Mouse Magic

Last night, I'm sitting at the table reading the newspaper and I hear a 4 year old boy's cry making its way across the yard to the door. Hayden opens the front and heads straight for my arms. I ask what's wrong as he wails away. "Mom let the mouse go!"

We have a medium-sized steel garbage can for storing our black sunflower seed in. It sits near the back door of the old, abandon farm house we used to live in before we upgraded to cordwood. Yesterday, somebody didn't tighten the lid on it. When Annie and the kids when to refill the birdfeeder there was a mouse waiting for them at the bottom of the nearly empty can. With the help of their hands the mouse got the opportunity to run circles around the bottom of the can for a few minutes. Annie then went to pick it up so she could give the kids a closer look. It had different ideas. As soon as the mouse made contact with her hand it scampered up her arm and onto her shoulder, across to Sophia's hand which was touching her shoulder, and down her back to her pant leg and was gone in a flash. Not what Hayden had in mind.

Annie decided to leave the lid off the can for another night in an attempt to recreate the experience. This morning, while filling the dog food dish, I looked down at the can and noticed two beady, black eyes looking up at me.

I gave Hayden the news upon awakening. A few minutes later I see a naked boy running across the yard with mittens on to handle a mouse. It's like Christmas morning all over again without the snow and presents.

Goosebumps and Nixon

If something moves me I usually get goose bumps all over my body. Chris Hedges did this to me the other day in the few comments he made about Richard Nixon. He said that tricky Dick was our last liberal President. Why? That was the last time there was a liberal class willing and strong enough to push a President into signing liberal-minded legislation. He also mentioned that Nixon was frightened to death that the 50,000 or so protestors marching outside the White House in the name of civil rights were going to come through the walls and get him. That's according to Henry Kissinger's memoirs.

Mediocre people usually seek power. It's up to us to keep them in check. That's democracy.

30 Hours of Podcasts

I downloaded close to 30 hours of author podcasts from The Philadelphia Free Library, and listened to all of them in the car while delivering mail last week. Out of all of them two authors and what they had to say stick in my mind. First, I'll paraphrase Alice Walker: Hope to sin only in the service to waking up. Sin is part of the discipline of who we become. There is no such thing as living without it. Secondly, Chris Hedges said that if we allow unfettered and unregulated capitalism to continue we'll be extinct as a species within a 100 years. The elites, he said, are preparing for the instability that every empire in its endgame goes through. That's part of the reason why they are collecting massive amounts of information about us and storing it in a building in Utah. He also said that theologists call the systems that our corporate state has created "systems of death." I like that term. I'm becoming more and more a fan of Chris Hedges. He's just as dark and doesn't sugar-coat a thing about the predicament we've got ourselves into, much like Derrick Jensen.

In House Exchange Between Wife and I

My wife and I had one of our typical exchanges this morning. While reading this morning I ran across some really good writing about James Hillman. It expressed well the experience that I've had reading Hillman's work. I liked the section so much, and noticed there was a brief silence in the crying and chattering children, that I thought I'd better take the opportunity to read it to her. Like usual, afterwards she shook her head and wondered what the hell that had to do with anything.

"What?" I asked.

She said, "It doesn't really resonate for me because his work hasn't had an impact on me like it has you."

"I know." I said, "But it was so good that I had to read it out loud to you."

"That's fine. I don't mind listening. It just doesn't have the same affect on me as it does you," she said.

Then I said to her, "You know, it just occured to me that I used to do this exact same thing with a girlfriend that I had when I was 14. We talked alot on the phone. And there were times where I'd sit feeling the same way I do this morning blabbering on about some fascinating idea that someone had talked to me about. I wasn't talking about books or other's writing back then because I didn't read books. But it's the same exact thing but in a slightly different form."

"Ha!" she said with a smile, " I guess some things just never change."

"Guess not."

Here is the writing that inspired this post:

"By the way, a nonromantic friend or partner, too, can be a muse. I've already told the story of how James Hillman entered my imagination, taking up room and board there for decades, giving rise to much creative work. He has done the same for many other people because of the seminal quality of his thoughts and writings. You read him and the seeds get planted in the soil of your mind and sprout in good time. Then you don't know for sure if the ideas are yours or his. He wrote about people starting out in childhood like an acorn destined to be an oak, but he himself was an acorn. You have to read him with care, lest you lose yourself in his brilliance.

"Hillman's anima, his soul, his aesthetic sense mixed with his sharp ideas, the spark of imagination within him, revealed the nature of his muse. He inspired with his imagination and with the world he loved. On the other hand, to me Hillman was a muse taking on the disguise of a friend." ( Thomas Moore, pg. 193, A Religion of One's Own)

It's Been Awhile

I did something last night that I haven't done in probably close to 20 years: I ate a Big Mac. Afterwards my wife looked over at me from the driver's seat and jokingly asked: "Do you feel violated?" I thought I could just go with the flow and perhaps even rise above it. But after a night's worth of indigestion and reflection I can honestly say that it'll probably be another 20 years before it happens again.

An Unschooling Reflection

It was my now 14 year old son's first day of first grade. We decided as parents that it'd be a good idea to drive him into school given that it was a new school and experience. I was driving our rusty, old 1990 Ford Taurus, my wife in the passenger seat, my son in the backseat wearing his new school clothes holding onto his backpack. Traveling west on County E halfway between our house and where you turn off onto Hwy. 63 a voice from the backseat breaks the silence as we passed through the red pine plantations.

"What do you think I'm going to learn in school today?"

Without pause I answer, "You're going to learn how to sit still in a desk for long periods of time and watch the clock."

Years later I still find myself wondering if I should've or shouldn't have been so direct and honest.

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.

Good Video on Right's-Based Organizing

This video is the best introduction that I've seen yet on what Community Rights and "rights-based" organizing is all about.

"Communities, municipal officials, environmental and social justice organizations, and others engages in this "rights-based" organizing have come to a shared conclusion--we can't achieve local self-governance or sustainability under the existing structure of law.

"And further, that in order to drive necessary structural change into our legal system, they must begin by making legal change at the local level, and then drive it upward."--Thomas Linzey from "New Frontiers: Building a Grassroots Movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature" video

Overthrowing The American Government

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

First Day of Fishing Season

Yesterday was the opening day of fishing season in Wisconsin. The events of that day went more or less like this. Woke up and sat on cushion for half-n-hour; started fire in masonry stove to keep house warm; arrived at work and delivered mail until mid-afternoon; stopped at gas station and bought: two bags of Giants sunflower seeds ( one bacon ranch the other siracha flavored), a fishing license and trout stamp; entered a house that looked like a bomb went off from three kids being home alone for 7 hours; started van and loaded up kids; stopped at the closest culvert with trout stream running under it; 14 year old son joyfully fished while I exhaustively kept kids out of road and from falling in fast flowing water; got home and played catch with sons; grilled some burgers for dinner and ate; read book to 4 year old son in bunk bed; passed out with book and son; we both awake at 2:30 AM to take pee and get in bed with wife and daughter.

Oh how the opening day of fishing season has evolved over the years.

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.

My Compass Points to Colorado

This morning I put 45 minutes into the Community Rights effort. It was basically 45 minutes full of grief and despair. When you see it pointed out to you again and again how corporations have rigged the system to the point where most people in the country feel powerless to the point of self-destruction, and most methods of activism surrounding you is the one-corporate-harm-at-a-time type, grief and despair are just part of the program. Or to say it another way, it's all part of the decolonization process. I'm not complaining here or need support of any kind, that's not the intent of me writing this. It's an attempt at a description of what I consider to be an important and essential part of my life.

My compass points to the courageous folks in Colorado working toward an amendment to their state Constitution giving local communities the right to govern themselves. I want to see a Wisconsin Community Rights network some day.

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...

The End Of The World As We Know It

Yesterday, I had a brief conversation about gas prices with an over-the-road truck driver. I mentioned that a lot of us would be shocked if we had to pay the real price for gas. He said, "We don't as it is; we pay over 60% in taxes." I knew where he was going with it: Gas is over taxed; we need cheap toilet paper; and government is going to tax the working man out of a job. I more or less bowed out of the conversation and took in what he had to say.

But before I went on my way I did mention that no matter what the government does I'm afraid the price of gas will continually rise until a lot of us can't afford it anymore. I pointed to the fact that in the mid-eighteen hundreds the first oil well in the United States was only about 60 feet deep and produced a gusher of oil. About 150 years later we had the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that was at least a mile below the ocean's surface and a couple more miles below the bottom of the ocean. "I'm afraid we're running out cheap oil. It's becoming harder to find." I said. He said, "We have all the oil we need in Alaska. It's just that pipeline that's holding it up."

I wished him a nice day

Welcome to the end of the world as we know it. (Thank you to the band REM for this line)

"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.