, fasting, and alms giving.
Is there something I'm missing?
Have I never gotten what real spiritual life is?
I will die.
And snow falls.
Imagination. I lack imagination. Coupled, imagination and inspiration are our new sensual and spiritual sexuality. Seeing within into, and, breathing within into -- are progenitors of a new and necessary being and way of being.
It is you.
You are cause, condition, parent and offspring of this inchoate and nascent creation -- yourself. This is no solipsistic ego-fashion walking a new-season runway. This creation is now-beyond-itself. Particular, specific, personal, and informed. A concretion, a growing together, of the spiritual.
Impregnate and be impregnated with this understanding -- what we envision, what we see, is what we become -- proleptic and parthenogenic.
The obsession of our contemporary culture with sex trafficking, abuse and molestation, prostitution and slavery kidnapping, numbing of real feeling for contrived power satisfaction, objectifying women and children with acts of venal self-serving poison -- these behaviors are signs of terror capitalism haunting our soul.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
(--Oliver, ibid)
Don't think you are an orphan. You are not abandoned. See, these words find you!
We are that place for ourselves, that family for one-another. A new biological/ecological/noosphere, as you are, transforming itself into One-Another-Itself.
Over and over, it is our place to imagine, create, inhabit, and inspire with loving dignity.
Out of, and with, ashes.
(Shoveling out wood stove for fresh Fire.)
had them they were clean and shining, but now after using them for so long, they're starting to wear out. Some are already broken, some have disappeared, and those left are deteriorating: they have no stable form, and it's their nature to be like that. Your body is the same way. It has been continually changing right from the day you were born, through childhood and youth, until now it has reached old age. You must accept that. The Buddha said that all conditions (sankharas), whether they are internal conditions, bodily conditions, or external conditions, are not-self—their nature is to change. Contemplate this truth until you see it clearly.
