The following is a recap of my experience in a recent class at the Healing Cave, part of the Institute for Shamanic Arts in Tucson, Arizona.
For Gigi, who asked about Symbolic Sight. First off, the teacher is a gifted young man who has written four books in the past seven months. You can go to his web site at TDJacobs.com to learn more about him and his work.
Symbolic Sight is based on two commonly accepted principles: First, that everything comes from energy due to the relationship between energy and matter as shown by numerous physicists over the past century; second, when an energetic imbalance exists for a long enough period of time it will manifest physically, because of the first principle.
Symbolic Sight allows us to see a ‘thing’ (physical manifestation) and the cause of the thing (energy imbalance) at the same time.
There are two ways of looking and both are part of the process. The literal route is the physical manifestation (illness, injury, emotions that overrun reason, etc.). The symbolic route is seeing the thing through an energetic practice (meditation, chakra work, yoga, tai chi, chi gong, etc.). The purpose of this is to understand the energy behind the physical manifestation, process and release it and in so doing, heal both the imbalance and the manifestation.
Here’s an example (my personal experience in the class): I participated in a twenty minute meditation with a group of four other people. We began with an intention centered on something that felt out of balance in our lives. I chose my relationships with family. We attempted to establish an energetic circuit, taking in energy on our inhalations through both the crown and root chakras – tapping into the earth’s core and the infinite cosmos – connecting the two energies at the heart, where they could be combined and transformed and released as love during the exhalations. We were specifically instructed to pay attention to blockages in the path, not only in the crown, heart, and root, but any of the other chakras as well. These would give us clues to the imbalances within us.
Once we either completed the circuit or identified the blockages (or in some cases, saw the blockages as slow down points) we then silently asked for guidance – Tell us what we need to know but don’t know about this energetic path. We then waited, focusing on the circuit but listening for a message from the subconscious mind.
I immediately saw a vivid image of two bare-chested warriors facing one another. Both wore buckskin pants and identical bear claw necklaces. Each of the necklaces had a bronze medallion hanging from it. An iron shaft joined the two warriors, piercing the medallions and their bodies. I knew a broad head arrow point was lodged in each of their hearts. Both bled copiously from the wounds. A series of satin ribbons wrapped around the shaft and extended out into the darkness where unseen hands pulled alternately at the ribbons, causing the arrowheads to twist in the hearts of the two warriors. All this time, the point of view was such that I could not see the men’s faces. The image finally expanded and the two warriors’ faces were revealed. One was me. The other was my son.
Shortly after, we came out of the meditation to describe our experiences. Tom helped us to interpret them.
The symbolism of the painful connection at the heart represents the love I feel for my son. At the same time, because of differing world-views, I feel that I am not very effective at expressing that love. There is a painful rigidity both in my expression and his acceptance. The identical necklaces show that he is my equal and there is no longer any need for me to take the lead in guiding him in the ways of the world. He has found his own path and is succeeding on it. It would be wise for me to let go. I don’t do this because of fear that letting go (pulling out the arrow) might kill either me or him. So instead, we bleed together. The ribbons represent the desires and influences of others, who are equally conflicted as to what we should do to have a loving and productive relationship.
I asked Tom how to heal this. He said that the first thing I have to do is cut the ribbons. Others have no place in this situation. He then explained that energy can be consciously transformed, that I have the ability to change the material of the shaft into anything else. I can make it into something that binds us at the heart, but allows us the freedom to be who we are as individuals. He suggested I repeat the meditation a few times and ask for guidance on what material would best serve that purpose, and when it becomes clear, make the change.
The others present had similar experiences, some with more detail, some less.
This is really a thumbnail sketch of what the experience was like but it was powerful enough that I wanted to share with any who care to know.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Infinite Love, based on a shamanic journey
Infinite Love
By Stephen Russell
One of the tribe returned from a journey with an ecstatic smile on his face. He was the eunuch, the castrato who had slipped away early in the morning of the day of Love’s Expression, when couples gathered to celebrate their passion. Those whom romantic love had smiled upon exchanged gifts, dined lavishly, and joined in conjugal bliss, in commemoration of their discovery of the most elusive and ill-defined of human emotions.
The castrato had no one on this day and like many others who found themselves uncoupled, experienced a complex and widely opposing range of emotions. Most remained hopeful that love would find them willing rather than wanting, however, a few felt the weight of loneliness more acutely than usual. The hopeful ones offered sincere wishes for continued happiness to the coupled members of the tribe, all the while keeping an open eye and eager heart for another unattached person to join with, thereby gaining the keys to the circle of Love’s disciples.
The castrato had long since abandoned hope, falling into a deep depression followed by a towering rage that led him to run down the back trail, into the wild lands North of the tribal encampment. There, exhaustion overtook him and he fell heavily in a sandy place alongside a stream that bubbled out of a fissure in the cliffs of the Moon King a day’s ride distant. Perhaps it was something in the waters that infected the castrato’s mind as he slept, the moon being the goddess of love, and allowed him to slip into the world of the journeyer, the one who sees outside reality and experiences wisdom from the ancient energies. In any case, something happened during the long night and when the castrato returned to the tribal encampment the next day, his face glowed, his stride was confident, and he seemed about to burst with some news that brought about a rapturous elevation in his mood.
The tribal elders quickly received word of the castrato’s strange behavior. Hearing that the depressed man was so cheerful so soon after the day when he usually experienced his greatest sadness concerned them. Perhaps the man he left his sanity out there in the wilderness along with his sadness. A hasty conference took place and a squad of strong-armed men was sent to bring the castrato before the tribal council that he might be questioned and the state of his fitness for intermingling with the general tribal population determined.
“Noble elders,” the castrato began, genuflecting deeply before the panel as they eyed him suspiciously. “You honor me by allowing me to kneel before you today and share my joy at a discovery I have made just this past night. Surely the gods are smiling on us as they have not only sent me back with a message of great importance for our people, but in particular for those such as myself, afflicted in some manner and cursed to remain separate from the coupling that is the source of our tribe’s renewal.”
“He’s either mad or filled with liquor,” one of the elders whispered to another. The castrato heard him and laughingly leaned over to breath in the man’s face.
“Smell you nothing but the sweet scent of love on my breath, oh wise one. But it is neither madness nor strong drink that has made me like unto a field of sunflowers on this day. Bear with me but awhile and all shall be revealed.”
“Speak then,” the chief of the council said impatiently. “You have journeyed outside the tribal boundaries and returned in a most mysterious good humor. Speak so that we might all enjoy the reason of this … elation.”
The castrato bowed and returned to the center of the room. A chair was brought for him and a pillow to sit upon the chair. He made a great deal of fuss over getting settled just right, adjusting his wrinkled cloak about his body and turning his face to and fro with his eyes closed, as if trying to feel the light of the sun pouring through the high windows of the council chamber, seeking the perfect angle to reflect the incomprehensible joy in his face.
“I will speak now,” he at last said. “I traveled out the North Road, last night, following the winged horse and his warlike rider as they circled round the pole star. I was in a funk and then a rage as I ran, both resentful and envious that I should be cursed not only with the loss of the desire for the physical act of love, but also cursed with a voice that is required to sing for the pleasure of others at this festival each year. It has always been torturous for me to do so and last night was simply the final in a long series of frustrations concerning the matter. I intended to run away and never return.”
A disapproving murmur filled the room at this declaration but the chief stilled the elders with his uplifted palm, then gestured for the castrato to continue.
“I thought to make my way to the Moon King and offer my services as a harem guard. I have heard that his is the finest and largest harem in all the world and I thought perhaps by being among so amorous a collective I might, by some trick of imagination, fall far enough into madness to live vicariously through the old king as he worked his conjugal way around the beds of his many, many wives.”
An amazed gasp emerged now from the elders. A sense of outrage came over their faces. Even the chief of the council felt his mouth tighten into a sneer, his eyes hooding with disapproval. Nonetheless he beckoned the castrato to continue.
“Of course, the story of the Moon King and his many wives is all but a legend, as no man who has sought the harem has ever returned from the Moon King’s castle. This should perhaps give some indication of the degree of my desperation!” the castrato said with a wink.
“Tell us, castrato, did you in fact make it so far as the Moon King’s palace and are you now going to tell us of the fabulous pleasures that await there? I warn you, we’ll not be taken in by fancy lies here. This is not madness, but mockery,” one of the elders said, shaking a long finger at the castrato.
The castrato gave the chief a look that begged indulgence and the chief, frowning at the interrupting elder ordered the castrato to continue, admonishing him to speak only truth or suffer more than seclusion until his madness played out.
“I assure you, great warrior and chief of our tribe, I would never waste this council’s time on madness or mockery, nor will I utter a single untrue word in your presence. I have a message of great importance, a message that will have you rejoicing.”
“Then get on with it!” the chief said impatiently.
“As is well known, the gateway to the Moon King’s land is guarded by a fearsome dragon. Well, by the time I reached the stream that marks the boundary between the wild lands and the Moon Kingdom, I had exhausted both my despair and anger. I crossed the creek and suddenly found myself unable to take another step, so great was my fatigue. I found a soft patch of sand beside the stream and promptly collapsed in an unfeeling sleep.
“After some hours the chill night air woke me. I sat up and found myself alone in a strange land with no cover, no companion, and a deep sense of shame at my behavior. It was at that moment that I noticed something very peculiar.
“There was a sound like a tremendous drum beating that filled the night and when I looked around for the source of it, I discovered that the sky was black, entirely. Not a single star so much as winked overhead. I reached up and to my amazement, my hand pressed against something leathery and warm. It was then that I realized the drumming sound was the stomping of a large foot and that the foot belonged to the leathery warm thing whose great wings were spread above me like a domed tent. The Moon King’s dragon had found me by the stream and was stamping its foot while it sheltered me beneath its outspread wings.”
“Enough of this nonsense,” one of the elder’s said. “The man is obviously mad, but I don’t see that he presents any danger to himself. In fact, some of our simpler members might find him amusing. In any case, we have a day’s work to do. Let’s end this and get about the important business that waits our attention.”
“Not so fast, brother,” the chief spoke. “I have journeyed across the wild lands and seen the dragon the castrato speaks of. It’s wings are indeed leathery, rather than scaled, as we might think. And it does have the peculiarly annoying habit of stamping its foot pretty much all the time. I cannot explain this odd behavior, nor can I account yet for the state of the castrato’s sanity, but I will hear more, as will you all. Now sit down and listen.
“As for you, castrato, I will ask you one question, and from it, I will know the truth of all that you have spoken, thus far.”
The castrato took a deep bow, having risen from his stool while the chief was talking.
“Please, great chief, test me.”
“What color are the dragon’s eyes.
The castrato stood very still, holding his hands together with his fingers steepled as he smiled up at the council.
“They are blue, my chief. But not ordinary blue. No, they glow blue from within, a deep cobalt that highlights the alternating bands of turquoise, celadon, robin’s egg, and midnight that surround a glistening golden pupil. And the dragon stomps its foot because it itches and having no hands to scratch with, it is mad with annoyance.”
“And how do you know this?” the chief asked.
“I scratched the offending foot, my chief. The dragon, being appreciative, told me so.”
Another murmur began but was stilled at once by the chief.
“I will hear all of this, without any more interruptions. The next man who speaks other than the castrato will be sent to see the dragon in person!”
A heavy silence fell over the council chamber. The castrato asked for a drink of water and took a long minute to quench his thirst before resuming.
“I saw the eyes very near to my own, my chief. The dragon had its head immediately to my left, resting it on a stone near where I slept. When I touched its wing, its eyes opened and I thought that I was surely doomed. I ran the opposite way and in so doing, ended up directly under the descending foot of the dragon. I was nearly flattened but managed to dive out of the way and holler ‘Watch it!’ just in time.
“The dragon, by the way, is a most polite beast. It apologized for nearly smashing me and then explained its predicament. Apparently the Moon King is a poor caretaker. The beast has had the itch in its foot for more than twenty years. At any rate, I offered to scratch the offensive area and the beast gratefully acceded.
“Once the itch was gone the dragon began to speak quite freely, telling me it had been waiting for me to come along forever, and that it had wanted to make my acquaintance for years, and that it could only feel love for me, both on account of my singing voice, which is perhaps my greatest asset and the fact that I was thought to be a compassionate man. This I laughed at.
“You laughed?” the chief said, incredulous, “At the dragon?”
“I had too, you see, I was terrified. If I didn’t laugh I undoubtedly would have done something horribly embarrassing like faint or pee on myself or something even worse.”
A slight laugh of amusement rippled around the council table.
“So, there I was on the border of the Moon King’s land with a relieved but still very dangerous dragon, especially if it learned my true purpose in coming. I decided to take an indirect approach.
“Dragon, I said, I’ve come to your land because I am a eunuch, a castrato, and I would that I might be allowed to sing for your master, the Moon King and his fabulous harem. At this, the dragon began to chuckle, which is not unlike the sound a volcano makes before it erupts. And then it began to howl with hysterical laughter, falling on its back and kicking its feet high in the air.
“Please, dragon, I begged, tell me what it is about my quest that is so amusing. The dragon slowly regained his composure, and then sat up rubbing tears from its eyes. It looked at me and slowly shook its head before politely refusing to answer that specific question. But you may ask me any other and I will not refuse you, the dragon said.
“After pondering for a bit, I decided to ask about the thing that had driven me mad and into the dragon’s space. All right, I began; tell me about this thing called love. Tell me what it is. I never seem to be able to find it. Perhaps I’m looking for the wrong thing.
“Love, the dragon said musingly, begins with desire. Yes, you must desire love to find it. But no ordinary desire is this which I speak of. No, this is desire that burns, consumes, and turns you to ash with its power. It is something that unrequited sustains you and feeds the whole world with its energy. It is the positive desire of the lover waiting for his beloved, the beloved in an equally powerful state of expectation. It is the closest to heaven and hell that you will ever be while alive in this world.
“I thought about the sulfurous flames lurking in the body of the beast that spoke so eloquently to me. I thought about my wanting for love, about my desire and need and hunger for it. I knew what the dragon meant, but I needed more. I needed to literally feel that burning sensation. Call me mad now, but I asked the dragon if I could be burned up with desire right then and there, on the spot I stood. I said it with such sincerity that the dragon seemed to choke up for a moment.
“You truly do have a burning desire, it said to me. I do, I answered, I want to be burned on love’s altar and my ashes scattered to the four corners of the earth that I might find love’s essence. Will you help me dragon, please?
“And the dragon could only nod. It watched as I lay on my back, my arms spread wide, ready for the scorching flames that would incinerate me and allow me to be reborn ready for love. The dragon helped, exhaling its super-heated breath on my prone body, but I know that it was my own wanting that at last caused me to burst into blue flame and wither away to ash beside the Moon King’s stream. And then I found out the real power of the dragon.
“Taking in another lungful of air, the mighty beast exhaled through its nostrils this time, and my ashes whirled aloft on a cyclone of heated air, sparking to life and becoming a million stars that formed the shape of a new constellation, a dragon equally as ferocious and huge as the one that had aided me to feel love’s burning desire. I sat in the heavens and I looked out on the whole land and I waited. Love come to me, I waited. Love? I waited some more.
“I don’t see it yet, dragon, I at last said.
“The dragon thought for a long time, and then it spoke very softly to me. The blue eyes glowed like a gem lode. Tell me what you think love is, the dragon demanded of me.
“I had to think only a slight moment, for I knew precisely what I had been missing out on for so many years. Love, I said, is the unconditional acceptance by another, no matter who you are, what you have done, or what might become of you. Love acknowledges you as valid and allows you to become all that you can without judgment. More than that, love gives back to you its strongest feelings of approval, validation, and acceptance. It gives all in service to you and in so doing, the lover is also served, allowed to shine in the presence of the object of love.
“An enormously high expectation to put on someone, don’t you think, the dragon challenged me. Not at all, I said. I would feel the same way toward one who loved me. The dragon smiled. It was a truly frightening smile, not only because it came from a ferocious dragon, but because the mental process behind it was so plain. The dragon had led me into some sort of linguistic trap and was about to spring it. Or so I thought.
“Well, castrato, the dragon said, based on your definition you must feel very loved right now. The dragon then waited for me to reply.
“How can you mock me, I said, feeling hurt. I am utterly alone, cold, and unwanted. Nothing and no one shines on me. I am accepted only with conditions, that I sing and that I not become to morose during this festival. How can you possibly think I should feel loved?
“By your own definition, the dragon said, you are loved. Consider if you will the stars. Night after night the heavens glow with a billion points of light that not only illuminate you in your so-called loneliness, but are the source of the minerals that formed every element on this planet. The stars glow and glow no matter what you do, who you are, or what you might become. They illuminate you and based on all the known signs, they are unwavering in their shining fully in your presence. You have as many lovers in the stars as the Moon King, who incidentally already knows this truth and his famous harem is nothing more than what you can see overhead. With that, the dragon folded his great wings, revealing to me the full splendor of the night sky and indeed, in that moment, in the glow of those billion suns washing over my own star body, I felt joy like I had never known. I was not alone. But of course my brain interrupted with a dampening thought.
“Fine and well, dragon. But that’s a bit grandiose for my needs. How about something a little closer to home.
“The dragon immediately blew on me and I found myself back by the stream. The beast picked me up by the collar and dunked me in the water. The stream, it said, loves you too. See how it parts to admit your body, yet at the same time, its glorious flow and melody remain unabated by your presence. The same could be said for wind, rain, even the sand where you slept. All submit willingly to any behavior you care to exercise without so much as a hint of slowing down their own grand gestures of existence. All accept you just as you are. All allow you to become whatever you will.
“I stood shivering and wet with my billions of lovers overhead and the long silver stream of my lower love below. The water felt good on my weary feet. It caressed and soothed them. The light of the stars and the stories told within them indeed seemed grand. But still something seemed to be missing.
“I still feel an empty place, here, I told the dragon, touching my heart. It is because you desire to share your feelings of love with others, the dragon said. Again I became a starry constellation. And this time I truly felt connected to all the other stars. We shone into the night, we felt each other’s presence. We loved and were loved by humanity and gave love in return. And would continue doing so for billions of years.”
The chief scratched his chin.
“And yet here you are, a man, standing before this council, not a constellation overhead.”
“This is true, my chief. You see, I realized that if I remained as a group of stars, no matter how joyful that felt, I would miss the greatest opportunity of all, that is the opportunity to share this story with all of you, to let you see how loved and accepted you and everyone in the tribe are by all of nature, and how that love accepts us no matter what we do. For the real lesson of the dragon is this, if the stars can love us that way and feel that way in their love, then we too can love one another unconditionally. And in doing so, we become stars. We become grander than any king’s treasure. We become all that we can and will bring all of our fellows along with us.”
As he spoke, the castrato began to glow. His chest in particular, in the area of his heart, took on a golden sheen that suddenly burst out and filled the whole council chamber. The light blinded all present and then faded, leaving only an empty chair in the center of the room. But that night, when darkness fell and the stars came out, a new constellation filled the northern sky. A magnificent winged dragon with a ferociously smiling face was outlined in the stars.
All the tribe turned out to see it. Some, especially the uncoupled ones, claimed that they could hear it singing.
By Stephen Russell
One of the tribe returned from a journey with an ecstatic smile on his face. He was the eunuch, the castrato who had slipped away early in the morning of the day of Love’s Expression, when couples gathered to celebrate their passion. Those whom romantic love had smiled upon exchanged gifts, dined lavishly, and joined in conjugal bliss, in commemoration of their discovery of the most elusive and ill-defined of human emotions.
The castrato had no one on this day and like many others who found themselves uncoupled, experienced a complex and widely opposing range of emotions. Most remained hopeful that love would find them willing rather than wanting, however, a few felt the weight of loneliness more acutely than usual. The hopeful ones offered sincere wishes for continued happiness to the coupled members of the tribe, all the while keeping an open eye and eager heart for another unattached person to join with, thereby gaining the keys to the circle of Love’s disciples.
The castrato had long since abandoned hope, falling into a deep depression followed by a towering rage that led him to run down the back trail, into the wild lands North of the tribal encampment. There, exhaustion overtook him and he fell heavily in a sandy place alongside a stream that bubbled out of a fissure in the cliffs of the Moon King a day’s ride distant. Perhaps it was something in the waters that infected the castrato’s mind as he slept, the moon being the goddess of love, and allowed him to slip into the world of the journeyer, the one who sees outside reality and experiences wisdom from the ancient energies. In any case, something happened during the long night and when the castrato returned to the tribal encampment the next day, his face glowed, his stride was confident, and he seemed about to burst with some news that brought about a rapturous elevation in his mood.
The tribal elders quickly received word of the castrato’s strange behavior. Hearing that the depressed man was so cheerful so soon after the day when he usually experienced his greatest sadness concerned them. Perhaps the man he left his sanity out there in the wilderness along with his sadness. A hasty conference took place and a squad of strong-armed men was sent to bring the castrato before the tribal council that he might be questioned and the state of his fitness for intermingling with the general tribal population determined.
“Noble elders,” the castrato began, genuflecting deeply before the panel as they eyed him suspiciously. “You honor me by allowing me to kneel before you today and share my joy at a discovery I have made just this past night. Surely the gods are smiling on us as they have not only sent me back with a message of great importance for our people, but in particular for those such as myself, afflicted in some manner and cursed to remain separate from the coupling that is the source of our tribe’s renewal.”
“He’s either mad or filled with liquor,” one of the elders whispered to another. The castrato heard him and laughingly leaned over to breath in the man’s face.
“Smell you nothing but the sweet scent of love on my breath, oh wise one. But it is neither madness nor strong drink that has made me like unto a field of sunflowers on this day. Bear with me but awhile and all shall be revealed.”
“Speak then,” the chief of the council said impatiently. “You have journeyed outside the tribal boundaries and returned in a most mysterious good humor. Speak so that we might all enjoy the reason of this … elation.”
The castrato bowed and returned to the center of the room. A chair was brought for him and a pillow to sit upon the chair. He made a great deal of fuss over getting settled just right, adjusting his wrinkled cloak about his body and turning his face to and fro with his eyes closed, as if trying to feel the light of the sun pouring through the high windows of the council chamber, seeking the perfect angle to reflect the incomprehensible joy in his face.
“I will speak now,” he at last said. “I traveled out the North Road, last night, following the winged horse and his warlike rider as they circled round the pole star. I was in a funk and then a rage as I ran, both resentful and envious that I should be cursed not only with the loss of the desire for the physical act of love, but also cursed with a voice that is required to sing for the pleasure of others at this festival each year. It has always been torturous for me to do so and last night was simply the final in a long series of frustrations concerning the matter. I intended to run away and never return.”
A disapproving murmur filled the room at this declaration but the chief stilled the elders with his uplifted palm, then gestured for the castrato to continue.
“I thought to make my way to the Moon King and offer my services as a harem guard. I have heard that his is the finest and largest harem in all the world and I thought perhaps by being among so amorous a collective I might, by some trick of imagination, fall far enough into madness to live vicariously through the old king as he worked his conjugal way around the beds of his many, many wives.”
An amazed gasp emerged now from the elders. A sense of outrage came over their faces. Even the chief of the council felt his mouth tighten into a sneer, his eyes hooding with disapproval. Nonetheless he beckoned the castrato to continue.
“Of course, the story of the Moon King and his many wives is all but a legend, as no man who has sought the harem has ever returned from the Moon King’s castle. This should perhaps give some indication of the degree of my desperation!” the castrato said with a wink.
“Tell us, castrato, did you in fact make it so far as the Moon King’s palace and are you now going to tell us of the fabulous pleasures that await there? I warn you, we’ll not be taken in by fancy lies here. This is not madness, but mockery,” one of the elders said, shaking a long finger at the castrato.
The castrato gave the chief a look that begged indulgence and the chief, frowning at the interrupting elder ordered the castrato to continue, admonishing him to speak only truth or suffer more than seclusion until his madness played out.
“I assure you, great warrior and chief of our tribe, I would never waste this council’s time on madness or mockery, nor will I utter a single untrue word in your presence. I have a message of great importance, a message that will have you rejoicing.”
“Then get on with it!” the chief said impatiently.
“As is well known, the gateway to the Moon King’s land is guarded by a fearsome dragon. Well, by the time I reached the stream that marks the boundary between the wild lands and the Moon Kingdom, I had exhausted both my despair and anger. I crossed the creek and suddenly found myself unable to take another step, so great was my fatigue. I found a soft patch of sand beside the stream and promptly collapsed in an unfeeling sleep.
“After some hours the chill night air woke me. I sat up and found myself alone in a strange land with no cover, no companion, and a deep sense of shame at my behavior. It was at that moment that I noticed something very peculiar.
“There was a sound like a tremendous drum beating that filled the night and when I looked around for the source of it, I discovered that the sky was black, entirely. Not a single star so much as winked overhead. I reached up and to my amazement, my hand pressed against something leathery and warm. It was then that I realized the drumming sound was the stomping of a large foot and that the foot belonged to the leathery warm thing whose great wings were spread above me like a domed tent. The Moon King’s dragon had found me by the stream and was stamping its foot while it sheltered me beneath its outspread wings.”
“Enough of this nonsense,” one of the elder’s said. “The man is obviously mad, but I don’t see that he presents any danger to himself. In fact, some of our simpler members might find him amusing. In any case, we have a day’s work to do. Let’s end this and get about the important business that waits our attention.”
“Not so fast, brother,” the chief spoke. “I have journeyed across the wild lands and seen the dragon the castrato speaks of. It’s wings are indeed leathery, rather than scaled, as we might think. And it does have the peculiarly annoying habit of stamping its foot pretty much all the time. I cannot explain this odd behavior, nor can I account yet for the state of the castrato’s sanity, but I will hear more, as will you all. Now sit down and listen.
“As for you, castrato, I will ask you one question, and from it, I will know the truth of all that you have spoken, thus far.”
The castrato took a deep bow, having risen from his stool while the chief was talking.
“Please, great chief, test me.”
“What color are the dragon’s eyes.
The castrato stood very still, holding his hands together with his fingers steepled as he smiled up at the council.
“They are blue, my chief. But not ordinary blue. No, they glow blue from within, a deep cobalt that highlights the alternating bands of turquoise, celadon, robin’s egg, and midnight that surround a glistening golden pupil. And the dragon stomps its foot because it itches and having no hands to scratch with, it is mad with annoyance.”
“And how do you know this?” the chief asked.
“I scratched the offending foot, my chief. The dragon, being appreciative, told me so.”
Another murmur began but was stilled at once by the chief.
“I will hear all of this, without any more interruptions. The next man who speaks other than the castrato will be sent to see the dragon in person!”
A heavy silence fell over the council chamber. The castrato asked for a drink of water and took a long minute to quench his thirst before resuming.
“I saw the eyes very near to my own, my chief. The dragon had its head immediately to my left, resting it on a stone near where I slept. When I touched its wing, its eyes opened and I thought that I was surely doomed. I ran the opposite way and in so doing, ended up directly under the descending foot of the dragon. I was nearly flattened but managed to dive out of the way and holler ‘Watch it!’ just in time.
“The dragon, by the way, is a most polite beast. It apologized for nearly smashing me and then explained its predicament. Apparently the Moon King is a poor caretaker. The beast has had the itch in its foot for more than twenty years. At any rate, I offered to scratch the offensive area and the beast gratefully acceded.
“Once the itch was gone the dragon began to speak quite freely, telling me it had been waiting for me to come along forever, and that it had wanted to make my acquaintance for years, and that it could only feel love for me, both on account of my singing voice, which is perhaps my greatest asset and the fact that I was thought to be a compassionate man. This I laughed at.
“You laughed?” the chief said, incredulous, “At the dragon?”
“I had too, you see, I was terrified. If I didn’t laugh I undoubtedly would have done something horribly embarrassing like faint or pee on myself or something even worse.”
A slight laugh of amusement rippled around the council table.
“So, there I was on the border of the Moon King’s land with a relieved but still very dangerous dragon, especially if it learned my true purpose in coming. I decided to take an indirect approach.
“Dragon, I said, I’ve come to your land because I am a eunuch, a castrato, and I would that I might be allowed to sing for your master, the Moon King and his fabulous harem. At this, the dragon began to chuckle, which is not unlike the sound a volcano makes before it erupts. And then it began to howl with hysterical laughter, falling on its back and kicking its feet high in the air.
“Please, dragon, I begged, tell me what it is about my quest that is so amusing. The dragon slowly regained his composure, and then sat up rubbing tears from its eyes. It looked at me and slowly shook its head before politely refusing to answer that specific question. But you may ask me any other and I will not refuse you, the dragon said.
“After pondering for a bit, I decided to ask about the thing that had driven me mad and into the dragon’s space. All right, I began; tell me about this thing called love. Tell me what it is. I never seem to be able to find it. Perhaps I’m looking for the wrong thing.
“Love, the dragon said musingly, begins with desire. Yes, you must desire love to find it. But no ordinary desire is this which I speak of. No, this is desire that burns, consumes, and turns you to ash with its power. It is something that unrequited sustains you and feeds the whole world with its energy. It is the positive desire of the lover waiting for his beloved, the beloved in an equally powerful state of expectation. It is the closest to heaven and hell that you will ever be while alive in this world.
“I thought about the sulfurous flames lurking in the body of the beast that spoke so eloquently to me. I thought about my wanting for love, about my desire and need and hunger for it. I knew what the dragon meant, but I needed more. I needed to literally feel that burning sensation. Call me mad now, but I asked the dragon if I could be burned up with desire right then and there, on the spot I stood. I said it with such sincerity that the dragon seemed to choke up for a moment.
“You truly do have a burning desire, it said to me. I do, I answered, I want to be burned on love’s altar and my ashes scattered to the four corners of the earth that I might find love’s essence. Will you help me dragon, please?
“And the dragon could only nod. It watched as I lay on my back, my arms spread wide, ready for the scorching flames that would incinerate me and allow me to be reborn ready for love. The dragon helped, exhaling its super-heated breath on my prone body, but I know that it was my own wanting that at last caused me to burst into blue flame and wither away to ash beside the Moon King’s stream. And then I found out the real power of the dragon.
“Taking in another lungful of air, the mighty beast exhaled through its nostrils this time, and my ashes whirled aloft on a cyclone of heated air, sparking to life and becoming a million stars that formed the shape of a new constellation, a dragon equally as ferocious and huge as the one that had aided me to feel love’s burning desire. I sat in the heavens and I looked out on the whole land and I waited. Love come to me, I waited. Love? I waited some more.
“I don’t see it yet, dragon, I at last said.
“The dragon thought for a long time, and then it spoke very softly to me. The blue eyes glowed like a gem lode. Tell me what you think love is, the dragon demanded of me.
“I had to think only a slight moment, for I knew precisely what I had been missing out on for so many years. Love, I said, is the unconditional acceptance by another, no matter who you are, what you have done, or what might become of you. Love acknowledges you as valid and allows you to become all that you can without judgment. More than that, love gives back to you its strongest feelings of approval, validation, and acceptance. It gives all in service to you and in so doing, the lover is also served, allowed to shine in the presence of the object of love.
“An enormously high expectation to put on someone, don’t you think, the dragon challenged me. Not at all, I said. I would feel the same way toward one who loved me. The dragon smiled. It was a truly frightening smile, not only because it came from a ferocious dragon, but because the mental process behind it was so plain. The dragon had led me into some sort of linguistic trap and was about to spring it. Or so I thought.
“Well, castrato, the dragon said, based on your definition you must feel very loved right now. The dragon then waited for me to reply.
“How can you mock me, I said, feeling hurt. I am utterly alone, cold, and unwanted. Nothing and no one shines on me. I am accepted only with conditions, that I sing and that I not become to morose during this festival. How can you possibly think I should feel loved?
“By your own definition, the dragon said, you are loved. Consider if you will the stars. Night after night the heavens glow with a billion points of light that not only illuminate you in your so-called loneliness, but are the source of the minerals that formed every element on this planet. The stars glow and glow no matter what you do, who you are, or what you might become. They illuminate you and based on all the known signs, they are unwavering in their shining fully in your presence. You have as many lovers in the stars as the Moon King, who incidentally already knows this truth and his famous harem is nothing more than what you can see overhead. With that, the dragon folded his great wings, revealing to me the full splendor of the night sky and indeed, in that moment, in the glow of those billion suns washing over my own star body, I felt joy like I had never known. I was not alone. But of course my brain interrupted with a dampening thought.
“Fine and well, dragon. But that’s a bit grandiose for my needs. How about something a little closer to home.
“The dragon immediately blew on me and I found myself back by the stream. The beast picked me up by the collar and dunked me in the water. The stream, it said, loves you too. See how it parts to admit your body, yet at the same time, its glorious flow and melody remain unabated by your presence. The same could be said for wind, rain, even the sand where you slept. All submit willingly to any behavior you care to exercise without so much as a hint of slowing down their own grand gestures of existence. All accept you just as you are. All allow you to become whatever you will.
“I stood shivering and wet with my billions of lovers overhead and the long silver stream of my lower love below. The water felt good on my weary feet. It caressed and soothed them. The light of the stars and the stories told within them indeed seemed grand. But still something seemed to be missing.
“I still feel an empty place, here, I told the dragon, touching my heart. It is because you desire to share your feelings of love with others, the dragon said. Again I became a starry constellation. And this time I truly felt connected to all the other stars. We shone into the night, we felt each other’s presence. We loved and were loved by humanity and gave love in return. And would continue doing so for billions of years.”
The chief scratched his chin.
“And yet here you are, a man, standing before this council, not a constellation overhead.”
“This is true, my chief. You see, I realized that if I remained as a group of stars, no matter how joyful that felt, I would miss the greatest opportunity of all, that is the opportunity to share this story with all of you, to let you see how loved and accepted you and everyone in the tribe are by all of nature, and how that love accepts us no matter what we do. For the real lesson of the dragon is this, if the stars can love us that way and feel that way in their love, then we too can love one another unconditionally. And in doing so, we become stars. We become grander than any king’s treasure. We become all that we can and will bring all of our fellows along with us.”
As he spoke, the castrato began to glow. His chest in particular, in the area of his heart, took on a golden sheen that suddenly burst out and filled the whole council chamber. The light blinded all present and then faded, leaving only an empty chair in the center of the room. But that night, when darkness fell and the stars came out, a new constellation filled the northern sky. A magnificent winged dragon with a ferociously smiling face was outlined in the stars.
All the tribe turned out to see it. Some, especially the uncoupled ones, claimed that they could hear it singing.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
A New Mythology
This post serves as a beginning point. I hope there is some force behind my spending time putting thoughts on paper. I don't know if there is and if I should someday find that my hopes are in vain, I still would continue to do so. After all, if it's all pointless, and we know it, then at least we can choose how we spend our meaningless time.
I've been reading posts at the Joseph Campbell Foundation website. If you want to get involved in some heavy philosophical discussions about life, the universe, and everything, I strongly encourage you to visit there. At the same time, be warned, it's a thoughtful, well-educated, and sometimes infuriating group that actively participates in the forums. This explains my decision to simply read for awhile. My point in referencing Campbell, a man who devoted his life to the study and application of mythology to human existence, revolves around my own search for meaning in a universe of infinite possibility.
It has been suggested by a number of thinkers, among them Carl Jung and the aforementioned Joseph Campbell, that mythology is our connection to collective consciousness, that is to say, to collective truth as reflected in our perceptions of the universe. Whether those perceptions are sensory and/or extra-sensory is one of many points of contention in this work. To resolve any of that is not necessary for this 'beginning.' Instead, I want to introduce another common idea, that mythology is so pervasive, so consistent, and so deeply interwoven with all known human cultures that it might be offered to us from the creative force of the universe as the gateway to answering all of our questions about existence.
With that said, I'll move to the beginning place. What would happen if we were able to erase our collective experience, to be reborn in the sense of purifying our belief systems, eradicating our fallacies of thought, and approaching the universe of our personal existence as a new arrival? What if we then could seek our personal truth absent the influence of others, simply by extension of our own thought and experience rather than the opinions of others? If mythology is indeed the gateway to the truth, and it is a common feature for all of humanity, then purging ourselves of all knowledge of it ought to lead to, as Jung suggested, a recreation of the very same mythology over time. Perhaps coming at it from a place of openness, without all the false and unsubstantiated ideas that have filled volumes in our libraries for centuries, would allow us to discover the underlying story of us that is surely the place where we will find solace and satisfaction to the questions that have filled us with such fear, wonder, shame, awe, etc. for all the centuries of our time as a species.
The beginning then is this:
Close your eyes and allow yourself to drift into the silence.
Feel the 'you'.
Know that you are thinking, therefore you exist.
You are breathing and your heart is beating, therefore you live.
You hunger and thirst, in ways physical and non-physical, therefore you wonder.
Take it from there...and anytime you think you discover something true ask yourself, is this really true? How do I know it is true? If it isn't true, how would I know that? What are the consequences of it being true or untrue?
Don't get locked into anything as 'true' or 'untrue' until you can prove it to the satisfaction of you as an individual and to the collective whole of which you are a part.
For example: We can all agree that living brains think. We can all agree that living humans breathe and living hearts beat. We can all agree that we have physical needs to be met, specifically hunger and thirst in order to supplement the breathing and remain alive. We all agree that we seek something beyond that...and that is the point that we pretty much stop or head down such divergent paths that we ultimately end up in a place of violent disagreement, either individually or collectively within our circle of seekers.
Somewhere in between what we agree on and what we don't agree on might be the truth. That is the role that myth, the stories we create out of our inquiry, might play in this reimagined universe.
This is only a suggested beginning place. I'm starting there. I wonder where it will take me?
I've been reading posts at the Joseph Campbell Foundation website. If you want to get involved in some heavy philosophical discussions about life, the universe, and everything, I strongly encourage you to visit there. At the same time, be warned, it's a thoughtful, well-educated, and sometimes infuriating group that actively participates in the forums. This explains my decision to simply read for awhile. My point in referencing Campbell, a man who devoted his life to the study and application of mythology to human existence, revolves around my own search for meaning in a universe of infinite possibility.
It has been suggested by a number of thinkers, among them Carl Jung and the aforementioned Joseph Campbell, that mythology is our connection to collective consciousness, that is to say, to collective truth as reflected in our perceptions of the universe. Whether those perceptions are sensory and/or extra-sensory is one of many points of contention in this work. To resolve any of that is not necessary for this 'beginning.' Instead, I want to introduce another common idea, that mythology is so pervasive, so consistent, and so deeply interwoven with all known human cultures that it might be offered to us from the creative force of the universe as the gateway to answering all of our questions about existence.
With that said, I'll move to the beginning place. What would happen if we were able to erase our collective experience, to be reborn in the sense of purifying our belief systems, eradicating our fallacies of thought, and approaching the universe of our personal existence as a new arrival? What if we then could seek our personal truth absent the influence of others, simply by extension of our own thought and experience rather than the opinions of others? If mythology is indeed the gateway to the truth, and it is a common feature for all of humanity, then purging ourselves of all knowledge of it ought to lead to, as Jung suggested, a recreation of the very same mythology over time. Perhaps coming at it from a place of openness, without all the false and unsubstantiated ideas that have filled volumes in our libraries for centuries, would allow us to discover the underlying story of us that is surely the place where we will find solace and satisfaction to the questions that have filled us with such fear, wonder, shame, awe, etc. for all the centuries of our time as a species.
The beginning then is this:
Close your eyes and allow yourself to drift into the silence.
Feel the 'you'.
Know that you are thinking, therefore you exist.
You are breathing and your heart is beating, therefore you live.
You hunger and thirst, in ways physical and non-physical, therefore you wonder.
Take it from there...and anytime you think you discover something true ask yourself, is this really true? How do I know it is true? If it isn't true, how would I know that? What are the consequences of it being true or untrue?
Don't get locked into anything as 'true' or 'untrue' until you can prove it to the satisfaction of you as an individual and to the collective whole of which you are a part.
For example: We can all agree that living brains think. We can all agree that living humans breathe and living hearts beat. We can all agree that we have physical needs to be met, specifically hunger and thirst in order to supplement the breathing and remain alive. We all agree that we seek something beyond that...and that is the point that we pretty much stop or head down such divergent paths that we ultimately end up in a place of violent disagreement, either individually or collectively within our circle of seekers.
Somewhere in between what we agree on and what we don't agree on might be the truth. That is the role that myth, the stories we create out of our inquiry, might play in this reimagined universe.
This is only a suggested beginning place. I'm starting there. I wonder where it will take me?
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Avatar and My Personal Soundtrack
Just in case you are one of the three people in the world who haven’t yet seen AVATAR, be warned…THIS POSTING CONTAINS MANY SPOILERS…If you want to be surprised, go see the movie first. STOP READING NOW!
Actually, the movie telegraphs its major scenes so thoroughly that I’m not sure my comments will detract at all, but just in case…YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
I’ve got a soundtrack playing in my head. It varies in tempo and intensity and the music is as diverse as the ideas wrapped within it. Currently it’s Carl Orff’s oratorio Carmina Burana. I like the recording Ozawa’s Boston Symphony put out in 1969. The choir is spot on and even rolls their r’s properly, that is to say, in unison and on pitch. The symphony under the maestro’s baton is as precise as the chorus; in particular the horn parts are crisp, bright with just enough resonance to magnify the percussion that underlies most of the staccato trumpet parts. Tension comes through the piano and low strings.
Before Carmin Burana woke from a many months slumber my neurons were firing on the opening licks to Derek and the Dominoes’ hit Layla. That bit of thunder leapt to the forefront as soon as I exited the theater this afternoon from a showing of James Cameron’s Avatar.
The natural question here is “What did you think of the movie?” I’m still working on that, and a large part of this writing will undoubtedly be my processing. To begin with, I’m not a fan of big budget pictures like Avatar. Too often the characters and story get lost in the special effects. Too often, these films are just a rehashing of other similar pictures. I also think my emotional state going in has an effect on my like or dislike of a particular film.
Avatar is a big concept picture. Without special effects the story could not be told because the setting for the story doesn’t exist outside of the mind of the filmmaker. The race of forest people, upon whose survival the story’s narrative thread depends, don’t exist. With that settled, I can now perhaps think about my impressions of the picture.
It is a partial myth, a hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell in his work. I say partial myth because the journey never comes full circle. Rather than returning to the world he left for his adventure, bringing with him the boon or blessing obtained there, the hero stays behind, becoming one with the beings whose way of life he saved. He wasn’t killed in the attempt, as tragic heroes often are. So there’s a piece missing. The earth people are banished back to their failing world and the forest people will, it is assumed, rebuild their village and their lives. Of course, the missing ending leaves plenty of room for a sequel, maybe several. After all, George Lucas milked the Star Wars saga for six films. I can’t imagine that possible comparison has escaped James Cameron’s ego-eyed watchfulness. So that’s point one, the story isn’t done. (Who really believes the mercenaries would leave with their tails between their legs, and the corporation that paid for it all would just abandon their investment when the rarest mineral in the universe remains beneath the planet’s surface?)
The story, as it is told, doesn’t break any new ground either philosophically or in the science fiction genre. Cameron has done a nice job artistically, pulling together all the science fiction elements of the last sixty years that we so love here on our third rock from the sun. He’s got flying dragons ala Anne McCaffrey, a planet whose indigenous people are so linked to the ecology of the place as to be literally bound to it like Frank Herbert, the militarism of Robert Heinlein, the empire building of Asimov, the corporate mentality of the Matrix, and enough gadgets, guns, and cool transport vehicles to match anything Lucas’s empire ever threw at the rebellion. But all he does with it is tell a predictable story that sadly still has relevance to our world and society.
The preceding point is where I have to get thoughtful about Avatar. Tell me why the “solution” to conflicts among people is always armed battle? Why is war the alternative everyone is spoiling for from the moment we determine that these two races have fundamental incompatibilities? The forest people want to kill the “dream-walking demons” and the military mining corporation prepares for the inevitable war, the act of “last resort,” from the moment humans arrive on the incredible biological treasure of Pandora. Even the name given to the planet by the explorers implies that war cannot be avoided. Pandora is a box of evil, the place war came from. As the rogue colonel in charge of planetary security tells the new arrivals, “If you know the way to hell, you might want to head there for some R & R after you rotate out of here.”
At the point that diplomacy broke down, which is almost immediately, the threat of armed conflict became the dark force driving the picture. Cameron goes all the way down the trail, tying up all the loose ends in a neat package by killing off most of the principle combatants and leaving the hero and heroine to remake the world in their image. Sadly, they too are of the warrior breed. They are fighters first, lovers second, and naïve children in terms of the soul’s journey to love and peace. The harmony with nature thing is great but isn’t humanity part of nature too, albeit an at times arrogant and abhorrent bit of life?
I’d like to see someone tell a hero’s story where war isn’t the inevitable outcome and profit the objective. Or is that how we define heroes in our world? Is it in our soul-DNA to be violent to the point of self-destruction? There’s a very telling scene in the film, when the overzealous colonel orders huge fires to be set to drive the forest people from beneath the enormous tree that is their home. “That’s how you scatter cockroaches!” he laughs to the soldier who launched the incendiary assault. It’s an ironic statement because the film tries to teach us that living in harmony with nature is the key to survival as a race. And cockroaches, perfectly adaptable to whatever nature tosses at them, will in all likelihood, be feasting on the refuse of our remains long after we have departed this world.
That brings me to the following suggestion: Why can’t we begin to tell a new story, a better story, a story where war as an option is off the table. I’d like to see a story where humanity has evolved beyond the need to learn this sad lesson over and over and over. As I think about how this might happen, I realize that without the threat of violence most people have a hard time imagining any conflict in a big story like this. Maybe that’s true. Maybe if we ever evolved past the need to be violent, then the need for heroes would evaporate. And maybe it’s hard-wired into us after thousands of years of adrenaline rushes, of flight or fight responses, and of competition and commerce being the benchmarks of success or failure in life. We love our heroes from Odysseus to Luke Skywalker to Neo. But what if they were no longer necessary? What if we all learned to get along and work cooperatively to understand life, the universe, and everything? There is a moment in the picture when Sigourney Weaver discovers a mysterious energy signature flowing out of the most sacred spot of the forest dwelling people that outlines what the new forms of conflict might be about. She eventually comes to the sacred ground, though she is moments from death when she arrives there, and wants to take samples. She is, after all, a scientist. She doesn’t want it for the profit it will bring. She wants it because she wants to know if there is something biological that drives the impulse to eternal life, to spirit, to a soul’s journey that most of us sense, even if we have repressed it to the point of extinction or corrupted it by our malformed organized religious orders.
The conflict in a story like this is internal. If, as Buckminster Fuller believed, we are born into this universe to learn everything there is to know about it, then we have enough challenges to keep us working cooperatively for millennia. And that is a conflict of a different sort, to learn to cooperate with the whole universe. But since we haven’t learned to get along with each other, it’s a difficult one to explore in film or story. If we don’t try, I fear we may never get to see the reality of it.
My final comment might seem minor in light of the bigger questions posed above. I don’t think it is. The characters are portrayed as caricatures rather than believable flesh-and-blood beings. Sigourney Weaver is simply an older, more passive version of Ellen Ripley. The war-mongering colonel is a joke with lines like “Come to Papa,” and “I want this operation high and tight. I want to be home for supper.” The CGI aliens have the disturbingly lifeless fault of never having the pupils of their eyes change size. They appear like characters in a video game, blue striped versions of Jar-Jar Binks. I think that may be as disturbing as the ultimate solution theory of the movie. We have a generation of video game players being marketed to by our military branches. What do they see? Weapons, tactics, and portrayals of the enemy that resemble the villains in the video games that occupy more of their time than television. We glorify video-game violence in a way that makes it not seem real. But all violence begins in the mind. Imaginary violence is one blow from moving from thought to reality, as are all ideas, whether constructive or destructive. The flat, archetypal caricatures in Avatar are like Wiley Coyote. They are smashed, shot, immolated, and blown to bits. But for $8.25 and two and half hours of your time you can see them whole again, and again, and again. And now you see them in 3D. We are transforming our most violent fantasies into reality without having any real sense of a reasonable stopping point. How this raises us up in the grand scheme of things is something I can’t begin to explain.
If you stayed with me this long, thank you. I’m not interested in having a debate about this. I am very interested in hearing about ideas for stories along the lines of the new mythology I alluded to, a mythology where heroes aren’t compelled by an inevitable drive to violence and where cooperation, not competition wins the day, as well as the hearts and minds of those who will shape our world for future generations.
Two following items: the definition of avatar and the poem O Fortuna, from Carmina Burana, which has been played in movies, shows, and spectacles since the days of Nazi Germany.
av⋅a⋅tar
1. Hindu Mythology. the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape; the incarnation of a god.
2. an embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life.
3. Computers. a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet.
Poem – O Fortuna from Carmina Burana
English
O Fortune,
just as the moon
Stands constantly changing,
always increasing
or decreasing;
Detestable life
now difficult
and then easy
Deceptive sharp mind;
poverty
power
it melts them like ice.
Fate—monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
stand malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game,
my bare back
I bring to your villainy.
Fate, in health
and in virtue,
is now against me
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating string;
since through Fate
strikes down the strong,
everyone weep with me!
Latin
O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.
Sors immani
set inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
michi quoque niteris;
nunc per ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris.
Sors saluti
set virtutis
michi nunc contraria,
est affectu
set defectus
semper in angaria.
Hac in hora
sine mora
corde pulsum tangite;
quod per sortem
sternit fortem,
mecum omnes plangite!
Actually, the movie telegraphs its major scenes so thoroughly that I’m not sure my comments will detract at all, but just in case…YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
I’ve got a soundtrack playing in my head. It varies in tempo and intensity and the music is as diverse as the ideas wrapped within it. Currently it’s Carl Orff’s oratorio Carmina Burana. I like the recording Ozawa’s Boston Symphony put out in 1969. The choir is spot on and even rolls their r’s properly, that is to say, in unison and on pitch. The symphony under the maestro’s baton is as precise as the chorus; in particular the horn parts are crisp, bright with just enough resonance to magnify the percussion that underlies most of the staccato trumpet parts. Tension comes through the piano and low strings.
Before Carmin Burana woke from a many months slumber my neurons were firing on the opening licks to Derek and the Dominoes’ hit Layla. That bit of thunder leapt to the forefront as soon as I exited the theater this afternoon from a showing of James Cameron’s Avatar.
The natural question here is “What did you think of the movie?” I’m still working on that, and a large part of this writing will undoubtedly be my processing. To begin with, I’m not a fan of big budget pictures like Avatar. Too often the characters and story get lost in the special effects. Too often, these films are just a rehashing of other similar pictures. I also think my emotional state going in has an effect on my like or dislike of a particular film.
Avatar is a big concept picture. Without special effects the story could not be told because the setting for the story doesn’t exist outside of the mind of the filmmaker. The race of forest people, upon whose survival the story’s narrative thread depends, don’t exist. With that settled, I can now perhaps think about my impressions of the picture.
It is a partial myth, a hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell in his work. I say partial myth because the journey never comes full circle. Rather than returning to the world he left for his adventure, bringing with him the boon or blessing obtained there, the hero stays behind, becoming one with the beings whose way of life he saved. He wasn’t killed in the attempt, as tragic heroes often are. So there’s a piece missing. The earth people are banished back to their failing world and the forest people will, it is assumed, rebuild their village and their lives. Of course, the missing ending leaves plenty of room for a sequel, maybe several. After all, George Lucas milked the Star Wars saga for six films. I can’t imagine that possible comparison has escaped James Cameron’s ego-eyed watchfulness. So that’s point one, the story isn’t done. (Who really believes the mercenaries would leave with their tails between their legs, and the corporation that paid for it all would just abandon their investment when the rarest mineral in the universe remains beneath the planet’s surface?)
The story, as it is told, doesn’t break any new ground either philosophically or in the science fiction genre. Cameron has done a nice job artistically, pulling together all the science fiction elements of the last sixty years that we so love here on our third rock from the sun. He’s got flying dragons ala Anne McCaffrey, a planet whose indigenous people are so linked to the ecology of the place as to be literally bound to it like Frank Herbert, the militarism of Robert Heinlein, the empire building of Asimov, the corporate mentality of the Matrix, and enough gadgets, guns, and cool transport vehicles to match anything Lucas’s empire ever threw at the rebellion. But all he does with it is tell a predictable story that sadly still has relevance to our world and society.
The preceding point is where I have to get thoughtful about Avatar. Tell me why the “solution” to conflicts among people is always armed battle? Why is war the alternative everyone is spoiling for from the moment we determine that these two races have fundamental incompatibilities? The forest people want to kill the “dream-walking demons” and the military mining corporation prepares for the inevitable war, the act of “last resort,” from the moment humans arrive on the incredible biological treasure of Pandora. Even the name given to the planet by the explorers implies that war cannot be avoided. Pandora is a box of evil, the place war came from. As the rogue colonel in charge of planetary security tells the new arrivals, “If you know the way to hell, you might want to head there for some R & R after you rotate out of here.”
At the point that diplomacy broke down, which is almost immediately, the threat of armed conflict became the dark force driving the picture. Cameron goes all the way down the trail, tying up all the loose ends in a neat package by killing off most of the principle combatants and leaving the hero and heroine to remake the world in their image. Sadly, they too are of the warrior breed. They are fighters first, lovers second, and naïve children in terms of the soul’s journey to love and peace. The harmony with nature thing is great but isn’t humanity part of nature too, albeit an at times arrogant and abhorrent bit of life?
I’d like to see someone tell a hero’s story where war isn’t the inevitable outcome and profit the objective. Or is that how we define heroes in our world? Is it in our soul-DNA to be violent to the point of self-destruction? There’s a very telling scene in the film, when the overzealous colonel orders huge fires to be set to drive the forest people from beneath the enormous tree that is their home. “That’s how you scatter cockroaches!” he laughs to the soldier who launched the incendiary assault. It’s an ironic statement because the film tries to teach us that living in harmony with nature is the key to survival as a race. And cockroaches, perfectly adaptable to whatever nature tosses at them, will in all likelihood, be feasting on the refuse of our remains long after we have departed this world.
That brings me to the following suggestion: Why can’t we begin to tell a new story, a better story, a story where war as an option is off the table. I’d like to see a story where humanity has evolved beyond the need to learn this sad lesson over and over and over. As I think about how this might happen, I realize that without the threat of violence most people have a hard time imagining any conflict in a big story like this. Maybe that’s true. Maybe if we ever evolved past the need to be violent, then the need for heroes would evaporate. And maybe it’s hard-wired into us after thousands of years of adrenaline rushes, of flight or fight responses, and of competition and commerce being the benchmarks of success or failure in life. We love our heroes from Odysseus to Luke Skywalker to Neo. But what if they were no longer necessary? What if we all learned to get along and work cooperatively to understand life, the universe, and everything? There is a moment in the picture when Sigourney Weaver discovers a mysterious energy signature flowing out of the most sacred spot of the forest dwelling people that outlines what the new forms of conflict might be about. She eventually comes to the sacred ground, though she is moments from death when she arrives there, and wants to take samples. She is, after all, a scientist. She doesn’t want it for the profit it will bring. She wants it because she wants to know if there is something biological that drives the impulse to eternal life, to spirit, to a soul’s journey that most of us sense, even if we have repressed it to the point of extinction or corrupted it by our malformed organized religious orders.
The conflict in a story like this is internal. If, as Buckminster Fuller believed, we are born into this universe to learn everything there is to know about it, then we have enough challenges to keep us working cooperatively for millennia. And that is a conflict of a different sort, to learn to cooperate with the whole universe. But since we haven’t learned to get along with each other, it’s a difficult one to explore in film or story. If we don’t try, I fear we may never get to see the reality of it.
My final comment might seem minor in light of the bigger questions posed above. I don’t think it is. The characters are portrayed as caricatures rather than believable flesh-and-blood beings. Sigourney Weaver is simply an older, more passive version of Ellen Ripley. The war-mongering colonel is a joke with lines like “Come to Papa,” and “I want this operation high and tight. I want to be home for supper.” The CGI aliens have the disturbingly lifeless fault of never having the pupils of their eyes change size. They appear like characters in a video game, blue striped versions of Jar-Jar Binks. I think that may be as disturbing as the ultimate solution theory of the movie. We have a generation of video game players being marketed to by our military branches. What do they see? Weapons, tactics, and portrayals of the enemy that resemble the villains in the video games that occupy more of their time than television. We glorify video-game violence in a way that makes it not seem real. But all violence begins in the mind. Imaginary violence is one blow from moving from thought to reality, as are all ideas, whether constructive or destructive. The flat, archetypal caricatures in Avatar are like Wiley Coyote. They are smashed, shot, immolated, and blown to bits. But for $8.25 and two and half hours of your time you can see them whole again, and again, and again. And now you see them in 3D. We are transforming our most violent fantasies into reality without having any real sense of a reasonable stopping point. How this raises us up in the grand scheme of things is something I can’t begin to explain.
If you stayed with me this long, thank you. I’m not interested in having a debate about this. I am very interested in hearing about ideas for stories along the lines of the new mythology I alluded to, a mythology where heroes aren’t compelled by an inevitable drive to violence and where cooperation, not competition wins the day, as well as the hearts and minds of those who will shape our world for future generations.
Two following items: the definition of avatar and the poem O Fortuna, from Carmina Burana, which has been played in movies, shows, and spectacles since the days of Nazi Germany.
av⋅a⋅tar
1. Hindu Mythology. the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape; the incarnation of a god.
2. an embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life.
3. Computers. a graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet.
Poem – O Fortuna from Carmina Burana
English
O Fortune,
just as the moon
Stands constantly changing,
always increasing
or decreasing;
Detestable life
now difficult
and then easy
Deceptive sharp mind;
poverty
power
it melts them like ice.
Fate—monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
stand malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game,
my bare back
I bring to your villainy.
Fate, in health
and in virtue,
is now against me
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating string;
since through Fate
strikes down the strong,
everyone weep with me!
Latin
O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.
Sors immani
set inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
michi quoque niteris;
nunc per ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris.
Sors saluti
set virtutis
michi nunc contraria,
est affectu
set defectus
semper in angaria.
Hac in hora
sine mora
corde pulsum tangite;
quod per sortem
sternit fortem,
mecum omnes plangite!
Monday, February 1, 2010
The Golden Buffalo
This story is largely based on a shamanic journey on January 31, 2010.
Gristhorpe felt Viriugum's tremendous girth swaying between his thighs. Viriugum, the golden bison, had carried Gristhorpe for more than twenty-years. Together, man and beast ruled the Ciniwavi people with a strong but compassionate hand. Gristhorpe felt his heart and that of the great animal beat as one. He felt that they shared breath and muscle and mind through the hardships and dangers of life in the great stone wilderness. Were he and Viriugum to be separated, Gristhorpe felt certain that the greatness of the Ciniwavi people would slide precipitously towards oblivion. But today was not a day for such dark thoughts. Today was a day for rejoicing, for Gristhorpe had at last found the fabled falls of Soul Reflection. While his people waited in long lines on both sides of the high cliffs surrounding the hidden canyon, Gristhorpe gazed deeply into the rippling silver surface of a broad sheet of water as the sacred river spilled over a stone ledge some twenty feet above him. He had never imagined anything like the Soul Reflection falls. From where he and Viriugum stood, the image in the water seemed to have a life of its own. He could see the long, dark hair of the warrior falling over the muscular shoulders, the brown skin painted with ochre and henna in mystic symbols of the Ciniwavi people, telling their history. Gristhorpe's personal history reflected in the iconic images of battle stitched in the fabric of his leggings. The beaded headband bore an intricate design of his journey from orphan to ruler of a people as ancient and powerful as the mighty river that flowed all through the granite sepulchres of the Ciniwavi hunting grounds.
Gristhorpe eased Viriugum a step closer to the falls. The great beast shook his shaggy head as if warning Gristhorpe not to tempt the gods. Gristhorpe leaned over the massive black horns of his companion and extended his hand toward that of his reflection. He stopped just short of the shimmering image, not quite able to reach it, letting his fingertips dance in tandem with those of his silent doppelganger while the sound of the water filled the air with a steady, low roar.
"Off we go then, Viriugum," Gristhorpe said, kicking with his leatherclad heels against the heavy ribs of his mount. Viriugum turned and splashed ashore on the near bank. This was the west side of the river, the protected lands where the spirits of the ancestors hunted. Only the chief of the Ciniwavi was allowed to ride on the hallowed ground, and only once, after seeing his image in the Soul Reflection. The legends of the Ciniwavi foretold a great boon to be bestowed on one leader in each generation after he discovered the secret route to the falls, viewed his image, and retreated down river on the protected bank. It was a legend to be proved as no chief prior to Gristhorpe had ever successfully ventured down the treacherous walls from the stony heights of the granite canyon. Indeed, Gristhorpe had ridden out every day for nearly the entire twenty years of his rule seeking a navigable path to the canyon's bottom. Today, he had found it, and sounding a long note on the ram's horn trumpet, he had called his people to witness his triumph on this fine spring morning.
Now, having seen his image in the Soul Reflection falls, he felt his breath quicken and his heart beat in time with the trotting pace of Viriugum as they raced through the ancestral lands. What boon would Gristhorpe receive? He lacked for nothing of necessity. He'd a fine wife, two strong sons, three beautiful daughters, a contented tribe of warriors and their families, land to hunt in, and few enemies remaining. All this was possible, he believed, because he had learned well the teachings of Shiroakum the elder, the long-deceased medicine man of the Ciniwavi who had taken in the orphaned boy when he was found hidden deep in a crevice of a tree, his mother's half-eaten body lying nearby where a great cougar had attacked her and young Gristhorpe as they walked unattended through the Mid Woods.
"You must not dwell on sadness," Shiroakum had told the boy, "For it will not bring her back, nor will it serve to move you any closer to your destiny. Be busy always, pressing forward, doing, not thinking too much, and keeping your eyes on the possibilities for success, rather than the unchangeable blood of failure." It was Shiroakum's only lesson, repeated endlessly until Gristhorpe buried his sense of loss, hurt, and abandonment beneath a callus of activity, ambition, and limitless drive.
He had been six when he lost his mother. His father had been killed in an accidental fall into the sacred river from atop one of the sepulchres two years earlier. That death too, and the sadness of it, lay buried deep within the warrior. His mother had seen to it that Gristhorpe's mind and body remained occupied with learning the ways of the wilderness and the Cirivani people so that he had little time to miss his father. If he ever allowed himself to lapse into melancholy, he was rewarded with a double ration of chores, sometimes painful ones such as scraping moss from the flat stones of the foundations of the cliff dwellings of the Ciniwavi, until the sorrow passed. "Boys become men. Men who cry do not become warriors. They become prisoners and casualties of life and battle," his mother taught him over and over.
Gristhorpe and Viriugum both shared the drive, the ambition, and the boldness that had made them the finest hunters, fighters, and natural leaders of the whole Ciniwavi tribe. Gristhorpe knew his animal so well, and vice versa, that a simple exhalation of breath with the thought of command was usually enough to send the ton and half beast in the proper direction at exactly the right speed for whatever task needed doing. The present task was among the simpler and more pleasant of their lives, Gristhorpe thought. He and Viriugum simply had to ride down the bank of the sacred river and obtain the boon in full view of the Ciniwavi who lined the high cliffs overhead, their coyote hides flapping in the spring breeze as their howls of encouragement and praise echoed through the walls of the canyon.
All at once, the canyon grew silent. Gristhorpe, who had been daydreaming about the day when he would become a permanent member of the honored dead whose hunting ground he now rode upon looked up. A low murmur filled the air, like a second stream of water floating above Gristhorpe's head. It was the voices of his people as they pointed toward a bend in the river. Gristhorpe looked and saw the cause of the change in the people's mood.
Standing on a flat rock on the opposite bank, an enormous female cougar stared with hungry eyes at Gristhorpe and Viriugum. She was the length of two and a half men from the tip of her nose to the twitching end of her tail. Her jaws were wide enough, Gristhorpe saw, to take his entire head easily inside. Three spotted cubs sat attentively outside a den behind her.
Gristhorpe had come unarmed to the Soul Reflection falls, as the legend decreed. All that stood between him and the hungry cougar was ten yards of shallow river. Still, he thought, I am aboard Viriugum. We have fought worse with less and in poorer conditions. Like that pack of wolves in the dead of winter with blinding snow all around. He still got a thrill thinking of the slashing horns atop the massive head meeting charge after charge from the hunger-crazed drooling jaws of the great grey beasts. More than a dozen had died on those horns before the remaining three gave up the fight. Gristhorpe had the finest pair of wolf-hide blankets of all the Ciniwavi after that. Besides, he reasoned, cats dislike water, to the point of madness. He smiled at the cougar and gave Viriugum an encouraging kick. The bison increased his trotting pace to a gallop. The cougar bared her teeth and leapt lightly from the stone, running easily parallel to Gristhorpe, though she remained on the far bank. The Ciniwavi overhead held their breaths and watched.
Abruptly, the river narrowed, close set trees crowded the shoreline and both Gristhorpe and the cougar were forced into the gravel lined shallows on their respective sides of the sacred river. Gristhorpe could hear the sound of rapids ahead. He glanced over at the cat. She ran easily through the water and a low rumbling growl came from her throat. Gristhorpe snarled back, thinking to his size and ferocity might chase her away. She moved toward the center of the stream.
"I see you, warrior-chieftan," a voice in his head said.
"Who are you?" he thought in answer. "A god or an ancestor?"
The low growl grew louder as the cat reached the center of the channel.
"I am the boon you are to be given. I live in the mind of this cougar," the voice said. Gristhorpe shook his head and frowned, looking at the cougar who now ran on a diagonal path that would intercept the warrior in just a few more paces. "I'm here because there is an important lesson for you to learn."
"I followed all the requirements. I studied the legend, found the trail, bested the cliffs, and went to the sacred fall. What sort of boon is this? To be eaten, as my mother was?"
The voice fell silent and Gristhorpe kicked vigorously at Viriugum's sides. The bison was panting, his huge size a disadvantage in the fast flowing waters of the rocky bottomed river. The cat closed. Gristhorpe turned and raised a hand when the cougar leapt. The cougar hit the warrior with both front paws and knocked him into the waters just short of a long series of rapids. Gristhorpe had an image of Viriugum whirling toward him and then slipping on the treacherous bottom of the river, falling with a tremendous splash as the weight of the cougar pressed Gristhorpe's head beneath the foaming waters. The world went black for a few terrifying moments.
Gristhorpe opened his eyes. He was still underwater. The cougar stood atop him. He could see her face, mouth open, canines at the ready, directly above him. He struggled to move but she extended her claws and pressed them into his chest, breaking the skin. If he moved, she would rip him open.
"Now comes the lesson," the voice in his head whispered.
Behind the cat a massive shadow filled Gristhorpe's vision. Viriugum had regained his footing and charged the cougar, head high, ready to lower it and impale the cat on the heavy points of his horns. Suddenly, Gristhorpe was free. The pressure of the claws on his chest was gone as if carried away by the current. Only it wasn't Viriugum's horns that had removed the predator. The cougar, timing her whirling leap perfectly, had turned and launched herself, jaws open, at the loose skin of the bison's throat. She bit, hard and deep, ripping a half-yard of fur and flesh as she settled on all fours in the water in front of the surprised bison. Viriugum whirled and again lost his footing, falling hard at the same time the cougar again attacked, this time aiming for the exposed flesh of the bison's belly. Her razorlike claws disemboweled the animal in an instant and with a tremendous bellow of pain and rage, Viriugum thrashed and kicked and bled into the sacred waters until at last he lay still against a rock while the river flowed around him.
The cougar turned to see Gristhorpe staring, horrified at what had just occurred, then turning her back on the man, she swam easily to the far shore and trotted back to her den, the cubs following her inside.
Gristhorpe felt the grief building. His heart filled his throat, his head pounded as if being beaten with the boulders creating the rapids in which he and Viriugum had fought their final battle, and lost. It was too much, the grief. Shiroakum and his mother's faces filled Gristhorpe's eyes, pressing back the tears. He rose to his feet and ran, faster than he'd ever run, onto the riverbank, down the river past the rapids where he leapt into the deeper waters and heavy current as the stream widened. He began to swim, mindlessly, the blood roaring in his ears, drowning out the echoes of Viriugum's death cry that reverberated endlessly.
By the time Gristhorpe felt the first pangs of fatigue the river was a quarter mile wide and he was in the center of it. He'd been carried far from the traditional Ciniwavi lands into unknown territory. He saw a cloud of mist in the distance, downstream, and heard a new roaring sound, a sound that terrified and intensified with each stroke of his strong arms. He was heading for another waterfall, and from the height the mist rose and the volume of the sound of falling water, it was a fall that he would not survive a trip over.
Immediately he began to swim diagonally toward the nearest bank. He knew the current was too strong and he didn't have enough strength left to make it. His grief weighed him down like he was pulling the body of the bison behind him. Not just the bison, but also the unshed tears for his mother and father as well. He was a warrior. He'd locked away the parts of himself that hurt and now they had all gathered themselves into the dispassionate flow of this river and were carrying him to his demise. He suddenly felt very afraid. And then, the gods gave him a real treasure. Seconds before reaching the head of the falls he came upon a narrow sandbar some thirty feet from the shoreline. Lying full atop the sandy surface, Gristhorpe hugged the wet earth and gasped for breath. He would have to remain here for some time, perhaps even overnight. He was totally exhausted. As he regained his breath, the grief that he had been eluding for all of his life caught up with him, surrounding him in a cocoon of pain like being slow-roasted over hot coals. He was too tired to swim, he would either have to endure this grief or drown.
"So be it," he thought, surrendering to the tears that after what seemed hours, released him to the oblivion of sleep.
Shiroakum and his mother came to him in a dream. They sat atop the broad back of Viriugum and smiled down at Gristhorpe as he tried to reach them. But although they seemed right on top of him, they were always just out of range of his outstretched hand. It was the same as when he had reached for his doppelganger in the Soul Reflection falls earlier. Nothing to touch.
"Gristhorpe," the two riders said in unison, "We were wrong. By his sacrifice Viriugum has helped all of us to see and to learn."
"To learn what?" Gristhorpe heard his dream self ask.
"A warrior isn't a true to himself or his tribe by suppressing grief. For it is still with him, like an unseen millstone that will eventually drag him beneath the waves to his ruin. Grief must be expressed, not suppressed. Only when he has purged his soul of the anguish of loss and replaced it with the love of the memory of that he has lost will he be whole again."
Gristhorpe remained on the sandbar for many days, grieving the losses of his life. When he was at last free of his tears, he swam easily ashore, returned to the land of the Ciniwavi, and ruled wisely for many more years, carried on the memories of those whom he loved and lost and strengthened by the knowledge that even though they were gone, their love for him was indestructible.
Gristhorpe felt Viriugum's tremendous girth swaying between his thighs. Viriugum, the golden bison, had carried Gristhorpe for more than twenty-years. Together, man and beast ruled the Ciniwavi people with a strong but compassionate hand. Gristhorpe felt his heart and that of the great animal beat as one. He felt that they shared breath and muscle and mind through the hardships and dangers of life in the great stone wilderness. Were he and Viriugum to be separated, Gristhorpe felt certain that the greatness of the Ciniwavi people would slide precipitously towards oblivion. But today was not a day for such dark thoughts. Today was a day for rejoicing, for Gristhorpe had at last found the fabled falls of Soul Reflection. While his people waited in long lines on both sides of the high cliffs surrounding the hidden canyon, Gristhorpe gazed deeply into the rippling silver surface of a broad sheet of water as the sacred river spilled over a stone ledge some twenty feet above him. He had never imagined anything like the Soul Reflection falls. From where he and Viriugum stood, the image in the water seemed to have a life of its own. He could see the long, dark hair of the warrior falling over the muscular shoulders, the brown skin painted with ochre and henna in mystic symbols of the Ciniwavi people, telling their history. Gristhorpe's personal history reflected in the iconic images of battle stitched in the fabric of his leggings. The beaded headband bore an intricate design of his journey from orphan to ruler of a people as ancient and powerful as the mighty river that flowed all through the granite sepulchres of the Ciniwavi hunting grounds.
Gristhorpe eased Viriugum a step closer to the falls. The great beast shook his shaggy head as if warning Gristhorpe not to tempt the gods. Gristhorpe leaned over the massive black horns of his companion and extended his hand toward that of his reflection. He stopped just short of the shimmering image, not quite able to reach it, letting his fingertips dance in tandem with those of his silent doppelganger while the sound of the water filled the air with a steady, low roar.
"Off we go then, Viriugum," Gristhorpe said, kicking with his leatherclad heels against the heavy ribs of his mount. Viriugum turned and splashed ashore on the near bank. This was the west side of the river, the protected lands where the spirits of the ancestors hunted. Only the chief of the Ciniwavi was allowed to ride on the hallowed ground, and only once, after seeing his image in the Soul Reflection. The legends of the Ciniwavi foretold a great boon to be bestowed on one leader in each generation after he discovered the secret route to the falls, viewed his image, and retreated down river on the protected bank. It was a legend to be proved as no chief prior to Gristhorpe had ever successfully ventured down the treacherous walls from the stony heights of the granite canyon. Indeed, Gristhorpe had ridden out every day for nearly the entire twenty years of his rule seeking a navigable path to the canyon's bottom. Today, he had found it, and sounding a long note on the ram's horn trumpet, he had called his people to witness his triumph on this fine spring morning.
Now, having seen his image in the Soul Reflection falls, he felt his breath quicken and his heart beat in time with the trotting pace of Viriugum as they raced through the ancestral lands. What boon would Gristhorpe receive? He lacked for nothing of necessity. He'd a fine wife, two strong sons, three beautiful daughters, a contented tribe of warriors and their families, land to hunt in, and few enemies remaining. All this was possible, he believed, because he had learned well the teachings of Shiroakum the elder, the long-deceased medicine man of the Ciniwavi who had taken in the orphaned boy when he was found hidden deep in a crevice of a tree, his mother's half-eaten body lying nearby where a great cougar had attacked her and young Gristhorpe as they walked unattended through the Mid Woods.
"You must not dwell on sadness," Shiroakum had told the boy, "For it will not bring her back, nor will it serve to move you any closer to your destiny. Be busy always, pressing forward, doing, not thinking too much, and keeping your eyes on the possibilities for success, rather than the unchangeable blood of failure." It was Shiroakum's only lesson, repeated endlessly until Gristhorpe buried his sense of loss, hurt, and abandonment beneath a callus of activity, ambition, and limitless drive.
He had been six when he lost his mother. His father had been killed in an accidental fall into the sacred river from atop one of the sepulchres two years earlier. That death too, and the sadness of it, lay buried deep within the warrior. His mother had seen to it that Gristhorpe's mind and body remained occupied with learning the ways of the wilderness and the Cirivani people so that he had little time to miss his father. If he ever allowed himself to lapse into melancholy, he was rewarded with a double ration of chores, sometimes painful ones such as scraping moss from the flat stones of the foundations of the cliff dwellings of the Ciniwavi, until the sorrow passed. "Boys become men. Men who cry do not become warriors. They become prisoners and casualties of life and battle," his mother taught him over and over.
Gristhorpe and Viriugum both shared the drive, the ambition, and the boldness that had made them the finest hunters, fighters, and natural leaders of the whole Ciniwavi tribe. Gristhorpe knew his animal so well, and vice versa, that a simple exhalation of breath with the thought of command was usually enough to send the ton and half beast in the proper direction at exactly the right speed for whatever task needed doing. The present task was among the simpler and more pleasant of their lives, Gristhorpe thought. He and Viriugum simply had to ride down the bank of the sacred river and obtain the boon in full view of the Ciniwavi who lined the high cliffs overhead, their coyote hides flapping in the spring breeze as their howls of encouragement and praise echoed through the walls of the canyon.
All at once, the canyon grew silent. Gristhorpe, who had been daydreaming about the day when he would become a permanent member of the honored dead whose hunting ground he now rode upon looked up. A low murmur filled the air, like a second stream of water floating above Gristhorpe's head. It was the voices of his people as they pointed toward a bend in the river. Gristhorpe looked and saw the cause of the change in the people's mood.
Standing on a flat rock on the opposite bank, an enormous female cougar stared with hungry eyes at Gristhorpe and Viriugum. She was the length of two and a half men from the tip of her nose to the twitching end of her tail. Her jaws were wide enough, Gristhorpe saw, to take his entire head easily inside. Three spotted cubs sat attentively outside a den behind her.
Gristhorpe had come unarmed to the Soul Reflection falls, as the legend decreed. All that stood between him and the hungry cougar was ten yards of shallow river. Still, he thought, I am aboard Viriugum. We have fought worse with less and in poorer conditions. Like that pack of wolves in the dead of winter with blinding snow all around. He still got a thrill thinking of the slashing horns atop the massive head meeting charge after charge from the hunger-crazed drooling jaws of the great grey beasts. More than a dozen had died on those horns before the remaining three gave up the fight. Gristhorpe had the finest pair of wolf-hide blankets of all the Ciniwavi after that. Besides, he reasoned, cats dislike water, to the point of madness. He smiled at the cougar and gave Viriugum an encouraging kick. The bison increased his trotting pace to a gallop. The cougar bared her teeth and leapt lightly from the stone, running easily parallel to Gristhorpe, though she remained on the far bank. The Ciniwavi overhead held their breaths and watched.
Abruptly, the river narrowed, close set trees crowded the shoreline and both Gristhorpe and the cougar were forced into the gravel lined shallows on their respective sides of the sacred river. Gristhorpe could hear the sound of rapids ahead. He glanced over at the cat. She ran easily through the water and a low rumbling growl came from her throat. Gristhorpe snarled back, thinking to his size and ferocity might chase her away. She moved toward the center of the stream.
"I see you, warrior-chieftan," a voice in his head said.
"Who are you?" he thought in answer. "A god or an ancestor?"
The low growl grew louder as the cat reached the center of the channel.
"I am the boon you are to be given. I live in the mind of this cougar," the voice said. Gristhorpe shook his head and frowned, looking at the cougar who now ran on a diagonal path that would intercept the warrior in just a few more paces. "I'm here because there is an important lesson for you to learn."
"I followed all the requirements. I studied the legend, found the trail, bested the cliffs, and went to the sacred fall. What sort of boon is this? To be eaten, as my mother was?"
The voice fell silent and Gristhorpe kicked vigorously at Viriugum's sides. The bison was panting, his huge size a disadvantage in the fast flowing waters of the rocky bottomed river. The cat closed. Gristhorpe turned and raised a hand when the cougar leapt. The cougar hit the warrior with both front paws and knocked him into the waters just short of a long series of rapids. Gristhorpe had an image of Viriugum whirling toward him and then slipping on the treacherous bottom of the river, falling with a tremendous splash as the weight of the cougar pressed Gristhorpe's head beneath the foaming waters. The world went black for a few terrifying moments.
Gristhorpe opened his eyes. He was still underwater. The cougar stood atop him. He could see her face, mouth open, canines at the ready, directly above him. He struggled to move but she extended her claws and pressed them into his chest, breaking the skin. If he moved, she would rip him open.
"Now comes the lesson," the voice in his head whispered.
Behind the cat a massive shadow filled Gristhorpe's vision. Viriugum had regained his footing and charged the cougar, head high, ready to lower it and impale the cat on the heavy points of his horns. Suddenly, Gristhorpe was free. The pressure of the claws on his chest was gone as if carried away by the current. Only it wasn't Viriugum's horns that had removed the predator. The cougar, timing her whirling leap perfectly, had turned and launched herself, jaws open, at the loose skin of the bison's throat. She bit, hard and deep, ripping a half-yard of fur and flesh as she settled on all fours in the water in front of the surprised bison. Viriugum whirled and again lost his footing, falling hard at the same time the cougar again attacked, this time aiming for the exposed flesh of the bison's belly. Her razorlike claws disemboweled the animal in an instant and with a tremendous bellow of pain and rage, Viriugum thrashed and kicked and bled into the sacred waters until at last he lay still against a rock while the river flowed around him.
The cougar turned to see Gristhorpe staring, horrified at what had just occurred, then turning her back on the man, she swam easily to the far shore and trotted back to her den, the cubs following her inside.
Gristhorpe felt the grief building. His heart filled his throat, his head pounded as if being beaten with the boulders creating the rapids in which he and Viriugum had fought their final battle, and lost. It was too much, the grief. Shiroakum and his mother's faces filled Gristhorpe's eyes, pressing back the tears. He rose to his feet and ran, faster than he'd ever run, onto the riverbank, down the river past the rapids where he leapt into the deeper waters and heavy current as the stream widened. He began to swim, mindlessly, the blood roaring in his ears, drowning out the echoes of Viriugum's death cry that reverberated endlessly.
By the time Gristhorpe felt the first pangs of fatigue the river was a quarter mile wide and he was in the center of it. He'd been carried far from the traditional Ciniwavi lands into unknown territory. He saw a cloud of mist in the distance, downstream, and heard a new roaring sound, a sound that terrified and intensified with each stroke of his strong arms. He was heading for another waterfall, and from the height the mist rose and the volume of the sound of falling water, it was a fall that he would not survive a trip over.
Immediately he began to swim diagonally toward the nearest bank. He knew the current was too strong and he didn't have enough strength left to make it. His grief weighed him down like he was pulling the body of the bison behind him. Not just the bison, but also the unshed tears for his mother and father as well. He was a warrior. He'd locked away the parts of himself that hurt and now they had all gathered themselves into the dispassionate flow of this river and were carrying him to his demise. He suddenly felt very afraid. And then, the gods gave him a real treasure. Seconds before reaching the head of the falls he came upon a narrow sandbar some thirty feet from the shoreline. Lying full atop the sandy surface, Gristhorpe hugged the wet earth and gasped for breath. He would have to remain here for some time, perhaps even overnight. He was totally exhausted. As he regained his breath, the grief that he had been eluding for all of his life caught up with him, surrounding him in a cocoon of pain like being slow-roasted over hot coals. He was too tired to swim, he would either have to endure this grief or drown.
"So be it," he thought, surrendering to the tears that after what seemed hours, released him to the oblivion of sleep.
Shiroakum and his mother came to him in a dream. They sat atop the broad back of Viriugum and smiled down at Gristhorpe as he tried to reach them. But although they seemed right on top of him, they were always just out of range of his outstretched hand. It was the same as when he had reached for his doppelganger in the Soul Reflection falls earlier. Nothing to touch.
"Gristhorpe," the two riders said in unison, "We were wrong. By his sacrifice Viriugum has helped all of us to see and to learn."
"To learn what?" Gristhorpe heard his dream self ask.
"A warrior isn't a true to himself or his tribe by suppressing grief. For it is still with him, like an unseen millstone that will eventually drag him beneath the waves to his ruin. Grief must be expressed, not suppressed. Only when he has purged his soul of the anguish of loss and replaced it with the love of the memory of that he has lost will he be whole again."
Gristhorpe remained on the sandbar for many days, grieving the losses of his life. When he was at last free of his tears, he swam easily ashore, returned to the land of the Ciniwavi, and ruled wisely for many more years, carried on the memories of those whom he loved and lost and strengthened by the knowledge that even though they were gone, their love for him was indestructible.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Shamanic Journeys: The Pantheon and Creation Myth
These are the journeys I experienced during a shamanic circle this past weekend.
The Pantheon –
The first beat of the drum seems to instantly awaken shamanic consciousness in me. My internal eyes open and I am … in a vast, domed building. The floor is marble, with a many sided star filling the center beneath the high ceiling. Corinthian columns support the dome. Between each of the columns a marble statue beckons.
My eye first lights on Michelangelo’s David. But it is not the perfectly sculpted figure. It is David’s gaze I am drawn to. He is looking at a statue of Uncle Sam in his familiar I WANT YOU pose. I don't want him and turn my back only to see Blind Justice holding her scales. All of this is too heavy, too politically problematic for me. I want something else, a gateway to the lower world. There! In the shadows on the far side of the room, a small statue of a man in a rumpled suit with wild hair and a mischievous grin winks at me. Hello, Dr. Einstein. The statue swings away, revealing a tunnel lit by candelabras. A polished floor descends down and I begin my journey.
The walls of the tunnel are lined with mirrors. The descent is rapid and although I am passing down a narrow passage the mirrors reflecting mirrors create a sense of infinite, receding space to my right and left. At last the tunnel winds into a vast cavern where tongues of flame whip out across the floor. I hesitate. GO ON! An imperative voice demands. YOU CAN CONTROL THE FLAME. GO ON! So I press forward, quickly gaining control of the fire with my hands. A path appears. The cavern is rocky and at its end a sharp turn leads me outside, into a jungle. There, peering over a cluster of palm leaves held in a leathery fist is the ugliest ape I have ever seen. He appears to be a gorilla, but his bulbous nose, bulging eyes, and wart covered chin along with a yellow-toothed grin and a broken coconut shell atop his head like a homemade crown mock those noble animals. He throws the palm leaves at me and dashes off into the jungle. Unable to resist I follow.
He leaps into a tall palm and climbs quickly to the top. I come after somewhat more laboriously. From his place in the crown of the tree he begins to throw coconuts at me. I bob and weave until I get angry and extend a hand, catching a coconut and throwing it back at him, narrowly missing his taunting face. However, he ceases throwing coconuts at me, beats his chest and waits until I join him at the top of the tree. I am out of breath.
“Who…are…you?” I ask.
“You know my brothers, you know, you do!” he answers. He pantomimes their names as he speaks in a rough tone. “See-no-evil, Hear-no-evil, Speak-no-evil.”
I scratch my head.
“And you are?”
He grins and leaps off the tree grabbing a vine.
“Why I’m EVIL!” he shouts, swinging away.
The chase resumes. Soon we are side by side on a tall branch of a Banyan Tree over a deep emerald pool. Evil dives in. Beautiful swan dive, I think and follow. When I emerge from the pool, he is gone, but a long stone staircase leads out of the water and up to a cliff where a waterfall obscures the top landing.
A large group of apes are on either side of the stairs, dancing and encouraging me to come out and up, up, up. When I reach the waterfall they push me through and there, seated on a makeshift rock throne is Evil. He grins. I demand to know why he has brought me to this place. He shushes me and then places a huge hand on my head and forces me to my knees. It feels as if he could crush my skull as easily as he might an egg. I am soon nearly face down on the step, staring at his bare and very smelly feet. After I stop resisting he releases me and I stand up, demanding satisfaction for the indignity he has subjected me to. To my surprise he is wearing a mask, the surface of which is a mirror and I find myself screaming at my own image.
The mirror draws me closer and quite suddenly, Evil and I become one being. I am now the one sitting on the throne looking out on the apes dancing on the stairs. All of them now wear the mirrored masks.
“Why have you brought me here?” I ask, able to sense his consciousness sharing the hairy body with me.
“I’m lonely,” he says with a sigh.
At this utterance, the mirror masked apes all vanish and we are truly alone.
“I’m getting out of here,” I say and find myself, still in Evil’s body, climbing the cliff face. When we reach the top I see a vast city spread out in the jungle below. It is all white. Marble! I think. A city made of marble. Evil laughs.
“It’s not.”
Atop the three tallest towers in the city are enormous statues of his brothers in their iconic poses.
“Then what is it?”
“Salt!” he says, taking control of our body and quickly bashing the whole city into fine white dust that settles into a long river, snaking away toward a distant sea.
“Hey! You’re destroying the city of men, the place where there is no evil.”
“Go after it if you like,” he tells me.
When I leap, I emerge from his body and find myself carried along in the salty current. Presently I emerge in a dark and frigid sea. Overhead a dim sun looks down, lighting only a portion of the waters. The salt remains of the city sink beneath the waves. I hear voices to my left.
“Over here, come over here out of the light.”
“Who’s there?” I ask, trying to see in the darkness.
“We are, the men from the city. We’re hiding here, where Evil can’t find us.”
I laugh.
“Evil knows right where you are. He’s destroyed your city. Come out into the light. It’s the only way to fight him.”
“Oh no,” weak voices say in unison. “We like it here in the dark. It’s safer here.”
Realizing that they are simply pretending Evil doesn’t exist and won’t ever find them in the dark I swim into the shadows. They are all huddled in huge rafts. I grab the first one and push it out into the light.
“You can’t stay in here, because I…won’t…let… you!” As I shove the first raft into the sunlight the drum calls me home.
Creation Myth –
The drum sounds and I am looking down into an enormous pot of water hung from a tripod in a forest clearing. Strong arms grab me and drag me back as the leader of a tribe of humans tips the pot, spilling the water onto the bare dirt of the forest floor. The tribe leaps into the mud, stirring it with their feet until it is thick, black, and putrid smelling. Then they begin to throw chunks of it at me. I try to duck but the hands holding me are too strong. Several members of the tribe run up to me and smear the foul-smelling mud on my face and body. I fight until I am nearly exhausted. Finally, I surrender to it.
“Go ahead, cover me with your filthy mud. See if I care. I don’t.” I allow myself to go limp and instantly the torment stops.
“Well, that’s no fun,” the leader says and leads his tribe back into the forest. The strong hands release me. I fall to my knees, wiping the mud from my eyes and nose. When I look up a small boy is standing before me.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“Tell me a story,” he says.
I shake my head and stand up, looking at the shambles of the clearing.
“Help me pick this up and we’ll see,” I say, starting to lift the pot back onto the hook.
The boy shakes his head.
“No sense picking it up. They won’t be back and no one will care if you leave it messy. That’s the way this world is. Everything is messed up and then abandoned. Now, tell me a story.” Something in the way he asks gets my attention.
“What kind of story?” I ask.
“Tell me how to make a world.”
“Yes the creation story!” another voice says. I am astonished to see a large group of children around me, all demanding to be told a story of creation.
“I don’t know that story,” I say, feeling more intimidated by these children than by the mudslinging adults.
“Of course you do,” the boy says. “To make a world you just take some mud and rocks and stick it together into a ball, and you keep adding more and more mud.” He acts out his description and soon all the children are helping him build what will turn out to be a mudball some twenty-five feet in diameter, nearly filling the clearing.
“That’s just a giant mud ball,” I say.
“No it’s not, it’s a world, our world. And I love it!” a small girl yells, wrapping her arms as far as she can around the giant mud ball.
Just then the adults emerge from the woods, staring up at the giant mud ball.
“Come on children,” they say, grabbing for the kids.
“No, I won’t go!” the little girl says and before anyone can stop her she scrambles up the sides of the mudball and stands on the top. “This is the world we made and I love it and I won’t let any of you take me from it!”
She leaps up and down on top of the ball and almost immediately sinks into it, disappearing from sight.
“We have to help her!” I yell, trying to claw my way into the mud ball. To my amazement it is as hard as stone. The mud has dried and resists all my efforts and those of the other adults to break into it.
Suddenly the girl’s voice comes from the interior of the mudball.
“This is my world. You’ve made a mess of yours. When and if you clean it up I might let you come visit me on mine.”
“Whose child is this,” I ask. All of the adults look around and shrug. They all have their children.
Darkness falls, we sleep for the night, determined to attack the mudball again in the morning and rescue the girl.
Dawn breaks and we are shocked to see greenery growing over the surface of the child’s world. Not only that, but rivers and oceans appear to have formed on the surface. As soon as I reach out to touch one of these new formed seas, the mud ball rises several inches off the forest floor and moves away.
“This is my world,” the girl’s voice says. “When you clean up yours, you can come visit. Not until.”
And with that the newly made world, the child’s world, rises into the sunlit sky and soars away.
“Come visit me!” the girl’s voice says as the new world fades from sight into the distant sky.
The Pantheon –
The first beat of the drum seems to instantly awaken shamanic consciousness in me. My internal eyes open and I am … in a vast, domed building. The floor is marble, with a many sided star filling the center beneath the high ceiling. Corinthian columns support the dome. Between each of the columns a marble statue beckons.
My eye first lights on Michelangelo’s David. But it is not the perfectly sculpted figure. It is David’s gaze I am drawn to. He is looking at a statue of Uncle Sam in his familiar I WANT YOU pose. I don't want him and turn my back only to see Blind Justice holding her scales. All of this is too heavy, too politically problematic for me. I want something else, a gateway to the lower world. There! In the shadows on the far side of the room, a small statue of a man in a rumpled suit with wild hair and a mischievous grin winks at me. Hello, Dr. Einstein. The statue swings away, revealing a tunnel lit by candelabras. A polished floor descends down and I begin my journey.
The walls of the tunnel are lined with mirrors. The descent is rapid and although I am passing down a narrow passage the mirrors reflecting mirrors create a sense of infinite, receding space to my right and left. At last the tunnel winds into a vast cavern where tongues of flame whip out across the floor. I hesitate. GO ON! An imperative voice demands. YOU CAN CONTROL THE FLAME. GO ON! So I press forward, quickly gaining control of the fire with my hands. A path appears. The cavern is rocky and at its end a sharp turn leads me outside, into a jungle. There, peering over a cluster of palm leaves held in a leathery fist is the ugliest ape I have ever seen. He appears to be a gorilla, but his bulbous nose, bulging eyes, and wart covered chin along with a yellow-toothed grin and a broken coconut shell atop his head like a homemade crown mock those noble animals. He throws the palm leaves at me and dashes off into the jungle. Unable to resist I follow.
He leaps into a tall palm and climbs quickly to the top. I come after somewhat more laboriously. From his place in the crown of the tree he begins to throw coconuts at me. I bob and weave until I get angry and extend a hand, catching a coconut and throwing it back at him, narrowly missing his taunting face. However, he ceases throwing coconuts at me, beats his chest and waits until I join him at the top of the tree. I am out of breath.
“Who…are…you?” I ask.
“You know my brothers, you know, you do!” he answers. He pantomimes their names as he speaks in a rough tone. “See-no-evil, Hear-no-evil, Speak-no-evil.”
I scratch my head.
“And you are?”
He grins and leaps off the tree grabbing a vine.
“Why I’m EVIL!” he shouts, swinging away.
The chase resumes. Soon we are side by side on a tall branch of a Banyan Tree over a deep emerald pool. Evil dives in. Beautiful swan dive, I think and follow. When I emerge from the pool, he is gone, but a long stone staircase leads out of the water and up to a cliff where a waterfall obscures the top landing.
A large group of apes are on either side of the stairs, dancing and encouraging me to come out and up, up, up. When I reach the waterfall they push me through and there, seated on a makeshift rock throne is Evil. He grins. I demand to know why he has brought me to this place. He shushes me and then places a huge hand on my head and forces me to my knees. It feels as if he could crush my skull as easily as he might an egg. I am soon nearly face down on the step, staring at his bare and very smelly feet. After I stop resisting he releases me and I stand up, demanding satisfaction for the indignity he has subjected me to. To my surprise he is wearing a mask, the surface of which is a mirror and I find myself screaming at my own image.
The mirror draws me closer and quite suddenly, Evil and I become one being. I am now the one sitting on the throne looking out on the apes dancing on the stairs. All of them now wear the mirrored masks.
“Why have you brought me here?” I ask, able to sense his consciousness sharing the hairy body with me.
“I’m lonely,” he says with a sigh.
At this utterance, the mirror masked apes all vanish and we are truly alone.
“I’m getting out of here,” I say and find myself, still in Evil’s body, climbing the cliff face. When we reach the top I see a vast city spread out in the jungle below. It is all white. Marble! I think. A city made of marble. Evil laughs.
“It’s not.”
Atop the three tallest towers in the city are enormous statues of his brothers in their iconic poses.
“Then what is it?”
“Salt!” he says, taking control of our body and quickly bashing the whole city into fine white dust that settles into a long river, snaking away toward a distant sea.
“Hey! You’re destroying the city of men, the place where there is no evil.”
“Go after it if you like,” he tells me.
When I leap, I emerge from his body and find myself carried along in the salty current. Presently I emerge in a dark and frigid sea. Overhead a dim sun looks down, lighting only a portion of the waters. The salt remains of the city sink beneath the waves. I hear voices to my left.
“Over here, come over here out of the light.”
“Who’s there?” I ask, trying to see in the darkness.
“We are, the men from the city. We’re hiding here, where Evil can’t find us.”
I laugh.
“Evil knows right where you are. He’s destroyed your city. Come out into the light. It’s the only way to fight him.”
“Oh no,” weak voices say in unison. “We like it here in the dark. It’s safer here.”
Realizing that they are simply pretending Evil doesn’t exist and won’t ever find them in the dark I swim into the shadows. They are all huddled in huge rafts. I grab the first one and push it out into the light.
“You can’t stay in here, because I…won’t…let… you!” As I shove the first raft into the sunlight the drum calls me home.
Creation Myth –
The drum sounds and I am looking down into an enormous pot of water hung from a tripod in a forest clearing. Strong arms grab me and drag me back as the leader of a tribe of humans tips the pot, spilling the water onto the bare dirt of the forest floor. The tribe leaps into the mud, stirring it with their feet until it is thick, black, and putrid smelling. Then they begin to throw chunks of it at me. I try to duck but the hands holding me are too strong. Several members of the tribe run up to me and smear the foul-smelling mud on my face and body. I fight until I am nearly exhausted. Finally, I surrender to it.
“Go ahead, cover me with your filthy mud. See if I care. I don’t.” I allow myself to go limp and instantly the torment stops.
“Well, that’s no fun,” the leader says and leads his tribe back into the forest. The strong hands release me. I fall to my knees, wiping the mud from my eyes and nose. When I look up a small boy is standing before me.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“Tell me a story,” he says.
I shake my head and stand up, looking at the shambles of the clearing.
“Help me pick this up and we’ll see,” I say, starting to lift the pot back onto the hook.
The boy shakes his head.
“No sense picking it up. They won’t be back and no one will care if you leave it messy. That’s the way this world is. Everything is messed up and then abandoned. Now, tell me a story.” Something in the way he asks gets my attention.
“What kind of story?” I ask.
“Tell me how to make a world.”
“Yes the creation story!” another voice says. I am astonished to see a large group of children around me, all demanding to be told a story of creation.
“I don’t know that story,” I say, feeling more intimidated by these children than by the mudslinging adults.
“Of course you do,” the boy says. “To make a world you just take some mud and rocks and stick it together into a ball, and you keep adding more and more mud.” He acts out his description and soon all the children are helping him build what will turn out to be a mudball some twenty-five feet in diameter, nearly filling the clearing.
“That’s just a giant mud ball,” I say.
“No it’s not, it’s a world, our world. And I love it!” a small girl yells, wrapping her arms as far as she can around the giant mud ball.
Just then the adults emerge from the woods, staring up at the giant mud ball.
“Come on children,” they say, grabbing for the kids.
“No, I won’t go!” the little girl says and before anyone can stop her she scrambles up the sides of the mudball and stands on the top. “This is the world we made and I love it and I won’t let any of you take me from it!”
She leaps up and down on top of the ball and almost immediately sinks into it, disappearing from sight.
“We have to help her!” I yell, trying to claw my way into the mud ball. To my amazement it is as hard as stone. The mud has dried and resists all my efforts and those of the other adults to break into it.
Suddenly the girl’s voice comes from the interior of the mudball.
“This is my world. You’ve made a mess of yours. When and if you clean it up I might let you come visit me on mine.”
“Whose child is this,” I ask. All of the adults look around and shrug. They all have their children.
Darkness falls, we sleep for the night, determined to attack the mudball again in the morning and rescue the girl.
Dawn breaks and we are shocked to see greenery growing over the surface of the child’s world. Not only that, but rivers and oceans appear to have formed on the surface. As soon as I reach out to touch one of these new formed seas, the mud ball rises several inches off the forest floor and moves away.
“This is my world,” the girl’s voice says. “When you clean up yours, you can come visit. Not until.”
And with that the newly made world, the child’s world, rises into the sunlit sky and soars away.
“Come visit me!” the girl’s voice says as the new world fades from sight into the distant sky.
Haiti, a sorrow repeated, a lesson still waiting to be learned.
To all the men and women who are helping with disaster relief in Haiti: I'm sure many of you have your hearts in the right place, and to turn our backs on so much suffering would be unforgivable if there is any kind of divine justice in this universe. At the same time, I wonder if we will learn the lesson this time, the one that has been playing out for thousands for years and that we just don't seem to quite figure out... it's a lesson in time and ignorance. That's what this posting is about, the affects of time and ignorance.
Oh no, Haiti has been decimated by an earthquake. Hundreds of thousands are dead. We have to help them! Oh look! The United States military is going to help. We're sending doctors, money, hospital ships, food. Look, even China and Russia are helping. Isn't that wonderful! Give yourselves a pat on the back world. One of our neighboring nations is in need and we are responding.
Wake up, people. What we are doing is not for the Haitians. It's not humanitarian. It's political. It's economic. It's to save face in the face of something unsalvagable. Before you take me to task, learn a little bit about what's going on, not just in Haiti but with the 80% of the world's population that lives in Third World conditions of poverty, starvation, and oppression. Take just a few minutes to discover that the earthquake was only the coup-de-gras to a terminally ill nation that has been ravaged in every way for decades. Then tell me this is a humanitarian effort. If it is, it is one born out of ignorance.
Haiti became the first republic in the world to have a black leader following a successful slave rebellion. Because it has suffered under the leadership of dictators, para-military tyrants, embezzling diplomats, and criminal thugs since its inception it is, and has been for many decades, the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Attempts to aid Haiti have all fallen short for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the conditions tied to the aid. We'll send food but not birth control supplies or education. Guess what starving people do when their bellies are full! They procreate! Population pressure on Haiti along with rampant poverty has led to two conditions that doomed the nation years ago. 1) More than 98% of the forests in a country that was once 60% forest have been cut down for fuel to keep the population warm. 2) the deforestation has led to salinization and erosion of the soil that has destroyed nearly all of the cultivatable land. In other words, there is no fuel and no food unless the Haitians buy it from outside their country.
The country's economy consists of subsistence farming on tiny plots of land and a few coffee plantations and mango farms that make up the exportable goods of a miniscule economy with a GDP of less than $7B/year. Most of the people live in conditions that are worse than when they were enslaved in the 18th C.
No land, no money, no trees, no economic growth in an already devastatingly poor economy, plus a string of bad leaders stretching back two centuries equals a failed civilization. And it's not like this happened behind the world's back. We've known about Haiti and the problems there for a long, long time in this nation. That's what the media has been reporting as far back as records go. Is anyone surprised at what happened when the earthquake hit?
The interesting thing is, we are pouring billions of dollars of aid into Haiti now but really don't have any strategy to help people beyond digging them out of the rubble and patching them back together. And there's not a lot that can be done in such an overpopulated and raped landscape.
Most of Africa, much of central and southern Asia, nearly all of Indonesia, including the Phillipines are in nearly the same sad shape Haiti was before the earthquake got the world's attention. What is being done there? We're waiting for a typhoon, hurricane, or newly discovered genocide to bring attention to the problem so we can 'send aid,' feel good about ourselves because we were there in their hour of need. And then we can go back to our overpriced fuel wasting cars, our overblown, over-mortgaged McMansions, our big screen televisions, over the top sporting events, Venti Lattes, extra 1000 calories per day diets, huge CEO bonuses, tax dodging organizations, and self-serving party politics until the next disaster allows us to send a few dollars and few men for a short while so we can all feel good about helping our neighbor in need.
There's a lesson here but most of us are too blind or choose not to see it. What happened to Haiti can happen anywhere. All it takes is time and a population willing to look the other way when the trouble starts. By the way, deforestation, losing tillable land, corrupt government and industry, and an uncaring population that just keeps on using up without putting back...there are growing elements of that in too many places within our own borders. Time and ignorance. Something to think about.
Oh no, Haiti has been decimated by an earthquake. Hundreds of thousands are dead. We have to help them! Oh look! The United States military is going to help. We're sending doctors, money, hospital ships, food. Look, even China and Russia are helping. Isn't that wonderful! Give yourselves a pat on the back world. One of our neighboring nations is in need and we are responding.
Wake up, people. What we are doing is not for the Haitians. It's not humanitarian. It's political. It's economic. It's to save face in the face of something unsalvagable. Before you take me to task, learn a little bit about what's going on, not just in Haiti but with the 80% of the world's population that lives in Third World conditions of poverty, starvation, and oppression. Take just a few minutes to discover that the earthquake was only the coup-de-gras to a terminally ill nation that has been ravaged in every way for decades. Then tell me this is a humanitarian effort. If it is, it is one born out of ignorance.
Haiti became the first republic in the world to have a black leader following a successful slave rebellion. Because it has suffered under the leadership of dictators, para-military tyrants, embezzling diplomats, and criminal thugs since its inception it is, and has been for many decades, the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Attempts to aid Haiti have all fallen short for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the conditions tied to the aid. We'll send food but not birth control supplies or education. Guess what starving people do when their bellies are full! They procreate! Population pressure on Haiti along with rampant poverty has led to two conditions that doomed the nation years ago. 1) More than 98% of the forests in a country that was once 60% forest have been cut down for fuel to keep the population warm. 2) the deforestation has led to salinization and erosion of the soil that has destroyed nearly all of the cultivatable land. In other words, there is no fuel and no food unless the Haitians buy it from outside their country.
The country's economy consists of subsistence farming on tiny plots of land and a few coffee plantations and mango farms that make up the exportable goods of a miniscule economy with a GDP of less than $7B/year. Most of the people live in conditions that are worse than when they were enslaved in the 18th C.
No land, no money, no trees, no economic growth in an already devastatingly poor economy, plus a string of bad leaders stretching back two centuries equals a failed civilization. And it's not like this happened behind the world's back. We've known about Haiti and the problems there for a long, long time in this nation. That's what the media has been reporting as far back as records go. Is anyone surprised at what happened when the earthquake hit?
The interesting thing is, we are pouring billions of dollars of aid into Haiti now but really don't have any strategy to help people beyond digging them out of the rubble and patching them back together. And there's not a lot that can be done in such an overpopulated and raped landscape.
Most of Africa, much of central and southern Asia, nearly all of Indonesia, including the Phillipines are in nearly the same sad shape Haiti was before the earthquake got the world's attention. What is being done there? We're waiting for a typhoon, hurricane, or newly discovered genocide to bring attention to the problem so we can 'send aid,' feel good about ourselves because we were there in their hour of need. And then we can go back to our overpriced fuel wasting cars, our overblown, over-mortgaged McMansions, our big screen televisions, over the top sporting events, Venti Lattes, extra 1000 calories per day diets, huge CEO bonuses, tax dodging organizations, and self-serving party politics until the next disaster allows us to send a few dollars and few men for a short while so we can all feel good about helping our neighbor in need.
There's a lesson here but most of us are too blind or choose not to see it. What happened to Haiti can happen anywhere. All it takes is time and a population willing to look the other way when the trouble starts. By the way, deforestation, losing tillable land, corrupt government and industry, and an uncaring population that just keeps on using up without putting back...there are growing elements of that in too many places within our own borders. Time and ignorance. Something to think about.
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