Fascism is "In"

Check this out:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/corporations-trump-inauguration

I just deleted my Uber and Uber Eats apps.  I rarely shop at Amazon but now, no more.

What are our priorities?

A man who kills someone on a subway, in cold blood, is not convicted, but the city of New York is turned upside down, and millions of dollars spent, looking for the killer of a man who made millions by causing suffering and death to thousands. What do you think about that? And how many murders of "regular folks" are never investigated at all because the victims are not rich?

Less than 50% of voters chose the incoming President, and we already know he is going to pillage the treasury for every penny.  Plans are to cut health care for everyone starting with veterans. Education will be cut, budgets for safety inspectors for our food, transportation, and industry, will be cut.  Pollution regulations will be cut.  By 2028 the US will be a MORE polluted country, the populace will be sicker with less access to health care, the food supply will be significantly less safe, industrial accidents will happen more often and be more severe with no accountability, but certain people will have grown their hoards.  What are our priorities?

20 years

Today is the 20th anniversary of my mother's murder.  The killing blow was struck on August 22, 2024, she died on the 24th. I miss her.

We just had a family reunion.  Not all the family could attend but there were 9 of us, nieces and nephews came.  One of my nephews I had never met before.  I love them all!  Each one is a great person I am glad to know.  Being with them made this month so much better.  In the last 19 years, August has been rough for me, to the point where sometimes I literally would see the world in black and white, no color.  This year none of that happened.  I was with people who also are affected by what happened to my mother, and that made all the difference.

Why share this?  Because being with people whom we love, who love us, who "get it" whatever "it" is, matters.  It makes a difference!

If you are suffering and can connect with others who understand, it helps.  If you can't be with people who understand, know that somewhere in this world they do exist!

We see the suffering of the people in the world who are under fire, whether it's Gaza or Ukraine, the people of Myanmar, the people of Yemen, Syria...women in India, Afghanistan, the United States...the list goes on and on, people who are being oppressed militarily, politically, culturally.  We see, we feel, we hope and work for Peace, it is the ongoing work of humanity to learn NOT to be violent, cruel, oppressive, greedy.  

Everyone can do their part by practicing self-awareness, by practicing kindness, by deliberately NOT seeking power over others, but instead sharing the beauty of power-with. 

On the metaphysical side of things...

There have been times in my life when, through meditation or ritual or just for no apparent reason at all, I have experienced what Ganesh Rajagopalan calls "the other dimension," a different reality.  I have been in a place where everything is made of light.  I have been in a place where time was nonexistent.  That may sound strange to some, others may relate.  The point is, though, that in my "regular" life, neither of those qualities are prevalent if they are present at all. So being in "regular" life, the world can seem very dense, and slow, and dull.  That doesn't mean I don't experience beauty and inspiration, I do, but it's all pale compared to being light in a place that is all light.  "Regular" life can be depressing when remembering these other experiences.

When I was in my late teens I was living in San Anselmo, California, renting a room in a house.  The guy whose house it was, in his mid 30's, told me he'd had an experience 10 years earlier, a spiritual awakening, and since then he'd been waiting for it to happen again.  He had a job, but he did that job and he waited.  That seemed really sad to me at the time, it still does.  I don't see myself as waiting.  I do see myself sometimes as trapped in a place that is slow and thick and dull, not joyful or ecstatic, but tolerable, and sometimes just barely so. I know others who have similar experience.  Today I am thinking that part of the task is to learn to live in the slow thick dense dullness without being diminished by it.

Politics this week...

Part of the strategy of fascists, not just the Republicans in the US but Hitler, Mussolini, Ceaușescu and others, is to overwhelm their opposition with propaganda declaring their victory and greatness, even when they are not great and are not victorious. That is what the Republicans did this week at their convention. Lots of fanfare, lots of self-congratulatory speeches, behaving as if they have already won. They haven't.

It is critical that we not buy into their narrative. The DNC is coming up. It looks more and more like Biden will not run. Whether it's Biden or not we must stay focused on anti fascism, on exposing the Republicans disastrous plans for the US. If Biden is going to step down, or be deposed, the focus has to be on who can run and win, not on hand wringing or circular firing squad or any of that.

It is not a foregone conclusion that Trump will win, far from it!

Travelin'

I've been traveling again. In December, I learned that I can't get residency in Jamaica until I'm retired and have a pension, and that's a few years off, so I am in transition. Dear friends welcomed me in Portland for four months, wow, and then I went on a hiking trip in Ireland and visiting friends in England, and now I am visiting my brother in Hawaii. I am essentially homeless, but not destitute, and not without friends and family and resources, so I am very fortunate.

All this has led me to reflect on ideas like home, permanence, and impermanence (again), and the effect of uncertainty on my equanimity. It kind of does a number on it. Which offers me this opportunity to see that, and not allow myself to get sucked into a panic about my future. I don't know what's going to happen, but the reality is even when we have lives that feel very settled and we think we know what to expect next, anything can happen, and does. So really this is just me getting to be pretty real about it.

There are so many people in the world who have no home, who have no place where they feel welcome, where there is violence at their backs and uncertainty and likely hostility in front of them. This is a difficult time. There are so many humans and there's so much greed-driven war and other exploitive and brutal forces being foisted upon regular folks. Not to mention the crazy ideological extremism that we see coming out of the Abrahamic religions all around the world.

I got to visit a really fantastic food forest earlier this week, just beautiful. 6 acres of fruit trees, and flowering plants just all kinds of stuff, all organic, all Permaculture gloriousness!

Today...

Injustice and cruelty do not just happen, they are the result of choices made by people. When someone cuts a plume on a graduation cap, or drops a bomb on a house with people in it, shoots up a school, or uses a deadly pandemic for personal political gain, etc etc etc these are choices made by people, they are not accidents, they are not random acts.

We are each responsible for our choices. That means we must each fess up to ourselves about the damage we cause, and we all do. Drive a car, fly in a plane, use anything plastic...that is causing harm. Pollute to create electricity...that is causing harm.

When I was younger I wanted to live off the grid, grow all my own food, the whole nine yards. Now I am older, I don't grow any of my own food these days, I work online...I'm shaking my head.

This human existence, the ways that we live, the ways that I live, so many points of imbalance. It pains me and I know many feel this way, yet this is what we perpetuate.

I have no solution. I'm writing this, naming this, as part of my own processing, my response to this mornings information, and yesterdays, and anticipating tomorrow's.

Kindness is also a choice. Honesty is also a choice. Compassion is also a choice. Creativity, curiousity, respect...

Have a great day! ❤️

Abrahamic Religions are Violent

The current spate of religious holidays celebrated by those adherents to the Abrahamic religions, occurs while all three branches are represented on the world stage by extremists engaged in the organized oppression and murder of much of the world's population. Jewish extremists in Israel are committing genocide. Muslim extremists continue to oppress women and LGBTQ people throughout that region. Christian nationalists in numerous countries are trying to revive nazism as a dominant force.

Let us call out and question the Abrahamics for their actions. These religions have been the dominant paradigm in the so-called "west" and "middle east" for a long time, and look what they are bringing to the world. Not OK! Enough!

The paradigm of the Abrahamic religions in these extreme forms; all are patriarchal, anti-nature, misogynistic, and violent.

Maybe we the people of the world need to think about how it is we allow the world to be hijacked by these belief systems that are so obviously destroying life and seeking to control humanity on a massive scale.

Remember!

A lot of folks don’t understand, transgenderism, or sexual orientations that are different from hetero, or any number of other things about other people, so what. We don’t have to understand each other to treat each other with respect. Human dignity matters . So if you don’t understand another person, you think they’re weird, you think their choices don’t make sense, just remember, it doesn’t matter what you think, it matters how you treat people. So just treat people decently. It’s the golden rule! It’s what allowed humans to live in civilized societies. So let’s get back to it.

The Turning of the Wheel

It's the last day of 2023.  Ancient ways of tracking of time are about cycles, which are circles.  The physical universe is all about roundedness.  Not perfect circles necessarily, planetary orbits are often elliptical, the Earth is not a perfect sphere, but the force of gravity tends to round things out.

We experience cycles in our lives; birth and death, day and night, fertility, "to every thing, turn turn turn" etc. We even see cycles in our human inventions; economic cycles, cultural cycles, even fashion.

When we are younger and have less life experience, we tend to experience the moment and generalize it into the future, "it's like this now and so it will be like that then."  As we get older we have a different perspective, and so what is happening in this moment can more easily be seen as just this moment, something that is unfolding, rippling effects through time, throughout our lives.  For example, let's say one chooses to care for one's body in certain ways as a young person, that will affect the person's life as they get older.  Likewise if one chooses not to care for one's body, the effects will be quite discernible as time passes.

What happens when we bring together our understanding of the cyclical nature of things with our ability to make choices?  I think this is part of wisdom. That's a word we don't hear a lot these days, nor see practiced by those who are prominent.  We see lots of decisions made for expediency, political and economic, usually very short-term thinking.  It hasn't always been thus.  The people we call Indigenous to the land mass once known as Turtle Island, famously considered the actions of the group in terms of it's effects seven generations into the future.  How will this action affect the people and the place seven generations hence? This appears not to be a consideration in our modern technologized societies. Instead we have sped things up. We walk fast, drive fast, eat fast, think for the present, plan only a short time into the future.  We're busy busy busy. I am reminded of how small children (and some larger children too!) have trouble with delayed gratification.  They want it NOW!  Modern societies on Earth are very much behaving like small children in this way.

Like all things physical, this Earth has it's limitations.  The biosphere is finite and exists within a delicate balance. If you study biology at any level, macro or micro, you learn that life can exist within a fine balance, chemically.  Change certain ratios, say salt to water, and organisms die. Change the CO2 - O2 ratios in the atmosphere and some life forms will flourish while others die off. This isn't an opinion, it's observable fact, what we call "science."

As we recognize another cycle around The Sun it would be wise for us to examine our behavior, as individuals and as a group, to understand the impact we are having on our physical world and in our abstractions (politics, feelings, social behavior).  This is why cultures throughout time have taken moments to stop and reflect on what has happened and how that informs what will happen. Isn't that what New Year's Resolutions are about?

All of this to say that today and tomorrow we have this cultural tradition of reflection, taking time to stop and sit with what is, both to evaluate and to digest. This is the practice of wisdom, and wisdom leads to better choices.  Humanity is (always) faced with choices that have significant effects, in our individual lives and in the life of the group (and by "the group" I mean ALL life on Earth). What would happen if we stopped moving so fast, and instead, considered how our choices will affect the whole in seven generations? What if we stopped thinking about our desires, and instead focused on the well-being of the whole field of life on Earth, and how we as individuals and as part of the group can choose consciously the intentions on which our actions are based?  I invite all of us to take this with us into 2024.

Tonight's episode of Paradigms features Yungchen Lhamo, a woman from Tibet who makes music with the intention of spreading kindness. The music is so beautiful and effective, and Yungchen brings wisdom to the conversation. I hope you'll listen to the episode.