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