Vonnegut's Seeds

Sitting in silence drinking coffee with Daniel (17 yrs. old) at the kitchen table. It doesn't last long and I break it. There's a quote by Kurt Vonnegut (below) I'd like to share. In my role as an unschooling father, especially with mom out delivering mail, it's the best I've got to offer so far today. I reach to my right, swipe the smartphone screen and start reading it aloud with little or no effort. We're off to the races. It doesn't take long and Donald Trump walks into the conversation. Soon after that we're talking about uninitiated males. How they, especially young ones, will burn your city down. I make sure to add they'll burn the whole polis down. Then my son adds, "Isn't it interesting that most advertisements directed at men promote youth. If they could figure out a way for us to have a 24 hour erection they'd do it."

Thank you Mr. Vonnegut, wherever you are, for offering the seeds for a morning conversation with my son before I also head off to do mail duties.  

"'Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue,' the monograph went on. 'Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.'"

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade : A Duty-dance with Death (1969)

Green Mama and The Angel of Fire

This morning I decided to put down my reading on Community Rights and pick up a book on The Soul. I Pulled Thomas Moore's "Original Self" off from the shelf and wasn't disappointed.

"What would it be like, I wonder, if we were born in some dramatic spiritual way. Say the soul like a sheet of silky gauze fell down from the heavens in a soft flutter? Would that be preferable to the birth of a human being at the fork in the legs amid blood, excrement, and waters? I don't think so, because we are given life by the green mama as well as the angel of fire, and the green mama doesn't think much about what she does. She loves and gives birth and then takes back to herself everything she has birthed." (Pg. 82)

I think it's interesting that me mentioned the green mama and the angel of fire in the same sentence.

Some Psychological Thoughts on Robin William's Death

The other day, following Robin William's suicide, I was following an internet discussion about it. Of course, religion and how he lived his life was the central theme. And why wouldn't they be? Like sex, death and suicide cannot be explained on any rational level and are therefore religious matters. Anyway, a couple of the posters commented on how he was wicked, no friend of Jesus Christ, a sinner; and had free will and decided to take his own life and will suffer his fate in hell. My god, I thought, how could anyone say such things after someone has ended their life? He's done nothing wrong. He hasn't sinned. It's his life and he can do what he wants with it. His pain is his to suffer. So, on the mail route yesterday the urge to read a postscript that James Hillman wrote at the end of "Suicide and the Soul" presented itself. Having read it before I knew there were some answers to my questions there. This is what I came up with this morning:

"Old church decrees banned suicided bodies from burial in the common graveyard. Evidently, it was believed that suicide severed your body and soul from the soul-body of the community. Suicide not only took your life; it took you out of your inherent attachments with others, cutting the threads with the polis. By taking your own life you were asserting that you were ontologically not a citizen, not a member, as if utterly free of any kind of cosmic participation.

"Yet it is not the act that does the severing. It is the thought that my soul is mine, and so my death belongs only to me. I can do with my death what I choose. Because I can end my life when and how and where I please, I am wholly my own being, utterly self-determined, free of the fundamental constraint that oppresses each human's being--the uncertain certitude of death. No longer am I Death's subject, waiting on its will to pick when and how and of its arrival. I have taken my death out of the hands of Death. Suicide becomes the ultimate empowerment. I am my own redeemer-- 'Death where is thy victory....'[I. Cor. 15:55]-the superbia of individualism.

"This helps account for the common reaction against those who attempt suicide. They are not welcomed with sympathy by family, friends, or clinic, but rather are met with anger and disgust. Before we sympathize with a person's plight or pain that may have occasioned the attempt, we blame; we find ourselves spontaneously annoyed, outraged, condemnatory. I do believe that all too common response points to the enduring strata of the psyche that we all share, call it our archetypal humanity. We are indeed societal animals, as well as having individual destinies. Something insists we belong to a wider soul and not only to ourselves alone." [James Hillman, pg. 197-98, Suicide and The Soul]

If your soul isn't yours alone then perhaps some of their anger at Robin William's suicide comes from the simple fact that he didn't let us in on it before he did it.

Who Ya Gonna Serve?

The final authority in this culture is its technics and not the health of the land base. We serve the former before the latter. It's pretty fucking scary.

“My thesis, to put it bluntly, is that from late Neolithic times in the Near East , right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other [hu]man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable. If I am right, we are now rapidly approaching a point at which, unless we radically alter our present course, our surviving democratic technics will be completely suppressed or supplanted, so that every residual autonomy will be wiped out, or will be permitted only as a playful device of government, like national balloting for already chosen leaders in totalitarian countries.”--Lewis Mumford

Faith Looks for Understanding

"Fides quaerens intellectum." Faith looks for understanding.

I have been thinking about why I support one of the most radical environmental organizations on the planet: Deep Green Resistance. Part of it comes down to the idea that The State will determine how we will resist. DGR and what they stand for exist in reaction to The State's unwillingness to adequately address the environmental horrors that we face as a species. We're literally facing the possibility of going extinct within the next 100 years or so. That means my great-grandchildren could be wiped out. DGR has the best plan that I've seen so far in preventing this from happening

Spring and Desire

Every spring it seems like my desires muliply.

"Desire takes you on and on until you realize that there is nothing in this world that will calm it completely. Then you find deep religion and learn that the ultimate object of desire is God or the divine, the mysterious and unnameable."--Thomas Moore, pg. 123, A Relgion of One's Own.

The Two Monk's Story

"In a famous Zen story two monks are walking together and come to a river. A beautiful woman is standing there trying to figure out how to get across. The older monk offers to help and picks her up and carries her. Later, as the two monks resume their stroll, the younger says, 'I thought we weren't supposed to have contact with women.' The older monk replies, 'I put the woman down long ago, but you're still carrying her.'

"The lesson usually drawn from this story is, do what you have to do and move on. From a typical spiritual point of view, the monk picks up the woman and then lets go. No attachments, no complications, no worries.

"But disturbing reflection can be a good thing. Even inner conflict and worry inspire the need to sort things out. In my interpretation of the story, the young monk who can't stop thinking about the woman would become the teacher. He's more human and has the capacity to carry his experiences for a long time and worry about them. In a way, the story contrasts spirit and soul, and I favor the soulful young man."Thomas Moore, Pg. 115, A Religion of One's Own)

It was a refreshing and a relief to read this excerpt this morning. I've heard this story a few times and I've always looked at it from the spiritual point of view. I'm glad Thomas Moore gave us his perspective from the soul's point of view. I spent a lot of my childhood worrying and full of inner conflict, and to have a licensed psychologist acknowledge that this it isn't a genetice defect or something that needs to be fixed is a huge relief, even as a I approach 40.

Overthrowing The American Government

"I'm not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has." - John Trudell

Walk Like an Elephant

"In one of his insightful talks Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said that in your practice you should walk like an elephant. 'If you can walk slowly, without any idea of gain, then you are already a good Zen student.' There's a mantra for your religion: Walk like an elephant. It means to move at a comfortable pace. No rushing toward a goal. No push to make it all meaningful." Thomas Moore, pg. 43, A Religion of One's Own

All I need to say about this quote is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I think that is why I love baseball so much. A few years back, an elder friend of mine once said, "your a baseball player, the game and its pace fits your character." At that time in my life I hadn't played the game for close to a decade and wasn't coaching. He'd only heard me talk about it and seen me play catch with a weak and wounded arm. I was around 25 at the time and about ten years earlier I had my arm surgically repaired because it would not stay in it's socket anytime I threw a ball. I've never had full strength in my arm since. And ever since then anytime I took the field the feeling of being weak and disabled has always accompanied me. Anyway, the comment confused me because he'd never seen me compete. Nonetheless, the comment has always stuck with me.

This also points to why one of my biggest bitches about paying the bills by means of being a part-time rural letter carrier is that the job is based on speed. You're suppose to try and be back to the office at a certain time no matter what. If an elderly customer wants to sit down with a cup of coffee and chat about their childhood or gossip about a neighbor; or you want to pull over and watch a bear stroll across a field with her cubs, the clock is always ticking, and I despise it.

This also takes me back to a comment that a Facebook friend of mine made about a year or so ago: "It's interesting to me why your work is so far away from what your values are." It's one of those comments, I think, that cuts right through to the bone and arises periodically until the space between the work and the values isn't so vast.

Time to get ready to help out a fellow carrier pedal mail so she can go to a funeral.

Thomas Moore on Soul and Spirit

"Spirit is the element that wants to perfect, purify, and transcend. It directs our attention to the future, the cosmos, and the infinite. It is abundant in education, progress, and vision. It allows us to advance and move upward in all our pursuits. It directs our attention away from ordinary life, the body, and sensual existence. Soul is the opposite: It lies embedded in our struggles and pleasures, in our ordinary circumstances and relationships, and in the emotions and fantasies that lie deep. We feel our soul stir at family gatherings and visits home, in deep friendships and romantic relationships. Comforting dinners and friendly lunches--food in general--makes the soul come alive. People often bring their soul issues to therapy and yet may need better ideas and a vision for their lives."--Thomas Moore, pg. 29, A Religion of One's Own

Your Wicked Good Militia

I have been looking for this quote since I first heard Paul Cienfuegos use it in a talk that he recorded for Alternative radio awhile back.

"We The People must unite if we are to be a power strong enough to get our sovereign rights back. we must not squabble amongst ourselves over stuff like abortions, drugs, guns, welfare, unemployment benefits, men who whistle at women, cultural differences, race, and all that. a united people must include all of us: the homos, the heters, the yuppy, the hippie, the red necks, hairy, shaved, kinky, spiffy, the work boots, the sneakers, the black shiny pumps, the nose rings, the knit shirts, flannel shirts, pink shirts, the fat, the thin, the tall and the short and the beauteous, and the ugly. We need millions. We can’t fight the corporate scheme if we are all hissing and fluffing and puffing and snorting in little isolated groups which blame other little groups for the country’s ills."--Carolyn Chute

I found it HERE.

Barbara Ehrenreich's New Book

Barbara Ehrenreich's new book "Living With A Wild God" has moved up to the top of my reading list. I've listened to an interview and talk with her while delivering mail the past couple of days. I was interested so much in what she had to say that I forgot to deliver some of my customer's packages and had to back track. That's one of the ways I can tell if a thinker has really got my attention. Along with her stories I agreed with almost all of what she had to say. She deplores monotheism; doesn't think God has a care in the world about goodness and morality; thinks we're paying a heavy price for close to erasing all of the animistic rituals from the face of the earth; and how the animistic gods don't requite belief.

What most interested me, though, was her description of one of the mystical experiences she had in her teens (I've heard the psychologist James Hillman say that most of us get closest to God in adolescence and towards the end of our life). I would like to read more of her description of this. She said it was both ecstatic and horrifying at the same time. Plus, to all of you Daniel Quinn fans out there, it sounds very similar to the experience that he had at the monastery in his early twenties, which he described in "Providence."

Another quote that points to the idea that I got from Robert Bly's "Sibling Society" years ago: We are the only culture to have ever colonized ourselves; and the political left are the gatekeepers. Also, I think this is perhaps why environmentalist and author Derrick Jensen has received close to a thousand hateful emails from folks on the left and only a handful from those on the political right. I've also heard Thomas Linzey say that the "progressive" community will not likely be the ones to carry the Community Rights work forward, a whole new constituency will arise and will be responsible for moving it forward.

"Corporations essentially define our economy, out society, our jobs, our educational system, and our leisure time. Our state legislatures once defined corporations as subordinate entities, yet now We The People find every aspect of our lives subordinated to corporate "needs."--Jane Anne Morris, pg.41, Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy

It's because of these corporate "needs" that I deliver so much junk mail and you get so much of it.

Our First Baseball Practice

Last night I spent the evening with 18 young men on the baseball diamond. I'm helping coach my son's 13-14 yr. old Babe Ruth team. Last night was our first practice. A few reflections and observations:

Reflections: This thought kept reoccurring during our practice: "Wow, just think you used to move and throw like that with little or no effort. Now you come to practice with ice packs and ibuprofen set to pace yourself." Ah yes, grief and diminishment. Welcome to middle-age, forty is only a few months away.

Observation: There is an underlying rage in most of those boys. They're extreme in nature. In trying to understand this I turn to Michael Ventura's "Age of Endarkenment:"

"We tend to think of this extremism in the young as rela-
tively new, peculiar to our time. The history of the race
doesn't bear this out. Robert Bly and Michael Meade,
among others, teach that tribal people everywhere
greeted the onset of puberty, especially in males, with
elaborate and excruciating initiations — a practice that
plainly wouldn't have been necessary unless their young
were as extreme as ours. But, unlike us, tribal people
met the extremism of their young (and I'm using "ex-
tremism" as a catch-all word for the intense inner caco-
phony of adolescence) with an equal but focused and
instructive extremism from the adults.

"The tribal adults didn't run from this moment in their
children as we do; they celebrated it. They would as-
sault their adolescents with, quite literally, holy terror;
rituals that had been kept secret from the young till
that moment — a secrecy kept by threat of death, so
important was this "adolescent moment" to the ancients;
rituals that focused upon the young all the light and
darkness of their tribe's collective psyche, all its sense
of mystery, all its questions and all the stories told to
both harbor and answer those questions. Their 'meth-
odology,' if you like, deserves looking at, since these
societies lasted with fair stability for at least 50,000 years.

"The crucial word here is 'focus.' The adults had some-
thing to teach: stories, skills, magic, dances, visions,
rituals. In fact, if these things were not learned well
and completely, the tribe could not survive. But the
adults did not splatter this material all over the young
from the time of their birth, as we do. They focused
and were as selective as possible in what they told and
taught, and when. They waited until their children
reached the intensity of adolescence, and then they
used that very intensity's capacity for absorption, its
hunger, its need to act out, its craving for dark things,
dark knowledge, dark acts, all the qualities we fear
most in our kids - the ancients used these very
qualities as teaching tools.

"Through what the kids craved, they were given what
they needed. Kids of that age crave extremes of ex-
perience — they crave this suddenly and utterly, and
are possessed by their craving. They can't be talked out
of it or conditioned out of it. It's in our genetic coding,
if you like, to crave extremes at that age. (So they must
certainly feel rage if, as in our culture, adults tell them
that these cravings are wrong, disruptive, and/or don't
really exist — which New Agers do as surely as Vic-
torians.) At the same time, these kids need the cosmology
and skills apt for survival in their world. The kids can
create the extremes for themselves — they're quite good
at it; but not the cosmology, not the skills. And
without those elements, given at the proper time
through the dark-energy channels that have suddenly
opened in the young and go clear down to their souls,
the need for extremes is never really satisfied in its pur-
pose, and hence it goes on and on."--Micheal Ventura out of The Age of Endarkenment

We don't give them a working cosmology. Why? We don't have one.

Earth Day 2014

It's Earth Day. And I've been sitting here for a half-n-hour or so trying to figure what I'm going to say about it. This best I can come up with is a quote by a guy that I didn't know existed until yesterday. His name is Henry Giroux. I guess Bill Moyers has interviewed him the past. I heard about him from Derrick Jensen. He'll be doing an interview with him on Resistance Radio in the near future. Anyway, here is the quote:

“It’s hard to imagine life beyond capitalism. It’s easier to imagine the death of the planet than it is to imagine the death of capitalism.”

I struggle with this all the time. Do you?

I want my kids and grandkids to sit down some day and not have to hear about species going extinct, overpopulation, poisoned water, rising cancer rates, mountain tops being blown to pieces, oil spills, climate change, desertification, and the list goes on.

Happy Earth Day...

"Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy" Has Arrived

The other day I received "Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy" and immediately started reading essays out of it. I can't believe this book is out of print. I think it's essential reading for any citizen that wants to fight for democracy. It's clear after reading a few essays that things really do not have to be this way. Anyway, the first essay by Jane Anne Morris is one of the best titles to an essay that I've come across in my short and limited reading life:

"Help! I've Been Colonized And I Can't Get Up..."

Ain't that the truth. It's going to take generations to get this thing turned around...if we do. Right now, as I type this Plum Creek is clear cutting (liquidating) close to 100 acres of red pine plantation next to my neighbors house. And if that isn't horrible enough they have plans on spraying the whole section with herbicides to kill anything that'll compete with the trees (assets) they are going to plant.

To show you how naïve I used to be, when I first read "Ishmael" and quit logging back at the turn of the century, I thought for sure we'd be well beyond this type of forestry practice within a decade. I really thought that enough minds would be changed and more sensible and sustainable ways to cut trees would be common.

On my way out the door to shovel a foot of wet, heavy snow so that I can get out of my driveway. I wonder if this is the last storm of the year.

The Lower Brains Run The Show

I found the internet quote I was looking for yesterday. I'm beginning to think about the only thing the internet is good for is an organizing tool.

"Virtually reality, touted as an alternative reality, really means no reality at all, or rather it means that the neocortex, outflanked and pressured, creates a place it can be in control for forty minutes, while the lower brains [reptilian and paleomammalian] run everything else in the universe.

"The internet is a perfect creation of the sibling society, particularly in its belief that no codes of literary behavior and no standards are called for, and information can come along fruitfully without any filtering. But civilized proceedings cannot proceed without filters." (Robert Bly, Pg. 258, The Sibling Society)

Wrong Book

Yesterday I wrote about my oldest son and how I read him a passage about Thoreau. What I forgot to mention was there was another passage that I was searching for and wanted to read to him but couldn't find. Well, this morning I found it. I couldn't find it because I was looking in the wrong book! I found it while looking for another passage on how the internet has made us even less political than we already were before it became popular. Here's the passage:

"[Thoreau's] aunt, who admired an ethical man named Dr. Chalmers, complained, 'Henry will stand for six hours watching frogs hatch, but he won't read the biography of Dr. Chalmers!' When Thoreau was dying, a neighbor said to him, 'How do you stand with Christ?' Thoreau said, wittily, but truthfully for him, 'A snowstorm is more to me than Christ.'" (Robert Bly, Pg. 56, The Sibling Society)

Another Week

Yesterday, after work, I made up my mind that I was going to return Jung's "Red Book" to the library. It was a day overdue and it's hard to get an extension on inter-library loan books. Plus, I've got plenty of books and magazines around here to read but not enough time to read most of them as it is. But when I got up to the counter to hand the book off to the librarian I changed my mind. I asked her if I could keep it for another week and she didn't think it would be a problem, they just had to do some paperwork on it. Once again, I walked out the library with "The Red Book." This time not feeling excited but slightly obligated and overwhelmed.

This morning, to justify my keeping it, I was determined to randomly open it and just start reading a section or some footnotes. So, I did. The first paragraph that I layed my eyes on was underlined in pen by someone else. It read:

"It is better to be thrown into visible chains than into invisible ones. You can certainly leave Christianity but it does not leave you. Your liberation from it is a delusion. Christ is the way. You can certainly run away, but then you are no longer the way." [Pg. 293]

I think it's noteworthy because this is more or less what I've been getting at in some of my posts after the sermon from my fundamentalist neighbor. I also wrote down another quote that I think is somehow related to telephone sermon:

"Like everything healthy and long-lasting, truth unfortunately adheres more to the middle way, which we unjustly abhor." [pg. 293]

Seeing more blue herons around here. Time to go add to my firewood pile.

The Lorax and Beauty

"A think of beauty is a joy forever"-- John Keats

Believe it or not I first heard this quote while the kids were watching "The Lorax" about a month or so ago. After I wrote it down I'd assumed Dr. Seuss came up with it until I googled it this morning. It looks like he stole it from Keats.

I've heard James Hillman say that beauty is proof that the gods exist. Without it we'd only have theology.

Off to work we go this morning. That wasn't the plan until the phone woke me up at around 10 last night.

A Two-Thousand Year Curse

The other day I posted about the telephone sermon that my firewood cutting, fundamentalist Christian neighbor felt that he needed to give me. I'm a bit worried that come across as anti-Christian or anti-religious or just beyond all of that at times. I don't think I am. I was born and baptized a Christian for gods sakes. I may proclaim that I'm not Christian on the surface but below I am. The great thinker and psychologist James Hillman convinced me of this last year, and he alluded to it here in Lament of the Dead (A conversation about Jung's Red Book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in Jung's work.)

"When I'm talking about the Christians, I'm not only talking about those who are denominationally officially Christian, or go to Church or whatever. We're all Christians. We're all suffering the two-thousand year curse that has been laid on us by what you all like so much, the early Church." (Pg. 218)

Perhaps, I'm just one of the billions suffering from the two-thousand year curse.