You Might Be A Wetiko If..

I've noted, and will continue to note, much on the Wetiko and the Wetiko culture we appear to be living within. But what, when we use that term, do we really mean by it?

In Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack Forbes describes the central characteristic of the Wetiko to be “that he consumes other human beings for profit, that is, he is a cannibal”.

I note the masculine pronoun used by Forbes, and heaven knows I've also gone on about how this culture is essentially patriarchal; but really, Wetiko knows no gender. Nor race, nor class nor religion or lack-of-religion. Much like HIV/AIDS, Wetiko is a disease, as well as a shortened form by which we describe all that is worst in humanity for around the last 6-10 thousand years.

I suppose, then, that the one thing we can say about Wetiko disease is that it does not appear to infect any forms of life apart from humankind. It's just possible that there exist non-3D life forms who are also carriers - we would call them demons, evil spirits, or dark forces I suppose.
I don't know, not having had much to do with those beings. And for today, I'd like to look at what some of the distinguishing marks of Wetiko are in humans.

Pstonie has offered his opinion that "..it all stems from unchecked fear" and I think that he's correct. But what is this all we speak of?

So, in the spirit of those ghastly internet memes we all love to groan over, I'm putting together a list of:

"You Might Be A Wetiko If.."

1) Humans, and only the right kind of humans at that, are the only forms of life you consider worthy of the description "living beings".

2) You believe - consciously or semi-consciously - that the amount of money an individual has access to is a direct measure of their worth.

3) Your actions show that you think the planet is here primarily to support human kind.

4) When it comes right down to it, preservation and/or advantage of yourself (or your kind) trumps those rights in every other living being.

5) You engage in retail therapy.

6) You are a firm believer in physical/mental evolution...for human beings only.

7) You propagate those tiresome dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest and it's-a-jungle-out-there memes as justification for your behaviour.

8) You hold up Richard Dawkins/the President of the United States/the super-successful athlete/the thrusting, confident business (wo)man as people to admire; just because of their worldly "achievements".

9) Television programs and Hollywood offerings have meaning in your life.

10) You believe that advertising in the last 50 years is not an unmitigated heap of shit designed to scare you into being a better consumer.

11) You don't see anything wrong with being labelled a consumer.

I'd like to add to this list, but these are just some ideas off the top of my head, for now.

Anyone got some more? Please feel free to append in the comments!

Pic: Wendigo, another name for Wetiko, by hellsama.

Their Own Personal Pantry

You often hear the cry, in this country, that all the power is still, despite cosmetic changes, in the hands of the old guard - specifically, White males. And I often wonder about that.
Yes, in some cases it seems to be true. Key international corporations are almost inevitably headed by pale y-chromosome carriers. Plus, white owned or managed companies and services are perceived as being more efficient, more profitable...just more.

I suppose this is not really surprising, when you get around to thinking about it. If you get round to thinking about it, in my case. The European branch of humanity certainly seems to be a problem child. It's the Wetiko branch, for a start. And by this I mean it carries the pathology of needing, somehow , to devour not just enough to keep the individual or the tribe alive, but as much of anything it can cram into its maw, for no better reason than it feels compelled to do this.

Yes, a Wetiko is not just - my former post to the contrary - a cannibal. A Wetiko consumes its own kind, yes, but the definition of own kind  here includes most of Life.

I am an omnivore, for example - I consume the flesh of animal people as well as the flesh of plant people. I also take in the substance of mineral people, insect people and atomic people. It's one of the pacts, it seems to me, that you make in becoming incarnate upon the Earth. You agree to take in the substance of many forms of life to sustain your own life - and in turn you agree that you are just as much food as anyone else.

I am food to a variety of organisms which subsist upon my skin, my blood, and my gut. As I am food to them, I also hope that I have not forgotten that I am food to larger organisms - at least potentially. But this is exactly the point that Wetikos do not acknowledge. They don't see that they should be food for anything else, and on the contrary, aim to treat all of the living world as their own personal pantry.

Therefore, it is perhaps not so surprising that most "successful" enterprise in Southern Africa appears to be White owned or controlled. For by the standards of success being used here, the White race - and most particularly the male portion of it - have exactly the form of "intelligence" necessary to empower that kind of success. The "intelligence" of power hierarchies, dominance cultures and violence-driven paradigms.

That's the difference between the Wetiko race - originally mostly Eurasian, I grok - and all the other races of humanity which they have eliminated or absorbed and converted by infecting them with their disease. And it's a fearsome disease, as we can all see these days very clearly. Could it be this pathology which got the Caucasians kicked out of Paradise in the first place?

Pic: Taken from Urycon's Meanderings

Wetikos Among Us

Not having grown up on occupied Turtle Island, and never having read “Columbus and Other Cannibals", I was struggling to come to grips with the context and meaning of the term wetiko, and it was being discussed in the Derrick Jensen forums recently. I felt unable to understand exactly what was meant by this word which was being used with such ease by the good radicals and activists I love to interact with online.

This evening the partner and I popped in at a local shopping square (not quite a mall- the same shops, but built around the parking lot, facing in to it) for the weekend’s groceries. Just recently, this square has been the scene of a couple of grisly incidents: about a month ago, a young woman was raped and murdered with a hammer almost within sight of pub-goers and sports-television addicts. The perpetrator was arrested by a security guard on duty at a townhouse complex. Then a few days ago a very small girl was in the process of being lured into a strange man’s car when her mother noticed her missing from the ghastly industrial ‘play area’ in the square, and caught the abduction before it was effected.

As we walked through the carpark, partner and I were going over these incidents, and I opined that, wherever high numbers of the civilized are packed together, as in this area of endless concrete and steel ‘security complexes’ and shopping centres, there you will always find these civilized humans tearing insanely at each others’ throats.

“Fucking wetikos” was what came out of my mouth next, much to my surprise. At that moment, I realized that I had found the context in which to understand the term in my own locality.

Wetikos are Black, White, Coloured and Indian – the race is unimportant. They live almost on top of each other, as this enables them to have access to what feeds them – the feelings, fears and life-force of other humans. And also, in more than a few cases, their very lives. Wetikos live on others’ pain and suffering. There they are, stalking the paved-over roads beneath the ‘security’ lights. Zombie life forms seeking the stink of terror to keep themselves alive. Cruising down the tarmac in their ludicrously over-powered vehicles, shopping for the tastiest morsels of human life force to be picked off the streets.

Of course, wetikos also consume non-human lives and life-forces. But their distinguishing mark is, it seems to me, a need for sustenance from others of their own species.

Cannibals, indeed.

But are wetikos confined to men abducting little girls or your neighbourhood rapist-murderer? Of course not. They’re just displaying the qualities they’ve absorbed from the over culture. There are wetikos in government, for sure – the power over other people which the title of President gives is a certain source of wetiko nourishment. The ANC Youth League is, it seems to me, composed entirely of wetikos. Rather dim ones, but there you are. The media is another wetiko gathering place. Emiseration really feeds them. Corporate boardrooms are a natural habitat for these creatures, of course, as are golf courses – and here you see them feeding at more of a remove, as they plan together how best to gather the resources of the world to cram into their rapacious maws.

I’m sure that Columbus was a wetiko. He has thousands of incarnations today, under various names: Chevron, Texaco, Monsanto, CocaCola, Pacific Lumber. And he’s returned to Europe and pitched up in Africa in a more monstrous form. Human slavery, starvation, war and misery continues to vitalize him. Will we stop him?

Image: found at Eskimo.com

Awaken In The Dream

Having taken a firm resolve to let the professionals fix our Legendary Car , Warren and I took it down to Safety Brake and Clutch this morning for the fitting of a new master brake cylinder.

We hiked up to the Sandwich Baron and bought a breakfast of cheese and bacon on French rolls, then walked back down to where we had left the car.

The wait was over four hours long - but damn, those people did the job properly!

While waiting I parked myself on a stone storm drain cover under a tree whose species I have yet to pin down - despite it being a pretty common planting in the new North of Joburg - and read chapters out of Tara Sanchez' The Temple of Hekate off my phone. When my eyes tired, I gazed at the people in the streets below me; coming and going and lounging around, people on foot and people behind the wheels of tons of fast-moving metal; people going to work and people hoping to find work. Human people being, in short, human people on a warm and windy Monday morning in Joburg.

I visually followed a couple of clean, neat guys who may - I thought at first - have been looking for work in this area of light industrial businesses. One was dressed in freshly laundered blue overalls, the other looked more like a pirate in his jailing jeans and bandanna. They stopped to hail a passing stranger, which was what drew my attention to them - but what kept my attention on them was my growing suspicion that they were fairly slick criminals casing various joints. I'm not sure even now why I thought this. But they must have felt my gimlet gaze upon them at some stage, for they turned around several times and looked around for the source of their discomfort.

Next I decided to play with the owner of a humongous Hummer vehicle parked in the Absa Bank lot. I waited, wondering what someone who would drive such a gas-guzzling, earth-destroying monster would look like. When he walked out of the bank and flashed his remote unlock, I saw a young-ish man in long shorts and baggy T shirt, his fish white arms and legs proclaiming him to be some kind of software programmer - just like me. I hated him on sight, of course. What did he need that much metal to be driving around in? Where was his consciousness that he apparently needed so many tons of metal alloy and large amounts of petroleum to take him to his local bank? What a tosser.

At more or less that moment, another customer of the brake centre ambled over to what I was rapidly considering to be my tree and sat down upon the stone drain cover. Much too close, I felt - but then I tend to wield a personal space about the size of a European country. I sidled away down the embankment, and then got very irritated when I had to climb past him to get to Warren when the car was ready.

I remember this flood of indignation, irritation and self righteousness. I remember thinking very clearly that all these monkeys were nothing like me. That I was so much better than them that I was practically another species, and that the reason I disliked them so much was that they were demonstrably not like me.

Uh-oh. Wetiko Disease attack.

When we start drawing out the perceived evil in everyone around us - everyone but ourselves, of course - then we are surely caught fast in the Wetiko Disease.

Those hateful ways of those people I'd just been other-ing were my own shadow, evoked and visible and appalling. It took a couple of hours before I could admit that truth to myself.

A couple of hours and a listen to Paul Levy on Red Ice Radio , talking about his new work, Dispelling Wetiko. 

Well, well, well. And are we finally ready to admit that we have a disease of insanity?

Yourself especially, Terri , as you are no different from any of those other humans out there.

This is very important for us all to remember. We are the only people to be actively crafting our suicide, and taking the rest of the living world with us. When Wetiko Disease has us pinned, we certainly do not see it, do not acknowledge it. And this is the pernicious nature of this sickness - we'll be feeling that Everything Is OK as we slide down into extinction, despite what the trees and the birds and our own domestic animal companions have been trying to tell us for the last 6000 years.

Please. Can we not awaken in the dream?

See How It Works?

I love synchronicity.

Having been attracted to The Sync Book originally because of its inclusion of Neil Kramer as one of its contributors, I found myself hooked, in a mild fashion, by Synchromysticism  and went on to purchase The Sync Book 2.

I only managed to start volume 2 yesterday, having been held up by finishing my twelve billionth re-reading of ChapterHouse: Dune , the last in the Dune Series actually written by Frank Herbert.

The opening essay in Sync 2 is a beautiful exposition on the nature of synchronicity by Paul Levy - author of Dispelling Wetiko. I read last night in that wondrous state where the author's words bore like little rotifer torches into your soul, igniting  fierce blazes of comprehension which lift you from the page even as you cannot tear your eyes from it.

This morning, I followed a link in my morning news to Reality Sandwich; an essay by Richard Smoley titled Does Prophecy Work? . Smoley delves into Jungian synchronicity here, so I found myself seriously considering the nature of the Sync once again; and was thereby encouraged (a trait of a good sync) to revisit Levy's Wetiko work.

I shall definitely have to get hold of a copy of this book. And meanwhile, I'm thinking about what the exact characteristics of a Wetiko are. I'm not quite ready to list them here, yet - maybe tomorrow.

The second contribution in Sync 2 is by Robert Perry and puts forward his theory of CMPEs - Conjunctions of Meaningfully Parallel Events - as being those syncs with multiple correspondences, which support the idea that the stream we-are-currently-testing-the-water-of is correct for this time and place. Good syncs affirm us spiritually, in other words.

Perry is the author of An Introduction to A Course In Miracles, which I freely admit I've been avoiding like the plague on account of its title and my perception of it being too similar in content to that awful  The Secret nonsense. I may have to change my opinion. On Perry, not The Secret.

So really, just by reading the first 2 chapters of a particular book, I've been led into a commitment to buy 2 others. I wonder how long my to-read list will have become by the time I've finished Sync 2?

And as an aside, I can really recommend  Alan Abbadessa-Green and anything his new press puts out.

See how it works? Well, sometimes.

Update: Followed a tweet a few minutes ago to an article on personality types. Main modern foundations layed by Jung. As I'm reading, a pop-up announces that I might also like to read Carl Jung's Archetypes.Right, right, I think I've got it, dammit.

A Year In Review

I haven't tried this before - let's see how it goes.

January saw me helping to rescue a Bull Terrier running loose , ranting on about Wetiko and Corporate culture quite a lot, and starting across a bridge in the Night. That last one was a spot-on dream.

In February, traditionally a month I take at least a week's leave from work, I (re)discovered the wonderous plantain, had an unsportingly easy prod at Jacob Zuma, used the road-exchange method to get rid of an old stove (and started cooking on gas again) and established a real communion with the living world. I also declared myself food.

In March, I seemed to have spent a lot of time dreaming, and feeling intense joy. The winding down of the autumnal equinox was evidently very kind to me, this year.

April saw the fairly shocking murder of Eugene Terreblanche , and into May I was, in Samhain style, sorting out the Ancestors I really wanted to connect with truly. Then my friend and colleague Don died, and I found myself putting my Shamanic skills to the real test.


Just before Yule I was cast adrift in Time, wandering the streets of my youth and getting some serious Vipassana in, a practice which has served me well all year.

I started July with intense devotional nights to my matron and was visited by my boy Chippy in the dreamtime. That was bittersweet, all right.

August found me being asked to intercede in a tricky neighbourhood situation, with surprising results!

I claimed Henry Okah as a true son of Africa in the traditional terrorist month of September and in November was invaded by the lovely Scimitar Bills - and a high-flying spider.

I made good decision this month to retire from Facebook and Twitter - a decision I haven't come to regret at all, and I haven't actually deleted my accounts, just mothballed them. Who knows what madness will overtake me in the future, after all?

The country is ending the year on several mixed notes. The one I picked up on was the chicken horror story,  as I though it perfectly encapsulated the Wetiko mindset of the civilised corporate world.

So, with a vivid hypnagogic lesson to round off what has been a pretty dreamy year, we come to the end of 2010. Not much soccer in my worldview, I'm afraid.

And, as with most humans, I'm suddenly prey to a great hoarding and stocking-up instinct, as if the line between this year and the next is some great chasm we will have to leap. So I've got in supplies of food and household necessities for the coming siege - wondering a bit at my own motives - and I'm prepared to batten down the hatches on Friday night, and sit up playing Bach for my canine companions while the neighbourhood erupts in a dionysian frenzy.
See you all on the other side!

Pic: The Wheel of Time by Kelly Art

No Gods, No Masters

Now there's a concept which makes me wrinkle my nose in distaste - mastery.

It's very much a part of the Wetiko culture - a core concept, perhaps.
Mastery over the planet, 'nature', women, children, workers, fields of study, animals,instruments, feelings, thoughts, ideas...yourself. Somehow this culture has embedded in it the principle that a true human exhibits, or at the very least aspires to domination over some subject. Which turns everything into objects.

The only real sin may be thought of as just this - treating others as objects. And that's precisely what thousands of years of patriarchally-driven culture has inculcated into us all - the need to master, to control. To subjugate something or someone else to yourself is, I submit, to miss in large part the point of being Here.

For standing in the flow is not to block it. And Being in the Tao is not to oppose it. it all flows, and you with it. Unless you have bought into the Wetiko culture completely, you need to swim with Life rather than try to command the tides. To allow your entire soul to enter into participation with the mystery and ecstasy of the rush of water, the swirl of waves, the swell and fall of gravity.

Even our gods are not our masters. Hecate Herself is not in charge, even when She overshadows me: She merely has access to more dimensions than this human does at present. But She and I are co-Being. Together, making and shaping and creating and destroying...For all Time.

So no, my fellows. No gods, no masters. No gurus, no saints-in-charge, no over-demons and no control. Just Being, now and always, to the very ends of the Cosmos.

Re-Membering

Parked at a filling station while retrieving the mail from the PO Box, I had one of Those Moments.

Gazing at a Douglas Fir back-dropped by the blue Highveld Winter sky - home to Pied Crows, Indian Mynahs, assorted rodents and myriad unicellular organisms – I am in full possession of the Reason. The reason we keep coming back to this Earth – whether as Crow or Human, wavelet or virus, blades of grass or rambling ivy – the pull and wonder of this place we call Home is irresistible. I am swept by a feeling of deep and rooted Love, coming from me, coming from the tree, and radiating from the sky. It’s all around again, and my sometime anger and angst at being submerged in a Wetiko culture is washed away.

I’ll never realize that sweet logic, that reason for being, while my eyes are enmeshed with petrol pumps. Or office towers. Or multi-unit “contemporary living” high security complexes. My soul blanches when I engage with such. But the Douglas Fir – tall, wispily, fuzzily firm in the still Winter air, a foreign national of unknown provenance and unknowable agenda, reminds me like a hammer blow to the thorax that this is what Life means, this is the reason we draw breath as humans, crows or bacteria. This is it.

To try to draw meaning from the jagged outlines of components of the Machine is a short-lived, at best, and entirely futile, most often, enterprise. The Machine can confer no reason, no logos, no Hah! of recognition.

A little later, I was engaged in the pastime of foraging for my food, Machine Style.
A brightly lit supermarket (pardon me –hyper market. Bigger must be better) funnels us into its maw, shoves a trolley into our hands, and, moving to the beat of a thousand million pistons, we march in lockstep with every other human who has come here to ‘do the monthly groceries’.

Cunningly-wrought plastic packaging vies on the shelves for my attention. Buy Me! Me! Me! While each competitor for my purchase offers no real information as to why it should be the Chosen Product, rather than its equally garish shelf-neighbour. Hydrogenised, over-salted, artificially coloured processed Durham Wheat proclaims itself “Short Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce”: and you and I are really none the wiser, nutritionally or spiritually. For these tins, boxes and plastic packages cannot, however hard their manufacturers try, actually communicate to you anything of worth. Whereas the Rocket in my garden has plenty to say, these plasticized regurgitations of the soulless Machine cannot offer a single word. Despite the ugly, ambush-the-eyesight nature of their exterior coatings. Not a damn word.

We’ve had our ability to communicate with the interlocking web of life taken away from us. Even if we wanted to, very very few of us could raise sufficient food on the land we inhabit to sustain us. Or even know where to begin. For we’ve had the ability to live in mesh with the land removed from us, as well. By thousands of years of ever-more aggressive agriculture, and a culture which ensures that we are dependant our whole lives upon the structure of the Machine.

Go to school, or you’ll never amount to anything. Meaning: you’ll never get anyone to pay you enough money to exchange for vital foodstuffs. Go to Grammar School. Go to University, or you’ll never learn enough Machine Code to be Successful. As Wetiko culture counts successful, that means being able to persuade someone to pay you enough of this money stuff that you can show off your ‘wealth’ and announce to the culture that you have ‘arrived’.

The culture ensures- by sending you to school, by having assimilated your parents before you were even born – that your choice is removed, that you have an entirely one-eyed view of the world, and that you never develop the longing (let alone the ability) to remake your connection with Momma Matrix, the true home of all life.
If, as has happened to me, you should begin to awaken to the theft of your being, your birthright, your natural knowledge and functions at a point somewhat more than halfway through your life, you will find that your ability to exist independently of the Machine has been effectively amputated.
Only the throbbing of the struck-off limbs might –just maybe – remind you of a time when you were Whole.

Pic: Found here

Back To Work

Am I looking forward to going back to work tomorrow?

You bet I am.

The last 3 months have been very productive, in terms of getting house, garden and bakkie sorted out, but more important was the opportunity to rest and refresh my soul.

For the last few years at Osiris traumatised me more than I was aware of. It was not so much that I suffered from bad management in the Fraud department - indeed, I was treated relatively very well - but more the everyday abuse of my colleagues at the hands of one immature and control-ridden Wetiko manager which bit deep and left me tired and angry.

I've never, in 30 years in the workplace, seen such abuse and I don't expect to ever witness it firsthand again. I have learnt much from that close contact with mundane evil - which is, I believe, the point of everything we experience on this plane.

Duality. Good and Evil. Hierarchical forms in action. Materialism, lack of consciousness and the workings of the Wetiko culture.The reasons we keep on showing up down here, eon in, eon out. And the way Love, of course, includes and transcends it all.

On Monday I'm starting at NetCare as a Data Analyst and I'm happy about it, although since it has been over 11 years since I last started as the new girl, it's going to be an interesting day, I'll be bound.

And all the while, I haven't given up hope that my erstwhile colleagues will -each and every one - find their own way out of that particular living hell.

Pic: from Peoples Drawing People

Buying Our Way

I see people all the time who think that they can buy their way out of their own personal boredom, anguish, or sense of self-worthlessness.

Most of these people, of course, are perfectly correct to feel unworthy. They are blank-brained idiots who see something which makes them go ahh and want to buy it, to appease their inherent need for -what? - love, gratification,power?

I am so disgusted I can’t begin to explain the sense of loathing I feel towards such people.

And yet, they are all around me. And all around you, too.
They are the marching morons, the zombie population who are driving this machine called civilization.

It’s an appalling selfishness which informs this – I like it, I’ll buy it – mentality.

Tell you what – give me the choice of bombing the hell out of the big corporations and bombing the hel out of these small, brainless, vain ego-centric individuals, and I’ll choose the murder of the millions every time.
This planet, and all life on it, truly does not need their vacuous stupidity.

I wrote that about three hours ago, and due to the fact that I’m at work, couldn’t find time to post it on the blog. It was sparked by a woman – a woman, by all that’s holy! – who thinks that she can buy a wild creature just because it’s cute.

You cannot buy the force which moves the stars and binds the molecules. You cannot indulge in commerce with the root of all that’s sacred. You cannot…arrrgh.

I’m displaying it now as an example of my own Rage.

But oh hel I needed that lesson.

Needed to know that, however lulled into semi-somnolence I might be on occasion, I am still very much embedded in the Wetiko Culture.

The culture which sees the All as commodity, to be bought, sold, and above all consumed.

The Cannibal culture which not only eats its young, but all Life, including itself .
Let me never forget that.

And in the meantime, let me try to not be eternally surprised when I rub the sleep from my eyes and find that I’m surrounded by fatuous evil.

Release Henry Okah

Yes, I'm on this topic again.

Recently, Henry Okah was moved to a maximum security prison in Joburg - presumably the locally-named Sun City - after a raid on his cell produced eight cellphones, with chargers and airtime, and a map.

The tip off was given by one Colonel Zeeman who, interestingly, is also one of the investigating officers in Okah's case, and is a member of the Hawks. This is pretty damed fishy, in my opinion.

However, suppose Henry Okah did have those cellphones in his possession. This is certainly against the law as applied to awaiting-trial prisoners. Yet I would submit that Okah is detained at the State's leisure for maybe being the leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta who maybe committed the Abujah bombings last year. That last point, by the way, is far from being a proven fact.

I refer the reader to the recent raid by the police on the offices of the Public Protector, and the incarceration without trial of journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika in August last year, apparently for being a bloody nuisance to the criminals in power, and you can easily see that the regime change in South Africa has been more of a changing of the guard from the old bastards to the new ones. Not much else.

There is talk that maybe MEND wish to shut down oil production in the Niger Delta, and I don't have to tell you what a happy occasion that would be, both for the human and the non-human residents of that area.

Release Henry Okah, you Wetiko dogs.

Free Again

My weird-ometer has been unusually sensitive these last couple of days: in common, I would guess, with most peoples' sense of the unusual at this time.

I went through a short period yesterday where it seemed I was stuck in a matrix glitch. I would pick up a shiny pebble - fallen off my beautifully wrapped leaving present - and put it away, only to return to the spot ten minutes later and find another pebble lying there. I would eat up half a biscuit laying forlorn on a plate, only to come back a little later to the same half-biscuit confronting me accusingly.

I stepped out into the back yard last night just in time to witness two great flaming orbs of orange-red sailing north-to-south in the eastern quadrant of the overcast sky. I'd never seen anything even faintly like them before, and I stood with my mouth hanging open, too stunned to get a camera. Although I did call Warren to see them.

Just before bed, I came over extremely dizzy.

So that appears to be that for the end-of-the-world-consciousness-shift for this baktun, anyway.

There's nothing here that cannot be explained in rational, 3D terms.

But this morning, preparing the ritual space for new grass seed, I trundled up the driveway hefting a rake, following Scylla and Taranis, in Indian file also walking the car-wheel rut of nine years' usage, who were in turn following Warren who was pushing a wheelbarrow.

And I snapped that picture in my mind, preserved forever. The beings I love, tending the land, in a time-between-times, free at last of the self-imposed shackles of Wetiko bondage.

Pic: Thanks to dreammclelland "Time Between Times"

Special

Well, that was special.

Yesterday, the car having been fixed of its oil leak by Warren - which necessitated the timing belt being taken off and put back on, never an easy job - wouldn't start. Warren called in our friend Hennie, who's very good with machines, and between them they had the problem sorted within a few hours.
Apart from the oil leak, which had reappeared during the fixing.
Off to the spares shop we go, in Hennie's car, to purchase a new oil meter. Installed, sorted. Waved goodbye and thanks to Hennie, who has problems of his own to sort out.
By now it was after midday, and we were just getting started on our usual work days. We took the normal route along Leslie to William Nicol, where the car stalled on an uphill and refused to budge.
We reversed free-wheeling back down Leslie, as we were seriously blocking traffic and really annoying some daft types in very expensive cars, who overtook us with roars of their engines.
We backed eventually into the broad car-entrance to a couple of complexes built side-by-side, and called Hennie.
We'd probably flooded the engine, in his opinion. So we took a walk down the road a way to the Douglasdale Shopping Centre, to buy bread and cigarettes and look for a spark plug spanner, which we had neglected to pack into the car.
 Two hours later, the car is still sitting outside the complexes, the spark plugs have all been examined and cleaned, the presumably flooded engine now viable once more. We should have been able to start out again.
Only we couldn't, as by now you'll have guessed. There was spark and we had a quarter tank of fuel, but no running engine.
Back to the shopping centre, where a petrol attendant at one of the garages gave us the number of a mechanic who lived nearby. (No, don't ask me why petrol stations have no mechanics or workshops - that's so yesterday, and unproductive in the Wetiko scheme of things).
When he examined the engine, the local mechanic pronounced our fuel pump inoperative - which explained a lot of things that morning.
By now it was mid afternoon, and a new petrol pump could be purchased at the spares shop - about ten kilometres away. Hennie was involved in his own problems, and we had no recourse but to walk.
The going was rough, particularly considering the recent rains had washed huge amounts of suburban debris onto what we laughingly call our pavements. Actually, pavements don't exist in suburbia more often than not : if you're so lower-class as to be walking, you can bloody well walk in the road much of the time.
The last couple of kilometres of our journey were short-cut by our arrival at a major road, where we opted for a taxi ride, to get to the spares shop before it closed.
Surprisingly, I'd never ridden a 'common' taxi before - most of them are extremely scary, from the outside anyway, and - well - white folks don't often make use of them. Good excuse,huh?
We found a small knot of people standing by the road, ascertained from them that they were also headed in our direction, and caught the appropriate taxi with them. This, if you're not a South African, is more complicated than it sounds. It requires a knowledge that middle-class office workers just don't have, often.
So we arrived at the spares shop before closing, after a really pleasant ride in a clean and quiet taxi, squashed among many other people, who all politely made room for the mlungus aboard their commute.
Petrol pump purchased. And a couple of Cokes, for the walk home.
Arriving home just before seven, the dogs were really glad, although puzzled, to see us arriving on foot. But you know, your non-human animal companions never question how you got there or where you've been - they just make a huge fuss of you when you are there.
Warren calls his manager, who is surprised that he didn't ask one of the mobile supervisors for a tow. Well, I wouldn't have known to ask that, either. So a couple of hours later still, car is towed back home,and we get some sleep.
The walk, though, was an opportunity to see things easily missed as we whizz about in this car culture. A Glossy Starling who sits still long enough for me to enter its birdy mind; several mafioso Sparrows struggling in the dust and refuse; a real, live Quercus Alba where one would least expect to see one. And the humans of course - this is Africa - full of good cheer and greetings....

...This morning, Warren is installing the new petrol pump. We'll see from here.
It's certainly never boring in this life. Frustrating, painful, horrific even. Never boring.

Pic: Quercus Alba - the White Oak

The Machine In Action

I sometimes wonder why I even open up the page at News 24.
The standard of original journalism - when it occurs at all - is low, sometimes only being beaten in the godsawful stakes by the comments section.

But seriously, people - what have we come to?
Over 34000 applicants for 90 trainee posts at the Traffic Department.

Of those, over 15000 got through to the next qualifying round - where 6 died of heat and exhaustion and one committed suicide following a physical fitness test.

I speak from experience when I say that being penniless, homeless, and hungry messes with your mind all right.

When you're in such a place, the need for survival is the over riding one. And you don’t really stop to think how you could be doing anything differently - you just play by the rules embedded in the culture.

Get a job. Earn some money. Buy the food/shelter/happiness you are being denied.

But there's something very, very screwed up with that when thousands apply for the most menial of jobs - and some of them die trying for that golden ring, which in the end doesn't even deliver on its nebulous promise.

There's a whole lot wrong when we don't even question how this system came to be the life-destroying, soul-shredding monster that it is.

The machinery of Wetiko culture, stomping, chewing up and spitting out the species which brought it into existence.

Wetiko Means Cannibal

This post brought to you courtesy of a word-byte conversation I've been having with my son on Facebook.

Here's a police officer punching a teen aged girl in the face. Her crime? Jaywalking.

And here is a police officer shooting a dog dead, as the dog wags his tail furiously at the officer. The dog's crime? Resisting arrest, apparently.

I get so angry I could bite heads off, and so sad I could just put my head in my hands and cry, and cry, and cry.

The pathologies of civilisation are both acute and widespread, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Or is there?

Last night, I suffered a nightmare. A large, threatening man was trying to get me to do something I didn't want to - drive a passenger bus. My son, Shevek, was to be tortured if I did not comply. In the dream, I felt all the anger, all the rage, which witnessing things like those last 2 videos normally brings on. I flung myself at this huge man - who, now that I think about it, was backed by several equally-threatening members of his family - and tried to kick, gouge and tear at him. It didn't have much effect.

And I knew, in this dream, that the man was supported by and representative of a worldwide religion.

My son and I hatched a plan to put an end to the man. Several other people joined in....and this is where the dream ended.

I know that the human animal is not the only one who kills and maims when it's not hungry or threatened - goodness knows I've seen my dogs take down birds often enough, plus I've seen lions literally 'playing with their food'.  I know that life necessitates death, and that we kill for various reasons.

But what is needling me here is the widespread commonality of such behaviour. Give a human a license to kill in his society, and more and more often, he will. And it's becoming so damned indiscriminate.

As if we're lashing out at something we can't quite see.

What plan have we got, people, to put an end to this vast pathology of civilised humanity? This sickness which devours planet and animals,plants and elements- all living things, and shits the waste out upon its own living room floor: what action shall we take to cure it?

Or shall we, as I thought to myself early this morning - dressing in the cold predawn because someone had tried to dig up the electrical cabling to sell it, again - shall we just see an end to it, in the finality of mass genocide?

Fish And Water

It's International Women's Day and here in South Africa, a woman is killed by her intimate partner every 8 hours. 

It's International Women's Day, and female scientists are still earning considerably less than their male peers.

It's International Women's Day, and women are being killed as "Witches" in higher numbers than ever before. Never mind the "Burning Times". We have a real, present holocaust on our hands here.

The reasons? Doubtless they are many, or could be presented as many by people far more qualified than I in social science matters. But, for my own curiosity, I have a one-word catchall answer to the why of it: the Patriarchy. You're stewing in it, and have been for thousands of years, so that you often don't see it for what it is.

The patriarchy: that ignoble structure which has its roots deep in the big monotheistic religions of today, as well as in agriculture, civilization and city-building, and of course the Wetiko disease.

The patriarchy: whose reign degrades and hurts men as well as simply killing women.

It's not going away any time soon. Not so long as most of us are as unaware of it as a fish is of water.

Never Mind The Reasons

Hey, how many of us remember growing crystals in a saucer in school?

You would be given a bunch of copper sulphate, or something, and if you made up a solution of this with a little water - and made the solution up just right - you could stick a piece of string into it and grow crystals all along it. Magic.
The key of course was the solution. It had to be super saturated. And then, anything of large enough dimension which was placed into it would act as a flash-point for all those copper sulphate molecules hanging around.

I guess we have something like that in many, if not most, places in the civilized world today.

Take a population of humans, and divide them so that some - a very small number - are super rich and the rest either dirt poor or just getting by. Increase this division so that the super rich get even richer, and end up controlling most of the resources that the entire human race needs to live. The pool of poor people increases, and those who were just getting by become poor, too.

Subject all humans to the machinations of a marketing and media organism which has as its one objective hypnotising people into believing that owning material goods equals power and worth, while at the same time making sure that the poor do not ever have enough nutritious food to eat - substitute junk food made from real junk, and watch those minds fail to grow and thrive.

Make sure that your media/marketing machine keeps the carrot of aspiration dangling- allow the people to fixate on the possibility of becoming themselves one of the elite.
Add to this mix a class drawn almost exclusively from the non-elite whose function is to protect the power, wealth and property of the elite. They may not think this is what they're doing - after all, they're humans just like us, trying to stay afloat - but that's what it comes down to: the police in every nation are the guard dogs for the property and privilege of the rich. No wonder police men and women everywhere are so stressed and conflicted that they often end up shooting someone. And so provide the catalyst for the crystals.

Watching the world catch fire one city at a time is not fun. My son is living in England, but I feel no fear for him. I'm wondering why he isn't out on the streets himself actually. And moaning about criminals who try to rob my loved ones is not helpful to anyone.

I feel no fear for myself, either. It's happening, as it was bound to happen, and my chief feeling is that yes, it's past time that this Wetiko civilization was put to the flames. It won't stop the destruction of the Earth and much of its biological life, however.

The people rioting in Egypt and Lybia and London and Athens are huge allies to the planet.
Never mind the reasons.

And I - and you, too - are incredibly powerful, with the sort of power never dreamed of in such trash as The Secret and only envisioned by the elite themselves in their darkest nightmares.
Go, humans.

Closure

On New Year's Eve of 2008, RSS Security shot and killed three of our canine companions - Charybdys, Chippie and Bart - under what we considered to be highly suspicious circumstances, and then proceeded to treat our concerns as if they were entirely inconsequential.

Warren and I set out to provide them with some consequences, and yesterday that road seemed to have come to an end at last.

We were taking them to the High Court, aided by an attorney and an advocate.
Our last attendance in Pretoria was just over a year ago, when the case was postponed as the defendants needed to change their defense. Our legal team told us there would be another date in about a year.

So we waited, and, hearing nothing from either Stef Guldenpfennig the advocate or Ferdi the attorney, assumed that everything was chugging along just as it should.

Then, three weeks ago, we get an email from another attorney, saying that our previous guy had left the company, and that the trial date was set for 2nd October. This was  Thipe Mothle, of Mothle, Jooma, Sabdia who seems to be leading a bit of a double life - which I commented on earlier. (He appears to be both Thipe Mothle and Peter Nyane.)

( I must add that the email correspondence, coming as it did from a presumably expensively educated attorney, left so much to be desired in the usage of English grammar and spelling that I wondered at the legitimacy of the correspondence.)

The email also inquired about payment. No problem. I have to do large money transfers through my bank branch, so, being busy at work, we asked them to wait until Saturday, two days from then.

The next day we received another email telling us that Stef the advocate had withdrawn from the case, after (quote) "you made numerous promises to pay". The attorneys were thus withdrawing as well.

Well I'll be damned, I thought. We go for almost a year hearing nothing and therefore trusting everything is OK, then out of the blue up pop these ill-educated people claiming we were not honouring our promises.
I did see red, briefly.

This left us not enough time to secure another attorney and advocate.So yesterday Warren and I went along to the offices of the attorney for the defense, and we settled.

Let me just say here that I have never, in a relatively long life so far, been the recipient of quite such dishonourable behaviour. Advocate Guldenpfennig and Thipe Mothle should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Yet I doubt that they are. Hard as it is to realise, there are people in this world who fit the bill of conscienceless parasites pretty damned well. After this little demonstration of bare-faced lying, I wondered for a while how either of them could actually sleep at night. And then I realised that they probably slept pretty well, thank you. For they seem to have lost their moral compass entirely when they contracted this disease called Wetiko syndrome.

But on the closure front, although Warren has been enjoined not to discuss the matter, no such stricture is binding upon me. So I can say that we did succeed in hitting RSS Security where it hurt; their market-share in this neck of the woods has noticeably dwindled (to just about nothing in our suburb), plus they were forced to spend money on advocates and attorneys - just as we were, conceded - something which I guarantee has hurt them more than it has hurt us.

 This was never about money. And, if I had the choice, I would certainly do it all - extravagant expenditure included - over again.

Rest well, my beloved friends.You have been avenged.

Pic: Chippy and Charybdys, Lughnasadh Eve 2008

Take, Eat...

Yes, the dominant culture really does turn the living world into dead things.

And yes, I eat living things, too.

But there is, you know, a difference between a living being eating other living beings as part of being a living being, and a culture taking living beings and turning them into dead objects for nothing more essential than bodily adornment, or a means of getting somewhere really fast, or plastic goodies to keep cutlery in.

And, in that vein, I really don't care very much what another living being eats to sustain hir status as a living being, as long as that's what the eating is for, and not to address some shadow issue s/he had with hir parents twenty years ago.

And so, considering the pie-ing of Lierre Keith by a bunch of vegans, apparently in a fit of revenge for her having written  The Vegetarian Myth , last year at an Anarchist Book Fair, I am deeply saddened to have come across this website.

Not because it critises Lierre's book - that's a legitimate part of open and honest dialogue - but because of some of the stances it takes on the plant realm.

In the section Plant Sentience we read that "While it is true that plants have fascinating, complex stimulus feedback systems, modern science knows that these are not sufficient to give rise to consciousness.."  That makes me very, very sad, as you can imagine if you've been following along in my plant communication series.
 
Even if you haven't been following my particular adventures, how hard is it to accept that the whole darned world is engaged in sacred communion with itself - eating and being eaten, killing and dying, absorbing food and being food?

This arbitrary drawing of a line in the sand, and declaring one side of it to be populated by conscious beings, and the other not, is appropriate only to the science of the Wetiko culture - which sees life not as a self-sustaining web, circle or sphere, but as a domain to be dominated and dissected, and turned into gold and diamond rings and toy guns for little boys.

Adrift in an Insane Culture

Warning - what follows is not going to sound good.

I feel I must say it, however, if only as a record for the future, perhaps helping to explain when and how I finally started to lose it with the civilised people around me.
I've never been particularly good at fitting in to the society I found myself born into, but that was mostly explained to me by the adults in charge of my education and conditioning as an unavoidable by-product of being so highly intelligent.

At a measured IQ of over 150 - later in my young adulthood it hit 170-175 quite regularly - I've normally had a problem understanding why something which was quite obvious to me wasn't even on the radar of most folks around me.

For a while I pandered to this sense of superiority by studying Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy - the 'hardest' sciences I could find, which seemed to give me some kind of pleasure and even more of an explanation for being different. Eventually, however, as I became sensitised to the actual, real world in which I found myself - the world of Life everywhere, and much of it nonhuman - and as I finally began to grow up a bit, I noticed that this feeling of not fitting in had not gone away. It was more pronounced than ever.

And so I find myself resident in a country with an average IQ of just 70, surrounded front and back and on all sides with humans who seem to me the epitome of insanity - if insanity can be imagined as that quality of not giving a shit about the future, the matrix which sustains you, and the nonhuman intelligences all around one.

I'm having a pity party right now, yes. I'll snap out of it in due time, I know. But right now I feel my strangeness very keenly, and the only explanation I can put upon it is that I'm still diverging widely from the culture of my birth.
The Wetiko culture, the culture of the dangerously insane, the culture of the zombie.