Fire and Brimstome

Sun in late Aries and Mars up close to the Sun, also in the Cardinal Fire Sign, and you can expect things to get a little..err...heated.

Add to that Pluto Retrograde in Capricorn (and this affects me more personally, being conjunct my Natal Saturn) and, oh, well, Fukushima is at it again.

(Those links are to an excellent professional astrologer, by the way, who explains things much more vividly than I ever could.)

So what have we here? I was woken on Tuesday morning by a Twitter line gone insane with the Boston bombings. All praise be to Anonymous, who break the real news first, and no mistake.

My first reaction was typical of the stressed period: "BooFuckingHoo Boston" I tweeted. Sometimes, I get pretty exasperated with the Americans. They behave like a bunch of parochial colonists. Oh, wait...


And all the while, Derrick Jensen's Premise Four was bubbling through my trauma-tired brain:

"Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims."


But I'm pretty stoked to see so many Americans showing signs of growing up, finally.It's a pity it takes a bomb and a fertilizer factory exploding all over the place to awaken them to the fact that yes, much of the rest of the world has had to put up with stuff just like this for years now. Just like this, and much worse, too.

The number of US citizens suddenly turning their faces to the outside world and their empathy to the inhabitants of lands other than the Leader of the First World is quite heartening - in my own, neo-colonialist opinion.

Meanwhile, the Lord and Archetype of Chthonic energies moves slowly backwards, leaking radioactive water in His wake. These are interesting times, no doubt about that.

Waterless

Thursday there was a planned water outage in the Bryanston/Douglasdale area in order to repair damaged pipes. Somehow, this resulted in further damage to the network of water pipes - there were bursts in two separate areas - and we, along with the entire metropolitan substructure extending from Maroeladal to Dainfern, have been without water since Friday.
(I'm going on record, right here, with my opinion that South African tecnicians are, for the most part, incompetent by now. We're getting stupider, and in a big way.) It is now Sunday, and I have to say that getting along without water on tap has proved more difficult than I expected.

Water for the morning coffee we scraped from the icebox. I ended up rinsing my hair in the dogs' drinking basin. The floors have gone uncleaned and the dishes unwashed. If I want to go to work tomorrow, I'm going to have to devise a method of de-stinking myself, probably involving a Dettol-and-spirits spritz. Not a lot of fun.

But this is such a small matter when we consider that, in fact, water will be the next resource that humans fight wars over. If the United States survives another twenty years, we could well see unilateral engagements of the Iraq kind as a cover for procuring the water of life, instead of oil.

Do I think we humans will come to that? Yes, and further: I foresee the fairly fast (in planetary terms ) severe decline of humanity on this Earth. Besides lack of water, we will be facing increased earthquakes, inundations, hurricanes, melting polar ice releasing lethal gases, not to mention the murderous scramble for other resources (land, food..) which we shall shortly all be engaged in.
And we humans, like the masters of the universe we deludedly suppose we are, will rather take every living thing with us, before we give up our death-hold on this planet.

Pessimistic? Looks and sounds that way, but really, no.
I believe we need a die-off of the toxic dominant species here, and I have great trust that Life will not, in fact, allow us to take all of our fellow life-forms with us into oblivion.
Terrestrial life is starting to fight back, and joyfully I applaud. Have we learnt anything from our short, doomed and tragic reign of terror? I fully believe that some of us - enough, enough - have gained deep lessons in the Field of Life through the mistakes of this one species. If we start again, then, all is not lost. Embodied life continues; the great experiment flows on and on and on...

Waiting For The End Of The World

Above the white noise of the fan you can hear the rumble of thunder approaching.

The greens and purples, reds and whites of the garden take on a richer hue – all overlaid with a dark gravity which says more powerfully than sound that the storm is coming, is coming, is close.

I savour the taste and juiciness of a piece of charcoaled steak in my mouth; chewing slowly, the ultimate act of one animal enveloping another. My soul treasures the textures and seems to know that these days, too, will pass. Even as I add the lightly-boiled flesh of a plant person to my ingestion, I am overwhelmed with joy at the brevity of days, and the impermanence of this plane.

The air outside is gravid, now: the storm is nigh upon us. First a raindrop, then another, spatters the terracotta tiles on the patio of my temporary empire. Here, here is the meat of other and self, ever evolving into One Thing. Here, too, is the terrible Sign and the Portent. Here where I sit, chewing, waiting for the End of the World.

Birds Over Water

The human race, seriously now, has a need to grow up.
No, I haven't just come to that conclusion, but I'm betting that thousands upon thousands of people are waking up to that inescapable statement.
Amid the clamour and horrors of the BP mass ecocide, followed shortly by the horrors of the Fukushima meltdown, there is one glaring point coming to light: to whit, not one of the people who were nominally in charge of these runaway pieces of technology had the slightest idea of how they really worked, and, when they got away from us - as technology has a tiresome history of doing - not one of the controlling human powers really knew what to do about it.
I'm a little bit more au fait with nuclear physics than with deep sea geology, so my reaction to the unfolding, and largely hidden, catastrophe at Fukushima cut a little deeper and faster than when the Deepwater rig exploded-what, just last year?

The moment that first hydrogen explosion took place all my danger senses were fully alert, and my dreams deeply troubled. But, if you can believe this guy, we don't know the half of it. I'm inclined to give credence to much of what he says there-and a careful reading of New Scientist and Nature online will back that conclusion up.

Like children with toys that no-one thought would harm them, mankind has let his technology run amok. Might we dare hope, for the last time?
I don't know. I accept the heartbreak, depression and tears of all humans ( some of whom have proven themselves heroes by their actions - valiantly striving to contain the nuclear meltdown by deliberately sacrificing themselves, may the gods give them room at the banqueting table) who are in the least connected to this real earth, this real landbase, this real environment which sustains us. As for some of the others- chairmans-of-the-board and fat-walletted shareholders who should have been thrown headfirst into the ravine beneath reactor number 2-well, may they return again, to try again, until they start to get it right.

 I sometimes think that it's a pity that humanity doesn't have something like the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood to ride herd on us until we mature sufficiently to handle the products of our wild technological imaginings. But maybe we do. All the living world can be our allies, teaching us,if we open our senses to it, how to live upon and within the matrix of life, the great field of Love which sustains every cricket, every blade of grass, every mountain range, every star. But we have to be receptive to seeing and accepting such allies for this to work. Meanwhile, they go on, trying to get us to learn these lessons anyway.

For myself, I envision my Being as the reflection of a flock of birds in an endlessly placid lake: still moving, not sticking, flowing through, over and around this vale of horror. Birds over water. Bearing witness.

Illness and Illumination

The last 12 days have been challenging and interesting indeed.
Starting on 10th March, when our car burst into flames on the highway and carrying on through our inability to get the car started again, a battle to find a rental car service which didn't require a small ransom of a hold on our credit cards- not to mention the little matters of Libya and Japan -I'm hardly surprised that I haven't actually performed the ritual of Rushing Dark Water yet.

Well, actually it was more down to a sudden and vicious bout of 'flu which grabbed me, shaking and shivering , on Sunday night and saw me delirious and in pain until this morning.
I have made up the incense, put aside golden candles and marked the ritual passage in my Book of Shadows, so I suspect that I'll be out in the circle tomorrow night at the latest.

In the meantime, I have gathered a sense of what life is going to be like when none of us can afford petrol anymore. Walking to the garage for milk and bread through our delightfully life-rich suburb with children playing in the streets, families walking back from church and belligerent dogs left to roam outside their owners' properties is a worthwhile education in itself, and taking the hour-long hike to the nearest small supermarket -through the bush and across the river on stepping stones- opens your eyes to some details of other peoples' lives indeed. The metres of electric cable covering abandoned on the bush path  near our substation in particular provided insight into lives far more desperate from our own, and the constant cheery greetings from fellow bush-whackers underlines perhaps the more humanising effect of not always going everywhere in a damned car.

Then again there was the precious illumination granted so often to us when we are severely ill: an effect noted by many others over the years. There I was, on Sunday night, using psychic techniques to dull the pain in my kidneys and muscles, shivering and sweating and unable to fall asleep, staring up at the join in the ceiling boards in the dark. The line blurred and fuzzed, and I felt my consciousness as a field extending quite some way from my physical body. The top of my head seemed to open wide, and I knew again that I was an experience module in a larger field, outside of which there is Nothing and within which is Everything.

This experience of remembering who we are comes from time to time - not often, but frequently enough to remind me, that I should not forget in this lifetime. I treasure the remembering, for it is perhaps the only thing of which I am really sure. That we are, as Hecate puts it :Goddess pouring Goddess into Goddess, and that's All it is, and that's more than enough.

Now that I'm on the mend and we have the use of a rental car for the week I'm going to find time to say something about combining Juniper and Buchu as a sovereign remedy for aching kidneys. Maybe tomorrow.

Pic: Jessica . I'm waiting for the source from Jacurutu, and I will then attribute it.

Back In The Slightly Realer World

As some of you might have inferred, my son contacted me a little while ago.
We had been estranged for 11 years - he was taken away from me, rightfully I have to say, when I lost the rest of my family, and all my worldly goods, and my sanity, and a roof over my head, and very nearly my life. That this period was an agonising death and rebirth experience, often referred to as a Shamanic Dismemberment, is neither here nor there for this post .

I joined up on Facebook as Shevek seems to keep a regular network of connections over there - not too many, to his credit, but at the time he wasn't on the wider web- and FB only through his cellphone- so it was a great way to keep in contact with him.

So Shevek was the primary reason I had a Facebook account. If it could have stayed there, it might have been well and good. But I soon found myself being friended by people I didn't know from a bar of soap, being cajoled into using apps I shouldn't touch with a bargepole and joining groups which, frankly, should know better than to not only stick their heads above the parapet but to wave their flags around wildly as well.

A week or so ago I finally had enough and deactivated my account, after mailing my important friends about my decision. I just couldn't take the attention-deficit inane chatter any longer.

So I've more time to mull things over, to myself, here on this blog, which has always struck me as a richer, more organic way to belong to the Gaian Polity. I also feel vastly relieved. There are, as far as I'm concerned, angelic modes of communication on the web: blogs, focused and well-run discussion groups, the occasional outstanding lecture on video. But the demonic realm is well represented in all its distracting, confounding noise as well: FB, Twitter and other superficial networking systems. Which, as far as I'm concerned, I'm well out of.


Pic: Some games graphics work by Shevek

Another One Leaving Early To Avoid The Rush

Temporary farewell to Don Pablo Amaringo.

I will see you on the other side.

How Ironic

Something I've been banging on about before: life on earth may well have arrived from space, via a comet

"An amino acid called glycine has been found in dust collected by the Stardust spacecraft, which flew by Comet Wild 2 in 2004"

I see the ghost of Fred Hoyle riding in on that comet.

The irony is that we are perhaps on the verge of deciding that the universe is in fact full of life (something mystics have known for thousands of years but which seems to be a hard-won fact for scientists) just as we are about to destroy ourselves - ourselves, and all life on the planet.It's been done before.

Bloody well done, humanity.

Meanwhile, back in my own godhood, I woke up in the middle of the night with symphonic music rising up from within.

Pic: David Darling

With Friends Like These..

How's this for a bizarre article?

"Biologists have shown that it's a natural tendency of living creatures to fill up all available habitat and use up all available resources"

says William Rees, who is apparently an ecologist.

Now, pardon me while I scratch my head, here.
When did you last see salmon using up all the available water in a river?
Pied Crows using up all the available air? Or trees? Or even food, for that matter?
And the last time you saw a pride of lions slaughtering all the available game in its area was....?

Dr Rees is obviously mistaking all living creatures for humankind.

Ah, but we get a glimmering of understanding as to where he's coming from in his next utterance:

"That's what underlies Darwinian evolution, and species that do it best are the ones that survive, but we do it better than any other species"

Well, given a certain reading of the word better,I might be inclined to agree with him there.

The article's author continues ploughing on with this alarming statement:

Although we like to think of ourselves as civilised thinkers, we're subconsciously still driven by an impulse for survival, domination and expansion.

Is this truly how some people still think and write?
That we're 'subconsciously' driven by an impulse for survival (!) and that one can include the words domination and expansion in the same sentence?

Talk about slipping your assumptions past the reader!

As if it's nothing more than our instincts which causes these symptoms of Wetiko disease.
The expansion and domination symptoms have been displayed by humankind in the last few thousand years - and not all humans, just the civilised ones. There have been, and still are, populations of humans living in cultures which do not have hierarchical control of everything natural as their prime objective. But the author doesn't seem to be aware of these facts, preferring the picture he has in his mind of civilisation as the apex of all humanity - just as most of us were brought up to believe.

Pagan Values - Bringing It Down

What has become of the generation who fomented the Soweto Uprising?

On this day in 1976, I was attending a (Whites-only) school in Rhodesia,as it was then. I barely heard about the trouble, when the rancid pus burst upon the streets of Soweto. I was 16 and in my final year of school- taking 'M'levels in Physics, Mathematics and Biology. I was completely unaware that elsewhere, children of my age had had a gutsful of the Apartheid bag of tricks, the latest issuing of which was a commandment that all Black pupils in South Africa would now be forced to have their education administered to them in Afrikaans.

I hope that, had I been in the same situation they were, I too would have rioted on the streets of Soweto. The person I am now certainly would have - I'm not so sure about the person I was then(with whom I unaccountably seem to share some memories).

I salute the spirit of those youth, even as I look around me today, and wonder where they've all gone.

For the survivors must be about my age- a little older, perhaps, or a little younger - and I wonder how they've grown, and why they're so invisible right now.

Maybe some are in the halls of government, or legislature, or the professions. Good for them - although in the case of many of our politicians, I have to ask if they've mislaid their sense of humanity in favour of overwhelming greed.

For the materialist paradigm seems to have enveloped this land, since 1994, when all was bright with hope and tender with compassion and unity.

The toxic waste land around the corner from where I live - a closed dump - has been slated to become a 'development golf course', of all ludicrous things. I'm so sorry, but I just don't see golf courses, development or otherwise, in anybody's future on this Earth.The reasons are left as an exercise for the reader.

In a similar way, I am less than hopeful for my countrymen and women when a huge ponzi scheme nets reactions ranging from "the investors deserved it" to "you're just jealous because you can't build your own empire". I'm sorry again, but empire building is hardly a calling which should be admired in this world.

Resting from an hours-long bout of programming yesterday, my eyes alighted on the edge of the monitor. And there I saw, chasing up and down the black frame, green and blue double helices of wondrous aspect. My soul connected to the worlds-between in that moment, and I was swept away with sorrow for our failing structures. Yes, sorrow.

We think we're not only the pinnacle of evolution so far, but in the process of further and better upward movement. We believe that somehow, someone will know what to do to make all this dismal failure of a culture come out all right. Somebody knows what's going on, and we will fix it with our superior ingenuity.

No, we won't.

Not least because- despite the conspiracy theorists desperately positing the existence of people-who-know, and therefore people-who-control, nobody knows what's going on, how we got here, and how we, let alone the rest of the living earth, will survive.

New Age sweetness and light be damned. We're falling, fast. Accelerating as we drag every other life form over the edge with us. Which is why some of us have come to the conclusion that the only solution is dissolution. Civilisation must be dismantled - this lethal combination of hubris-ridden humanity embedded in a culture which sees the earth as a vast resource pool has to be destroyed, before (and this is what I'm working towards) it destroys the very fabric of Life on this planet.

In my view, this is a very important, and still under-represented, Pagan Value. The realisation that we fucked up and the very best we can hope to do now, for the sake of the All, is to put on our Destoyers hats, call on Hecate and Kali, and in divine representation of them, Take The Bloody Machine Apart.

Will you give some thought to joining us? Together, indeed, we can do more. You are each and every one of you - collectively and singularly God - desperately needed.

Pic: Cosmogenesis2122012

Rising, Falling

I stood looking into the well of the corporate building at which I work. Two small moths were -what? fighting, mating, playing? - battering back and forth at each other as they rose, as two, in a spiral, upwards. They ascended almost to the level, one storey above, at which I stood watching them. Suddenly, their spiral collapsed, and the moths fell, still locked in battle/love/play, to the ground.

I turned away, thinking of Police forces and ex-policemen I have known.
Three of them, to be exact - all of them carrying intense burdens in their spiritual, mental and emotional baggages. Two of them have worked alongside me in corporate Fraud and Security, and one continues as a Private Investigator. The anger just under the surface of control is unarguable. One of them - the PI - seems unable to set boundaries on his ingestion of alcohol and prescription medication. He also has stomach cancer.

We point our fingers and snarl at corruption in the Police Force, seeming shocked that such defenders of the peace could be so open to bribery and kickbacks. And we really scream when they descend into the pits of crime themselves.

But there's a fine line - not easily walked - between the perpetrators and the preventers of crime in our society.

Talking with colleagues earlier in the day, asking who taught the African politicians and business people to be so materialistic, so grasping, so greedily aspirant.
Why, that's an easy one - we did. By we of course I'm referring to the people who usually ask this question, who sneer down their patrician noses at the banana republics of Africa - the white colonials. In whose number I count myself, but with whose attitudes I rarely agree.
The folk of Africa have had a few hundred years of stewing in the cauldron of material wealth being the ultimate goal of every human...every decent human that is. Those who can send their children to the best schools, shop in the luxurious malls with ever-flowing plastic money, drive the biggest, fanciest cars, and live in the quietest suburbs.

And this itself is Corruption - deadly, insane and toxic corruption of the very soul.
The idea that good education a good person makes. The values which imbue wealth with saintliness. A foul, life-trampling, crock of shit.

People arise and realise: the State is Not Your Friend. The Police are the Armed Militia of the State, masquerading as defenders of the populace.

We're so in this together, but some of us think we're above the mass.

Will we awaken and see what deathly harm our civilisation has inflicted upon us?
Some few of us stir, even now, fluttering our eyelids open in the raw dawn. But the clarion may have sounded too late. We may be just about to collapse our spiral, falling like dead weights to the ground. The only question worth asking now is - how much other life will we take with us?

Pic found on Sunneley's Tribe page

Corporate What?

Sermon from the Corporate Church

This belief, that property is more valuable than human life itself, is the basis of humanity’s current problems

Almost. But not quite, Peter Chamberlain.

The belief that property is more valuable than Life itself is the problem.

Once more, All together:

"Which would you rather have - your car or the planet?"

How To Eat Your Landbase 101

New Scientist, stating the bloody obvious nevertheless performs a valuable service by bringing a whole lot of factors together.

Check the graph, especially, for those of us visually biased - brings it home.

However, if you read some of the comments at the article be warned - it's not easy to tell whether the commentators are radically poking fun at the consumerist worldview or are just run of the mill jerks. The latter would be my best bet.

How did we breed these growth-is-good-science-is-Lord-shut-the-fuck-up-and-let-us-get-on-with-the-destruction types, anyway?

I have no idea, and I used to be one of them.

On the more positive side, it's in the dying phases of a developmental stage that we often see the most vitriolic kicking and screaming.

Orange materialism is on the way out, and it knows it.
In time to save human and nonhuman life from its ravages? I doubt it.

As temporarily incarnate humans, we each have what seems to us a natural sphere of vision – an area which includes all that we hold dear, all that we consider important, and all that we concern our little selves with.

As we grow, this sphere seems to expand, and includes more and more of what we consider to be important stuff – while leaving the unimportant stuff beyond the circle’s boundaries, often tagged in demeaning ways – loony left, wingnut right, feminazi, ecomentalist. As if tagging these points of view in such a way renders them safely unimportant, or more properly invisible. I can’t see them, therefore they don’t exist. Or exist only to radically insane people. It’s the same thing.

So, I’ve been thinking – how much vision is enough? How much of the trap should we/must we be able to see?

Is it enough to see through religion as manmade structures to entrench and retain power-over?

Is it enough to recognise the ravenous, destructive nature of consumerism?

Enough to see that civilization is eating away at the very ground it is built upon, until eventually we are left like some mythical Kilkenny cat colony, devouring each other?

As the Integral folks know, when we grow into new developmental spaces, we include the vision space of our previous spheres, and include them in our new vista.
It seems a bit of a joke on the Integral practitioners that people undergoing growth – in their terms, no less – get to a point where they have outgrown the Integral worldview itself. But we see it. We transcend and include that paradigm along with all the others.

Is it enough then, to recognise that humans are the disease-carrying vectors of a sickness which threatens the very fabric of life itself? To see the trap that civilisation – with its institutionalised education, infinite capacity for resource consumption and its necessity for keeping its prisoners blind, deaf and dumb –has us all caught in?

The trap, you see, is not just laid for us. It has us. All.

Seeing the trap for what it is can only be a first step; a totter in the direction of the exit. I see the trap. How difficult should it be to understand that we are seemingly requiring endless resources for endless material growth and that we patently don’t have them?

By the definition of life, we cannot have infinite supply of resource. But that is exactly what we are wanting, and – roping in science, technology and human ingenuity – we are praying with our eyes squeezed shut that we will find our way out of this logical dilemma.

Time to open the eyes, people.

Stop that praying. No magical being is coming to our rescue.
As Life, we are It.

And we will cease our existence upon this material plane – taking with us all other life forms and the plane itself – if we don’t cut this denialist crap very, very soon.

Bugger Beltaine..

.../Samhain.

As Hecate noted (and also Lunaea), the Veil is thinning now.

And it's only Alban Eiler.

Maybe it's the turning online of the Large Hadron Collider, with all it's oh-gods-we're-all-gonna-die connotations, or the ongoing collapse of the climate, or the sudden collapse of the worldwide economy (yes, I believe it's come to that, cover up like a cat on a rug though we may) - whatever, there's this huge pervasive feeling of total connection to all that is.

I woke up this morning feeling bathed in universal agape. It's as though I've spread, like an amoeba, throughout the multiverse and can feel every little pull and tug on the web. Or expanded like a light wave, encompassing the All within my skin.

When something collapses, it tends to leave a space into which rushes all sorts of things we never noticed before. Faith in our leadership has collapsed along with geological and financial systems. Faith in our monolithic religions, too, is failing fast. I can feel this. What rushes in to fill the vacuum? It's too early to see its full shape and substance, but it feels like paradigm shift.

And not, as I noted previously, a damn minute too soon.

It's The....

The Large Hadron Collider makes its debut today, amid lawsuits and some measure of fear that the daft physicists are about to kill us all.

Actually, that might be a mercy killing, but nevermind.

I'm sure it's not just me, but that CERN globe looks like an upended wicker basket. Oh well, at least the LHC went to the establishment with the right name.

The idea here, in a nutshell, is to speed up some particles (protons, usually being easiest to get hold of and least difficult to control) to huge speeds by circling them around a track until they're almost at light speed and then -zing!- the daft physicists place an object in their path,* and observe the ensuing carnage.
Usually this means looking at all kinds of subatomic particles flying off from the collision, and presumably learning more about them -like how they can stop world hunger or put the godsdamned ice floes back.

Daft physicists are flocking to CERN at this moment, most of them hoping that they'll be the ones to actually find the UPSAP (Ultimate Patronising SubAtomic Particle) , also known as the Higgs Boson.

Which is, you know, theoretically existent, it's just that we've never actually seen one. How embarrassing.

Anyway guys, if we all disappear in a puff of mini black hole sometime around lunchtime today. it's been good knowing you.

I'll probably go out singing:

" SIX , six SEVEN -the NEIGHbour of the Beast.."

*= Apologies. That's indeed what I wrote this morning. I obviously was not paying sufficient attention-probably due to the proximity of the threat of death-by-blackhole.
The LHC is of course a hadron collider, not a fixed-target accelerator. So daft physicists will not, in fact, be trying to place a stationary object in the path of flying protons. They will instead be attempting to crash two beams of flying protons into each other.
I hope this makes you feel safer.

We Need It All

The Earth is being murdered, by large corporations and the governments who support them. In other words, by civilisation.

It's a fact.
Our planet is losing 30,000 species a year.
There are dioxins in every mother's breast milk.
90 % of fish life has already been wiped out.
There are poisons and pesticides in almost every thing we eat, and in all our water and the air, too.

Tell me this is not murder.

As soon as I had this thought laid out, from end to end, neatly in my mind, I experienced a deep sense of peace. Rather like trying to swallow a bitter pill - and I'm a particularly difficult pill-swallower - once it's down, you feel relief.

I'm looking at the fact that the Earth is being murdered, and I feel ataraxia.

As some very thoughtful commenters on my last post have put forward, rioting in the streets is not solving anything.
But then again I can't help but thinking that not rioting in the streets may be worse. At least these angry young people are dragging the police states of our countries out into the open, where we can all see them.
We need to know that those in power will be ruthless with opposition.

I know, now, where I stand. I know it with a deep, peaceful certainty that precludes flight, dithering and anxiety.

There is work in plenty available for those of us who have come to this conclusion, and we may not win - in fact the odds are against us taking back our planet from the abusers' hands. But I'm willing, for I have to act.
Not to do so, with my new-found surety, would probably kill me - and most certainly will kill countless other human and nonhuman people across the globe.

Think on the fact that, for the first time in our planet's 4 billion-year history, almost half its plant species are facing extinction.

Yes, we're the only truly insane animal on this planet. But that doesn't mean that each of us must hold ourselves accountable.
You may drive a ground-devouring 4X4, but you're not responsible for the manufacture,marketing and sale of the beast. OK, if the corps didn't think they could sell you such a daft machine, they wouldn't make them - but that's a question of mind set. And I believe our mass human mindsets are changing. Not fast enough to stop the murder of our Mother, but changing, indeed.

That reminds me: Can this desolation on the Earthly plane be remedied on one of the others?

There is a small but noticeable growth in the number of folks attempting 'earth healing' on one of the less tangible planes of existence. I'm right there with them, although I don't think this effort will be nearly enough, it's still necessary.

Earth healers, we need you.
Anarchist activists, we need you.
Hackers, we need you.
Tribes and indigenous people who are still connected, we need you.
Those who stand ready to take radical action,violent or peaceful, we really need you.

We need it all.

Pic: found on Alex Pendragon's site.

Moral High Ground

"Hey Bru - do you know what moral high ground is?" I hear one of the Floor Managers asking one of the Support Agents as I walk into work this morning.

Hey, sure. It looks like this:


and this:

and this:


and most certainly like this:


It also continues to look like this.

Yes, I know what the moral high ground is, and what it looks like, and I also know that I'm not standing on it.

If my countryfolk, who are so good at rioting in the streets with their superior numbers, lack of inhibitions and will to act, would just get it together enough to commit direct action against something other than not-enough-pay, I'd be there like a shot.

But the world is burning, genocide is being perpetrated against all the life on Her, and I'm not rioting in the streets.

Whatthefuck is wrong with me?

And you?

Morrigan

A lone Pied Crow cawed to catch my attention as I was hanging out the washing this morning.

Ave Corvus I responded.

In the next moment, five flew overhead, travelling high and scouting for food.

Avete Corvi.

I've been bothered by lots of seemingly solo acts of insanity making the news recently.

There was the man who beheaded a fellow bus passenger in Canada,the UU Church killing dude,to cite just two of them.

Thomas Robert Malthus may well be looking on in sad resignation.

Some of my thinking is obviously informed by my early exposure to Robert Heinlein,that marvellous misogynist storyteller, and in this case I'm particularly thinking of his Year of the Jackpot, a novella which tells the tale of the madness and demise of the human race through the eyes of an American statistician.

It may also have been Heinlein, speaking through the race of Mother Thing beings - or it could well have been Madeleine L'Engle, speaking through one of her wonderful wise women, who labelled human love a tragedy, and then gently asked "What else could it be?".

I'm watching the crowded-lab-rat behaviour of all around me while coping with my own heart breaking wide open. My partner of almost 9 years has broken that partnership, and I find myself unable to trust him in anything at all anymore. When that trust is gone, it's all gone. So I'm living in the same house as a person I once loved and trusted very much - it's hard.

But I'm wading into the dark waters now - buying myself a bike so I'll have my own transport, and decoupling all of my financial affairs from his.

Despite the fact that I've gone through two divorces in my life, this is much more painful.

So, Imbolc, when it comes ( I celebrate at the astronomical midpoint between Solstice and Equinox, which this year falls on the 7th August) will be bittersweet. An opening to Spring, and a loss I really never thought I'd have to face, foolishly.

But I'm breathing through it all, knowing I'll make it through this lesson, too.

Will the human race get through its present harsh schooling? I don't know.

I do know that if we don't lose this deadly civilization, however, we're less than history.

Pic:Last night, the Morrigan appeared in a vision to me.

Thanks to Mahud for the image.

Not Just Sick

I've been taking part in an Endgame reading and discussion group over at the Derrick Jensen Forums. The classes are led by the author himself, so it's a great experience.

We've been going through the chapters about two at a time, and pondering questions which Derrick asks about them. I'm finding my reaction to having the proofs that this society is insane paraded before me is more analytical than when I first read this important book (two books, actually, but Vol 1 is the heavier-hitter from a neophyte point of view).

Don't get me wrong - I'm still angry as all hel that we've allowed this destructive, deathly culture to prosper and dominate. I'm just in a better position to look more closely at the signs of this sick society.

"What are the signs of a sick society?" Dr. Baldwin asks Friday. The last and most telling sign, in Heinlein's opinion, is a loss of good manners. That the society exhibiting such a loss feels that this is a sign of its strength is moreover the sign of a dying society.

I offer Heinlein's view as an example of one person's opinion.

As we read in Endgame, the producer Brian de Palma, upon being criticised for putting females in positions of mortal peril in all his movies, opines that this is merely '..a genre convention..', somewhat akin to using violins when people fall in love.

Let me get this straight Mr. de Palma - chopping up the female body in extremely violent scenes is a genre convention? What sick, leprosy-ridden genre are we talking about here then? Oh yes, snuff flicks.

If the public appetite for such fare does not start you thinking there's something wrong here, well - there's something wrong, here.

So I'm on the highway this morning, predawn, a very good time for thinking, and I'm turning over a couple of examples I've bumped my nose against recently that point to the ill health of this culture.

Firstly, I recall a couple of days ago seeing a beautiful young woman who had called in to our offices. She was, I was told, a "Life Coach".

What the fuck?

We've actually reached the point where we're willing to pay people quite a lot of money to teach us how to live? I don't think I need to elaborate, except to note this - said Life Coach is the mother of 6 offspring.

The other example I had in mind was Viagra. I'm not sure that any but a sick society would give so much hype, so much money, and make quite so much use of an expensive blue pill which allows men to get their erections back.

I suppose there must not be enough unnecessary death and suffering on this globe after all, if we can afford to chase the maintaining of the male organ in a state of uprightness so seriously.

There are many signs that this society is sick. When I turn them over for more than half an hour in my mind I reach the same conclusion every time:

Not just sick, but insane.

Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Pic: Dave Ehlen

After the Deluge

Guy McPherson asks the intriguing question:

What will I call my vocation, in the years ahead?

He means, after the collapse of the oil-dependant, hierarchically entrenched civilization we've all been brought up in.

Well, after we've all stopped cheering, I guess we may need to do something to contribute to society.
Not like I do now - I'm contributing to the economy right now, but not so much to society.

Guy thinks his years of academia might suit him for a position as Teacher, and I say right on.

For myself, however, I wouldn't wish Terri as Teacher on the most depraved (err..deprived) of societies. I have very little patience. If you don't get it, I'm not wasting my time on you. That Maths teacher who was the horror of your high school years who made pets of the mathematical geeks and despised everyone else -that's me, today.

So, no - despite a university education, I won't be going for the slot as local science teacher.

I'm also a pretty damn good coder - of computer programs, that is. But...no more computers.

But I do have an alternative vocation.

Despite my difficulty in reaching and staying in trance when I'm awake, I am nevertheless a shaman. Or a druid,if you prefer, since I descend from european stock.

All right - apprentice shaman, then.

I'm learning from the botanical kingdom, from the birds and beasts, and most of all from the land Herself. Which plants will protect us, which heal us, and which leave us stoned out of our minds, when Big Pharma has crumbled to dust, as it should?

How can we communicate with our landbase in order to feed ourselves?

In dreams I'm starting to learn to be a student.

So, that's what I'll be doing After The Deluge, in between marking out ritual space and compounding incense - what about you?