When It Finds You

"When death finds you, may it find you alive."--African proverb

Litima

My son's 14 years old. And has friends around the same age. They exhibit, among many other things, a sense of heightened irritability and energy. The body races. The head is ready to explode with plans. It could just be a dragon in the blood. Or is it what Michael Meade and the Gisu of Uganda call Litima?

"To them [the Gisu], Litima is the violent emotion peculiar to the masculine part of things that is the source of quarrels, ruthless competition, possessiveness, power-driveness, and brutality and that is also the source of independence, courage, upstandingness, and emotional force that fuels the process of becoming an individual ... Litima is ambiguous ... it has two sides. The source of independence and high ideals can also be the source of ruthlessness and brutality."--Michael Meade

I find it easier looking at this way compared too seeing it as a thirty-fold increase in testosterone.

Feeling Fucked Up For The First Time

The other day I received Men and The Life of Desire, by James Hillman, Robert Bly and Michael Meade. It's a recording of a men's conference that took place in 1990. I think the men's work is more relevant today than it was back in '90. About halfway through 1st CD I was moved by James Hillman reading this poem by Ehteridge Knight.

Feeling Fucked Up

Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs—

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing

All Learning is Remembering

I learned yesterday in a talk by Michael Meade that "all learning is remembering." What I'm hearing him say is that if you want to learn there has to be some remembering involved. In other words, the knowledge is already there it is just needs to be awakened. It's also interesting to note that in The Story of B Daniel Quinn titled one section The Great Forgetting and followed up later with a section titled The Great Remembering. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that if any schooling program isn't aimed at remembering then all it is doing is putting kids and adults to sleep and it isn't worth the taxpayers money. The Quote below out of The Story of B better illustrates some aspects of this remembering.

"B means to gather the voices of humans all over planet into one voice singing, 'The world must live, the world must live! We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies. The age of The Great Forgetting has ended, and all its lies and delusions have been dispelled. Now we remember who we are. Our kin are not cherubim, seraphim, thrones, principalities, and powers. Our kin are mayflies, lemurs, snakes, eagles, and badgers. The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has abated, so we no longer imagine that Man was ill-made. We no longer imagine that the gods botched their work when it came to us. We no longer think they know how to make every single thing in the whole vast universe except a human being. The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has passed, so we can no longer live as though nothing matters but us. We can no longer believe that suffering is the lot the gods hand in mind for us. We can no longer believe that death is sweet release to our true destiny. We no longer yearn for the nothingness of nirvana. We no longer dream of wearing crowns of gold in the royal court of heaven.'"--Pg. 324, The Story of B

Children and Childhood

The other day a friend of mine sent me Michael Meade's Alchemy of Fire lectures. And in it he mentioned an idea that I've heard repeated by others (Robert Bly, James Hillman) in the men's movement of the late eighties and early nineties: We Americans idealize childhood and hate our children. Perhaps this explains why funding is being cut for the arts and general education in the public sphere, or how we've made sex into a plaything.

The Difference Between Madness and Insanity

"The difference between blessed madness and insanity is: insanity is following the wrong God."--Michael Meade