Melting the Ice

As the cherry blossoms turn from pink to sprouts of green and their last fallen petals are blown away by the spring winds, I'm still mourning the loss of winter. It seems a bit uncharacteristic of me not to be saluting spring and its bursts of beloved foliage, but I've been enjoying the emptiness of winter. Maybe I'm not ready to jump into the social extravanganza that defines summer in san francisco, or maybe I'm having difficulty with yet another transition that I have to process. (so many this past year, I feel like I've been cracked open with the sharpest of axes) Whatever the case, I'm still wanting to breathe the clear cold air and hide inside my mind for a little while longer. Any suggestions for moving out of the winter funk and into enjoying spring with the rest of the city?

coldscapes

This is a really beautiful article about how we connect with nature and why it's important to preserve our wild spaces..

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007...-text

ps. I now have more posts out there in the blogosphere:

ghostorchid.wordpress.com

and history repeats itself..

There are some who maintain that the present war is a war in defence of democracy. I do not know whether this view is adopted by the Tsar, and for the sake of the stability of the Alliance I sincerely hope that it is not. I do not, however, desire to dispute the proposition that democracy in the western nations would suffer from the victory of Germany. What I do wish to dispute is the belief not infrequently entertained in England that if the Allies are victorious democracy can be forced upon a reluctant Germany as part of the conditions of peace. Men who think thus have lost sight of the spirit of democracy in worship of the letter. The Germans have the form of government which they desire, and therefore any other form, imposed by alien victors, would be less in harmony with the spirit of democracy, however much it might conform to the letter. Men do right to desire strongly the victory of ideals which they believe to be important, but it is almost always a sign of yielding to undue impatience when men believe that what is valuable in their ideals can be furthered by the substitution of force for peaceful persuasion. To advocate democracy by war is only to repeat, on a vaster scale and with far more tragic results, the error of those who have sought it hitherto by the assassin's knife and the bomb of the anarchist.

~Bertrand Russell, Ethics of War, 1915

Soma

This sums up what drives me these days...

The uniqueness of human beings is in being, simultaneously, subjects and objects. Humans are self-sensing and self-moving objects while, at the same time, they are observable and manipulable objects. To yourself, you are a soma. To others you are a body. Only you can perceive yourself as a soma- no one else can do so. But everyone else can see you as a body. Even you can see yourself as a body looking into the mirror.

The great calamity of the human sciences is that we have, as it were, ganged up on ourselves. Only one person can see himself or herself as a first-person somatic being, but millions of people can see that person as a third-person bodily being. Consequently, these millions can join together and observe, measure, and diagram the objective body of the human person. That is the easy and obvious way taken by the sciences.

But what is easy and obvious is not necessarily true or effective. It is all very well for millions to study our objective bodies: There are some fundamental essential facts to be ascertained about how humans are subject to the same physical and chemical forces as are all other bodies, from atoms to asteroids. But if these millions pursue their studies of human bodies as if humans were only third person, objective bodies and not simultaneously first person, subjective somas, then they are somewhat both blind and dangerous. They are blind because they have trained themselves only to see only one side of whole people: they ignore our somatic side. They are dangerous because their observations, predictions, and practical methods are based on an incomplete view of the human being.

The reason that physiology and medicine have failed to perceive the myths behind aging is that they have failed to recognize the fundamental fact that all human beings are self-aware, self-sensing, and self-moving: they are self-responsible somas. The somatic viewpoint recognizes that not only human beings are bodily beings who can become victims of physical and organic forces, but also that they are equally somatic beings who can change themselves. Humans can learn to perceive their internal functions and improve their control of their somatic functions.

By adding the somatic viewpoint to our human sciences, we not only become capable of overcoming major health problems mistakenly attributed to aging, but we are capable for overcoming many of the major health problems that plague all of humankind.

--Thomas Hanna, Somatics

A New Declaration of Independence

A New Declaration of Independence, by Emma Goldman, 1909

When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions.

The mere fact that these forces--inimical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--are legalized by statute laws, sanctified by divine rights, and enforced by political power, in no way justifies their continued existence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all human beings, irrespective of race, color, or sex, are born with the equal right to share at the table of life; that to secure this right, there must be established among men economic, social, and political freedom; we hold further that government exists but to maintain special privilege and property rights; that it coerces man into submission and therefore robs him of dignity, self-respect, and life.

The history of the American kings of capital and authority is the history of repeated crimes, injustice, oppression, outrage, and abuse, all aiming at the suppression of individual liberties and the exploitation of the people. A vast country, rich enough to supply all her children with all possible comforts, and insure well-being to all, is in the hands of a few, while the nameless millions are at the mercy of ruthless wealth gatherers, unscrupulous lawmakers, and corrupt politicians. Sturdy sons of America are forced to tramp the country in a fruitless search for bread, and many of her daughters are driven into the street, while thousands of tender children are daily sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. The reign of these kings is holding mankind in slavery, perpetuating poverty and disease, maintaining crime and corruption; it is fettering the spirit of liberty, throttling the voice of justice, and degrading and oppressing humanity. It is engaged in continual war and slaughter, devastating the country and destroying the best and finest qualities of man; it nurtures superstition and ignorance, sows prejudice and strife, and turns the human family into a camp of Ishmaelites.

We, therefore, the liberty-loving men and women, realizing the great injustice and brutality of this state of affairs, earnestly and boldly do hereby declare, That each and every individual is and ought to be free to own himself and to enjoy the full fruit of his labor; that man is absolved from all allegiance to the kings of authority and capital; that he has, by the very fact of his being, free access to the land and all means of production, and entire liberty of disposing of the fruits of his efforts; that each and every individual has the unquestionable and unabridgeable right of free and voluntary association with other equally sovereign individuals for economic, political, social, and all other purposes, and that to achieve this end man must emancipate himself from the sacredness of property, the respect for man-made law, the fear of the Church, the cowardice of public opinion, the stupid arrogance of national, racial, religious, and sex superiority, and from the narrow puritanical conception of human life. And for the support of this Declaration, and with a firm reliance on the harmonious blending of man's social and individual tendencies, the lovers of liberty joyfully consecrate their uncompromising devotion, their energy and intelligence, their solidarity and their lives.

This `Declaration' was written at the request of a certain newspaper, which subsequently refused to publish it, though the article was already in composition.

Something wise I read in my friends' outhouse

"When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity -- in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. "The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. For relationships, too, must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits -- islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the security of the winged life, of the ebb and flow, of the intermittency." --- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I am part of the load
Not rightly balanced
I drop off in the grass,
like the old Cave-sleepers, to browse
wherever I fall.

For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust-grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time -and-space cross,
this waiting room.

I walk into a huge pasture
I nurse the milk of millennia

Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.

**Rumi**
We Are Three

Shared Occurrence

At one point elves appeared and accepted me as a
jolly fellow spirit. they spoke to me in verse
and wanted to guide me to magical places- to
castles and mythological realms. Many different
personalities, all of them part of oneself,
became autonomous and spoke of various things.
There was a great concern with personal
destiny and a sense that the total attention and
concern of the universe was focused upon me.
I thought I was participating in a test,
was being observed, and that the observing forces were
benevolent. All people seemed to me to be no
more than simple different forms of oneself,
different masks of oneself. They were all of the
different lives that one has, or that one has to
live. And there was the sense that the world has
no greater claim to substance than does a dream;
all authority, all validity rests with oneself
and the world is entirely one's possession.
Later, when I went out, this resulted in a total
unconcern for social forms, such as not sitting
down on the sidewalk or in the street; for now
one knew that the sidewalk was part of one's
brain and one could do with it what one liked.

**The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience**

A poem from a friend...

APPLE HEART

It's one thing to see the skin
and to feel the firm apple
and to know that when you eat it up
you'll get to that core
Rotten Core

It's another thing to see the apple
as a gate, a gate to the Something,
the Something that's not there.

***

It's a pulsar apple
that's there or not there
whether it wants to be or not

It's an apple at the core,
an apple we share,
an apple that is and is not there.

***

Hands to the apple core
Hands through the apple gate
Eyes to the pulsar apple
Nothing There

Eyes on the Rotten Core
Eyes on the Gateway Door
Hands on the Apple Star
Something There

If the apple were an eye
and not a heart
It would see its pulsing light
a pyramid of its dancing vision

If the apple were a hand
and not an eye
It would reach, it would
find its handy equilibrium
as a cloud or as this poem

***

It's one thing to see the seasons
The seasons of these apples, of these words
It's another thing
to be the Apple
with you.

for Amanda from Brent
August 11, 2005