Life As I Know It

You Are That

2012-01-25T18:15:00.000-08:00

For ages you have come and gone
courting this delusion.
For ages you have run from the pain
and forfeited the ecstasy.
So come, return to the root of the root
of your own soul.

Although you appear in earthly form
Your essence is pure Consciousness.
You are the fearless guardian
of Divine Light.
So come, return to the root of the root
of your own soul.

When you lose all sense of self
the bonds of a thousand chains will vanish.
Lose yourself completely,
Return to the root of the root
of your own soul.

You turned your sight
to the empty show of this world.

How can you be satisfied with so little?
So come, return to the root of the root
of your own soul.

Why are you so enchanted by this world
when a mine of gold lies within you?
Open your eyes and come ---

Return to the root of the root
of your own soul.

You were born of the universe
when the stars were in their perfect place.
How long will you suffer from the blows
of a nonexistent hand?
So come, return to the root of the root
of your own soul.

You are a ruby encased in granite.
How long will you decieve Us with this outer show?

We can see the truth in your eyes

So come, return to the root of the root
of your own soul.

Soul of all souls, life of all life - you are That.

Seen and unseen, moving and unmoving - you are That.
The road that leads to enlightenment is endless;
Go without head and feet
and you'll already be there.
What else could you be? - you are That.

I Believe

2012-01-24T20:36:00.001-08:00

I believe in nothing
Not the end and not the start
I believe in nothing

Not the earth and not the stars
I believe in nothing
Not the day and not the dark
I believe in nothing
But the beating of our hearts
I believe in nothing
One hundred suns until we part
I believe in nothing
Not in satan, not in god
I believe in nothing
Not in peace and not in war
I believe in nothing
But the truth of who we are

Winding Roads

2012-01-22T13:50:00.000-08:00

I feel like we're starting the roller coaster over again. It's like the 5 stages of grief played out in a continuous loop with occasional intermissions during the times they believe that you've changed.

We've all been through denial, "We don't care he's gone, it's happened too many times to even feel it anymore." " This time is different, he didn't even live here, we already left him." Then came Anger. " I Hate him for what he's done to us, I wish he was here right now so that I would scream in his face and let him know how much I really hate him." Next came bargaining, " I wish I could have just been able to say goodbye, I would have given anything for a goodbye." "Maybe if I went with him that night he wouldn't have done it." " I wish I had been nicer and told him I loved him more, I was still just so angry at him from last time. " And now we've hit depression with scattered moments of stages past. " I don't want to get out of bed today." "What's the point of being with friends, nothing makes me happy lately."

We had a family meeting today. The house is a disaster, no one will lift a finger to do anything. No clean cloths, no clean dishes, cupboards full of empty boxes. I've been very sick, I had to go in and receive IV fluids Friday night, I was so dehydrated. I can't keep them motivated when I'm giving it my all let alone from my bed. Everyone wants off the roller coaster. The good times don't hold a candle to the fallout and yet another round of grief. This can't continue I tell them, I promise to never let this happen again, just pull yourselves up one more time. Let's clean this place up, let's love ourselves.

Shem finally broke yesterday morning, he said that the overwhelming feeling of responsibility was crushing him. Emma is self medicating with food and sarcasm. Ella won't leave my side and Owen feels lost. I promise them that this time the ride is over for good. We're a family who knows love, love is what we do best. This too shall pass. I tell them that although our trails are crooked, winding, lonesome and dangerous, I know that they will lead to the most amazing view. I also know what crushing responsibility feels like.

At the Bottom of Everything

2012-01-14T14:47:00.000-08:00

We must talk in every telephone
Get eaten off the web
We must rip out all the epilogues in the books that we have read
And in the face of every criminal
Strapped firmly to a chair
We must stare, we must stare, we must stare

We must take all of the medicines too expensive now to sell

Set fire to the preacher who is promising us hell

And in the ear of every anarchist that sleeps but doesn't dream

We must sing, we must sing, we must sing

We must blend into the choir

Sing as static with the whole

We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul

And in this endless race for property and privilege to be won

We must run, we must run, we must run

We must hang up in the belfry

Where the bats and moonlight laugh

We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past

And in the caverns of tomorrow

With just our flashlights and our love

We must plunge, we must plunge, we must plunge

Mergings

2011-11-17T18:25:00.000-08:00

Jung, Mozart, Plath, Monet, Rumi. They have all taught me what it mean to be human.

Self expression, a sacred communion with the infinite. A way of revealing the world to itself. No one lives in the world that I live in, no one sees a tree as I see a tree. No one feels pain as I feel pain.

I will show you my word, a window into the reality that I alone reside in.

Flowers, leaves, clouds, snowflakes. They have all taught me self expression. The ability to merge seamlessly, the lone tree with the vast forest.

Writing, painting, photography, I will share my world with you, I will hold the mirror of self discovery.

I see the individual drops of water that create the unstoppable ocean. I become a part of something greater than myself and yet I know it was never whole without me.

Dance, sing, create. Share your soul with me.

The Cave

2011-11-12T21:26:00.000-08:00

Fake images.

False realities.
Prisoners of our own minds.

The need to destroy those who don't see the world as we do, who don't buy into the same delusions as ourselves. I am my beliefs, my culture, my religion, to reject my "isms" is to reject me. Those who deny the world as I know know it are my enemies, they threaten the very core of who I believe myself to be.

This is a tree. I have named it, labeled it, conquered it, built my world around it. If you say otherwise, I have lost a piece of reality, I have lost a piece of myself. And if that's not a tree, if that's not a truth, if I was wrong about that all along, what else could I be wrong about? In what world do I live in? Who am I?

I am a human being. I spend my life trying to stay the tides, suspend time, hold others in place, cheat death. I am the center of my own universe, reality flows from my roots. I have the truth, I am the truth. I will kill and destroy anything I don't understand, anything I can't control, anything that threatens reality as I know it to be. I am the blessed one, chosen by the God I have created.

I will not stop until I have secured my world, made it unmovable, indestructible. I will label it, file it away, put it in a box, claim it, control it, defeat it, make it a part of me. For without it, who am I?

Yin Yang

2010-12-16T13:33:00.000-08:00

Imagine you can see out into deep space, so far out that the distance to the nearest galaxies is so vast that no stars are visible in any direction, in fact all that there is to see is a solitary blue ball. Consider this ball for a moment and ask yourself this simple question... is it moving, slowly drifting across the abyss or is it holding still, hanging against the backdrop of the void? The more deeply we consider this question the more we come to realize that there is no possible way of knowing the answer. Indeed, in relation to what could it be said to be moving? Things are said to move only when compared with others, that are relatively still, for movement does not exist in itself but only in relation to stillness - likewise stillness cannot exist except in correlation with motion.

So let's have two balls, and notice that they come closer to each other, or get further apart. Sure, there is motion now, but which one is moving? Ball one, ball two, or both? There is no way of deciding. All answers are equally right and wrong. Now suppose that the balls don't move at all, but that the space between them moves. After all, we speak of a distance (space) increasing or decreasing as if it were a thing that could do something. This is the problem of the expanding universe. Are the other galaxies moving away from ours, or ours from them, or all from each other? The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat.

The space, then, is as real as the solid. Yet we think, 'Well, where there is a solid, there is something, and where there is space, there is nothing.' They are actually as mutually supportive as back and front, they are inseparable. Nobody ever found a space without a solid, and nobody ever found a solid without a space. We've been trained to fix our attention on the solid and disregard the space, but what we fail to see is that it is the solid which implies the space, just as it is the space which implies the solid. It is the soft of your skin that implies the rough of the tree bark, it is the warmth of your body that implies the cold of the snow. Nothing can exist except in relation to it's opposite... it is only through the concept of dark that we can conceive of light, and it is only in relation to light that we can comprehend dark.

Press a single key on a piano and we perceive a solitary note hanging in the air, but what our ear fails to tell us is that every second this note is flowing rapidly in and out of existence. In fact, were this not the case we would fail to hear anything at all. This is because sound is generated not by a tone but by a tone, followed by silence, followed by a tone, followed by silence. Likewise when you switch on a light in the dark you senses are flooded with the perception of light, but in reality your eyes are following your ears' example and withholding the fact that what you perceive as a beam of brightness is actually a union of darkness and light; the light dying away to bring life to the dark, the darkness giving way to the light which implies the darkness in turn. How do would we classify the rich without the poor? Sorrow without joy? If everyone was exactly the same size who would we consider tall? Whom short? If all of humanity were as intelligent as Einstein would we still consider him a genius? We never find the crest of a wave without an accompanying trough, nor a particle without an interval between itself and others. In others words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space around it. There is no on without off, no up without down. Take away the crest of the wave, and there is no trough.

We are so absorbed in conscious attention, so convinced that this narrowed kind of perception is not only the real way of seeing the world, but also the very basic sensation of oneself as a conscious being, that we are fully hypnotized by its disjointed vision of the universe. We really feel that this world is indeed an assemblage of separate things that have somehow come together or, perhaps, fallen apart, and that we are each only one of them. We see ourselves all alone, born alone and dying alone, maybe as bits and fragments of a universal whole, or expendable parts of a big machine. Rarely do we conceive of all these so-called things and events "going together" like the head and tail of the cat, or as tones and inflections - rising and falling, coming and going - of a single singing voice.

In other words, we do not play the game of death-and-life: the universal game of up/down, on/off. solid/space, and each/all. Instead, we play the game of death-versus-life. Then, not realizing the inseparability of the positive and negative poles of the rhythm, we are afraid that death may win the game. But the game "Life must win" is no longer a game, it is a fight - a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys.

Snowflakes

2010-12-07T18:46:00.000-08:00

There was a Zen Master who was very pure, very illumined. Near the place where he lived there happened to be a food store. The owner of the food store had a beautiful unmarried daughter. One day she was found with child. Her parents flew into a rage. They wanted to know the father, but she would not give them the name. After repeated scolding and harassment, she gave up and told them it was the Zen Master. The parents believed her. When the child was born they ran to the Zen Master, scolding him with foul tongue, and they left the infant with him. The Zen Master said, “Is that so.” This was his only comment.

He accepted the child. He started nourishing and taking care of the child. By this time his reputation had come to an end, and he was an object of mockery. Days ran into weeks, weeks into months and months into years. But there is something called conscience in our human life, and the young girl was tortured by her conscience. One day she finally disclosed to her parents the name of the child’s real father, a man who worked in a fish market. The parents again flew into a rage. At the same time, sorrow and humiliation tortured the household. They came running to the spiritual Master, begged his pardon, narrated the whole story and then took the child back.”

His only comment: “Is that so.”

Nonresistance

There once was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.

Nonjudgment

There once lived a king who was continuously torn between happiness and despondency. The slightest thing would cause him great upset or provoke an intense reaction, and his happiness would quickly turn into disappointment and despair. A time came when the king finally got tired of himself and of life, and he began to seek a way out. He sent for a wise man who lived in his kingdom and who was reputed to be enlightened. When the wise man came, the king said to him, " I want to be like you. Can you give me something that will bring balance, serenity, and wisdom into my life? I will pay any price you ask."

The wise man said, " I may be able to help you. But the price is so great that your entire kingdom would not be sufficient payment for it. Therefore it will be a gift to you if you will honor it." The king gave his assurances and the wise man left.

A few weeks later, he returned and handed the king an ornate box carved with jade. The king opened the box and found a simple gold ring inside. Some letters were inscribed on the ring. The inscription read: This, too, will pass. "What is the meaning of this?" asked the king. The wise man said, "Wear this ring always. Whatever happens, before you call it good or bad, touch this ring and read the inscription. That way, you will always be at peace."

Nonattachment

Compound, My Compound

2010-12-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

Holy, Moley, me, oh my,
You're the apple of my eye,
I've never loved one like you.

Man oh man you're my best friend,
I scream it to the nothingness,
There ain't nothing that I need.

Well, hot and heavy, pumpkin pie,
Chocolate candy, Jesus Christ,
Ain't nothing please me more than you.

Ahh Home. Let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you.

I'll follow you into the park,
Through the jungle through the dark,
I never loved one like you.

Moats and boats and waterfalls,
Alley-ways and pay phone calls,
I've been everywhere with you.

We laugh until we think we'll die,
Barefoot on a summer night
Nothin' new is sweeter than with you.

And in the streets you run afree,
Like it's only you and me,
Geeze, you're something to see.

Ahh Home. Let me go home.
Home is wherever I'm with you.
Ahh Home. Let me go ho-oh-ome.
Home is wherever I'm with you.

Music And Words

2010-11-25T22:21:00.000-08:00

My favorite part of Thanksgiving is probably the 'thankful circle', where we each share what we are thankful for while sitting... in a circle. Not only is this meaningful and thought provoking it is unbelievably adorable to find out the creative, insightful and off-the-wall things that my children are thankful for.

This year Shem asked if, rather than listing only a few things we were thankful for, we could take our time listing all the many things we felt we wanted to voice our gratitude for. This seemed like an inspired idea so we all agreed, little did we know how many things children are grateful for! As our Thanksgiving dinner slowly grew cold Shem, Emma, Ella and Owen spent well over an hour listing their often silly but always heartfelt gratitude for the world around them. Here are just a tiny selection of some of my favorites.

Shem: All nine planets (attempting several times to list them all but somehow always missing Mercury) but most especially Earth and Pluto, water (which was repeated at least four times), our many pets, rivers, streams and oceans, metal, books but not paper (because it meant trees were being harvested) but yet still paper, kind of, because he really likes to draw, and his compound family.

Emma: Her Godparents Ash and Derek, all her pets (including three horses a distant uncle told her she could share with him five years ago), all the mythical creatures (each was named one at a time, from centaurs to dragons and chimeras to wraiths), both the Greek and Egyptian pantheon of gods (also listed one at a time, including what they are gods of and some myths as well), music and Pluto (who kept popping up and whose planet-hood was vehemently defended, because as Emma says "A planet's a planet, no matter how small").

Ella: Animals (which each deserved their own individual mention), nature, hippies and peace, Pluto (naturally), words and numbers. Much of Ella's time was also spent espousing the many things she was not grateful for which include: pollution, mean people, people that hurt animals, and especially God whom she claims stole Emma's boca burger.

Owen: Was first and foremost grateful for himself "me", followed by "you", the heart on Mommy's shirt, his family (repeated even more often than Shem's water), aliens and monsters, haunted houses and ghosts, Frankenstein, the tooth fairy, Christmas, the guitar, leafs, his family, Pluto (because it just wouldn't make sense if he hadn't), dinosaurs and animals, himself... oh yeah, and his family.

Here Is Now

2010-11-21T22:36:00.000-08:00

Hakuna matata is a Swahili phrase that is literally translated as "There are no worries", in the words of the lovable meerkat Timon this means "Put your past behind you". Simple enough words for a task that most of humanity never really accomplishes in their entire lifetime. Who among us does not carry with us the baggage that our parents heaped upon us by raising us in inherently flawed manners, though who can really blame them when they themselves spent their lives coping with the issues handed down to them by their own parents? What small percentage of people have walked away from ex-husbands and wives, even ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, without an entire repertoire of battle-scars on their souls? Sibling rivalries, bullying received during our school years, a plethora of injustices met out in the 'real world', each and every one of us are bound with iron chains to the weight of decades worth of baggage.

Yet, what is the past, really? Beyond a hodgepodge of selective memories strung together to form a loose, hopelessly inaccurate and ultimately delusional narrative - one formed under the thinly veiled notion of an excuse for our behaviors in the present moment. And how much of our personal history, when it really comes down to it, do we hold even a modicum of influence over at any given moment?

On the flip side of the same coin we have the illusion of a history yet to be written. Would Timon's words be any less wise if we turned them around to say "Keep your future out ahead of you" or in other words "Cross that bridge when you come to it"? We all walk through life with our head stuck in the clouds, gazing out at a mirage that we perceive to be the horizon. To countless among us thoughts such as 'After a few more paychecks...', 'Starting next week...', 'Once begins/ends...' and 'Next time...' form the script of our lives at any given moment. We spend our entire lives focusing singlemindedly on the road ahead of us; yet, like a stray baseball to a window, this way of life can be shattered with two profound, simple statements: '90% of what you worry about will never come to pass' and 'life is what happens while we are making other plans'. We base our every decision on a subjective illusion of a future we intend to generate, conveniently forgetting that there are no guarantees that we will be around to see our next birthday, next month, or even the next day.

On a less dramatic scale we can see this same problem when two people are deep in conversation. With rare exceptions the person who is listening at any given moment is concentrating not on the words they hear, nor on their meaning to the speaker, not even on the speaker them-self; instead their attention is focused on formulating their next reply. Although our present actions may well influence the shape the future will take, what power do we really have over something which does not yet exist? Little more than a dream, we hold more power over the flight path of a butterfly in Tibet.

The only sphere of existence any one of us are able to have a direct impact upon is the present moment. Right now. Engaging in the moment is truly the only activity worth commiting oneself to.To live our lives focusing our attention on any moment beyond this one, is to throw away life in favor of an illusion. Likewise, to cling to the fleeting thoughts and demands of our mind is to fall willingly back to the deadly sleep of ignorance and commence sleepwalking our way through the remainder of our, now-pointless, existence.

Yet the present itself is a fleeting notion, it is something that can only be discussed in the abstract for the moment we begin to discuss it the moment has already slipped beyond the cusp of the present and into the past. Like a rock in a riverbed we must allow time to flow over and around us, making no attempt at grasping and holding to anything that happens. In the words of Sylvia Boorstein, "Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn't more complicated that that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it." Only when we learn to persist in the now do we truly become powerful, do we truly come to life.

I Am...

2010-11-18T19:46:00.000-08:00

Buddhism teaches that the origin of all suffering is attachment. Craving and clinging are natural reactions to life; we cling to our possessions and our wealth, we crave attention and affection, we attach ourselves to our loved ones and to our lives. Yet the objects of our attachment are transient, their loss is inevitable, thus suffering will necessarily follow. You pine for the love of someone, if your love is unrequited you naturally become sad or frustrated. Suppose, instead, you come to find that certain someone loves you too. The moment you share your love for one another, the moment that by all rights and reasons should be unmitigated joy, some part of you shifts to a fearful, defensive posture. What if they should stop loving you, move away or even die? In that instant that we attain that which we have been craving we begin to cling to it for dear life.

Arguably the most difficult things for us to learn to sever our detachments from are not our cars and houses, not our bank accounts, not even our loved ones... that which we grasp onto most tightly is our paradigms. The image we carry of ourselves, the lens through which we see the world, the guide by which we interpret our lives are often so ingrained, so intrinsically a part of who we are that we shrink in terror from the loss of them. We allow our beliefs, opinions and conceptions to shape our lives at such a fundamental level that many of us actually identify with them. Strip away our politics, our religion, our day-to-day world views and many of us don't even have a concept of what 'self' would be leftover.

The source of these deeply enmeshed attachments stem from an attachment to our thoughts. We suffer from the belief that whatever pops into our mind is part of who and what we are, thus we cling to the random wanderings of our brain under the delusion that our thoughts are as much a part of us as our own skin. I am learning to see my thoughts and emotions like clouds, there to be observed and considered but lacking any personal attachment, drifting across the sky of my mind leaving no trace of their passing. By identifying ourselves with our own attachments we tie our mental and emotional well-being to a vulnerable, false 'self'. This is why people become so defensive of their paradigms, what we feel as an attack on our core beliefs is seen as an attack on our very selves. To question someone's political stance or religion, for example, is perceived on par with coming at them with a knife, an attempt to cut away a part of themselves.

This simple, terrible truth is at the heart of the conflict between conservatives and liberals, Christians and Muslims, Capitalists and Socialists, husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and neighbors. It plays a core role in humanity's destruction of the environment, the exploitation and enslavement of one person by another and virtually every war ever waged in human history. These attachments are, quite literally, the fountain from which all suffering springs, thus it is only by finding these intrinsic attachments within ourselves and confronting them head on that we, both individually and collectively, will ever escape the vicious cycle of misery that binds humanity in a prison of our self-deluded creation.

A Rewriting Of History

2010-11-18T16:07:00.000-08:00

The past is a pliable myth and the future is merely an illusion, the present moment is all that exists.

That the future is an illusion has always seemed logical enough, no matter what expectations I have or plans I make today I have no inkling of what tomorrow will bring, or the next moment for that matter. There are no guarantees that I will even live to see the sun set on this day. Likewise, it seems natural to say that the only moment truly in existence is the here and now, it is this moment alone that I can have a direct influence over, the only moment that truly matters is the present one. Just as it makes perfect sense that the future has not yet been called into existence one can come to accept that the past has slipped irrevocably beyond our reach, but I admit that I have always struggled with the conception of a malleable past.

A zen master once said "We must reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present, That now is the creative point of life." This flies in the face of the Western linear view of time in which the present moment is the direct and literal culmination of every moment that preceded it. And while it is one thing to recognize the limitations imposed by this conception, it is something else entirely to shift our paradigms altogether. How can the present moment possibly effect the past when it is a myth, even less accessible to us than Jupiter's 63rd moon?

Yet this is precisely what happens when we speak to one another, you wait until later to find out the meaning of a sentence. Suppose we cross paths, I speak first and the first words that reaches your ears are 'I love'... At this point you have no way of knowing whether I am going to confess my undying love for you or simply share the fact that I enjoy running into you this way. It is only later, when I finish my sentence, that these words are retroactively imbued with meaning. Similarly, when we listen to the flow of music the expression of the melody early in the song is changed by the notes that come after. To take this concept a step further, this same phenomenon is precisely what takes place when you forgive someone who has wronged you. With no more effort than thinking, by merely making a decision, you have radically altered the meaning of the past, entire years worth of history are changed the moment your heart is.

Drowning Beautiful

2010-11-13T16:18:00.000-08:00

24 Hours Of Silence

2010-11-08T22:09:00.000-08:00

If you get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself a very strange thing happens. You find out that your body knows that you are one with the universe, in other words that the so called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out that it's you who circulates your blood you at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun.

I entered a void, I left my body, I was above everything, a wormhole, a spiral, a light, I was consciousness, I was wisdom. I was myself, looking at myself. A wave and a particle. I am the universe and the universe is me.

I don't know who I am unless I know who you are, and you don't know who you are unless you know who I am. A wise rabbi once said "If I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you." In other words we are not separate, we define each other, we are all backs and fronts to each other.

There was a young man who said "Though it seems I know that I know, what I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know."

We are symptomatic of the scheme of things, as the apple is symptomatic of the apple tree and the rose is symptomatic of the rose bush. The earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms anymore than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people and our existence on the earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances, as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy.

The drop merges into the ocean, and the ocean merges into the drop.
I am everything and nothing, I don't end at my skin.
Recursive, holographic, isomorphic.

Your body is a miracle of harmony. Even the corpuscles and creatures that are fighting each other in the bloodstream and eating each other up, if they weren't doing that you wouldn't be healthy. What is discord at one level of your being is harmony at a higher level, similarly the discords of your life and the discords of people's lives which are a fight at one level at a higher level of the universe are healthy and harmonious. And you suddenly realize that everything that you are and do is, at that level, as magnificent and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves, the markings in marble, the way a cat moves and that this world is really okay.

The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine time folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west,
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.

You may become the Buddha as soon as you know that you have always been the Buddha.

Illumination Of Heart

2010-11-08T21:27:00.000-08:00

huhhhhh

blah blah blah WHATEVER.

you don't exist (sorry) you are dismissed (sorry) I excuse you from the premises of my mind (thank you) regardless of the scars you've forged (slowly) I will soar above your walls (of control) I dare you to shuffle your deck (tricks) I reject your premise and despise your conclusion (bane and banal) and am moving on as soon as your pious purity is purged from the canyons of my insecurities (fuck you).

I welcome only soulfulness (please) embrace ecstatic life reaffirming experiences (each moment) forget the inconsequential, live now. now. now (forever) pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe (alive) express being (flux) struggle with, not against (grow) maintain balance (keep moving) and focus on pieces at a time (neverwhelmed) but always open soaking up whatever this is that we call life and pursuing existential passion be it bliss or despair there is no separation merely two sides of the same coin there is too much wisdom piled against the collapse of mystery and magic it will endure it lives right here and everywhere within you and without you let it be known that this is my position you're a quack not a physician.

that may be unfair and I may be wrong but when my soul writes a song I will sing along and let the rest come later. layer up on fucking layer. I'm not in a very good place to put this out in to space in fact I'll likely rescind my reaction but let it be known I'll never print a retraction only build upon the action. the rhythms of my brain and the wiring of my heart. this is where we start.

~Brittany Pendleton

Soul receives from soul that knowledge,
therefore not by book nor from tongue.

If knowledge of mysteries come after
emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.

To Watch

2010-11-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. - Arundhati Roy

Feeling Loudly

2010-11-02T12:49:00.000-07:00

Earlier times may not have understood it any better than we do, but they weren't as embarrassed to name it: the life force or spark thought close to divine. It is not. Instead, it's something that makes those who have it fully human, and those who don't look like sleep walkers... It isn't enough to make someone heroic, but without it any hero will be forgotten. Rousseau called it force of soul; Arendt called it love of the world. It's the foundation of Eros; you may call it charisma.

Is it a gift of the gods, or something that has to be earned? Watching such people, you will sense it's both: given like perfect pitch, or grace, that no one can deserve or strive for, and captured like the greatest of prizes it is. Having it makes people think more, see more, feel more. More intensely, more keenly, more loudly if you like; but not more in the way of the gods. On the contrary, next to heroes like Odysseus and Penelope, the gods seem oddly flat. They are bigger, of course, and they live forever, but their presence seems diminished...The gods of The Odyssey aren't alive, just immortal; and with immortality most of the qualities we cherish become pointless. Withing nothing to risk, the gods need no courage.

You Pin Both The Wings On Us

2010-10-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

Say no more, use your eyes

The world goes and flutters by...

I see the walls and see them fall

You break through them all
I see you crawl, now you stand tall
Grow and grow till tall

In storm we scream against the stream, our eyes watering
Jump into lakes, the surface breaks
We swim underwater, and our mouths - In tune

I see forest, a treasure chest full of labyrinth
I see a door, holes in the floor
We'll breed seeds - We grow

We all want to grow with the seeds we will sow

We all want to go with the trees we will grow
We all want to know when we're all meant to go
To a place you and I - Will call home

There's songs, songs you bring to us

You pin both wings on us
I hear it, I see you sing for us
You go tie a string around us

We all grow, use your life,

The world goes and flutters by.

Imagine

2010-10-09T19:06:00.000-07:00

~Buddhist Prayer For Peace~

May all beings everywhere plagued

with sufferings of body and mind
quickly be freed from their illnesses.
May those frightened cease to be afraid,
and may those bound be free.
May the powerless find power,
and may people think of befriending
one another.
May those who find themselves in trackless,
fearful wilderness–
the children, the aged,
the unprotected–
be guarded by beneficial celestials,
and may they swiftly attain Buddhahood.

Evoking the presence of the great compassion,
let us fill our hearts with our own compassion–
towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
Let us pray that all living beings realize
that they are all brothers and sisters,
all nourished from the same source of life.

The Language of Allen Ginsberg

2010-10-05T14:09:00.001-07:00

*click on picture to enlarge

Once Upon A Time...

2010-09-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

I am unwritten, can't read my mind,

I'm undefined, I'm just beginning,
The pen's in my hand, ending
unplanned.....

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. ~The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ~The Call of Cthulhu', by H. P. Lovecraft

My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. ~Metamorphoses by Ovid

It was a pleasure to burn. ~Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. ~One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquesas

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. ~The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

If you're going to read this, don't bother. ~Choke by Chuck Palladium

My suffering left me sad and gloomy. ~ Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.

~ The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. ~Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Call me Ishmael. ~Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. ~Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. ~The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Charlie lived in a place where the illegal was legal, where the immoral was moral, and where some people’s fantasies were other people’s realities. ~An Island Away by Daniel Putkowski.

Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
~The Raven', by Edgar Allan Poe.

I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. ~Notes from Underground by Fedora Dostoevsky

A screaming comes across the sky. ~Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. ~The Go-Between by L. P. Hartleyn

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was. ~Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams

To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'" ~The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Antigone

2010-09-24T19:49:00.001-07:00

Sophocles’ Antigone is a beautifully written Greek tragedy that has long captured the attention of philosophers and revolutionaries alike. It is a story of conflicting orders of values, of radical divisions and of opposition between family and state, men and women, ethics and politics, individuality and collectivism and religion and law.

In this play Antigone, the unflinching and uncompromising heroin, defies an ordinance issued by the King of Thebes (Creon) to let her slain brothers body rot and deteriorate above ground without a proper burial because of his betrayal of the city of Thebes. Antigone defies the king and buries her brother citing her duty to her family and to divine law.

"I intend to give my brother burial. I'll be glad to die in the attempt, if it's a crime, then it's a crime that God commands."

Antigone feels no remorse for her actions and refuses repentance, thereby inflaming the king who quickly decries:

“Show me a greater crime in all earth!
She, she destroys cities, rips up houses,
Breaks the ranks of spearmen into headlong rout.
But the ones who last it out, the great mass of them
Owe their lives to discipline. Therefore
We must defend the men who live by law,
Never let some woman triumph over us.
Better to fall from power, if fall we must,
At the hands of a man—never be rated
Inferior to a woman, never.”

Antigone’s sprit of defiance has long been heralded by feminists as a noble and revolutionary act in which Antigone stands in opposition to Creon in what seems to be an irreconcilable debate, Antigone becoming the embodiment of moral idealism and individuality and Creon political realism and collectivism.

Antigone espouses the ability to use social rebellion and civil disobedience to destabilize a society and traditional gender roles. As the story unfolds, Antigone exposes the falsities and failures of such oppositions and seeks to reveal and break down such false dichotomies as man and woman, individualism and collectivism and morality and law, showing a radical transcendence of an outsider living in a patriarchal society.

“I didn't say yes. I can say no to anything I say vile, and I don't have to count the cost. But because you said yes, all that you can do, for all your crown and your trappings, and your guards—all that your can do is to have me killed.”

Birth

2010-09-24T19:36:00.000-07:00

Every cell in the human body regenerates on average every seven years. Like snakes, in our own way we shed our skin. Biologically we are brand new people. We may look the same, we probably do, the change isn't visible at least in most of us, but we are all changed completely forever.

When we say things like "people don't change" it drives scientist crazy because change is literally the only constant in all of science. Energy. Matter. It's always changing, morphing, merging, growing, dying. It's the way people try not to change that's unnatural. The way we cling to what things were instead of letting things be what they are. The way we cling to old memories instead of forming new ones. The way we insist on believing despite every scientific indication that anything in this lifetime is permanent.

Change is constant. How we experience change, that's up to us. It can feel like death or it can feel like a second chance at life. If we open our fingers, loosen our grips, go with it, it can feel like pure adrenaline. Like at any moment we can have another chance at life. Like at any moment, we can be born all over again.

The Declaration of Evolution

2010-09-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.

We hold these truths to be self evident:

That all species are created different but equal;
That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;
That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;
That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.

Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded for frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpation's, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.

The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgment of generations to come.

These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.
They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.
They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth's abundance and God's endowment.
They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.
They have claimed private, personal ownership of God's land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.
In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.
In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.
In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.
In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.
In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.
In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.
For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas.
In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.
In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.
They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.
In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.
They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.
They have enlisted an army of informers.
In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.
They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.

They are bores.
They hate beauty.
They hate sex.
They hate life.

We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshiping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.

We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God's creatures - in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.

And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

by Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Seahorse

2010-09-20T19:23:00.000-07:00

I'm high and I'm happy and I'm free.

I have my whole heart
laid out right in front of me.
And I finally can see
the way it's always been,
the need for peace
starts from within.

So I leave my possessions to the wind,
and I'm done with ever wanting anything.
Well I can die satisfied,
no desires do I hide.
Not today, not today,
nor for the next one thousand lives.

I'm scared of ever being born again.
If it's in this form again.
I want to know how, why, where, when and then,
I want to see you be the bright night sky.
I want to see you come back as the light.

Culture is your Operating System

2010-09-17T21:14:00.000-07:00

When your cultural operating system is wiped clean something older, more vitalistic, more in touch with the animal soul replaces it. Something not determined by history or geography but something writ in the language of the flesh itself. This is who you are, this is true nakedness, shed of all religious assumptions, prejudices, your fears, your illusions and your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.

A Step Without Feet

2010-09-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,

to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.

First, to let go of life.

In the end, to take a step without feet;

to regard this world as invisible,

and to disregard what appears to be the self.

Explosions

2010-09-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

This great evil - where's it come from?

How'd it steal into the world?
What seed, what root did it grow from?
Who's doing this?
Who's killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we mighta known?
Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine?
Is this darkness in you, too?
Have you passed through this night?

A Holographic Universe

2010-09-07T21:16:00.000-07:00

We now know that under certain circumstances subatomic particles, such as electrons, are capable of instantaneously communicating with one another other regardless of the distance separating them. They can be 5 miles or 5 billion miles apart, it doesn’t matter. Each particle always knows what the others are doing. This perfect synchronicity violates Einstein's theory that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light and has left many scientists questioning their most basic understanding of the universe.

University of London physicist David Bohm has taken these findings and along with his own research has come to believe that objective reality does not exist. That despite its apparent solidity the universe is, at heart, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. And holograms have some incredible characteristics. If a hologram of a daisy is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the daisy, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. Western science has long believed that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts. A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, only smaller wholes.

Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something. Bohm says that we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality. They are facets of a deeper and more underlying unity. Since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons" the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected. The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

The hologram theory explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime. Holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage, simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film; it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information. And one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information, another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system. Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

So if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, the collective unconscious, out of body experiences, precognitive glimpses of the future, and regression into apparent past life incarnations don’t seem so unbelievable. If the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

And if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical. Maybe “reality” is nothing more than a consensus among humanity, formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected. If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality. What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we desire.

Eaarth

2010-09-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

In Eaarth, Bill McKibben paints a picture for us, a picture detailing the intricacies and interwoven nature of this planet we call Earth. He then goes on to tell us that this pale blue dot that we call home is no longer the Earth that we evolved on and the Earth that evolved right along with us, sustaining us all the while, this is a new Earth, one that we no longer know anything about. This new Earth is unpredictable, hauntingly beautiful and seemingly angry. This new Earth no longer plays by the rules we once thought we understood. This new Earth that we find ourselves residents of is a volatile place in which melting ice causes the sun to reflect off the blue of the ocean causing a temperature rise, which in turn causes a myriad of consequences, everything from the release of methane, to peat bogs drying out, to water shortages and hurricanes.

This new Earth is a place in which the poorest and most vulnerable of species, those members of our community that are causing the least amount of harm, are paying the highest price, millions are paying with their lives. This new earth is a place in which most of us avoid personal responsibility, pushing our problems off on someone else, leaving the hard work to the next generation to deal with. But, as McKibben writes, this problem can only be pushed off for so long, because this new Earth, the only home we’ve ever known, is being killed, one drop of carbon and one demolished tree at a time. Future generations are staring back at us through time, silently pleading to us, and begging us to see past our own selfishness and greed.

McKibben bombards his readers with shocking statistics about the acidity of our oceans, the un-breathability of our air, and the annihilation of our forests. He shares with us stories of struggling agrarians and fisherman who are trying desperately to feed their families and of entire countries facing the possibility of evacuation. And this is all happening today, not in the future, and although we haven’t had that much time to study this new Earth we do know one thing, things are speeding up. Processes that used to take hundreds and thousands of years now take a decade or less. The time has run out. As Mckibben tells us, even if every environmental bill was passed that has ever been proposed and every politician kept her promise about cleaning up the air and creating clean energy, it still wouldn’t be enough. We have caused irreparable amounts of damage to the very thing that keeps us alive and now we are left with the consequences of those actions. So now the question is, what are we going to do about it?

Clementine

2010-08-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

Clementine is my fellow ENFP and somewhat psychic, soul sister. She is that one person that makes you say "I get everything about you."

I'm always anxious thinking I'm not living my life to the fullest, y'know? Taking advantage of every possibility? Just making sure that I'm not wasting one second of the little time I have.

You know me, I'm impulsive.

But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me.

I'm a vindictive little bitch, truth be told.

...you stop listening to what is true, and what is true is constantly changing.

You can't be ugly - be pretty.

I apply my personality in a paste.

I'm just a fucked up girl trying to find her own peace of mind, I'm not perfect.

Look man, I'm telling you right off the bat, I'm high-maintainance, so... I'm not gonna tip-toe around your marriage, or whatever it is you've got goin' there. If you wanna be with me, you're with me.

I'm an open book. I tell you everything, every damn, embarrassing thing.

I'm gonna marry you... I know it!

My goal is to just let it flow through me. Do you know what I mean? It's like, there's all these emotions and ideas and they come quick and they change and they leave and they come back in a different form.

It's weird, like if I can transform her, I would magically change, too.

That's the thing about my psychic thing. I think that's my greatest psychic power, that I get a sense about people. My problem is I never trust it. But I get it.

Remember me. Try your best; maybe we can.

Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind; don't assign me yours.

Empty Cup

2010-08-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

Woke up and for the first time the animals were gone,

Our clocks are ticking now so before our time is gone.
We could get a house and some boxers on the lawn,
we could make babies and accidental songs.
I know I've been a liar and I know I've been a fool,
I hope we didn't break it but I'm glad we broke the rules.
My cave is deep now yet your light is shining through,
I cover my eyes still all I see is you.
I know that I've left you,
In places of despair.
I know that I love you,
so please throw down your hair.
At night I trip without you,
and hope I don't wake up,
'cause waking up without you
is like drinking from an empty cup.

Ten Years

2010-08-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick clouds.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.

I love you mom.

Overturned

2010-08-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

We are a nation that believes that every man and women is endowed by their creator with inalienable rights and those rights are guarded and sustained by the constitution, not by government officials, not by elected officials and certainly not by ballot initiative. Our rights are fundamental, they are the birthright of every American. That's why we challenged in a court of law the flawed and unconstitutional arguments that long have been used to deny Americans their rights. That gay marriage, a love between two adults is somehow a danger to society, that how we are born, our sexual orientation, not our love or personal commitment, somehow defines a marriage and that state sponsored discrimination is somehow justified and should be institutionalized.

With respect to marriage and after a lengthy trial, a fair trial, the court rejected the false logic that has been used for so many years to rationalize that blatant discrimination. But this trial did more than expose that false logic, it embraced the fundamental American values of freedom and fairness, it upheld the notion that the greatness of this country lies in the ability of each successive generation to broaden the scope of freedom, to deepen the notion of liberty and to strengthen the very principle of justice. Today's decision affirms that under the constitution a government of the people by the people and for the people cannot discriminate against the people.

There is another powerful consequence of this decision that I hope all Americans take into account, today there are millions of gay people across the country: they are your neighbors, your friends and your family, they see how marriage strengthens the bonds of family and community and they wonder, can they ever have that same strength and stability? Or will their government continue to say that marriage is not for them? Today's decision gives gay Americans the hope and strength and comfort that they too can have a future filled with love, commitment and shared responsibility. And so today we begin the process of saying to millions of people who are made to feel ostracized, besieged, bullied and ashamed of how god made them... be who you are, love who you love, and marry who you wish to marry.

As gay and straight citizens take to the streets in celebration here in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Dallas and New York I know there are millions who must celebrate quietly across America. Places where merely taking the hand of a loved one still feels like a revolutionary act. To those quiet millions, to the teenager in Bakersfield who aches for acceptance, to the college student in Salt Lake who only seeks liberty and equality, to the couple in Topeka who longs to openly share their commitment and love - this victory is for you. Because in ending the public sanctioning of discrimination in our law, we render unacceptable the private discrimination you must bear.

This is not the only victory needed to close that gap between the lives you lead and the lives you deserve, but it is a critical victory, one that honors the principles that define America . The principles that stirred a convention in Seneca Falls, the principles that fueled tireless marches through Selma, Birmingham and Washington DC, the principles that sparked the fires of resistance at the Stonewall Inn and the principles that inspire us in this urgent struggle to uphold the right to life, liberty, love and the pursuit of happiness. We will continue to stand up and fight for these principles, for these founding constitutional rights of all Americans until we truly are one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Chad Griffin
President- American Foundation for Equal Rights

Raw Sexuality

2010-08-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

It's a thing...

I Am, I Am Not

2010-08-03T00:08:00.000-07:00

I’m drenched

in the flood
which has yet to come

I’m tied up
in the prison
which has yet to exist

Not having played
the game of chess
I’m already the checkmate

Not having tasted
a single cup of your wine
I’m already drunk

Not having entered
the battlefield
I’m already wounded and slain

I no longer
know the difference
between image and reality

Like the shadow
I am

And

I am not

Uncovered

2010-08-01T13:49:00.000-07:00

The majestic curve of a river cutting through rolling plains can be seen in the enigmatic expanse of the spine's journey across a back. The monumental simplicity of a single atom is no more awe inspiring than the ridges and valleys, lines and curves of the human neck. The towering power of a mountain is held within the stunning peaks of a bottom laid bare. The mysterious draw of the moons path across the sky hints at the pilgrimage of the eye as it wanders across the sweep of a leg.

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story.

She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone.

In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.

Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.

Photos by Stan Trampe, to see more click here .
Selected quotes written by Jeanette Winterson.

Eccentricities

2010-07-31T18:19:00.000-07:00

They refuse to see the world through the rose colored glasses of the masses nor through the cynical spectacles of the disenchanted. Rather they watch reality unfold as if on a psychedelic journey - finding deeper, more profound dimensions than most people imagine possible, finding inspiration in the ordinary. They exist on the fringes of society, never quite fitting in to the social mainstream of everyday life, usually preferring it that way. Astonishingly simple in their miraculousness and surprisingly intricate in their simplicities they inspire us and we, in turn, inspire them. Some call them strange, some call them crazy, some say they are fucked up, others say they are eccentric, most find them confusing, I find them beautiful.

They are artists in the purest sense of the word, masters of the amazing they are capable of drinking deeply from the wellspring of the void. The works they create speak to the depths of my soul, calling to that part of me that each of us share, the unconscious mind that is, in a word, human. The mediums through which they touch my life vary, from poetry to paintings, from music to movies, yet the manner in which their magic has shaped me is penetratingly universal. To my mind they are more enlightened, their souls have swam in the abyss and have discovered a higher state of being. Through the power of their vision they pull me through the looking glass, carrying me along on the wave of their eccentricity...

The words swim before me as the language fades, replaced by an immense dreamscape. I am carried along by the river as my mind wanders across mountains and meadows, through forests and plains. The landscape curves about me and the fathomless beauty of the poet's imagination consumes me entirely.

As I study the oil soaked canvas my thoughts sprout wings and take flight, lifting from my mind and soaring from this world. The power of those thoughts and emotions pull away the curtains of ignorance from my sight and lay bear to me the majesty and mystery of existence. Though the span of a thousand years separates us I am taken by the hand to unknown places, innumerable worlds, lifetimes unimagined.

Standing in a crowd the vibrations and tone fill my body, shaking the mortar that holds my soul in place, filling me so completely that there is no room left for my conscious self. I lift away on a crescendo, my body and the crowd are left behind as I drift along the current of sound. Impressions are lost within me and I lose myself inside of them. A journey spanning the heavens, I am the same yet fundamentally I am changed.

Seeds to Sprout

2010-07-29T22:49:00.000-07:00

Go sing too loud.

Make your voice break, sing it out.
Go scream, do shout,
Make an earthquake...

You wish fire would die and turn colder.
You wish young eyes could see you grow older.

Go drum too proud.
Make your hands ache, play it out.
Go march through crowds
Make your day break...

You wish silence released noisy drummers.
You wish white noise surrendered to summers.

Just let yourself fall into landslide.
Just let yourself give into flood tide.

Tie strings to clouds.
Make your own lake, let it flow
Throw seeds to sprout.
Make your own break, let them grow.

You wish surprise would never stop wonders.
You wish sunrise would never fall under.
We should always know that we can do anything...

Harmony Of Dissonance

2010-07-29T21:24:00.000-07:00

I sleep the sleep of ignorance, the sleep of the dead. Dreaming that my life is orderly and neat, controlled and fulfilled. Yet at times there are glimpses, moments of wakefulness in which I am exposed to the terrible, beautiful interwoven reality of our existence. I see the rest of the world slumbering along, blissfully unaware of the harsh truth that surrounds humanity at all times. I can see clearly the lies that I tell myself, the walls that I build around my heart, the blinders I hold over my eyes. I am alone and the solitude leaves me hollow, but I recognize that this loneliness is preferable to the numb illusion of the dream. Deep inside I can feel it calling to me, the dreamscape of self deception, dragging me back to the comfortable death from which I awoke.

I see now that the walls that once filled me with comfort were, in reality, smothering the breath from my body. Exposed before me lies the unfathomable bedlam that was masked by my orderly world of illusion and the beauty of its intricate chaos steals the strength from my soul. It is tempting, the sirens call of the abyss. To return to a world of black and white, of good and of evil seems preferable. The human mind has been adapted to organize and compartmentalize, and so I find myself drawn back by the sterile order of an existence in which reality can be cut and classified, boxed and labeled. But I cannot. A bell once tolled cannot be unrung, so I too cannot lay my head down and resume my slumber. She that once rested here is gone, I am changed and the exhilaration of this recognition terrifies me.

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
Inviolable.
~ Ezra Pound

F@#k

2010-07-27T17:53:00.000-07:00

My favorite word in the entire English language is... Fuck. I argue that it is not only the most enjoyable but the most important, versatile, and magical word as well. It can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love.

In language it falls into many grammatical categories.
It can be used as a verb, both transitive: "Drew fucked Heather."
and intransitive: "Heather was fucked by Drew."
And as a noun: "Heather is a fine fuck."
It can also be used as an objective: "Heather is fucking beautiful."

As you can see, there are not many words with the diversity of fuck. Besides the sexual meaning there are also the following uses.

Ignorance: "Fuck if I know."
Trouble: "I guess I'm fucked now."
Fraud: "I got fucked at the used car lot."
Aggression: "Fuck you!"
Displeasure: "What the fuck is going on here?"
Difficulty: "I can't understand this fucking job."
Incompetence: "He's a fucknut."
Suspicion: "What the fuck are you doing?"
Enjoyment: "I had a fucking good time."
Request: "Get the fuck out of here."
Hostility: "I'm going to knock your fucking head off."
Greeting: "How the fuck are you?"
Empathy: "Who gives a fuck?"
Innovation: "Get a bigger fucking hammer."
Surprise: "Fuck, you scared the shit out of me."
Anxiety: "Today is really fucked."
Love: "I fucking love you!"
Affection: "I'm going to snuggle the fuck out of you!"
Exasperation: "Fuck that shit!"

This is why if I had to choose one word to use exclusively from now on it would be fuck. Have a fucking great day!

Awakening

2010-07-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

The present moment is all there is, the past and the future are just thoughts in the mind. Being in this moment, the present moment, all pain and discomfort cease. There are no distractions, no confusion and no trauma. There is no feeling of separation between the self and everything else. Within this moment there is tremendous potential, every second carries with it a glimpse of reality.

Ask yourself this...Who is it that's aware that I'm thinking? In this question lies freedom from the self and from suffering. The question is the answer. You are bigger than yourself, you are more than your body, you are everything and everyone. You are no longer a fragment of the universe, you are the universe, even if but for a moment.

Home

2010-07-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ Carl Sagan

I Am With You

2010-07-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

When the rain begins to fall and the rainbows paint the sky, I will dance with you. When the winter creeps, I'll stand beside you and watch as the snowflakes fall like poetry upon the boughs. When the rays of summer's sun kiss our skin, I will hold your hand and lie with you in the grass making pictures in the clouds. And when the night falls upon us, I will dream with you.

When we are apart, just look around, you will always be able to find me in small and beautiful things: the leaves of fall as sunlight passes through, footprints in the snow, the song of windchimes, springtime flowers, April rains and the stars at night. You will find me in those places and in your memory, and above all, in every song that brings peace to your heart.

Scales

2010-07-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

Reality exists on all scales at all times, from the subatomic levels to the galactic, even universal levels. Likewise we exist on all scales at all times, we are pieces of the cohesive whole that is existence, it is only our ignorance and a dependence on our finite senses that keep us shrouded behind a veil of illusion. This shroud over our minds is more ephemeral than smoke but can be absolutely opaque, keeping us ignorant of the true nature of our existence.

In much the same way that the philosophy of cyclic existence can be seen as a metaphor for the various states of mind that humans live their lives in, this multitude of scales ranging from the cosmic to the quantum can help us to understand the multileveled nature of consciousness. Just as I can focus my attention on the very real conception of my body as a collection of cells, molecules, or even atoms or my existence within the bigger picture of our earth, solar system or galaxy - all exiting simultaneously, so too can I direct my mind to varying levels of consciousness from being hyper-focused internally on my body or upon my surroundings, to daydreaming about the future and calling up memories of the past, from the foggy semi-attention that we spend the majority of our lives living in to the deepest meditative levels at which we become aware of the interconnectedness of all things.

Meditation is not a process that connects us to certain object like two cords being plugged into one another, we are always connected to things, to everything, at all times. Meditation merely allows us to access the levels of consciousness necessary to recognize this scale, the truest plane of existence. Like virtually anything we do in life, this process can becomes easier to complete through patient practice of meditation. This enlightenment through practice can be seen as another analogy, this one of the gradual enlightenment we each work to attain as we move across time, from one life to the next. Perhaps this is why humankind is living in an unprecedented state of enlightenment, technology, and social liberalism, we are carried forward as each new generation is born, slightly more enlightened than the one before.

Remember

2010-06-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

From as far back as I can remember one of my deepest feelings was that I did not belong to this world, that the reality society perceived was not reality at all. Even my very senses seemed to be in flux, at times more like a surreal painting than a photograph. Light, color and dimension rippled like the waters of a pond. Smells and tastes held worlds of their own, opening like new dimensions before me.

Persistent was an overwhelming longing to return to someplace other than the everyday world we move about in. While most people fall asleep and have unreal and confusing dreams or experience altered realities under an intense fever, the surreal realm of the dreamscape was where I felt most at peace. I spent my childhood in meditation, pushing aside the layers of delusion that keep our minds eye chained to the day to day world, and escaping back to the deeper realm I called home.

Space and time come unraveled, colors come into being that had never existed, ideas fall from the sky like drops of rain, and the laws of this reality hold no sway. In this world you are not trapped within the confines of your body, it becomes inconsequential. You recognize that you are intrinsically connected to everyone and everything that ever has been and ever will be.

Remember that you are not really here.

Remember where you must be.
Your eyes are about to tell you something that your mouth already knows.
Your ears are about to tell you something your feet already know.
Remember that you've never really been here.
Remember that you have never really been here.
Your nose picks up a fragrance and lets it go.
Your mouth picks up a taste,
and lets it swallow itself up into the very oceans of your body.
Remember you have not really ever, ever been here.
~ pulled from my mind by Alex Caldiero

Perfection

2010-06-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;

I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many, but I love none better than you.

I have been dilatory and dumb;
I should have made my way straight to you long ago;
I should have talked of nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you;
None have understood you, but I understand you;
None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself;
None have found you perfect—I only find no imperfection in you;
Some seek to subordinate you—I only am she who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am she who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are—you have slumbered upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time.

Underneath you, and within you, I see you.
I pursue you where none else has pursued you;
Silence, the flippant expression, the accustomed routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me.

I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you;
I sing the songs of the glory of none, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.

The Space Between...

2010-06-21T16:24:00.000-07:00

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image and elaborating and shaping the image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life." - Carl Jung

From the Dada activities of World War I, Surrealism was formed. The cultural hub of the movement was Paris in the 1920s, but it's influence quickly spread around the globe. Poet and critic André Breton has long been considered the major spokesman for the Surrealism movement. In his 1924 work "The Surrealist Manifesto" Breton proclaimed that Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely, that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality."

Joan Miro , a Spanish artist is recognized as one of the most important of the Surrealists. He created fantasy worlds that lacked realism and challenged reason, as in" Hirondelle Amour", 1933-34, oil on canvas. Notice the elements of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur.

Another artist who painted in the surrealist style was the Belgian painter Rene' Magritte. Her paintings force the viewer to reconsider what is real and what is not, for example the "Les Promendades d' Euclide ", 1955, oil on canvas. The work seems to show a room with a painting mounted on an easel. A window just behind the easel displays a view of a city. Yet a longer look raises a question Is the object on the easel really a painting or the scene behind it? Why is the shape of the tower identical to that of the street? Magritte offers no answers to these questions but instead, leaves us to ponder a picture that makes as much sense as a dream. Surrealism created new styles and techniques that inspired artists to go beyond their dreams with new ideas, new creations and a new world.

Surrealist writers and artists wanted to drive out reason, they were looking for states in which what is deep down in our minds may come to surface. I love the strange confusion between dream and reality, I call this place home, it is freedom in its truest form. I believe in the reality of our dreams and yes Dali... you read my mind.

Glósóli: Glowing Sun

2010-06-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

The rhythmatic, underwater beat of the drum makes me feel as if I am dreaming, searching and progressing toward an enlightened new day.

When the low notes empathize,
And the high notes inspire me,
Where the enigma enchants me,
The beats put forth motion,
Which my heart commands,
There lies a boundless existence,
That can exist without dimensions or words,
Within my mind.

Key To My Heart

2010-06-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

When I was a little girl my grandmother had, what seemed to me, a thousand antique treasures. Their unique shapes and mysterious origins held my young imagination captivate for hours on end. By far my favorite of Grandma's wondrous trinkets was a small brass key that she had laid reverently upon the scarlet velvet interior of her Grandmother's Dutch jewelry box, painted white with blue windmills across its surface. Whenever I would ask her what this little key was made to unlock, and why it held such a reverent place, my grandmother would bend close to my ear and, in a hushed whisper, she would tell me
"That is the key to the world of the fairies."

The winter I turned nine my parents let me fly out to see my grandma. On the morning of my birthday I woke up to find only one small present laid out on her round wooden table, a little white box tied up with a pink bow. My excitement grew because grandma had a saying that the best things in life came in small packages. My delight turned to surprise as I opened the box and found the magic key that I had been admiring for so many years.

In vain I searched everywhere I could think of for the door that would lead me to the fairy land. I carried the key with me wherever I went and tried it against the locks of every door, cupboard and box I came across, but I never found it's home. As I grew older I came to believe that the world of fairies must be locked away inside of our hearts, and that my Grandmother's key was crafted to magically unlock mine.

Ever since then I have kept the key to my heart tucked safely away where I would never lose it. On days that life feels especially wondrous I take it out to admire it the same as I did when I was little. A reminder to myself of the magic that holds our universe together.

Rowing the Boat of Fate

2010-06-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

Nobody knows who I really am

I never felt this empty before
And if I ever need someone to come along,
Who's gonna comfort me, and keep me strong?

We are all rowing the boat of fate
The waves keep on coming and we can't escape
But if we ever get lost on our way
The waves would guide you through another day.

Each breath escaping my body becomes transparent and goes far away
And even when I think everything’s dark, I’m only blindfolded.

I give a prayer as I wait for the new day
Shining vividly up to the edge of that sea.

Nobody knows who I really am
Maybe they just don't give a damn
But if I ever need someone to come along
I know you would follow me, and keep me strong.

Offering a prayer, I wait for a new day to come
Until the reflection of the sunrise sparkling on the sea disappears completely.

And every time I see your face
The ocean heaves up to my heart
You make me wanna strain at the oars, and soon
I can see the shore.

Oh, I can see the shore
When will I see the shore?

I want you to know who I really am
I never thought I'd feel this way towards you
And if you ever need someone to come along,
I will follow you, and keep you strong.

And still the journey continues on quiet days as well
The moon in its new cycle shines on the boats again.

I give a prayer as I wait for the new day
Shining vividly up to the edge of that sea.

And every time I see your face
The ocean heaves up to my heart
You make me wanna strain at the oars, and soon
I can see the shore.

We are rowing the boat of fate, but the waves keep attacking us
But isn't that still a wonderful journey?

Hold My Heart

2010-06-06T12:55:00.000-07:00

I love it when you dream with me

and when you hold me tight
I love the way you look at me
you make my soul take flight.

I love the way you talk to me
and the way you make me laugh
I love the way you see the world
even cynical at that.

I love the way you give me strength
and when I feel you near
I love the way you read my mind
and take away my fear.

I love the way you look at me
and the happiness you bring
I love the way we fantasize
with you everyday is spring.

I love the way that we make love
and hurt when we're apart
but mostly I love the way I feel
and the way you hold my heart.

The Best Kind of Love

2010-06-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that's what you've given me. That's what I hope to give to you forever.

Evil Empire Part 2: "Magic" Seeds

2010-06-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbors prepared their father's body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.

As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India's economic boom, they now face working as slave labor for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low. Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide. Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years' earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out.

There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on - they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless - as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting. Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.As neighbors gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. 'He was a loving and caring man,' she said, weeping quietly. 'But he couldn't take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.'

Shankara's crop had failed - twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India's ancient story. But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead. Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiraling debts - and no income. So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops. The crisis, branded the 'GM Genocide' by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a 'global moral question' - and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.

For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month. Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonizing deaths. Most swallow insecticide - a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.

It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed. Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and 'agrarian distress' that is the real reason for the horrific toll. But that is not the full story. In one small village 18 farmers have committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands - only to kill themselves as well.

Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed - two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much. She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. 'He cries when he thinks of his mother,' said the dead woman's aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.Village after village, families tell how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds. The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds. But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were 'magic seeds' - with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.

Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks. The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.

In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution. But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers' lives have slid back into the dark ages.

Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years - up to 17 million acres - many farmers have found there is a terrible price to be paid. Far from being 'magic seeds', GM pest-proof 'breeds' of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite. Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off. Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.

When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year. But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That's because GM seeds contain so- called 'terminator technology', meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own. As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.

Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated , leaving a wife and two children. As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbors squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a genetically modified plant created by Monsanto.

'We are ruined now,' said the dead man's 38-year-old wife. 'We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.' Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. 'He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,' she said, as her family and neighbors crowded into her home to pay their respects. 'He was dead by the time they got to hospital.' Asked if the dead man was a 'drunkard' or suffered from other 'social problems', as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. 'No! No!' one of the dead man's brothers exclaimed. 'Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes. 'He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.'

Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a 'factor in this tragedy'. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as 'untimely rain' or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life. Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds - no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.With rumors of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. 'We just want to escape from our problems,' one said. 'We just want help to stop any more of us dying.' India's farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant costs of GM seeds.

This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. 'I told him that we can survive,' his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell. 'I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.' But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way of paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children's schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country.
Cruelly, it's the young who are suffering most from the 'GM Genocide' - the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these 'magic seeds'. In the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.

Original author: Andrew Malone

Dream

2010-06-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

Dream: noun

Pronunciation: \ˈdrēm\

1 : a series of thoughts, images, or emotions occurring during sleep.
2 a : an experience of waking life having the characteristics of a dream: a visionary creation of the imagination b : a state of mind marked by abstraction or release from reality.
3 : something notable for its beauty, excellence, or enjoyable quality.
4 a : a strongly desired goal or purpose b : something that fully satisfies a wish.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe

Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.
Marsha Norman

Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
Henry David Thoreau

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

Robert Kennedy

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Jung

The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
William Shakespeare

Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.
Kahlil Gibran

Hope is a waking dream.
Aristotle

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
John Lennon

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Anais Nin

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?
Plato

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe

I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.
Bob Dylan

I Would...

2010-06-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea,

Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that
recedes.

I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me,
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul as it
leads.

I would carry you with me through all of time and space,
Holding you tightly against me, breathing you, tasting you,
becoming you.

Leaves

2010-06-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

~Walt Whitman

The Prince of Pop

2010-05-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work," because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

I try to think of what time is and all I can think is.... Time is, time was.

I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'

I like boring things.

I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumors to my dogs.

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting.

Love and sex can go together and sex and unlove can go together and love and unsex can go together. But personal love and personal sex is bad.

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

The symptom of love is when some of the chemicals inside you go bad. So there must be something in love because your chemicals do tell you something.

During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

I used to think that everything was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell?

Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I know said, "I knew he loved me when he didn't come in my mouth."

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

I'm the type who'd be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn't going to. I'm the type who'd like to sit home and watch every party that I'm invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

Some people, even intelligent people, say that violence can be beautiful. I can't understand that, because beautiful is some moments, and for me those moments are never violent.

Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look, how you feel about it.

America is really The Beautiful. But it would be more beautiful if everybody had enough money to live.

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly.

Death, I don't believe in it, because you're not around to know that it's happened. I can't say anything about it because I'm not prepared for it.

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it's much more exciting.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

In the 60's everybody got interested in everybody else.

Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.

People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don't look.

Evil Empire

2010-05-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

When we consider the morally bankrupt, devilish, over-sized, greedy and disproportionately powerful corporations we generally come up with corporations like Microsoft, Bechtel, AIG, Halliburton, Goldman-Sachs and Exxon-Mobil. Yet somehow, Monsanto, arguably the most devilish, over-sized, greedy and disproportionately powerful corporation in the world has somehow been able to disappear in a cloud of lies.

Monsanto has spent billions of dollars trying to depict itself as a visionary corporation, a world-historical force that is working to bring science and an environmentally responsible outlook to the solution of humanity's most pressing problems. Whether you are concerned about population growth, the future of agriculture, the quality of our food, or the health needs of the population, we are assured that Monsanto will find the answers.

But just who is Monsanto? Where did they come from? How did they get to be the world's second largest manufacturer of agricultural chemicals, one of the largest producers of seeds, and soon the largest seller of prescription drugs in the United States? Is Monsanto the "clean and green" company its advertisements promote, or is this new image merely a product of clever public relations? A quick look at their history reveals clues as to why Monsanto is known throughout the world as the most evil and unethical corporation on the planet today.

Founded by Missouri pharmacist John Francis Queeny in 1901, Monsanto is one of the world's largest chemical manufacturers and an agricultural giant that is indeed taking control of the world's population, one seed at a time. Just about every non-organic food product available to consumers has some sort of connection with Monsanto. Corn, soy and cotton can be found in just about every American food product and upwards of 90% of all corn, soybeans and cotton are grown from genetically engineered seeds, also known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). These genetically enhanced products appear in around 70% of all American processed food products and Monsanto controls 90% of all genetically engineered seeds. In other words, Monsanto controls and owns patents on most of the American food supply.

Since the 1980s, Monsanto has become the world leader in genetic modification of seeds and has won 674 biotechnology patents, more than any other company. But Monsanto is not only patenting their own GMO seeds, they have also succeeded in slapping patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life forms for the first time in history, without a vote of the people or Congress.

Farmers who buy Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds are required to sign an agreement promising not to save the seeds or sell them to other farmers. Farmers must buy new seeds every year, and they must buy them from Monsanto. Monsanto has actually hired an army of private investigators and agents to secretly videotape and photograph farmers that may attempt to reuse their seeds. These “seed police” as the farmers call them have infiltrated community meetings and attempted to pressure farmers into signing papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Quite fittingly, farmers have described Monsanto’s tactics as similar to the “Gestapo” and “Mafia.”

Monsanto tries to pass itself off as an innovative agricultural company, when in reality they produced two of the most toxic substances ever known polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxin (Agent Orange). Monsanto may also be responsible for more than 50 Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites ( uncontrolled hazardous waste sites), and they’re the masterminds behind some of the most dangerous products on the market today:

* Genetically modified crops (Monsanto provides the seeds for 90 percent of the world's GM crops)
* Fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides
* Aspartame
* Recombinant bovine somatotropin, or rBST, a genetically engineered growth hormone given to dairy cows to make them produce more milk

Monsanto has also considered using what’s known as terminator technology on a wide-scale basis. These are seeds that have been genetically modified to “self-destruct.” In other words, the seeds (and the forthcoming crops) are sterile, which means farmers must buy them again each year.Yet, most farmers cannot afford to buy new seeds every year, so collecting and replanting seeds is a crucial part of the agricultural cycle. This is the way food has been grown successfully for thousands of years.
Further, the traits from genetically engineered crops can get passed on to other crops. Once the terminator seeds are released into a region, the trait of seed sterility could be passed to other non-genetically-engineered crops, making most or all of the seeds in the region sterile. If allowed to continue, every farmer in the world could come to rely on Monsanto for their seed supply and this is not a company that you want in control of your food supply.

When you consider that one-in-four food labels is inaccurate, that the F.D.A.'s testing is weak at best, then how can we trust one corporation to have so much control over our produce? The answer is, we can't. Monsanto's Mon 863, Mon 810, and Roundup herbicide-absorbing NK 603 in corn caused kidney and liver damage in laboratory rats. Scientists also discovered damage to the heart, spleen, adrenal glands and even the blood of rats that consumed the mutant corn.

This hasn't slowed down Monsanto's profits thought, in 2008, Monsanto cleared over $2 billion in net profits on $11 billion in revenues. Its herbicide, glyphosate, alone is estimated to bring in a revenue of $1 billion in gross profit by 2012, enabling Monsanto to further drive herbicides into seeds and to price those seeds at a premium price, further driving price up on the farm and in the grocery stores which will be deadly for farmers who in 2009 saw their income decline 34%.

Because Monsanto claims that its GMOs create higher yields and therefore comparatively higher revenues per acre for struggling American farmers, they're certainly a tempting option. On the surface, that is. Monsanto controls its seeds with an iron fist, so even if you happen to own a farm next to another farm upon which Monsanto seeds are used, and if those seeds migrate onto your land, Monsanto can sue you for royalties.

Additionally, if you use seeds from crops grown from Monsanto seeds, a process known as "seed cleaning," you also have to pay royalties to Monsanto or they will sue you. Monsanto has recovered $15 million in royalties by suing farmers, with individual settlements ranging from five figures to millions of dollars each. But in keeping with the Orwellian nature of modern marketing, one of the first phrases you see on the front page of the Monsanto website is "we help farmers." Funny. In a cruelly ironical way, that is.

Stronger Monsanto herbicides, compatible with herbicide resistant seeds, are giving rise to mutant super weeds that have adapted and are rapidly spreading through the air to farms that don't use Monsanto GMOs, destroying obviously vulnerable crops. Say nothing of the inevitable mutant bugs that will adapt to the pesticides that are implanted into the Monsanto Mon 810 genetic code. And if further studies indicate similar organ damage in humans, the externalized costs to health care systems will begin to seriously out-weigh the benefits of this so called cheaper food.
On January 15, the Obama Justice Department launched an anti-trust investigation against the corporate behemoth over its next generation of genetically modified "Roundup Ready" soybean seeds. The very next day, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, which challenges the safety of genetically modified agricultural products, the centerpiece of the Monsanto empire. If the investigation fails, farmers will have to switch over to the next generation of Roundup Ready seeds in 2014. And the cycle of corporate abuse and monopolization will continue.

Numberless Forms

2010-05-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
in life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
that you take as your gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
in life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
its ancient tale of being apart or together,
as I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
you become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
at the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell--
old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
the love of all man's days both past and forever:
universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
the memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours--
and the songs of every poet past and forever.

~Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Tantric Buddhism

2010-05-26T17:40:00.000-07:00

There are an infinite number of paths available to us which can ultimately lead us to enlightenment. Of these innumerable paths, tantra is often considered the highest form of self actualization because of its ability to interconnect and unite all forms of reality, to mingle the physical world with the spiritual. No longer separated they become an integral part of one another.

Tantra is a diverse and rich spiritual tradition that deals with deep meditations, rituals and symbols. Tantric Buddhism is known as Vajrayana and is represented by a vajra and the ghanta, a bell. The vajra represents the masculine: skillful means and compassion. The bell represents the feminine: wisdom, emptiness, and nirvana. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud believed that symbols such as these could be used to access our sub-conscious, the parts of our mind that are kept hidden from us: symbols as a means to transform the mind.

Tantric symbols use sexual polarity to symbolize the twin concepts of insight and compassion. All goddesses are symbols of insight while the gods represent compassion. The union of compassion and insight symbolizes a non-polarized state of being or the mind of enlightenment, which is represented visually by showing two deities engaged in sexual union.

Tantric Buddhism views the body and sense experience as sources of knowledge and power. Tantrics believe the body to be the abode of bliss and affirm that desire, sexuality, and pleasure should be embraced on the path to enlightenment. Moods of exuberant delight, graceful sensuousness, and reciprocity characterize the sculpted and painted couples. They exult in an open and unashamed affirmation of sensuality in a religious context.
The process of enlightenment with Tantra is realized when the senses, the emotions, and the intellect are cultivated and brought to their highest levels, so that our deepest memories and responses are awakened and converted once more into the pure energy from which they originated. Tantra realizes the continuous connection between all human states and conditions, this realization is brought about by using more than eight million tantric mudras and their combination's in meditation as well as advanced sexual postures. Our deepest feelings and pleasures become the raw material for our transcendence into enlightenment.

Tantra asserts that, instead of suppressing the power of visions and passion they should be cultivated and made use of. Because sensation and emotion are the most powerful human forces they should not be suppressed, but harnessed toward the ultimate goal. Properly channeled they can provide an unparalleled source of energy to the individual, as well as society, by transforming them into enhanced expressions of love and passion.

Tantric Buddhism teaches that all these natural forces can be tied back in to the greatest power in the universe, love. Love is the pure expression of compassion, and this universal compassion is the ultimate social virtue... some would even call it god.

My I Love You

2010-05-26T17:06:00.001-07:00

I am your sunny day

you are my rain
I am your heart
you are my brain

I am your coffee
you are my tea
I am your desert
you are my sea

I am your audience
you are my clown
I am your jumping up
you are my falling down

I am your ice cream
you are my licorice
I am your dandelion
you are my first wish

I am your sky
you are my deep
I am your open arms
you are my running leap

I am your way home
you are my new path
I am your smile
you are my laugh

I am your finish line
you are my race
I am your praying hands
you are my saving grace

I am your favorite book
you are my new lines
I am your nightlight
you are my starshine

I am your lullaby
you are dream
I am your kiss goodnight
you are my everything

I am your hello
you are my adieu
I am your best friend
you are my I love you

My Inspiration

2010-05-24T13:05:00.000-07:00

My great-aunt May has always been one of my favorite poets. She met with presidents, rubbed elbows with celebrities and was friends with Robert Frost. She was the free spirited black sheep of the family that everyone loved but no one understood. May lived for writing, she felt it was the only way that she could truly express herself. Her poems are filled with relish for nature and her knowing symphony with wild creatures. May rejected religion in place of a knowledgeable awareness of the world that she perceived through science and logic. Her descriptive power and her ability to make us see objects sharply and in new ways made her a poet unlike all the rest.

May was obsessed with cognitive abilities, physics, and frequently wrote of atoms, swarming particles and the cosmos. She believed that nothing was independent and nothing could possibly know itself. She said that the universe and reality could only be known through an interplay or dialogue between the perceiver and the world.

About the poetic experience May wrote, " I see it based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into a larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming". This sentence and the following poem represent not only the drama and passion that is May Swenson's poetry, but mine as well.

Not able to be honest in person

I wish to be honest in poetry.
Speaking to you, eye to eye, I lie
because I cannot bear
to be conspicuous with the truth.
Saying it, all of it, would be
taking off my cloths.
I would forfeit my most precious properties:
distance, secrecy, privacy.
I would be exposed. And I would be
possessed. It would be an entire
surrender to you, eye to eye.
You would examine me too closely.
You would handle me.
All your eyes would swarm me.
Whether you are one or two or many
it is the same. Really, I feel as if
one pair of eyes were a whole hive.
So I lie, eye to eye
by leaving the core of things unvoiced
or else by offering a dummy
in place of myself.

One must be honest somewhere. I wish
to be honest in poetry.
With the written word.
Where I can say and cross out
and say over and say around
and say on top of and say in between
and say in symbol, in riddle,
in double meaning, under masks
of any feature, in the skins
of every creature.
And in my own skin, naked.
I am glad, indeed I dearly crave
to become naked in poetry, to force the truth
through the poem
which, when it is made, if real,
not a dummy, tells me
and then you
my whole self,
the truth.

A poem by May Swenson

~Communions~

2010-05-23T17:55:00.000-07:00

I asked the moon,

to tell me the secret,
behind her luminous light.

She told me she shone,
for her verboten lover,
the sun of noonday bright.

I asked the stars,
to share the joy,
of lighting the moonlit sky.

They recounted to me,
the story of time,
and endless years gone by.

I asked the sky,
to show me his dreams,
of the world that lay below.

He spoke of the movements,
of texture and color,
of existences continuous flow.

I asked the night,
to show me the mystery,
behind his blackened veil.

He uttered the secrets,
that humanity keeps,
the entire inscrutable tale.

I asked the wind,
what drives the passion,
that enlivens her to breathe.

She whispered of unions,
infinite threads of existence,
the lives that interweave.

I ask myself,
who I am,
and what I will become.

I am the joyous enigma,
the paradoxical lover,
the passionate dreamer,
of songs yet unsung...

The Sacred Prostitute

2010-05-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, sex appeal and fertility. She was born from the foam of the sea. When Cronos emasculated his father, Uranus, the blood drops that fell into the sea generated the goddess. The Zephyr gently blew and pushed her to the shore of the island of Cyprus, where she was received and dressed by the Graces, then taken to Mount Olympus. She is the embodiment of both her father's cynicism and his phallic sexual imperative. Aphrodite represents the uniting of feminine and masculine energies through sexual union.

Aphrodite’s origins pre-date the ancient Greeks. She is said to be older than Time. An even more ancient deity exhibiting more aspects than love and beauty, she can also be recognized as Astarte or Ishtar. Her origins were Babylonian and Sumerian. Her domain embraced all the natural world, animal and human. She is a multi-faceted goddess, her powers were associated with fertility and growth, harvesting of crops, birth, life, love, death and fate. She was also worshiped as the sacred ‘prostitute’.

The breath of the west wind bore her

Over the sounding sea,
Up from the delicate foam,
To wave ringed Cyprus, her isle.
And the Hours golden-wreathed
Welcomed her joyously.
They clad her in raiment immortal,
and brought her to the gods.
Wonder seized them all as the saw
Violet-crowned Cytherea."

She is the pure erotic impulse, libido, imagination, fertility and fruitfulness. She can manifest as artistic and aesthetic inspiration and the desire to give birth to something remarkable. She is associated with nakedness, courtship and lovemaking. By personifying a transcendent image of the seduction of mortals by a goddess, Aphrodite mediates feelings of immortality to the human from the divine.This is the oceanic experience of timelessness in orgasm.

She joins nature and culture by using love as an art form. Her well practiced skills are continually complemented by her attitudes, sentiments, and moral values. She promotes a lifestyle which declares boldly that we should take our fill of love, where and with whomever we desire. On a very practical level, Aphrodite is embodied in aphrodisiacs and their effects. Aphrodite is an enchanting sexual fantasy. Her allurement is nearly universal.

Hail Aphrodite

Maiden born of the Sea
She Who Shines Brightly
Ever Luminous Morning Star
Radiant Goddess of Feminine Beauty
Mistress of the Maiden's Sensual Allure
Eternal Venus of Beauty & Grace
Dancer in the Light, of every Woman's Eye
The Maiden Who lives within Mother & Crone
Feminine Sensuality Eternally Re-born in Woman

There are pleasures and dangers in her enchanting attentions. Aphrodite inspires a compelling, subjective state. Euripides called love the "breathes of Aphrodite." She seeks intimacy and touching of the most private aspects of our lives. Aphrodite was said to be as beautiful as sunlight on the sea and wherever she stepped, flowers sprang up and the air smelled as sweet as spring. she was a creature who craved loved and passion and thus she spent all of her extra time flirting and making love. She is attracted to creative men and engages with them as their
inspirer.

She possesses the type of allure and beauty which produced classic romances, the Queen of Sheba, Delilah, Cleopatra, and Helen of Troy embodied many of Aphrodite's qualities. She brings life's mystery with her, and mortals can never possess her fully. She appeals to men through reflecting on their personal anima, using seduction, flattery and inspiration. She awakens a man's perception of latent talents. She embodies the dual capacity to delight and lead astray. She can awaken not only desire, but also resignation and despair. She appeals to him consciously and subconsciously. She can be a physical, intellectual, or spiritual companion simultaneously.

With little or no regard for the future, her perception of time is discontinuous as is those under her influence, her lovers feel "suspended in time." Therefore, each moment must be experienced anew, irrespective of past commitments or consequences. Duration is not valued as highly as the experience. Importance is attached to the intensity of sensations and gratification. The sense of search and urgency for freedom compel Aphrodite to new affairs. She's a free spirit, at all times spontaneously realizing her whims.

Aphrodite not only engenders, but enlarges life. She possessed an empathetic and sympathetic relation or connection with others. She experiences the world through the same portal as the person she communes with, allowing her to understand the way that they make sense of reality. She is the Erotica and the fantasy lover of any whose imagination she stimulates.

Written on the Body

2010-05-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.
~Jeanette Winterson

Fencing the Commons

2010-05-19T23:01:00.000-07:00

Before industrialization brought about capitalism and capitalism brought about privatization, society believed that the land was not something to be owned but something to be cherished and cared for. The earth was held in common and we viewed private ownership of land as a sin against God because this earth was his creation and we were mere stewards of it. Towns set aside small plots of land for the building of houses but the rest of the land, the tangible and intangible aspects of the environment, the "commons", were to be taken care of and enjoyed by the community as a whole.The commons created a collectivist community that not only grew food together and cared for livestock together but also brought the people together to create strong community bonds based on interdependence and cooperation. Towns were self-sustainable and since the townspeople depended on each other and the land to survive, their existence depended upon their connection to one another and their understanding of the health and needs of the earth that sustained them. Sharing land in common built strong families and strong communities.

In the early 19th century American farming communities were confronted with a new alternative, factories. In the spirit of the Industrial Revolution Henry Ford dreamt of an unbroken line of human laborers acting as cogs in a machine to manufacture goods in the most efficient and profitable manner possible. Ford broke the craft of building products into constituent parts and highly skilled mechanics who used to take pride in their creations found themselves turned into mere assemblers, reduced to performing a limited set of tasks. Instead of craftsman people were delegated the task of tightening a bolt or fastening a single rivet while being timed with stopwatches, thousands of times everyday.
By 1910, these once-independent craftsmen refused to accept what they experienced as the mind-numbing and degrading division of their labor and began to walk off the job. They registered their revulsion at this systematic destruction of their knowledge and skill and walked off the job in droves, calling Henry Ford a slave driver. It was apparent that the Ford Motor Co. had reached the point of owning a great factory without having enough workers to keep it running. For the year 1913 alone, the employee turnover rate reached 380 percent. So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963 of them.

What was Henry Ford to do? All these new factories and no one willing to sell their freedom and alienate themselves from their families and land. What do you do when people refuse to sell the most precious and intimate parts of themselves, their very identity, refuse to be purchased like an object and used like a machine? The answer was simple, privatize the commons and take away their livelihood. Industrialization was the means and capitalism the ends. Sell off the public lands and create property taxes, making it impossible for communities to self-sustain.
An industrial empire blossomed, one that was bent on the conquest of the earth's goods. Ford's terrific effort to manufacture wealth prevailed and brought upon society a deadly conflict, one that deprived it of life itself. The conflict is a war between technology and the ordinary human functions of living. Human inventions turned humans into inanimate objects creating a moral and spiritual suicide. Without the commons people had no choice, they were forced to sell their dignity and their humanity in order to care for their families. Families and communities were torn asunder. Fathers went off to the factorizes working 12 hour days, no longer able to parent their own children. Children left the home in search for work elsewhere. Traditional values such as cooperation gave way to competition as people were forced to compete for jobs that they never wanted.

Our culture and politics are intrinsically tied to our economic system and an economic system that turns people into objects that can be replaced, separates and pits people against one another, treats the earth and her people as nothing more than a means to make a profit. Capitalism works like a dog chasing its own tail, one can never have enough money or objects in their lives - in other words insatiable desire is programmed directly into Capitalism. Possibly the biggest problem created by Capitalism, however, is that in order for money to be made a product must be sold to someone willing to buy it. Mass production compounds this problem by producing vast quantities of a given product, requiring vast numbers of buyers. In order to solve these problems the upper crust of America, Henry Ford and his compatriots, decided that they needed to make the populace to be dissatisfied with their lives and to convince them that satisfaction could only be found by purchasing the very same products they were working so hard to create. In a capitalistic society contentment with one's life and circumstance, formerly a virtue, become a dirty word. Capitalism reveres the pursuit of happiness while vilifying anyone who dares to be happy with their life the way it is. The lives and the communities of the agrarians were forever changed, their relationships with the land and with one another lost to the sands of time, and all because the suck of the others is so unreservedly gluttonous.

~Rain Dance~

2010-05-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

We dance in the rain,

Under the light of the moon,
It falls down in rhythm,
As it sings us a tune.

We sway through the raindrops,
Touching bare feet to land,
Your breath on my neck,
As we dance hand and hand.

You whisper sweet nothings,
As gently we sway,
Your hands search my body,
You sweep me away.

We pretend that we're lovers,
Under the darkness of night,
Escaping the world,
Till we see morning light.

Time seems to stand still,
We're locked in embrace,
We fall to the ground,
As my lips find your face.

Your wet kisses on my skin,
You whisper my name,
And to think it all started
With a dance in the rain.

The Compound

2010-05-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

What started over a year ago as a joke between close friends has now turned into into something that we're all committed to see through to fruition. "The Compound" as we so lovingly refer to it as, has become a lifeline that many of us hold up as the light at the end of the tunnel as we wade through college, jobs and the mind numbing existence that is life in modern America today. In an effort to better prepare for our future life many of us have been looking in to the communal living experiments that have taken place over the past 50 years in order to learn from their successes and failures. The main objective of communal living since the 1960s has been to repersonalize a society, making person to person relations the core of existence to promote greater intimacy and fuller human development. By rejecting the established order on which capitalism rests, competitiveness and production is replaced by unity and cooperative work. In communes people pool their resources and work together instead of against one another because an emphasis is no longer placed on competing for material goods, but instead on friendship and family.When people find out our communal plans they tend to attack it with their preconceptions of what a commune would represent. More often then not images such as drugs and free love associated with the 1960s are visualized. Many people assume that we are Lenin-style Communists, cult members or free-love druggies. In actuality, communes have existed since history has been recorded. For example, the Puritans who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony may have been one of the first utopian communities in the United States. In the late 1960s more than 2,000 communes were formed in the US.
Communal life idealizes social unity and maintains that humanness exists only in intimate and collective life. The commune that we envision would be referred to as a "service" or "intentional" commune in which people pool resources and agree to live a certain way with a motivating philosophy. The primary tenant of a commune is anti-materialism, not having any more than is needed in order for there to be enough to go around the world. It is our belief that it is wrong that some people own 5 million dollar houses while others don't have enough to eat. We are each committed to vegetarian and veganism because we recognize that there would be more food to go around the world and far less environmental degradation if people ate green instead of livestock. More importantly we reject speciesism and recognize that we are all Earthlings, humans and animals alike, sharing the same planet and struggles of life side by side. We believe that neither one has the right to harm the other for their own purposes, especially when the killing of animals is not only entirely unnecessary but harmful to all.When communes first became popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was due to a rejection of capitalism and a desire to return to the basics.It was groups of people who believed in sharing and dividing everything on the basis of one's needs. People started communes in rual areas, seeking a return to the land that they had been alienated from. Through agriculture, communes became more self-sufficient, not having to rely on outside income as much. The growing of food gave a feeling of accomplishment, a connection with each other and with the land. In this way people found a sense of unity with one another and the land. Industrialization boomed after World War II causing the economy to flourish. Many of the young people who grew up during this prosperous time expressed feelings of estrangement, isolation, impersonalization. While their parents were focused on material accumulation after having grown up during the Great Depression, young people felt there was something missing in their lives, a void that needed to be filled. Advances in technology which produced both the atomic bomb and television, made people feel detached from their environment, they felt that they were not in control of it, too far removed from it, and beyond understanding it. Even when it came to food, people felt detached from it or alienated from the process which produced it.It was also because of television coverage of the Vietnam War that people for the first time were actually able to view the consequences of warfare. The My Lai Massacre, for example, vividly showed American troops slaughtering an entire village -men, women and children. There were reports of American soldiers raping women and displaying other barbaric behavior. The print media allowed young people to communicate to other young people. Several underground periodicals devoted specifically to the "get back to the land" ideal were important to the development of the rural commune movement. Along with the prosperity resulting from post World War II, there grew an emphasis on education. Young people had more leisure, education, and security than any previous generation, providing them with the opportunity to question the established order and reflect on alternative options.
Probably the single most potent contributor to the communal movement was the political disruption and what was viewed as hypocrisy of the system during the 1960s. Although the majority of the American people were against the Vietnam war, it still dragged on. Many felt it was hypocritical to claim to be a democratic nation when our President continued a policy that was not supported by the people. Because of Watergate President Nixon had to resign from office and the assassination of those with new ideals such as President John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King shocked the country and resulted in many viewing the actions as reflecting a moral deterioration of the United States. Furthermore, the violent break up of political protest resulting in the killing of four students at Kent State University, the deaths of two black students in Jackson, and the assassination of the of Black Panthers leadership, further lead to the disillusionment of young people.
It was the combination of industrialization, technological advancement, prosperity and materialism, political disillusionment, and moral decay that brought people from all around the United States together to flee to rural utopian communes in attempt to escape the Establishment and take control of their own physical, cultural and spiritual environment. In our day and age with technology advancing at a mind spinning rate, it is increasing the potential for further alienation of people from the land and from other people as well. As a result of technological advancement, our economy has moved toward corporate production so much that the small family operated business is becoming a scarcity today. For example, with every new K-mart, Walmart, Shopko, and Target the small town feeling is becoming less personalized. Another example would be the disappearing small farmer due to competition with agribusiness.
We believe that when people are removed from their means to make a living and forced to work as a commodity for a big corporation, the mechanical and impersonal conditions result in alienation, personal dissatisfaction, and a loss of dignity and sense of purpose and with the turn toward Republicanism we see harsher conditions for the working class and a widening the gap between the "have's" and "have not's" and with this widening gap even more crime and social problems will befall the U.S. We believe that communal life is about justice, sincerity, honesty, humanity, and peace. Communes teach us to rethink the status quo, question authority, and stand up for what is right. It is here that we wish to raise our children and live in peace with each other and the land which gives us life.

"You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks...

"You fasten all the triggers
For others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
While the death count gets higher

"You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud...

"I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul."

~Bob Dylan~

Suggested readings
Mary Kay Blakely, Living On The Land
Richard Fairfield, The Modern Utopian
Geaorge Fitzgerald, Communes: Their Goals, Hopes, and Problems
Rosabeth Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective
Edward Morgan, The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America
Betsy Streisand, Creating An Instant Extended Family
Rachel Meunier, The Farm: Communal Living in the Late 60's and early '70's

~Lucid Dreaming~

2010-05-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

"To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come"

~ Hamlet, William Shakespeare

I always thought that dreaming was nothing more than living on a different scale of consciousness for a time. As a child I adored lucid dreaming, it made me feel powerful, I had the ability, even if just for a short time, to know two levels of consciousness at the same time. I felt like a sorceress with magical powers.

In sleep, mental consciousness continues on, only in a more subtle way. Every so often you have that amazing feeling in a dream, the overwhelming feeling of having a real flesh and bone body. Most of us can't remember dreams , we can't recall the moments we fall asleep nor the moments we awaken. Lucid dreaming is the ability to know that you are dreaming without waking yourself up from the dream.

Tibetans believe that nurturing the ability to know the precise moment in which we fall into sleep and the awaken, as well as knowing the in-between state for what it truly is, will help us very much at the time of death. When you fall asleep to dream or fall into the "sleep" that is death, you are entering a bardo, an empty space that exists between moments of time. Whether you're dreaming or going through the stages of death, you are existing in the "in-between". As you're waking up from a good nights sleep or awaking into a new life as a reincarnated being, you have just left the bardo. Sleep is a way of preparing for death. Life as a mirror image of death.

For the last six months or so I've been asking myself the same question over and over again throughout the day, "How do I know that I'm awake right now"? I can always think of experiments to perform in order to test myself. I ask myself this question because a good friend of mine told me that if I ask myself this questing enough times and over a long enough period of time, I will someday discover the key to lucid dreaming.

I never understood as a child why it was that I was so obsessed with lucid dreaming, I think I might understand now. I want to know death and be ready when it comes. Even thought I was unaware of what I was doing, I was preparing myself.

Last night I remember asking myself the question, " How do I know that I'm awake?" and you know what? I didn't have an answer and I knew that I was dreaming.

מביא שלום

2010-05-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

On the day you were born you stopped a blizzard and the sun shone bright, welcoming you into this world.

You filled your pockets full of rocks, even though we kept telling you not to, as the tide came in and the waves came chasing after you, you lost your pants to the ocean.

Hunter ate a baby bird that you were trying to rescue; I’ve never seen you cry so hard.

You found out where meat came from and you never ate it again, you were 8 years old.

Your favorite sound was ripping paper, by the time you turned 1 we had no books left.

You knew the name of every superhero ever created, you were 3.

In kindergarten you won district for writing a story about your favorite superhero, your dad.

You wanted a dog so bad you cried, you named her Muggles.

You showed me your muscles every morning and asked me if they’d grown.

Her name was Stormy; she was your first crush.

Her name was Summer, she always tried to kiss you, you said it was disgusting.

You were devastated when they broke your Lego dinosaur and I found myself yelling at 5 year olds.

You had a job fixing doors, just like daddy.

Your first word, Baba, which is Arabic for dad.

I never put you down and was worried that you couldn’t crawl.

I took you to play in the leaves, they scared you to death.

Your holding a peace sign in almost every picture I have of you.
You got into the refrigerator, you broke all the eggs onto the floor quickly followed by a chocolate pie, syrup, and butter….the floor was carpeted.

You flushed everything down the toilet and giggled as it swirled out of sight.

You climbed up the bookshelf and tried to fly like Peter Pan.

You had RSV, I’ve never been so scared. I held you against me all night crying.

You yelled at a boy in your class for using a hole punch on leaves, it almost made you cry.

You loved your third grade teacher so much that for an entire year you went to visit her every Friday when she became too ill to teach. You played games and read to each other. She told me that you were special, that she had never met a child as kind and intelligent as you... they all say that.

You would always throw dirt all over yourself, dumping it in handfuls over the top of your head.

We laid in the grass, making pictures out of clouds.

We lay by the river reading to one another all day long in the warm sunshine.

We go on grand adventures on our bikes together, you documenting nature with a camera.

You chased the ducks wanting to pet them but ran away crying when they got too close.

You stood there, ready for your first day of school, smiling like it was the best day of your life, my heart was breaking inside.

You told me that you hated money and wished that you never had to see it again.

You stood up for all the kids who were made fun of.

At lunch you sit with the kids who eat alone, the ones you thought most needed friends.

You wanted to give all your allowance to hurricane Katrina victims.

The news broke your heart, we got rid of TV.

The earth found a true champion in you, I’ve never seen anyone love her more.

You were a crazy child who couldn’t sit still for 5 seconds.

You had a blood curdling scream that drove everyone nuts, I loved it.

You whispered in my ear, telling me that we’d always be best friends.

I couldn’t get you to stop peeing outside.

Sometimes you’re so sensitive that everything brings you to tears.

You built towers just to knock them down.

You refused to take your Superman cape off.

You never missed Elmo’s World.

You always make me smile, even on the worst of days.

You’re my best friend.

I believe you’ll save the world someday.
You make wishes on every dandelion you see.

The neighbor boy steps on snails, I’ve never seen you so mad before.

You cry when you think of people destroying the planet, you tell me that you can feel it suffering.

You can’t understand why people eat meat, you judge them harshly.

We played Pokémon everyday that summer, you had to win, if you lost, you cried.

You are an amazing writer, so eloquent and beautiful.

You are an artist in everything you do.

You decided that you wanted to be a girl because you believed boys to be mean and selfish.

The rain just stopped, you run outside and begin collecting snails in your hands and gently placing them back into the grass.

Other boys want to play war games, you can’t figure out why.

You refuse to cut your nails.

You refuse to cut your hair.

We play Monopoly, you try to quit before you lose.

You can’t help but to tell the truth.

You’d put yourself into timeout if you thought you’d done something wrong, even at 4 years old you had a very strong sense of what was right and wrong.

I play you Billy Joel, placing earphones on my tummy, you dance.

I tell my life story to you, all my hopes and fears, dreams and aspirations, even in the womb you’re my best friend.

We tape ourselves singing together, we can’t stop laughing.

You love choir you drive the teacher crazy.

All the girls at school love you and do anything to be near you, you’re completely oblivious to this.

Your best friend moves away, we’re not allowed to say his name, it makes you cry.

I listen to your heartbeat; it’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.

In the nursery, they call you peanut.

Daddy stays up all night holding you, he never wants to put you down. You don’t sleep through the night until you’re almost a year old.

You tell me it’s like everything around you is yelling at you, grabbing for your attention. You cry, you tell me you want to be like a normal kid, we cry together.

You tell me that as soon as you grow up and get big, you’ll marry me.
Your hair grows long and you tell me that you hate material things; you wish you never had to buy anything ever again.

Muggles and you fall asleep curled up together every night.

I tell you that you were right, you were having a brother. I’ve never seen you so happy.

During every sharing time at school you talk about how unethical it is to eat meat and hunt.

You lecture about recycling and pollution. You beg people to ride bikes, you’re in 5th grade.

You choose to attend a fur protest for your 11th birthday.

I’m afraid that you’re too grown-up for your own good; you are such an old soul.

Animals are drawn to you, they sense your peaceful spirit, we all do.

Sometimes you’re too passionate, it clouds your judgment but it also makes you, you.

You’re helplessly loyal.

I learn something from you every day, you’ve been one of my greatest teachers.

I’ve never seen such selflessness; you’d give the cloths off your back.

I beg you to stop giving all your toys away and then feel bad because I know that you’re a better person that me.

You adore foreign music and films.

You still ask me to tuck you in every night, it makes my heart happy.

You walk across Salt Lake protesting for the child soldiers in Uganda. You tell me that you need to support other children, you’re 9.

You always root for the underdog.

You stay up all night long, playing with your new kitten. I can hear you through the wall, laughing.

You hug trees.
You start a recycling program in our neighborhood, you’re 8.

You’re a 10 year old existentialist.

I tucked you in, you sneak out the window. I get a call from the neighbors telling me that you’re playing in the sprinkles, you’re 4.

I feel unworthy to be your mother, secretly I know that you have more to teach me than I do you.

For my Beautiful Boy

The Unsettling of America

2010-05-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

"There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth." – Wendell Berry

Everything is connected. Individual humans are like waves upon the ocean of humanity, objects that are distinct in and of themselves and yet existing only temporarily, unable to be considered objective of the ocean itself. The action of one wave returning to its home in the body of the ocean works to power the rise of an altogether new wave to take its place, each wave lifting itself up toward the heavens only to return completely to the torrential waters from which it never truly separated. Out across the waters this process is repeated millions of times every minute. Just as the endless power of the ocean works ceaselessly, each wave powerful in its own right breaking free without ever truly escaping, so too can we see our existence arising from the whole of humanity for a time, only to crash back down into the whole once again.

We cannot exist in the abstract, independent of the whole of the human race; those of us that think that we can are living in a fantasy land that is far removed from reality. No wave truly ceases to exist, to wink out of reality, rather each comes crashing down, returning to the waters from which it arose. We also are here one moment and gone the next without ever disappearing.

As one wave is absorbed another arises to take its place, simultaneously composed of an entirely different set of water molecules, yet arising from the same waters as a direct result of the return of the wave before it. This represents the interconnectedness of all existence.

There was a time when we knew we were connected. It was a time before Ronald Regan told us to look out for number one; it was before World War II, before it was chosen for us to become consumers instead of producers; it was before the rise of capitalistic exploitation and the belief that competition was everything; it was before we believed work to be beneath human dignity. It was a time in which people were valued because of their morals and character instead of the materialistic things they owned, humans weren’t defined by what they had or by the money they made.

During this time humanity knew that in order to survive it must care for one another and put individual human life and the health of the environment above everything else. We knew where our food came from; we knew who made our cloths. We cared about air quality and top soil depletion, we understood that the earth along with all its life giving resources belonged to our children and our grandchildren; we recognized that it was our jobs to care for it. We understood the symbiotic relationship between ourselves and the earth. We cared about our communities, we helped our neighbors and we took pride in our work. We were disciplined, we refused to be wasteful, we needed less, we gave more.

Today we have separated ourselves from the whole, choosing to believe that we truly are an island, independent of the earth from which we came. In our post industrialized capitalistic society we are radically disconnected, body and soul, mother and child, husband and wife, community and Earth. Rather than emulating the master carpenter who shapes each area of her work with loving care, making each creation her own through hard work and creativity, we have degraded ourselves to Henry Ford’s assembly line workers, extensively trained to do one menial thing and one thing only with mind numbing repetition. Our lives would fall into chaos if we were forced to provide our own energy, our own clothing or own food and water; perhaps it is the unconscious recognition of this learned helplessness that causes so much pain and suffering in our lives. We have lost the art of living, we can no longer even provide for our own basic needs.

We buy into the lie of individualism. We believe that we are a human space station, separated from the rest of humanity and from the Earth itself. Americans believe they can consume an unlimited amount of resources without any serious impact on the Earth or the people that populate it. We want the Earth to support us and be able to exploit every square inch of it too. Humanity has this idea of itself as divorced from nature, a separate being that is ‘apart’ from nature rather than ‘a part’ of it. To the modern American nature has become so far outside themselves that it is somewhere they ‘visit’ to ‘get away’ from ‘real life’. Like the proverbial cake we want to be able to tear the natural world asunder and still have pretty scenery too.

By identifying ourselves with technological toys rather than with the natural order we have forgotten where we came from, we have lost the balance and the harmony that we once had when we recognized our connection to the dirt from which we rose. We have become so lost in our technological advancements that even our dreams of the future are of a utopian space age of ultimate convenience and luxury, freedom from care and responsibility and most of all work. All this is to be further accomplished the more we divorce ourselves from the Earth and from one another, relying instead upon futuristic technologies. Rather than social or personal progress, to us moving forward is represented by our desire for the next ‘new thing’, the shiny object that everyone will envy. Technology is our new savior.

This idealistic separation from responsibility carries with it the separation from hard work; we look down upon the farmer and idealize the entertainer. In an effort to meet the growing demands created by our over consumption and to compete against agri-business giants farmers have been forced to put away their plows and take up the machine, retire their horses and purchase a tractor. Where the equine laborer worked to cultivate nature, giving back as much as he takes the machine takes and takes while giving nothing back but pollution and waste. The same can be said for humanity, our very nature has been suppressed in order to gain a competitive edge by becoming machinery ourselves. We have reduced ourselves to the least capable cogs in the technological machine of modern life. The natural order has been laid to rest in favor of convenience and efficiency.

Yet even this trade off is an illusion, we lose in every conceivable way. Examples of this run the gamut of every aspect of our lives: We have taken up poisoning our food in order to kill the germs we fear, failing to recognize the cancer these poisons create. We gave up the horse, whose natural grazing and excreting processes worked wonders for our top soil, in favor of the farm equipment so heavy that it causes severe soil compaction. To make up for this problem we abuse chemical fertilizers with catastrophic consequences to the Earth and ourselves. More often than not technology is used to put out fires that technology started. While nature creates life and gives back what it takes technology creates pollution and gives back nothing of value.

As in so many other ways we fail every moment to recognize that everything in our lives come at a cost, efficiency and affluence on the one hand with our relationships, marriages and even our lives on the other. Our “labor saving” devices have put millions of people out of work, and then we cut the social welfare programs, because why would we want to support such lazy people? In order for us to live the way we do, we’ve had to make sacrifices. Americans live, very literally, on the backs of others. We sacrifice human life in order to have diamonds, i-pods, cars and fashionable clothing. We ignore the fact that 10 year old children are making a dollar a day sewing our Gap cloths. We admire the diamonds on our hands while ignoring the fact that human slaves mined them, scarifying their lives for our pride. We grumble about “illegal aliens” crossing our borders and taking our jobs, never asking ourselves why this might be happening.

Maybe it’s because we destroyed their economy in order to make a profit. Maybe it’s because we subsidized corn and bankrupted an entire country. Maybe it’s because after we destroyed their ability to farm we bought up their land and built factories where they’re now paid less than two dollars a day and can no longer support their families. Their children can no longer play outside because the air is un-breathable and there’s no longer clean drinking water because we pay the bankrupt country of Mexico to ignore environmental damages. We want our environment to be clean but Mexico is far away; it’s okay to pollute their air and water. We drive cars that are killing us, eat food that is bad for us and send our children to die for freedom that we have long since given away and democracy that we’re too lazy to participate in.

This disconnect has become so great that we are forced to live a dualistic lifestyle. What we say and what we do must necessarily diverge because to do otherwise would require us to acknowledge reality and recognize the fact that what we believe to be everyday innocuous actions actively create human suffering, poison the Earth and ultimately work against our very survival. Who among us could support the electronics industry while recognizing that the costs of their toys are measured not in dollars but in the lives of children living in the Congo? How many of us would still buy genetically engineered foods if we knew how many thousands of farming families have lost everything because consumers want fresh vegetables in the winter? Who would continue to drive cars if they knew the damage they were doing to their children’s future? Every day we choose to close our eyes and walk through life half asleep in order to assuage our conscience in order for us to maintain our comfortable, convenient lifestyles.

In the words of Wendell Berry, “The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.” We cannot choose to shut our eyes and disconnect from reality in one or two areas of our life alone, as long as we remain ignorant to the reality that surround us we will continue to poison the planet on which the survival of our species depends and to see ourselves as separated from humanity as a whole, destroying our marriages, our families, our relationships, our health, and ultimately humanity itself.

~ Water Painting~

2010-05-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

I get so lonely,
lost in the crowd,
I want to scream,
but I make no sound.

I escape out to drift
to a place that no one knows,
where the endless river flows
I call it home.

I feel a rush
like a rolling bolt of thunder,
spinning my head around
and taking my body under.

I fall through the water,
shimmmering like daylight
when the sun is perched
at its highest peak.

My head is weak, my heart always speaks,
before I know what it will say.
What I’ve felt and what I’ve known
are lost in cinder and smoke.

Below the current
I paint my picture.
I watch me unravel,
as I drift away.

I’d like to make myself believe
but I know that nothing is as it seems
My faith walks on broken glass
and the mirror image never lasts.

Corresponding shapes,
like puzzle pieces from the clay
I watch as it loses form,
and falls away.

Far away, I'm breathing,
as if I were transparent
seeing through time and
sight through smell.

Eyes wide open, naked as we came,
In the sun I feel as one
Tabula rasa, empty and open,
every path leads me to nowhere.

Obedience Training

2009-10-25T16:46:00.000-07:00

Miss Montessori,

Ella came home from school last week upset because she had not wanted to pledge her allegiance to the flag in class. She informed us that if she didn't recite the pledge, she would get in trouble. Dawson and I have tried very hard to teach our children to think for themselves and question everything that is taught to them and most of our children, including Ella, have many problems with pledging their allegiance to a piece of cloth that they feel they owe nothing to.

The Pledge of Allegiance was created in 1892 and did not originally contain the words, "one nation, under god". The phrase “under God” was added in the late 1940’s and made popular in the 1950’s.When Congress added the words “under God,” to the Pledge in 1954, it was actually a political move to try to gain favor with the Christian electorate, not for a religious purposes. The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy. Frances did not deem it necessary to insert God into the text because unlike many Christians today, he understood that we needed a separation of church and state. He understood that the founding fathers created this separation to protect us all from religious tyranny and the majority.Frances was later kicked out of the church for practicing socialism. He believed very strongly that "all men are created equal". He didn't just preach such utopian ideas, he wanted to see a society where we were all equal, socially and economically.

When it comes to the history of this county, I believe in giving my children the facts, not sugar coded utpoain stories and to the extent that the Pledge is about history, it is false. Many of our people were enslaved and denied any voice in our government, not to mention the fact that this country was stolen from the Native Americans and dosen't even belong to us.Given our history and the double standards that exist between races, classes, ages, sexual orientation, religions and gender, "with liberty and justice for all" is just not a true statement. As “history,” the Pledge is facile and absurd. I believe that children should be taught real history rather than be forced to stand up and repeat the same phrase over and over.

As I mentioned before, I want nothing more than for my children to be free thinkers and I don't think that pledging blind loyalty for one's country is something that I want my children to be participating in. It used to be mandatory to salute the flag at the end of the pledge, Hitler liked the official pledge salute so much that he later adopted it for his own use to espouse blind loyalty and nationalism to his country. Because of this we no longer salute the flag like we originally did.

Some people in our family believe in God and some don't, Ella does not and it makes her extremely uncomfortable to pledge her allegiance to one nation under God. I don't think that children should have to pledge their allegiance to something they may not believe in. If a public institution like a school requires or expects them to do so, that's the state and the society dictating an exercise.That's We the People, without whom the public institution could not exist, directing an oath that should be heartfelt. If it's not heartfelt, why even bother?

We have told Ella that the decision to pledge her allegiance to the flag is hers alone to make. She is a smart and beautiful little girl who has her own thoughts and beliefs about the world around her. We ask that you please respect her decision and support her in her free thinking.

Peace,
~Crystal Busenbark~

A Capital of Inspiration

2009-10-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

"New York is a tremendous generator of inspiration. It is a capital of inspiration... You feel at a place where reality is most intense."
~David Lehman

"If I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else?
Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself."
~John Lennon

What Actually Happened in Fatah's Elections?

2009-08-23T17:13:00.000-07:00

The US government has been meddling in the Palestinian internal affairs since at least 2003. Its effort is to transform the Palestinian national movement for liberation and independence into a more compliant or puppet government, willing to accede to Israel’s political and security demands.

The tactics employed by the U.S. include military, security, diplomatic, and political components. With the ascension of Hamas after the 2006 legislative election, U.S. strategy has been fixed on unraveling the election results. Its aim for a political comeback of the pro-American camp within the Palestinian political body has been initiated with the convening of Fatah’s national conference this last week.

During the week of August 4, 2009, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement Fatah, convened its sixth national conference in its 44-year history. Fatahhas historically been considered the largest Palestinian faction, but that perception changed when it lost the legislative elections to Hamas in January 2006. As the group wrapped up its conference after eight days, it announced the results of its elections. The international media, particularly western outlets, framed the election as “fresh” and “new” faces ascending to power in the movement. But what actually happened in the vote?

Fatah’s internal structure is unlike most political parties or resistance movements. It is not hierarchical and its members’ loyalty largely follows a system of patronage and factionalism embodied in a 23-member Central Committee. The Central Committee is technically supposed to reflect a system of collective leadership and the political program of a national liberation movement. Even its founder, the late Yasser Arafat, who led the organization from its inception in 1965 until his death in 2004, did not have an official title beyond that of a member of the committee and commander-in-chief of its military wing. But over time, in the eyes of many Palestinians, Fatah’s leadership has symbolized, a system of cronyism, corruption, collaboration with Israel, and political failures, especially since the Oslo process.

Although its internal charter calls for a national conference every four years to elect its leadership, the major questions at the eve of this conference were: Why did it take Fatah two decades to convene this one? Did the election of Fatah’s new leadership reflect the aspirations of the Palestinian people and a new and fresh approach to the political process? And finally, who are the backers of the main individuals who were recently elected to lead it?

Fatah’s Central Committee led by Arafat made the strategic decision in 1988 to negotiate a political settlement with Israel, and accept the United States government as the main broker. For two decades, especially in the aftermath of the 1993 Oslo accords, the Palestinian issue gradually receded from the international agenda, becoming an almost exclusive affair between the U.S, Israel, and the Palestinian leadership whether it was the PLO or after 1994, the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Most neutral Middle East analysts observe that American negotiators throughout several administrations (both Democratic and Republican) have mostly adopted the Israeli point of view and placed most of the pressure on the Palestinian leadership (whether Bill Clinton with Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, or George W. Bush with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.)

During the first term of the Bush administration, Arafat, as the head of the PA, was isolated, while Washington promoted those within the Palestinian leadership such as Mahmoud Abbas (imposed on Arafat as prime minister in 2003), and former security chief Muhammad Dahlan, both of whom embraced the American strategy in the region. In 2005, Bush declared his freedom and democracy agenda, demanding elections in the Palestinian territories, and hoping for a Fatah victory to implement his vision.

However, the administration soon abandoned its agenda of promoting democracy in the Arab world when Hamas won a landslide victory in the January 2006 legislative elections. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed shock about the results saying, “No one saw it coming.” A Department of Defense official told David Rose of Vanity Fair in 2008, “Everyone blamed everyone else,” “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the f*@# recommended this?"

Ever since that election, the American administration employed three different but overlapping strategies in order to undo the results. These efforts by the State Department, the White House and the Defense Department, were scantily planned and poorly coordinated.

Throughout 2006 and the first half of 2007, the State Department used its diplomatic resources and political muscle to topple the democratically-elected Palestinian government led by Hamas. In an April 2008 report, Vanity Fair disclosed that an American talking point memo emerged after a U.S. diplomat accidentally left it behind in a Palestinian Authority building in Ramallah. The document echoed Rice’s demand that Abbas dissolve the national unity government and take on Hamas.

Meanwhile, as detailed by Vanity Fair, neo-con and NSC deputy director Elliot Abrams was plotting a coup in Gaza against Hamas with former Gaza security chief Muhammad Dahlan in the spring of 2007. It included coordination with Israel, several Arab countries such as UAE and Jordan, payments to Dahlan of over $30 million, the training of five hundred security personnel, a campaign to destabilize Gaza, and a torture program against Hamas members and other Islamists.

Dahlan admitted as much to the magazine’s writer, David Rose, saying that he told his American counterpart who was pushing for a confrontation with Hamas, “If I am going to confront them, I need substantial resources. As things stand, we do not have the capability.”

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on June 7, 2007, that the American administration had asked Israel to authorize a large Egyptian arms shipment, including dozens of armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition. Rose explains that Abrams’s plan stressed the need to bolster Fatah’s forces in order to “deter” Hamas. According to a senior administration official the “desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political decisions (i.e. fulfilling the Israeli conditions for a political settlement) and dismissing the (Hamas led) cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”

But Dick Cheney’s Middle East advisor, David Wurmser, admitted the failed effort when he told the magazine, “It looked to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted (by Hamas) before it could happen.”

The third effort, was mainly overseen by the Pentagon, and led by Lt. General Keith Dayton. In a speech before the pro-Israel think tank, the Washington Institute on Near East Policy (WINEP) in May 2009, he said that the Office of the U.S. Security Coordinator, which he has been leading since December 2005, is “an effort to assist the Palestinians in reforming their security services.” But according to the notes of a meeting between Dayton and a Palestinian security chief in Ramallah in early 2007, the real purpose of the mission was revealed when Dayton said, "We also need to build up your forces in order to take on Hamas.”

Since 2007, Congress has given Dayton $161 million dollars to implement his plan. In addition, this year Congress appropriated an additional $209 million dollars to Dayton for the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years, to accelerate his program after receiving high marks from Israeli security chiefs. In the past year alone, more than 1,000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad members have been arrested and detained without trials, with many tortured and killed under interrogation, by U.S.-trained Palestinian security personnel in the West Bank. Amnesty International and many other human rights organizations have condemned these actions and called for an immediate halt to the human rights abuses of Palestinian detainees in PA prisons.

In his WINEP speech Dayton acknowledged this crackdown when he said, “I don't know how many of you are aware, but over the last year-and-a-half, the Palestinians have engaged upon a series of what they call security offensives throughout the West Bank, surprisingly well coordinated with the Israeli army.” He further admitted that during the 22-day Gaza war last winter, U.S.-trained Palestinian security forces prevented Palestinians in the West Bank from organizing mass protests against the Israeli army, which ironically allowed for the reduction of the Israeli military presence in the West Bank in order to redeploy those troops to Gaza. Dayton added, “As a matter of fact, a good portion of the Israeli army went off to Gaza from the West Bank— think about that for a minute, and the (Israeli military) commander (of the West Bank) was absent for eight straight days.”

After a failed coup and brutal military offensive failed to dislodge Hamas from Gaza, the Israeli and U.S. strategy sought to intensify its pressure against Hamas through a suffocating economic siege in Gaza, massive security detentions in the West Bank, financial squeeze in the region and political isolation internationally. Meanwhile, according to several Hamas spokesmen, including the deposed prime minister Ismael Haniyya in Gaza and political chief Khaled Meshal in Damascus, the main obstacle to any national reconciliation with Fatah has been the detention of hundreds of Hamas members and the PA’s security collaboration with the military occupation overseen by Dayton.

The next phase in this effort is to reinvent Fatah and present it as a viable political alternative to Hamas and other resistance movements by improving the living conditions in the West Bank in contrast to Gaza’s devastating siege. But more important, the plan envisions a new Fatah that is considered a reliable partner willing to accomodate Israel’s conditions for a political settlement. The sixth Fatah conference and accompanying elections was thus convened to dispose of its corrupt and dysfunctional image.

For over a year, the Central Committee, the highest body in its structure, could not agree on many major issues, including where to hold the conference (the final decision was to hold it in the occupied Palestinian territories, which means that Israel has a veto on which delegates from abroad would be allowed to participate). They also squabbled about which delegates would be appointed to the conference, which would determine the composition of the new leadership, as well as the political program and the role of armed resistance against the occupation. Abbas and his inner circle vetoed the decision of the committee, and decided to hold the conference in Bethlehem, virtually hand-picking all the participants to guarantee the election outcome.

Historically, the delegates to Fatah’s national conference were elected or appointed by the Central Committee, but at least fifty-one percent came from the military apparatus. Since most of the military wing has either been disbanded or wanted by the Israelis, a large number of the delegates to this conference were security personnel substituting for the military ones. This fact guaranteed that the election results would be skewed towards the security chiefs and their supporters.

The original number of delegates was supposed to be around 700. Then it increased to 1,250 but eventually mushroomed to 2,355. Less than ten percent were actually indirectly elected by the virtue of their positions, while the overwhelming majority was appointed by a small group in Ramallah led mainly by Abbas and other power brokers such as Dahlan and former West Bank security chief Jibreel Rujoub, who used to hang the picture of former CIA director George Tenet above his desk alongside that of Arafat.

The number of Central Committee members was also increased from 21 to 23, with 19 directly elected by the delegates. Abbas was to appoint four members later, but he himself was chosen by acclamation, to avoid embarrassment if he does not garner first place in a direct election. The 18 individuals who were elected at the end of the week-long conference comprised four from the “old guard” who are considered close to Abbas, and 14 new members, three of whom are former security chiefs who’ve been close to the CIA. These include Dahlan, Rujoub, and Tawfiq Tirawi, a former intelligence chief, who is currently heading a security training academy in Jericho under the supervision of Gen. Dayton.

From the outset, this conference was heavily tilted towards delegates from the West Bank. Unlike previous conferences, Palestinians in the Diaspora were hardly represented since Israel allowed only a few people to enter from abroad. While Gaza’s population is equal to that of the West Bank, less than 400 people were selected as delegates from Gaza, while there were over three times as many delegates from the West Bank.

But most of the Gaza delegates did not even attend because Hamas prevented them from leaving the strip, demanding in return that hundreds of its detained members in the West Bank be freed by the PA, which it summarily refused. In short, aside from Dahlan, who no longer lives in Gaza, not a single elected person is from or lives in Gaza. This prompted the entire Fatah leadership in Gaza, including former Central Committee member Zakariya al-Agha, to resign en mass one day after the conference, protesting not only the results, but also the whole election process.

Similarly, Fatah members abroad did not fare well. Only two people were elected to the Central Committee, though more than two-thirds of Palestinians (eight million) live outside of the Palestinian territories, many in squalid refugee camps, with the “right of return”, considered a hot- button issue in future negotiations, up in the air. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the new members were either from the West Bank or already living in Ramallah as part of Abbas’ closest aides, affirming the American-led ‘West Bank first’ strategy.

Some of the historic old guard who oppose Abbas’s political program such as Central Committee secretary Farouk Kaddoumi or Hani Al-Hassan did not even attend or run as candidates. Kaddoumi condemned the conference, questioned its legitimacy, and went as far as accusing Abbas and Dahlan of plotting with the Israelis to poison Arafat, eventually causing his death.

Other former members who ran as candidates were defeated and cried foul. Former prime minister and negotiator Ahmad Qurai (Abu Alaa) questioned the credentials of the delegates and the integrity of the election procedure. When Abbas chief of staff, Tayeb Abdel-Rahim lost, he demanded a recount and was eventually declared a winner, after the election committee claimed he was actually tied for last. Many delegates, especially female candidates, all of whom lost, criticized this blatant cronyism. Nevertheless, several popular and “clean” candidates were able to win a seat such as Marwan Bargouthi, who is serving five life sentences in Israel, and Mahmoud Al-Aloul, a former mayor of Nablus.

As Palestinians watched this conference unfold, many were hoping that it would be the beginning of a national reconciliation and the establishment of a unity government. However, it seems that as a result of this conference Fatah itself may further disintegrate, as its Gaza leaders and Abu Alaa are threatening to launch a new faction called “Fatah Awakening,” further increasing division and tension within the Palestinian ranks.

The next step in the strategy of the pro-American camp is to hold presidential and legislative elections in the Palestinian territories next January, hoping to present a rejuvenated Fatah as an alternative to Hamas and other resistance movements. Jonathan Steele of the Guardian further exposed on June 22, 2007 the U.S. "hard coup" of June ’07, as well as its political strategy. He detailed US officials' conversations with several Arab regimes. These were, among others, “ ‘to maintain President Abbas and Fatah as the center of gravity on the Palestinian scene’, ‘avoid wasting time in accommodating Hamas,’ ‘undermining Hamas’s political status,’ and ‘calling for early elections."

In the words of Gen. Dayton, the Palestinian personnel trained by the U.S pledge after their graduation that they “were not sent here to learn how to fight Israel, but were rather sent here to learn how to keep law and order.” The main purpose of these security battalions is to halt any resistance to or rejection of the occupation including non-violent means. He then added that senior Israeli military commanders frequently ask him, "How many more of these new Palestinians can you generate, and how quickly?”

Many of the questions, posed by ordinary Palestinians before the conference, remain unanswered. What is Fatah’s political program in light of the current Israeli intransigence and pre-conditions? What of national reconciliation with other Palestinian factions and the establishment of a national unity government? What is the role of resistance against the occupation, the suffocating siege against Gaza, and most importantly, the continuous collaboration with the Israeli security agencies and military against their own citizens?

These questions persist while Israel’s occupation and its brutal policies, the expansion of settlements, the separation wall, the detention of over 11,000 Palestinians, the expropriation of land, the depopulation of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents, and the denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return, continue unabated.

Simply put, the U.S. wants a Palestinian leadership that will answer these questions in a way that is satisfactory to Israel. As one State Department official said to Vanity Fair regarding American objectives in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, “We care about results, and we support whatever son of a bitch we have to support. Dahlan was the son of a bitch we happened to know best" ~By Esam AL-Amin

If There Wasn't Something Missing

2009-08-17T23:37:00.001-07:00

"Joshua, get off the computer."

The flashing images on the screen continued unabated as Joshua blocked out his fathers voice. It wasn't necessarily that Bio-Menace was an entrancing game, simply that he found it easier to patiently hope his father would go away than to acknowledge his existence.

"Joshua, I told you at dinner that your mother and I were going to go welcome the new neighbors and that we expected you to come with us. You can either save your game now and come back to it when we get back or I can turn it off at the surge protector and you can be grounded for the rest of the night."

Although he attempted to maintain his air of indifference Joshua knew better than to risk calling his father's bluff, he pressed the F5 key to quick save his game just in case.

"1... 2..."

"I am! I just saved! Jeez dad, why do you need me to go with you anyway? I don't give a hoot who the new neighbors are."

Trying to keep a lid on his frustration his father mentally counted backward from 10 before responding with some bait to catch his sons attention. "They have a pretty cute daughter about your age, isn't that reason enough to come along?"

Although his 13 year old hormones reacted unconsciously at the thought of a new girl in the vicinity Joshua knew better than to let his excitement show. Counting backward from 10 before responding he took a low blow "Dad, it's creepy for you to think a girl my age is cute."

Rolling his eyes Joseph turned away, leaving his son in the computer room as he walked down the hall to get get his shoes on. Pulling his lanky body up out of the swivel computer chair Joshua padded down the hall after his father. Meeting up with his parents in the kitchen his dad handed him a hefty watermelon. "For me?" he asked in mock surprise.

"Very funny" his father replied as he held his wife's hand to help her down the stairs. Following along behind the embarrassingly affectionate couple Joshua skipped putting on his shoes in favor of the slippers he was already wearing, he figured he'd be able to break away back to the comforts of home once the grown-ups got lost in their superficial chit-chat. Crossing the street diagonally to the north west it was only 50 or so paces before Joshua found himself standing in front of the new neighbors porch. His parents were already at the door making their introductions so he hung back a few feet closer to their ghetto van waiting impatiently for his chance to pass the giant fruit off on someone and make his escape.

Since he was the closest to the driveway he was the first to see the noisy gaggle of children come around from the back of the house to ride on their bikes in the drive. Quickly noting that these three girls were all quite a bit younger than him he turned his attention back to the adults who were coming off the step and onto the front lawn.

His father politely introduced him to these strangers, Sue and Jay by name, and it was to Jay that Joshua was able to hand off his burden. They seemed like nice enough people, although Jays simple T-shirt and jeans were a stark contrast to Joseph's Sunday best. The strong odor of cigarette smoke clung to Sue like a second skin, a fact that make Joshua smile because he knew it would make his parents far more uncomfortable than it aught to. Laughing quietly to himself at his parents awkward attempts at conversation with these obvious 'non-members' Joshua turned himself about to head for home.

In the fading light of the setting sun he was stopped dead in his tracks by what he saw behind him. Not a dozen feet away, riding a bike that was clearly too small for her, was the most exquisite beauty he had ever seen. Her long legs were tanned a perfect gold and were gloriously displayed by the tiny shorts she wore... in fact on closer inspection she wasn't wearing shorts at all but a skimpy pair of checkered boxers. Her golden hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her eyes sparkled in the failing light like a pair of flawlessly cut sapphires.

As she rode in figure eights on the driveway her sisters darted about on all sides, their giggles filling the air. Their merriment must have been infectious because Joshua found himself laughing out loud at their squeals as each took turns standing in front of their sister and jumping out of the way moments before they were struck. Perhaps it was his laughter that caught her attention causing her eyes to glance up at his own for the first time.

In the years that followed, even for the rest of his life, Joshua never forgot that moment. The way that he felt when his eyes met hers shattered any preconceived notions he had held on life. For him the entire world dropped away, existence winking out like a light, leaving no trace beyond this young woman in whose presence Joshua had been completely reduced to a thoughtless lump of jelly. In all of his years he had never imagined that such perfection could exist in this world.

While the young nerdy kid stood staring at her Ann wondered to herself why these three had come to introduce themselves without the gorgeous blond boy she had seen washing his truck in their driveway while she had unpacked that afternoon. It wasn't that this kid was unattractive, he had a goofy sort of charm and adorable puppy-dog eyes, as much as it was the fact that she had spent most of the evening wondering how she could introduce herself to the mysterious hunk who must have been this boys older brother. Although Joshua wasn't anything to rave about her naturally flirtatious nature kicked in and she found herself smiling and laughing just to see his reaction.

It was the laugh that broke into his trance, if someone had asked him right then what her laugh sounded like he would have confidently stated that it was what it sounded like when angels sang. He gaped at her, astonished by her glory, for a few moments more before he was able to bring himself back down to earth enough to shut his mouth and smile back at her. Her smile widened as she stopped her bike, both legs long enough to touch the ground on either side, and unnecessarily readjusted her ponytail.

He wanted more than anything to introduce himself, in fact the only thing he wanted more was to be able to impress her... something he didn't begin to trust himself to do under the full bore of her enchantment. The gears in his mind spun at a break neck speed to find something interesting or witty to say to her but his thoughts were so jumbled together that he wasn't at all sure he could even remember his own name.

Collecting himself enough to realize that he would quickly look goofy standing there gawking, he spun on his heel and made what he hoped didn't look like a mad dash for his front door. Once inside he leaned back against the closed door, his mind and his emotions spinning about inside of him as though caught in a tornado. Who was this amazing beauty, this perfect angel? How could he be so stupid as to wear slippers instead of shoes like a civilized person? What excuse could he come up with to be able to see her again? Why hadn't he been able to come up with a single thing to say to her instead of running away like a scared puppy? Would she ever be interested in him or would she see right past him like most of the girls his age? These and a thousand other questions played volleyball with his brain as his heart alternated between racing and nearly stopping altogether. Stumbling downstairs to his room, any thoughts of computer games obliterated from his mind, he attempted to focus on a single thought... what could he possibly do to make her fall in love with him?

Socialized Health Care for Dummies

2009-08-07T21:30:00.000-07:00

Our health care in America is a joke. It might be wonderful for a select few but for the rest of us it's downright awful. We are currently ranked 36th in the world with every other country who has universal health care ranking above us. We have 46 million people without insurance, doctors wasting time filling out insurance forms, insurance companies dreaming up ways to avoid paying out to people who faithfully paid their premiums for years and 50% of the 1,458,000 personal bankruptcies in the US in 2001 were due to medical bills. Health care should be considered a universal human right that should be made available to all persons regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or ability to pay. What it comes down to is countries who offer universal health care have happier citizens who live longer and are healthier.

For those who still are not convinced, I have provided some arguments that are posed to my friends and I almost daily, along with our replies:

"I, for one, do not trust our incompetent government to do anything, especially run our health care."

I hope anyone that argues that they don't trust the government to run health care is at least consistent and fights just as hard to get the government to disband the armed forces. If you can't trust the government to try and save lives, you shouldn't trust them to take them either.

That goes for the death penalty too, and really, the entire legal system. An error in the legal system especially as it pertains to the death penalty is, at least in my opinion, much more horrible. Your government making a mistake and purposefully killing someone is much worse than making your wait times for medical care slightly longer.

Most people’s views don’t jive with the facts of socialized health care in Canada or Europe, or of the role and usefulness of government in those countries. Many Americans seem to have an automatic fear of government which is based not on reason or clear facts, but of convoluted theories and misrepresentations of the real facts. Actually many government officials and representative are in bed with the insurance companies. So long as people profit when sick people don't get medical treatment, the system will stay broken, and quite inhumane.

"In Canada as well as England and other countries with socialized health care, you sometimes spend months waiting before seeing a physician. Many people would die just waiting in an emergency room."

Socialized health care has been proven to be far more efficient, fair, humane, and equal. It is not at all perfect, and needs improvement, but the US would be wise to adopt a more social health system rather than a private profit based one where insurance company bureaucrats are making medical decisions.

Although a few people do die waiting for treatment we have far more people who suffer and die because they go untreated due to lack of insurance. Not only is that statement about waiting for care patently misleading - (one only waits for non-emergency or elective specialty care which is based on the same principle as ER triage). Europe and Canada are doing very, very well under socialism. In fact the more socialist the country (Denmark, Sweden) the better off they are. Better education, health, longer life-expectancy, lower infant mortality, more productive, less crime, (because the poor have options and support from the community they don't have to resort to crime and violence out of necessity).

Those stories in which people die waiting for treatment, a rare occurrence, are flaunted about by the conservative news outlets, like Fox, which are owned by giant corporations and run by the elite few who make more money than God. This ruling class will do whatever they need to in order to keep the money pouring into their bank accounts. They recognize that higher taxes would drain them of some of their precious wealth and so they use their media power to spread the idea that covering their asses is in everyone's best interests. For example, the CEO of Fox holds stock in almost every major health insurance company; it would obviously be in his direct best interest to keep people from supporting universalized health care as he would end up losing millions when the insurance companies are forced to lower their costs to stay in business. So, of course, he is going to twist the truth and use scare tactics (in the form of hosts like Bill O'Reiley and Glenn Beck) to keep the populace complacent.

"Medicaid and medicare are a mess. Have you ever been on Medicaid?"

Yes we have and it is wonderful. The only reason that Medicaid and Medicare are a mess is due to a major lack of funding; they consistently have their budgets cut... thus why Medicaid has been forced to stop offering adults any dental and optical coverage. The US government already provides the best health care in the US for government employees and veterans, and the elderly (Medicare). It's cheaper, more efficient and provides a higher level of care than is available through private insurance.

"The US treasurer himself said the bottom line is that Obama's plan will cost $1 T more than taxpayers currently spend!"

Actually government health care has proven to be far cheaper and far more accessible than private. For one, overhead costs would be cut due to reduced staffing needs (administration, billing departments, etc.) than currently exist in hospitals and private health insurance companies. Also, socialized health care is not trying to generate a profit, just break even.

The fact is the US has by far the most expensive health care system in the world, has a lower level of care, lower life expectancy, and has far higher percentage of people without any access to care at all. More people in the United States are totally without access than the entire population of Canada. The US is currently paying out the nose for emergency care when it could be paying far, far less for European/Canadian type preventative care which is far cheaper in the long run for all involved. It's better to have free, easy access to a doctor whenever you need it than to have to wait until it develops into a serious, more expensive, problem to get help.

The way it works in Canada is that you get free access to basic health care, for specialty care you may be caused to wait depending on the status of your condition. If it is life-threatening you get immediate, free treatment. For elective or non-serious conditions you may well have to wait, but that is no different from how triage works in a hospital normally - those who need the care the most get treated first. Dentistry, prescriptions, optometric care are privatized and covered at different degrees depending on the province you reside in, but either way are far, far cheaper than in the US.

"Shouldn't the reform come from insurance companies, the doctors and hospitals who so ridiculously overcharge"

Unfortunately the insurance companies, doctors and hospitals will not reform, especially without government intervention. They are corporations whose primary purpose is to make the most possible money for their shareholders. The best way to drive their prices down is to offer some sort of alternative, where people do not have to pay exorbitant fees in order to receive treatment. Once they start to lose customers they will reform in order to stay in business.

"I have a doctor friend in Switzerland who had to go over the border to practice to make any money, because they were paid the same as every other average doctor, no matter how good they strove to be."

The fact that they weren't making 'any money' is a fallacy, obviously the other doctors in Switzerland are able to survive off of their wages. Another reason this argument is ridiculous is due to the fact that American doctors spend years paying off hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, whereas in a socialized country such as Switzerland their government pays for their college education and doctors graduate debt free.

Under our current system doctors are paid money based on how many patients they can squeeze into a day, to make even more money they are also paid a commission by pharmaceutical companies for each prescription they write. In socialized countries doctors are paid based on how well they care for their patients as well as their patients overall health. In other words our doctors are paid more if we are sick, by being able to write more prescriptions and taking follow up appointments, whereas their doctors are paid more the better their patients fare.

It is irrational that anyone should make a profit on top of what medical care costs. Doctors and nurses should be paid. Pay the costs, but making money on people who are ill is immoral. HMO's and businesses making money on people who are ill are vultures.

"Many people don't have insurance because they choose to spend the money on another area of their life, not that they can't afford it. They just think the government 'owes' this to them. They refuse to get jobs, because then they would have to give up the freebies. I don't want to pay for your health care."

If health care weren't at all tied to employment it would be the same as education - a right that all people (and their children) have regardless of their employment. Are we going to punish children because their parent can't afford health insurance, maybe can't work or even won't?

Many Americans seem to have a warped view on how social programs work. Their anecdotal evidence is a poor reason to go up against the reality of how socialized health care (and education for that matter) actually functions. The percentage of people in the US who abuse social programs, in the 'they' group, are minuscule, especially when compared to how many people in the US are uninsured, uninsurable, and under-insured, and have serious health and employment problems because they are simply less lucky than others. This view seems rather limited and selfish.

"Socialized health care is not only economically unsound, it is immoral. Stealing is wrong, even if it's for a good cause."

'Stealing is wrong.' Yes. So how about industrial waste and environmental degradation that is stealing our health in the first place? How about pesticides and herbicides that are in our food, and all for maximization of profit? Do you realize how much industrialization has increased the cancer rates in developing and developed countries? Causing this whole health care problem in the first place is our particular brand of capitalism.

Do you pay taxes at all? Because that's the government 'stealing' from you, that's forced charity. As the US becomes more and more liberal, which it will, more and more people will start to see why socialism works and will overcome the McCarthyist fear they have of the word socialism. The selfish might, at that time, want to find a nice island to isolate themselves from all the evil forced charity that will be imposed on their 'extremely moral' selves. As for theft, if taxes are theft, then you'd best be prepared to give up much. Police, fire, roads, schools etc.

"The reason health care was so cheap earlier in the last century was because there was less government involvement. Medicare and Medicaid has been a horrible disaster for our country and have increased the cost of health care to what it is today."

As for profit, look back 20 years. Medical care before the rise of the HMO was cheaper, and the people who made money then were doctors, nurses, hospitals, and people doing medical care, not the insurance companies and drug companies. Ask any doctor who has practiced medicine between 1980 and 2009 when and where they made more money. Doctors are making less money now, nurses pay more money for their own insurance (and they work for hospitals and insurance companies.) And people who hold these views obviously don’t have a chronic or debilitating illness or they would understand what it means to be robbed of their money, homes and quality of life.

Things were much simpler in the 'last part of the last century', they have become significantly more complicated by insurance companies. In reality the 'invention' of the HMO may be the most insidious creation ever developed. Insurance companies have developed entire systems and protocols to stop providing for people they insure so that they may retain more 'profit'... the profit of the insurance company is entirely created to decrease the service provided to the insured. If that's not immoral, what is? Health care isn't about simple economics, it’s about quality of life. If quality of life is money to you, then I hope when you snuggle up with it, it gives you lots of warm fuzzies.

"Big government is the problem!"

Back in the day, you had to subscribe for police coverage, fire coverage, and other things that we now consider city costs. How is medical care much different? Everyone in America is one major illness away from bankruptcy, and if you check yourself or a loved one into a nursing/rest home, you can kiss every dime you ever made or ever saved goodbye. And the poor? They already get the best medical coverage in America. Medicaid: The Unlimited Gold Pot at the end of the social ladder.

When a society has its basic needs cared for and doesn't need to struggle to feed their family when making $6 an hour at Mc Donald's, when they don't have to go bankrupt to pay for a surgery, when they can afford to send their children to university, when their government spends money on the welfare of humans and not on imperialistic military goals then you've got a society where social equality is possible, and where people don't die of tooth infections which spread and get into the blood stream because someone couldn't afford to go to the dentist.

"Socialism is nothing more than moral cannibalism. It is evil and it always destroys the people who live with it."

Unfortunately, a Euro/Canadian style health care system isn't even on the table in Congress right now. All they're trying to do is fix the uninsured/under-insured problem by having affordable coverage. Health Insurance companies currently can charge whatever they want and then refuse to pay for people's medical needs because that way they make less money. As long as medical care is for-profit, it is bad for Americans (unless you run a health insurance company). They want to make money, not help people get better.

Obama is not a socialist. He's not even a liberal. He's a centrist. Almost the entire democratic party and certainly its policies are centrist ones. And again Obama's plan isn't socialized medicine. It's just introducing some much needed regulation so insurance can't decline to cover treatment or choose what kinds of treatments it will cover, as well as a public plan which would force insurance companies to lower their rates to a reasonable level. That's all. No socialization, it's American-style health insurance which people will still have to purchase. It's still a terrible idea, but not nearly as terrible as what is currently in place.

Is socialism evil? No, what's evil is basing a society on extreme selfishness, on giving power to those who are just lucky and born into a situation where they can succeed, and where the majority of people exist mostly to supply the ruling class with ever more money. Unregulated capitalism is as bad an idea as Leninist communism. What we need a healthy balance of the two extremes, and that is socialism. Where personal freedom & human equality are sacrosanct.

"Socialism worked real well for the Soviet Union or Cuba or North Korea didn't it?"

Actually if you look at these examples they are not socialists at all, but communists. Communism is no more socialism than American capitalism is Nazism. You live in a society, and must either learn to live with the fact that we as humans are interconnected, need each other, and never succeed in a vacuum. You need us, though because you're just one person, we don't really need you as much. Socialism is a natural result of our basic nature as social primates. If we care for our community, they will in turn care for us and we all profit. What I see as really immoral is the power that rich people have over the poor to control their lives, to refuse them medical treatment, education, and equality simply because they weren't born powerful. All the while American society is becoming more fractured, most are getting poorer, while the few rich are getting even richer, and turning into an oligarchy.

A special thanks to my friends Craig Fitzner, Mark Olsen, Jillian Phippen and Derek Johnson.

The Sacred Vagina

2009-08-06T16:09:00.000-07:00

The traditional design of most patriarchal religious buildings of worship imitate the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora, a central vaginal aisle towards the alter, two curved ovarian structures on either side, and in the sacred center, the alter or womb, where the miracle takes place, where males give birth.

The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men.

No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tried to keep women away from the alter, just as women are kept away from the control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body.

~Excerpt taken from The Vagina Monologues~