First Thoughts…
229.4
… when i weighed myself this morning i thought, we had soup for dinner last night… left over turkey soup… i thought, hmmm, soup, a good way to eat lightly for dinner, maybe i will develop my soup chops this winter… there is lots of variety and one can make lovely stocks to be the base of them…
… our new suitcases arrived yesterday… they seem like the perfect things… now we just need to be able to distinguish them… color coded luggage tags?…
… i listened to podcasts on the way up and back from Woodstock yesterday… one from Believer magazine and one from OnBeing, Krista Tippet’s production which used to be, Speaking of Faith… i have begun to dislike KT… i used to love her, but there is a kind of arrogance that has crept into her work… she has developed herself as a nexus of human wisdom and seems more caught up in that exalted position than in delivering meaningful understandings to people…
… the podcast i was listening to was positing that the key to wellness, planetary and otherwise, was to transform our hatred into love… i thought to myself, John Lennon had that astute observation decades ago, and of course, the New Testament teaches one to love their neighbors as themselves… the two guests on the program, one the Surgeon General of the United States, the other a neurologist and psychologist/psychiatrist… the program came across as a sort of new age babble that appeals to a well off and elitist sort of crowd but is a bunch of meaningless platitudes and politeness being offered up… all this new agey thinking and what does the world have to show for it?… right now, everything looks to be going to “hell in a hand basket” if i may appropriate a cliche… there is so much anger, resentment and outright hatred in the US alone… no wellness guru/program is remotely making a dent in it…
… the question is, how do you make a dent in it?… the people that presently matter… the people with power… don’t seem to give a damn so long as their wealth and power continues to accumulate…
… i have the impression of a volcano getting ready to blow… is it really that it must blow?… that thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people must perish before there is any kind of coming to the senses?… is this the only way to break the white euro-patriarchy (or establish it hegemony once and for all)?… how do we kill the euro-patriarchal beast once and for all?… i am afraid we will find out in the coming three years… why are we unable to stop raping and pillaging the planet and its peoples?… is it really as bad as it looks?…
… just now, the thought comes to me… we are looking at a world built on the mythology of mountain climbing… the mythic ideal of human success built around conquering mountains (literal and figurative) and then dismantling them for their raw materials and starting the next higher climb… i have written before that this is one mythic model that humanity follows… is is the one western civilization is built on… it operates on the principle of unending growth, the greedy and often violent appropriation of resources and the literal or virtual enslavement of people to extract, move and process those raw materials…
… another mythic principle we could operate on is the tail devouring snake… the ouroboros… the tail devouring snake… the ouroboros model is one of the continuous replenishing cycle of, birth, life, death, birth, life, death… a continuous cycle of consumption and replenishment… the ouroboric system is one of local economies, living in mutually beneficial relationship to the land and to other people…
… the odd thing is, we know we have lost our way, but we can’t help ourselves… something there is about a human being that doesn’t love regenerative cycles… we wish, above all other wishes, to escape them… prefers… prefers baubles, bangles, and power…
… and yet… and yet…
… i have the nagging feeling that humanity is inconsequential to the plans the cosmos has for intelligence… that we are a way station on the journey to some higher form of being… fodder really… some alternative and superseding intelligence… is that possible?… is my despair one that is trapped in the limitations of my species?… is it possible for me to understand what comes next as it may well be a level of intelligence that i can’t know, being composed of the billions of minds slinking around the planet?… is it that the choice is between annihilation and subsumption which is itself a kind of annihilation?… whither humanity?…