Checking Rabbit Traps

It's 7:30 AM. I'm sitting at my T.V tray in front of the masonry stove fire reading an email. I hear Daniel's (15yrs. old) dresser drawer close behind his closed bedroom door. I sigh. He's up close to an hour earlier than usual. That means my cherished time to be alone reading and writing are about over. He comes out of his room carrying a loaded CO2 handgun dressed to go outside, which is slightly unusual. Usually he comes out grumpy with a handful of school books dressed ca...sually.

"Where are you going with that gun?" I ask.

"I'm going to check my rabbit traps." He says casually.

"Good luck," I say as he heads out the front door.

I'm a happy, proud, and grateful father this morning. Plus I get to read and write in solitude for a few more minutes.

Slowing The Rush To War The Redneck Way

Watching American Sniper brought up a memory for me that I'd like to share. On the morning the trade towers went down my grandfather stopped me on the road outside my great-grandmother's house. He in his pic-up and me in mine. It was a cold, crisp morning with the feel of fall in the air. I was driving home from cutting firewood at my future mother-n-law's house. He on his way home from having coffee with his sister, some brothers, and cousins at ma's house they called it. We got our trucks stopped, our windows rolled down, and after the "did-ya-hear-what-happens?" he said, "Don't you go fight for them. It's not worth giving up your life." We went on with our usual what've-you-got planned-today coversation and went our separate ways.

That's the redneck way of slowing the rush to war. It wasn't cowardice or just another one of grandpa's directives to rebel against. He'd seen his uncles rush off to WWII, cousins to the Korea War, and younger brother to Vietnam. He didn't want to see his eldest grandson rush off to war. It was an older man loving a younger man. It was a grandfather loving his grandson.

The Warrior and American Sniper

I decided to take my 15 year old son to see American Sniper. I don't go to the theatre or watch movies at home very often, so I surprised myself. Movies in general just don't interest me, or maybe it's just I don't feel like I have the time for them. But after listening to a hour long discussion on NPR about the movie, some lines by James Hillman came to me: There is a love and beauty in war that many of us don't want to see. And if we want to oppose war we have to go to war ourselves in our hearts and minds. We must imagine into the hearts of our enemy (All paraphrased).

Then I started second guessing myself, so I thought I'd better consult one of my elders and mentors. I pulled Robert Bly's "Iron John" off the the shelf and opened up to the chapter on Warriorship. This quote sealed it:

"We can all add further details to the account I've given of the decline from warrior to soldier to murderer, but it is important to notice the result. The disciplined warrior, made irrelevant by mechanized war, disdained and abandoned by the high-tech culture, is fading in American men. The fading of the warrior contributes to the collapse of civilized society. A man who cannot defend his own space cannot defend women and children. The poisoned warriors called drug lords prey primarily on kingless, warriorless boys.

"And it all moves so swiftly. The massive butcheries of 1915 [World War I] finish off the disciplined or outward warrior, and then within thirty years, the warriors inside Western men begin to weaken. The double weakening makes us realize how connected the outer world and the inner world are, how serious the events of history are." (Pg. 156, Iron John)

It's an interesting thought that part of the reason civilization is collapsing is because there aren't many warriors around to protect women and children. It brings up the question, at least in our house, what does it mean to be a warrior? I look forward to going to the movie and the discussion afterwards.

 

Music and Schoolwork

Daniel (15yrs. old) says to me, as we're sitting at the kitchen table with books and computers listening to the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, "I bet there aren't many kids that get to do their school work and listen to drug induced music." I laughed, then said, "One time I had a history teacher named Mr. Posselt. He was heavily influenced by the sixties, never married, led guided hunts in Minnesota, lived as a beggar, coached wrestling and football, taught your aunties, uncles, and grandparents, grew up in Antigo, and so on. Every Friday he'd let us move our desks wherever we wanted, shut all the lights off, and we'd listen to drug induced music for the hour. He called it Moments of Enrichment. His number one rule was: No Dope!

"Dad?" he interrupts and asks, "Do you think he'd stand with Scott Walker?" I laughed my ass off.

U.S District Judge Overturns First County In U.S To Ban Fracking And Oil Drilling

The first county in the United States to ban fracking and oil drilling to protect their water had their local law overturned by a U.S District Judge recently. You can read the article HERE. This makes it clear to me the difference between minority and majority rule. As it stands right now we are ruled by a corporate minority. We don't have the right or the power in our communities to stop corporate harms when they are imposed upon us.

If you want to see how mean-spirited some writers can get about Community Rights and some of the leaders involved take a look at this article. Calling Thomas Linzey, Stalinist, self-serving, and narcissistic is just crazy. All for just standing up for communities to have the right to govern themselves. Thomas Jefferson is probably rolling his grave.

Reading, Writing, And Revolution With My Son

I'm once again grateful this morning for the opportunity to sit down at the kitchen table with my teenage son and read to each other Derrick Jensen's "Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution." Given that he's working on writing a novel and generally likes to write I couldn't think of a better book to read at the moment. I would recommend this book be required reading for all 16 year olds. It would also be a part of my adult bookstore and my class on revolution that ...I fantasize about nearly everyday. Hey, a guy could be having much worse fantasies. Anyway, it was a pleasure to read these lines to him:

"Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, 'Power. If I've got power or authority over someone, it's my responsibility to use that only to help them. It's my job to accept and praise them into becoming who they are. But if I see someone misusing power to harm someone else, it's just as much my responsibility to stop them, using whatever means necessary.'"--Derrick Jensen, Pg. 17

A lot of people over the years have criticized Derrick Jensen for advocating violence in his writing. After all he has made the claim that we have to take down civilization if we want a planet for our children to live on. But I consider him to be an "everything on the table" type of guy. He advocates talking openly and honestly about the dire situation we are in (political, economic, ecological, spiritual, psychological) and all of the strategies we can use to improve the situation. I have no problem with that. And if the difficult subjects of sabotage and violence and such come up I have no problem with that either. You don't get anywhere, I think, burying your head in the sand. The things that you're burying your head about come back and bite you, like violence and war. We are born with violence and war in our souls. That's part of our inheritance as human beings when we come into this world. It's archetypal and given to us in the womb. It's part of the cosmos.

That's the truth as I see it right now. I'm glad my son and I can talk openly and honestly about it.

Occupying our Local Governments

This article lays out some of the basic strategies of the Community Right's movement. One of them is to create local laws that end up breaking state and federal laws. As it stands right now state and federal laws create a ceiling in which citizens who wish to improve upon those laws by making better laws at the local level cannot because, well, it's against the law. In other words, state and federal law trump local law. It's governing from the top-down instead of from the bottom-up. That's not how I imagine democracy. And that's why we fought the American Revolution: The central authority (The King) refused "to recognize local laws enacted as an exercise of the people’s right to local self-government."(Mazda)

"We must use our cities and towns to drive upwards against state and federal frameworks of law that protect decision-making authority by the one percent. It means that, in each of the cities where we live, we need to start working together to define the rights we need and then use those municipal structures to obtain them."--Thomas Linzey

Bucky Fuller and Breaking The Law

Buckminster Fuller once said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Under our current system of law you have to break the law to build the new model Fuller is talking about. In other words, they've made sustainability illegal.

The Box of Allowable Activism

This is a very important video describing how We The People can step out of the box of allowable activism, quit participating in what Jane Anne Morris calls our Democracy Theme Park, and stand up for our right to govern ourselves at the local level.

You're The Only Daddy That'll Walk The Line

It's close to 8 P.M. We just got done having dinner. The Beatles are playing through the Bose. Most of the lights are on in the house. And Hayden (5 yrs. old) is performing is usual evening ritual; he's naked, making every sound imaginable, and spinning like a whirling dervish in the middle of the kitchen. As I pass by him on my way to the sink with a handful of dirty dishes he stops in mid-spin, looks up at me, and says, "Dad, pick me up." I'm physically tired. Just like the night before that, and the night before that, back as far as I can remember. I say to him, "you're getting too big to be picked up, H. Pretty soon I won't be doing this anymore." He stands there undeterred staring at me in silence with his arms raised. He won't take no for an answer. So I set the dishes down on the counter, reach over and put each hand under each of his armpits, bend my knees, and heave him up into my arms. He looks at me and says, "You're the only daddy that'll walk the line. I love you." Then he gave me a kiss on the cheek. I smiled, told him I felt the same way, set him down, and he went on spinning.


When the kid has got something to say he says it.

PUSSYWILLOWS!?!?

My phone chimes letting me know that I have a new message. I get the car stopped, put the mail in the box, grab the phone off the dash, and open the message. It says, "PUSSYWILLOWS!?!?"

It's Saturday, so we're both working the mail-route. She's got the smartphone and I've got the measily tracfone. What takes me seconds to type a sentence on the former takes me minutes on the latter. I respond with, "wow." Hoping she doesn't send me another text. A minute later the phone chimes again. I get the car stopped at the next box, reach up on the dash, grab the phone and open the message. It says, "Nature is out of balance...:-)"* I laugh out loud.

If you've seen The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp you'll understand why I laughed. And if you know anything about my wife's sometimes unexpected subtle sense of humor you'd see that it came out in that moment. And that's one reason out of many why I love her.

*The pussywillows usually don't flower around here until some time in March.

Is That Oak?

I get home from work. It's late. I'm tense and tired. It's been a long day. I've got to get a fire going in the masonry stove before we sit down to eat. So I get the doors open to the stove. Turn around and reach over to grab a stick of wood. Standing there is Sophia (2 yrs. old). Before I can ask her for the stick she fires three quick, rhythmic questions off at me:

"Is that oak? Is that oak? Is that oak?"

It sounded like bird song, it was that rhythmic. I smiled proudly knowing that I didn't know what a stick of red oak firewood looked like until I was atleast 18. She's ahead the game in that regard. And damn cute in the process. Needless to say the tension lifted.

Under a Government?

This morning my teenage son and I started out with a question. Do we still imagine ourselves as living under a government? I know that we used to live under a King. He was granted authority to rule from the divine. And our Revolutionary War of Independence was fought to get rid of this idea. And now our government receives its authority to govern not from the divine but from us, the sovereign. But do we still imagine ourselves living under it like we once did under the King? I want to say it doesn't seem that way anymore. The tyrant is no longer the King or The Government but the ideas of the mind perhaps. Perhaps a good move for us is to get clear who the real tyrant is.

I don't know, just rambling. Feel free to add thoughts.

Lucky Pieces of Mud

My teenage son and I have a daily ritual in the winter: We split firewood together (except when I'm called in to deliver mail). He does most of the talking and I do most of the listening while splitting. Over half the time the conversations are focused on myth, philosophy, religion (This is a guy thing, I think) or whatever he's reading at the time. The other day, he broke the silence between us with this statement: "Dad, did you know that all we really are is just lucky pieces of mud that got to sit up." He chuckled. I laughed my ass off.

Thank you Kurt Vonnegut.

Dilemnas and Deer Hunting

I don't know if I should take my rifle or my chainsaw with me out in the woods this morning. Most of the people that I've talked to around here are saying they're seeing little or no deer. The other day walking down the trail I noticed an old, dead red oak that had blown over and pinned down a young white oak. It was still alive but bent over in the shape of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. So instead of sitting on my stand waiting for deer that aren't there I might just save this white oak since it produces more acorns than any other oak tree around here. Hopefully then my kids and their kids won't have to sit around and talk about the deer they aren't seeing because the deer will have something to eat. Plus, running a chainsaw is warmer than sitting on a deer stand when it's only 15 degrees out there.

Dilemnas like are common place when I finally make it out to the woods. Things could get out of control if I spent any significant time out there.

Day 4 of The Hunt

It's day four of the sacred Wisconsin-nine-day-gun-deer-hunt. Yesterday we were blessed with close to 6 inches of fresh tracking snow. My morning will be spent not out in the woods following tracks made in that snow but watching it blow out the chute of our Cub Cadet snowblower as I wrestle it up and down our driveway. By about noon that snow will no longer look like a blessing but a curse. I've done this before, can you tell?

I'm reminded of a statement often repeated by a fellow mail-carrier whenever he's asked how it's going. The carrier, who's been at it for over 40 years, milked cows for just as long and is well into his seventies, will pause, take a breath, and sometimes even put down what he's doing and say, "Oh, it's gotta go." Ever since I first heard him say that I often find myself wondering what the undefinable "it" that has to go is. Especially on days like this where I'd rather be out in the woods hunting but can't be because I have to make sure the driveway is clear, the cars are free of snow and full of gas, so we are ready to deliver mail at a moment's notice (Annie got called in at 6:30 yesterday morning).

But the hunt for the meaning behind the undefinable "it" is going to have to wait for now. Because, well, I hate to say it but "it's" gotta go. I'm off to blow snow.

It's Been Awhile

It's been awhile since I've posted here. I post something on Facebook almost on a daily basis. So if you have been following my blog and would like to see more of what I post just friend me on Facebook. I'd be happy to accept your request.

Thank you,

Curt

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

The Face

Yesterday we were over at my parent's house having Dairy Queen cake to celebrate my sister's birthday and my grandma got to telling me about what they call "bath salts" (I've never heard of them until yesterday). I guess it's a white powder, somewhat similar to Epsom salts, that can be inhaled, injected, snorted, etc. Anyway, she was saying that some users will take it so far that they will try to tear their own face off or remove another's face with their bare hands. Just last week I read a line by the poet Robert Bly that has stuck with me. He said something like "the face is the barrier between the soul and the world". So when we get slapped in the face it's a pretty big violation. I wonder what tearing your face of symbolizes?