Challenging Beliefs

People choose to believe many things: a wide variety of things.
Things that are not compatible with each other.
And then defend them with no evidence.
Most folks are offended when they encounter beliefs which are inconsistent with their own beliefs.
Careful arguments are critical for achieving the things we need to learn.
Not arguments simply between people or about people but arguments about ideas.
We need to examine careful histories.
We need to look closely at textual criticisms.
We need to submit our ideas to scrutiny: careful, careful, scrutiny.
It’s never too late to adjust our thinking.

My Little Ropes

Today is a rainy day,
but I had to take a walk.

So I have my favorite little umbrella
made by a company called Leighton.
It’s very steady, very well-made.
It’s double around the rim and opens very nicely.
Though slightly small it is just right for little walks.
I like it.

The woods were noisy with rainfall
but it was all rain that was caught in the leaves.
As I walked out of the woods it was quiet again.
My first stop was the little shed next to the pond.
While in the shed it poured down raining.
It was delightful.
I like sitting in that shed when it rains.

The rain eventually stopped and I moved on toward the vale.
I stopped at my first special place to sit on a rock on the near side.
I sat studying the underside of my umbrella.
What a cool design.
And then – I noticed the rope.
I think it once held up a pump down in a well.
Then it got used for other things.
But I found this 18 inch piece laying in the field
and I tied it around this tree that’s here next to where I like to sit.
I don’t know where the ropes were used last.
I’ve tied three ropes here, actually two ropes and one twine.
The twine was bailing twine. All of it is plastic.
The heavier blue and white rope that once held a well-water pump
is about a quarter inch in diameter.
The other twine is only an eighth of an inch or less.
I tied the bailing twine around a tree where I like to enter or leave the vale.
No one may ever notice it.
As a matter of fact, I don’t expect anyone to notice any of it.

Now I’m walking to the other side of the vale.
First I walked down the west bank to the vale bottom.
It’s not a steep climb down or anything.
It’s a small vale. It’s only maybe 100 feet across at the bottom.
Now I’m climbing up the east side.
I just passed the groundhog hole at the bottom of the tree.
Now I’m approaching my other favorite spot to sit.

You may ask, “Where do you sit without getting your ass wet when it’s been raining?”
I bring a plastic trash bag with me.
I unfold and set it down where I want to sit.

And now here I sit on the tree
which leans over at such an acute angle
there’s room for 4 or 5 people to sit on this tree.
It’s only 8 to 10 inches in diameter.
There is a little branch arising next to me
where there’s another blue-and-white rope tied.
I can see the other tree where the first rope is tied
but I can’t see the rope.
And I can’t see the rope at the wood line
where I will emerge when I leave for home.

It’s beautiful and green here.
There are lots of trees of different sizes.
It’s fairly rocky here too.
Some of the rocks are sharp and some are rather smooth.
That tells me something.
The sharp ones have been revealed sharp by more recent breaking pressures.
They’ve been cracked with sharp edges exposed.
The smooth ones have been weathered down by many years of rain.
It becomes obvious that water once flowed down this vale.
But it’s been a long time.

I expect glaciers left a lot of the soil here.
And trees left a lot of soil here.
Trees don’t grow very large here when there’s very little soil.
But they fall and become soil.
Then subsequent trees grow larger.
Then there’s the dust that falls to earth every day
that must add an inch every few hundred years.
The old old trees are gone entirely with no signs of the trunks
where they broke off or fell over.
There are a few trunks left from trees that have fallen over more recently.
And there are some that have been cut.
So there’s always an increase of soil.
Some of the trees seem to be growing right out of the tops of rocks.
Some trees are growing in soil that probably has good depth.
When the trees mature that have this deep soil my ropes may still be here.

My little ropes.

Raccoon Days

Yesterday was raccoon day.
So is today.
Yesterday a raccoon crossed my path as I was about to open the gate to the farm.
Today there was a dead raccoon in the road.
It wasn’t the same raccoon. It wasn’t big enough.
But that’s two raccoons two days in a row.

I learned today that the butchers son killed himself driving an ATV.
He was a young fella still in his teens.
He had served me numerous times in the butcher shop.
He had a slow but genuine smile.
It was always welcome.

Both he and the raccoon died on the road.
Both under circumstances that were easily avoided.
These fractal bodies of ours are easily lost.
Both of these bodies were young with no children.
Their friends and families know the impact of their lives.

I know little.

No Real You

I’d like to encourage you
to stop trying to be the real you.
What would you even suppose that might be?

Someday, notice how you change.
Notice the you that claims to be you when you wake up in the morning,
then notice the you that starts working or doing whatever you intend to do every day,
notice the you that stops for lunch and the you that needed to,
notice the you that watches the clock in order to go back home,
notice the you that greets whatever shares your home that makes it home for you.
Notice the you that eats dinner.
Notice the you that sometimes goes out in the evening to meet with other folks and
Notice how that you differs depending upon which folks you’re meeting.
Notice the you that protects itself from the things you don’t understand.
Notice the you that sheds its height as bedtime approaches.
Notice the you that wakes to pee before you’re done sleeping.

You can detect a different you at these and so many other times each day.
So which one is the real you?

None of them.

I recommend that you give up the idea of even discovering the real you.
It doesn’t exist.
But you can do this…
Write the old you off.
The more you write off all these old yous what’s left is rather precious.
It’s not that you will discover the real you, you will discover that there is no real you.
You’ll discover that our capacity for me-ness is huge and dynamic.
Our identity can continue to grow and grow and grow daily even hourly with the things that we see and discover each day.

I ate some snow today.
No big deal.
But I bet you did not.

The little things that each of us does
can mean so much to us,
and we may not realize how unique they are to us.

Imaginal Domains

I generally think you are referring to our “experience of ourselves and other things in the classical world”, right?

If so, I think you may be regarding some statements as solipsistic assertions that reality arises wholly from our imagination. But that’s not what I think it is. Our senses only assess a tiny fraction of the vibratory spectrum we might call ‘objective reality’. If we want to understand what we sense or discover more than we can directly sense, we employ the pattern-recognizing and pattern-making power of imagination. We settle into patterned ‘grooves’ of personal and social functionality and creativity. These become our realities, but I think they would better be called imaginal domains, or memetic vortexes.

I don’t concur with the suggestion that imagination is the antithesis of reality.
To me they are an integral fabric.

So, for me,
Truth is grokking the well-woven;
Responsibility is the ability to respond within our imaginal domain;
Validity or authenticity is recognizing other domains as co-real.

Stresses

I remember considering stresses –

Seeing the troubles of
too little
and too much.

We too often fail to regard
how stresses form us.

Too much stress in our youth
    leads many to avoid any.
To little attracts the wrong kinds later.

It is good to attract formative and positive stresses.
They become a healthy delight.
They make it easy to avoid useless, negative stresses.

Consider your stresses,
both self-generated
and from life situations.
They are your gift,
able to transform and develop you
into a positive and uniquely formed person.

Contraction Timing

You were born yesterday,
and again this morning,
and again we hope tomorrow.

Why, I asked,
are babies born so naked,
with their water flowing to ground, and
their fire flowing to sky
so perfectly — so automatically?

It creates currents that form
the multi-vortical human mindscape
where every spin the now-ist sees
as yesterday’s pre-reality.

You can’t make the same sacred snapshot twice:
no matter how terminally indignant
the weekly pattern-monger’s habit,
Love remains the fulcrum and
always moves above a still.

It’s a fragile eternity that yields
an allergy to urgency,
no appetite for the Bantu fractal or
the circumdancing flower of homo-spiritus,
or the growing rampant glory of identity
taming the local lizard.

But we can see the buds on gravid branches
all watching in their special ways
to be the stone, the bird, the tree,
the proactive jazz blossoms,
the spin-bombs of living Logos
bringing on more contractions…

First published at vox poetica.

The Speed of Life

We are a vine
seeking water by root
and light by leaf.

We climb
what is
to become what shall be.

We hunt
the spin authentic
for stable fruiting.

We recognize
and learn to internalize
beauty

To verify love
and learn to share it
unreservedly.

We are systems
embedded
in holons of holiness

Awaking
at the speed of life.

No Final Word

Final word
Final word
Final word
:
Orthodox aberrations of arrivals,
the dance of the lame by choice,
stanky stationary vision!

Oh! The things we should seek and prove together!!

To walk on land together
To walk on water together
To walk on air together

The increasing responsibility
a delight to the spirit
ever leaning forward
from firm ground
eyes all around.

Be brave!
Things are never as they say.

No final word
No final word
Be brave!
Be honest!

“Reinventing Capitalism”

I recently responded to one of Paul’s offerings with comments about the need for something beyond capitalism as we know it. I think this article says it better. Paul, see how you toss a pebble in the pond and the effects continue forever. Thanks. I am ever more convinced that there is no viable alternative for humanity other than a sea change transformation from the inside out.

Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul in the Machine
A Quick Re-Vision of Western Civilization
by Howard Bloom

The early part of the twenty-first century gave the Western world one skull-cracking slap after another. The downing of New York’s World Trade Center; the battle with militant Islam’s holy warrior; the crash and scandal of major corporations like Enron, Worldcom, and Arthur Andersen; and the growth of China to superpower status—these were wakeup punches. They handed us what may be our greatest opportunity and our greatest responsibility since the Great Depression and the Nazis threatened to topple the Western way of life in the 1930s.

Osama bin Laden’s threats against America and against the “false religion” of freedom of speech, secularism, spiritual eclecticism, human rights, women’s rights, and gay rights have the potential to nuke us into a new dark age. As you read this page, over ten thousand Wahhabi madrassas, “suicide bomber factories,” salted on every one of this planet’s continents, are teaching children to make holy war against you and me. The West, these kids are told, has nothing left to give the world but immorality and decay. The teachers in these madrassas peddle passion brilliantly. They feed the hunger for meaning with the junk food of emotion—violence and righteous fury. But could the madrassa teachers be right? Do we in the Western system have nothing worth struggling for? Do we have nothing that’s worthy of idealism and belief?

Please read the rest here…

Reprinted here with permission from EnlightenNext magazine,
Issue 28, March-May 2005
(c) 2005 EnlightenNext, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.enlightennext.org

Your thoughts?