bottom

"It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard." -May Sarton

Go deep, O ye journeyers into your own hell, for there is always a bottom, and there will ye find yourselves, beneath all of your monsters.






A wise man wrote that instead of feeling like the weight of the world is pressing you down and destroying you under its weight, look at that weight as a friend, pressing you down onto a firm place of solid ground from whence you may take steps forward.

I always was told I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, with breathless rhetoric about world-changing on my tongue, and fire in my eyes fighting every battle. But that weight brought me to the great void and I stood at its edge for a while, terrified of its breadth and depth. Upon setting out into it, am I realizing that every step taken is a step unto myself, and as I step each day, one at a time, in foggy bottoms and groggy stupors, my feet fall on firm ground each time. Falling from lofty places to which we have launched ourselves is painful, but the BBC had a story last week about a British climber who fell off a mountain and survived a thousand foot fall.

"It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day the doors of dark Death stand open. But to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - that is the rub, the task." -Virgil

Sometimes the way out is through, and I'm seeing steps in the bottom places. An old Puritan prayer entitled "The Valley of Vision" talks about being able to see brightest stars from deepest wells. Don't be afraid of the void.

awakening

One of my favorite storypeoples ever:

Awakening:
In those days,
we finally chose
to walk like giants
& hold the world
in arms grown strong with love
& there may be many things we forget
in the days to come,
but this will not be one of them.

My guitar sounds like pure sadness tonight, like the copper or the steel or the koa or the spruce can't produce any other sound, and even if say the steel wanted to be happy, the sad spruce would drown her out with its sadness leaking out of the grains into the air around me. Or is it just leaking out of me onto the strings? The only chord that sounds good is some variation of A minor, because all the others sound like different times in my life that feel too distant to pull back to me. E sounds like those crazy nights of connection in that dim room above Kelly Square at home when music flowed in and out of us as if we were some conduit of eternal languages, rattling the halls and windows with pure energy and god. C# minor feels like high school and too much sad Jesus, always trying to make myself better. And G, ugh, G sounds like too many happy Jesus songs. "every move I make..."

C sounds like Kenya, played on slabs and in rooms under huge skies and crisp night Kenya air, full of love and hopes and dreams and laughs about that which is here and gone.

B sounds like Sewanee, and belted Coldplay on stairwells and around campfires; Mumford and sons with Libby's banjo, fingers and hands moving too fast for dim light camera shutters. Friends around the campfire under starry skies so full of innocence and youth at the perfect summer camp that is Sewanee and is not the world we find when we leave. Some call it the real world, that which life becomes when you leave the mountain, but that's not correct. Sewanee, and that beauty is just as much the real world as anything else. Life CAN be that good.

Stages of my life and emotions and loves and sadnesses tied up around the 1, 3, and 5 notes on scales of keys, and this guitar been there through all of it, changing as I change, but always the same.

I feel like I need a new chord, because A minor leaks sadness, as if it knows too much and has seen the void and stood at its edge too many times, wondering if there was another side... And if there was, if there was any way to it other than straight through.

But, as Khalil Gibran writes in the prophet, the deeper sorrow has carved a well into your heart, the fuller can be the joy that fills the well. So I'll play my A minor, and not forget in these days when many things are forgotten to hold the world with arms grown strong by love.

Choc vs. Hud Bay

In the same vein as the Zapatista post yesterday, this was brought to my attention today. A Guatemalan community leader was murdered (hacked to death and shot) by a mining company's security forces in disputes over a community's land being in the way of a multinational mining company's interests. He was unarmed and had been invited by the mining company to come to their compound to talk about a peaceful resolution to the community's disputes over their land.

Read about it here: http://www.chocversushudbay.com/about.

This especially touched me because of a recent US appeals court ruling to uphold a September decision preventing US companies who have committed international human rights violations from being tried in US courts. Therefore, Shell can support and participate in an authoritarian regime's violent suppression of protests against oil exploration. Read about it here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/04/shell-nigeria-idUSN0424468420110204

This also happened in Ecuador, when Texaco dumped tens of thousands of gallons of oil into the Ecuadorian jungle. An estimated 1,400 people have since died from cancer related to the pollution, according to a recent report by a court appointed expert and geologist. Ecuadorians have since tried to sue the oil giant, and have been losing. Read about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/business/global/15chevron.html

International human rights law is so frustrating. It currently protects those who have the money, allowing the continual exploitation of people like this Guatemalan man, and the Nigerians Shell is complicit in killing in the 90s. The US isn't even a signatory of the International Criminal Court, meaning that we don't support the international body capable of bringing international human rights law offenders to justice. Why aren't we? It's a good question. Many have said that it's because we don't want the international community to be able to bring people like Rumsfeld and Cheney to court for alleged human rights violations in Iraq.

"The first duty of government is to protect the powerless against the powerful." -The Code of Hammurabi

The 1994 Zapatista Uprising

Demanding equal rights and justice for their impoverished communities, the indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico, descend from the mountains in rebellion on the eve of NAFTA's enactment.

About it, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos said in 2005:

"Our small history is that we grew tired of exploitation by the powerful, and we organized in order to defend ourselves and to fight for justice. In the beginning there were not many of us, just a few, going this way and that, talking with and listening to other people like ourselves. We did that for many years, and we did it in secret, without making a stir. In other words, we joined forces in silence. We remained like that forabout ten years, and when we had grown, we were many thousands. We trained ourselves quite well in politics and weapons, and suddenly, when the rich were throwing their New Year's Eve parties, we fell upon their cities and just took them over. And we left a message for everyone that we are here, and they had to notice us. Then the rich sent their great armies to do away with us just like they always do when the exploited rebel. But we were not done away with at all, because we had prepared ourselves quite well prior to the war, and we made ourselves strong in our mountains. And there were the armies--looking for us and launching their bombs and bullets at us--and then they were making plans to kill off all the indigenous at one time, because they did not know who was Zapatista and who was not. We were running and fighting, fighting and running, just like our ancestors had done. Without giving up, without surrendering, without being defeated."

Here's to the latest exploited peoples rising up in Egypt, albeit slightly different. Here's to the revolutionaries that demand their own right to their land, to self-determination, to independence, and to freedom from the rich and powerful of the systems that oppress and destroy. Here's to them:

This photo is of a group of Christians forming a protective barrier against Egyptian police forces. They are forming the barrier around Muslims at prayer.

dimmed by us

Being becoming what it is:
Miracle and parable
Exceeding thought, because it is
Immeasurable; the understander
Encloses understanding, thus
Darkens the light. We can stand under
No ray that is not dimmed by us.

-Wendell Berry

sunday, february 6

Listen.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Portland, Oregon

I return, to you, snow-crusted slopes

of a plateau called Cumberland.

Its features-friends missed.

I see trees stripped bare of leaves,

resting painfully, but resting still

in Winter's hands.

And in this snow I see footprints

made by friends named Jane, Katie,

Libby, Reed and Bran.

Prints telling countless stories, and

out of them I hear laughter, singing,

stories, sniffles.

Now, winds curl snow around their edges,

and the sounds become muffled as

definition obscured.

Sight returns to this city of industry and

Youth-smells of gasonline, exotic food, and hope

sometimes deadened by a weed.

Youthful, progressive maybe, but city still-

fraught thus with its illnesses implicit in a

system such as this.

Yet when clouds clear to show its mountain

Guardian, this city and its people

Slow and Remember.

A deep-seated and often forgotten feeling

still exists below a city's

manhole covers.

That inherent knowledge of truth known in

Silence of wind-swept, snow-covered slopes,

and quiet, protected coves.

Where that which is feared meets

that which fears, and it leaves as

snow melts and spring comes.

When trees reclaim color and life that

Lay dormant for a time, just as our

cities will someday do.

As they must.

freedom is the why

I got angry tonight, at being unfree. And about a world that tries so hard to remove my choice to be free.

I'm working for Falling Whistles this spring, working to develop a viable and sustainable program for what we call the Whistler Society, and I've been overwhelmed and confused about how to express why we all need the Whistler Society, and have only been able to come up with jumbled thoughts that express themselves as circles of black figures on the white paper of my mind.

But tonight in my anger and sadness of an unfree world that seems to be caught up in overwhelming cycles of destructive structural violence, all I could do was to write why I need the Whistler Society. And it's still a bit jumbled inarticulate and wine-tainted and written out of frustration, but it's a start.

The Whistler Society is a small group of individuals dedicated to whistleblowing--to growing freedom.

Why do we need the Whistler Society? I don’t know exactly how to say it, but I know I need it, and desperately.

I get so angry sometimes. At a way of life that strips me of my very nature with its systems and institutions and constraints and destructive ways.

Revolution, that’s what we need. To throw off the constraints of another and replace them with our own. This world, it tears at my being, at the very connections of my cells and the fibers and sinew and ligament tying this piece of flesh and bone together. It’s ripping me apart. You know what I mean, don’t you? You feel it too. We all feel it. We have to live in a place with a way and a methodology that tears at us, and strips us of all of our humanity, all that makes us who we are. I am so imprisoned by it all, and my entire being, my very essence, longs to be free. Longs to be free.

I have freedom of speech (to some extent), I have freedom of religion (to some extent), I have freedom of the press (to some extent), I have freedom to assemble peaceably (to some extent), and these are freedoms that many do not have, but I am not free.

Why? Because you are not free, and they are not free. I am not free until all are free.

I do not yet understand what freedom truly is, but I know that I am not free to live in this world in a way that aligns with the deepest parts of my being. I am infringed upon by systems that bind and constrain and dictate and manipulate and terrorize and pull; how they pull upon my soul!

We are not free to live and to love in harmony with the Earth and with one another. We are not free to hope for a world that allows us to do so. We are not free to just be, and how we long just to be.

We are not free to believe in our true selves, and to follow them and walk with them upon this earth. We are not free to turn toward the light and follow that light, being told as we are to look outside of ourselves for the light, we miss the light flowing outward from within.

We are not free to dream our dreams, the dreams of our hearts. We are not free to place our hope in ourselves and in one another, for we’ve been told to place it in something larger than ourselves. We are not free to live toward those dreams, because we’ve been told so many times that they are idealistic and impossible and detrimental and sinful and destructive and on and on and on.

We are not free to be unafraid—of ourselves and our dreams and our fears and our hopes and our failings and our successes and our weaknesses and our powers.

But we ARE free to do those things, aren't we? And yet we are unfree equally so. Freedom is not freedom if one does not know that there is a choice to be free, and the world around me exists to remove the knowledge of that choice from me—from all of us.

Revolution, that’s what we need.

Why do I need the Whistler Society?

Because I long to be free. Because I know intuitively that in order to find again that choice that has been stripped from me—that choice to be free—I must fight for the freedom of others as well, and the two are inseparable.

Why do I need the Whistler Society?

Because I long to be free. Because I desperately want to understand what it means to leave the profane behind and pursue a deeper connectedness with the living world around me. Because I long to be.

Why do I need the Whistler Society?

Because I long to be free. Because I need to love and be loved in a way that illuminates the very essence of my being, as a star is illuminated by the burning of energy within itself. Because I long to love my true self, and accept him for who he is.

Why do I need the Whistler Society?

Because I long to be free. Because I must believe that tomorrow does not have to be like today, that this world is not static, that I am not a static being, that life can be had and eyes can see and worlds can change and love can win.

Why do I need the Whistler Society?

Because I long to be free. Because I am a mover and a shaker and I need direct and concerted action against these systems that bind and constrain me. Because I want to rebel constructively.

Why do I need the Whistler Society?

Because I long to be free. Because I have dreams and I want to live them out loud in high and unobstructed volume in a way that creates a better future for us all, a free and beautiful future of dignified harmony.

Why do I need the Whistler Society?

Because I long to be free. Because I do not want to be afraid of myself anymore. Because I know that liberty is collective, and that only in the pursuit of such will I ever be free.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. – Albert Camus

I want to be free, but I am not free until all are free. Please. Please join me in pursuing freedom.

"Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.”

–Mark Twain

but i wanna live, he said to me that night, when everything else was telling him to lie down on that green carpet and die like everyone else who stopped believing that life could be had and eyes could see and worlds could change and love could win.