So, what happens when you decide to change?

#idlenomore

I’ve been following the growing Idle No More movement with great interest – four indigenous women leaders from Canada step up and say, “Enough is enough.” Round dances and drumming start to happen in flash mobs throughout Canada and beyond.

I follow them on Facebook and like/share photos… I see friends liking and sharing… and I think about what this could all mean.

 

Indigenous sovereignty.

Treaty rights.

People who actually care about the impact to the Earth that all our money-making is having…

And more. For life. For all our lives.

What a concept.

And I have to wonder – if all that’s being demanded is given, what then?

Is there a plan beyond the present for a sustainable future? The spirit of the movement may be strong now — and what are we doing to keep it going through the long days and months and years that are surely ahead?

For those who are involved, is it out of hope or fear or anger or love or what? We run the full gamut, of course. So, what are we doing to keep our resolve going?

All these come to mind especially because of my dream Strange Bedfellows, which came to me about 20 years ago and spoke directly to these questions and shows what can happen when even well-intentioned and scared-half-to-death people decide to make change… but never make provisions for keeping that change going, long into the future.

Now is the time to think of these things, especially. And it’s not just about environmental changes, it’s not just about indigenous rights, it’s not just about holding governments to their treaty agreements. It’s about any kind of change we want to see in the world.

Change is hard. It is hard work. It is a LOT of work.

What are we doing to make sure it holds, over the long, long years to come?

 

Idle No More

Seems to me, a lot of people are living like they’re sitting in their new car with the motor running, enjoying the new car smell.

But the garage door is closed.

Time to pull the car out of the garage (where it seems safer than it really is) and start to move.

Idle No More.

Every day we have the opportunity…

… to distance ourselves a little more from our humanity.

And every day we must work to not let that happen.

Every day, we must — or perhaps better said, we have the opportunity — to practice something different. Something more.

… to practice our humanity.

Waiting on the end of the world: Of writing – politics – hope

In the waning days of this past summer, while I was on vacation at the tip of America, I started to write – to formulate – to explore – a seemingly endless stream of interconnected ideas and impressions about politics. It was fitting, at the time. It was election season. And the things I was seeing didn’t sit right with me. They still don’t. But I – like many others – am so over the whole electioneering business, that it’s a relief to not think about it.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time on my vacation thinking about these things, jotting down notes, forming them into paragraphs, and stringing the paragraphs into streams of reason and exploration.

And life was good. Everything flowed so tremendously, and it all seemed… well… completely natural and restoring, considering all the drama that was going on around. I truly felt as though I’d cracked the hard kernel of what was going on — the hard kernel in the midst of a shitstorm, if you will — the reason so much of this was happening.

There was a lot there. Truly, there was. And when I got back, I started working on the piece again, with the intention of posting it all online, preferably before the election, so it would be contextual.

Then, as often happens, I got busy. And the political pitch got turned up even more. And all I could think was, “Oh, God – Oh, God -Oh, God… when will this all be over?”

Like so many others did.

And things got even nastier. And Facebook got even more vicious and divisive. And I thought, “You know, what I’m talking about here is probably not what people agree with or want to hear. In the midst of this forced divisiveness, I’m talking about unity.  In the midst of the political machinery, I’m encouraging folks to see the machine for what it is, and opt out of the artificial divisions and mind-controlling ideologies. And everybody’s pissed off. This might not be the best time for this piece.”

So, I tabled it. For then. For the time being. And I walked away and did other things – like despair quietly in my corner about the state of our minds and hearts… like answer neutrally when challenged by people who REALLY BELIEVED WHAT THEY BELIEVED AND DIDN’T MUCH CARE FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVED OTHERWISE.

It was not the time. That’s clear enough.

But now the election is over. One side won, and all the others lost. And I’m not talking about just Republicans. Winners (perceived and otherwise) chortled. Losers (both real and imagined) licked their wounds, railed against injustice, and marinated in their grief.

And life has gone on.

And I look to my work from the past months, the past year… I have a bunch of poetry I wrote at different points along the way. And I am taking another look at this stream-of-consciousness essay which comes both from the far margins of what’s recognized as “regular” and from the very center of this hard-shelled kernel we know as our everyday reality. And I look around at the world, which is changing so rapidly. And I look at the calendar, with the Winter Solstice approaching – with all its attendant apprehension among those who ascribe to the prophecies about the Mayan calendar – such as it is, in the minds and imaginations of so many. And while I’m far too agnostic to believe that anything will most definitely happen on Friday, December 21, 2012 at 6:12:00 AM (Eastern time), it does give one pause – what would I be doing with myself, if I truly believed the world was going to change/end/begin in 9 days, 22 hours, and 49… 48… 47… minutes?

You know, it’s funny. In a way, there’s part of me that thinks something might actually happen. Morphogenic field, and all that. Quantum/holographic universe stuff, and all that. I’ve read Michio Kaku, and that “Holographic Universe” guy. I’ve also heard Gregg Braden speak, and I’ve watched a ton of videos created by people who really, truly believed that something transformational is going to happen in less than two weeks. I’ve also spent a ton of time around people who either don’t believe a word about it, or who insist that it’s already happened, and we’re already in “The Shift”… as well as those who outright dismiss and condemn the whole business as a way to draw people into some weird conspiracy theory mindset that makes the less than what they could be.

Look at my Facebook friends, and you’ll see the whole gamut of individuals. From all over. With innumerably diverse points of view. I like it that way. I’m neither so hidebound to a particular ideology, that I cannot stomach diversity of thinking, nor am I so loosey-goosey, that anything goes. I actually relish the diversity. I love the mad rush, the churning, the stark contrasts that tell me, Life has a way of shaping you in ways you never expected or could have predicted, and from one generation to the next, we can swing as extremely in our opinions as Dennis Miller.

Amen. Let life be.

The only thing I know for sure, is that I actually don’t know. If you know, then great – I have no quarrel with that, and I look forward to hearing what you know and why you know it.

Which is ultimately what I come down to, as we near the possible end of the world. After all is said and done, what would I do with myself, if I had 9 days, 22 hours, and 43 minutes left to do whatever I wanted to do? What would I be doing with myself, if the tests hadn’t come back from the doctor clear, and that pain and swelling I’ve been having, on and off, over the past years turned out to “be something”? What would I do with myself, if I knew my days weren’t going to number many more, and I had x-number of hours to fill with what mattered most to me?

Thanksgiving has come and gone. My younger sister Carrie was not there for the 6th time running. Not all of us have all the time in the world. And on the other side of the coin, a friend of my partner was taken to hospice recently, with a rare, terminal (and as it turns out, often misdiagnosed) condition that’s a human variant of mad cow disease. Her doctors gave her days, possibly tortured weeks, to live. And she was slipping into a coma, on her way to passing over — or, as the less dainty say it — being dead.

Until the other day, when she came to and announced that she was not going anywhere, and hell-no she was not going to slip into a coma. And things changed.

This stuff happens all the time. We don’t know it, but it does. Countless stories abound, about the things people succumb to, and what we survive, despite all expectations and intentions to the contrary. We live in a magical world, full of mystery and frustration and pain and joy and everything we hardly anticipate.

And life goes on.

In the face of possible Shift, in the shadows of unending political gamesmanship and ever-increasing divisiveness, in the light of our coming new days… what would I do, if I had but a few weeks left to do what I please?

Just this – write a few words of wonder before going to work and finding out what life has in store for me… for us all.

 

Where I come from

Ufa

While I was in Germany, I shared a meal with two women – one from the Munich area, one from Ufa, 2000 miles to the east of Moscow. We looked at Google Maps on our smartphones to see where she was from – trippy, to meet someone from so far off the usual beaten path.

We spent the first part of the evening talking about our present lives, and then as the evening progressed, we started to talk about our childhoods.

Both the other women had pictures of themselves as young girls, pictures of places they had been, a while back.

I had pictures, too – but not of myself when I was younger. My pictures went farther back – to the land where my family came from… Newtown Road in Lancaster County, PA. Just a week or two before, I had been down with my family for Thanksgiving, and I had a couple of chances to drive Newtown Road — which will take you the whole way to Wilmington, Delaware, if you just keep going east.

Unfortunately, I completely spaced on having pictures of Newtown Road on my smartphone. I guess I was too caught up in the excitement of the good sauerkraut I was lucky enough to eat that evening. And meeting someone from Ufa. It’s the little things that get me going, you know?

But for what it’s worth, here are the pictures I took (very carefully) while driving down Newtown Road, over Thanksgiving weekend.

This is where I come from:

Back again – after Munich 2012

Morning…

It’s early – at least, it’s earlier than it usually is when I sit down to write something. I look to the east, out my study window, to the hill behind the house, and I see it’s getting lighter. Slowly but surely, another day is starting.

It rained last night. I heard it as I was getting ready for bed, an hour before my usual bedtime, but when I looked out the window, I could see no glistening on the back deck from the bug-light illumination cast in a broad half-circle around our back door. So I let it go. And went to bed. Jet lag trumped curiosity.

Now the morning light is dampened, softened, by a blurry mist that tells me, “Yes, it did rain last night. And yes, it is going to be unseasonally warm again today.” I hear it was seasonally warm all last week, while I was out of the country in Munich, Germany. It wasn’t warm there. It was seasonally cold. And seasonally snowy. I heard people grumbling about “Scheißwetter” the entire week. Die ganze Woche hat man darüber gemurrt. Naja – in dieser Jahreszeit gibt’s doch, oder? Soll’s- mein’ ich. So weiß man, daß es eigentlich Winter ist. Probier’s mal im Alltag ‘rumzugehen, ohne Scheißwetter, ohne Kälte, ohne irgend ein Winterszeichen. Deswegen soll man murren. Nicht wegen Zeichen daß alles in Ordnung ist.

You want pretty weather and clear skies and no snow? I hear Brazil is lovely, this time of year… I would have heard no arguments against that from the folks on the U-Bahn, I’m sure. Had they the time and the money, I’m sure they would have gladly relocated, for at least a few weeks. Oder?

But that was then, this is now. Hier gibt’s “Scheißwetter” – unseasonably warm, getting cold enough, here and there, to freeze in hidden places, making going a bit more treacherous than normal. Not cold enough to really dress warmly, not warm enough to shed your winter coat. The kind of weather that has you dashing between buildings, or from car to building, without a proper coat on – and you realize your mistake, when you’re within 200 meters of the front door. And as your breath catches with the cold and the damp, you suspect you’re going to regret the decision at the end of the day… when you’ve accomplished less than you set out to do, and you’re dashing for the other building or your car in the dark. With patches of ice invisible… but there. You suspect this is going to push you over the edge to pick up the cold you’ve been fighting off — it’s bad enough now, but it will be worse later. You know it’s going to take a little while for your car to warm up at the end of the day, you know you’re going to sit there in your cold car, fiddling with the radio and clapping your hands to warm them up… so you get the adrenaline pumping by thinking of other things – like all you’d hoped to accomplish that day, but didn’t. And what the might mean for your upcoming performance review.

That’ll get the blood pumping. For sure. And so you pick up your pace hustling for the door, with a sharp eye on the ground, watching for patches of ice. And you get on with your day.

I’m about to get on with my day. The morning sky lightens, powder blue curtained by a light steely mist. The tall trees stand darkly tangled in their sleepy mantle, and there is no sign of squirrels coming down from the hill in the back. We didn’t have many acorns this year – and the ones that we had were mostly rotten on the inside. Most of the squirrels must have moved on — those that didn’t fall under the wheels of passing cars, ending up crow fodder.

48 hours ago, I was in Germany – Munich to be more precise. Messestadt West – across from the massive convention center the city built atop the old airport. Business trip. And more. It’s hard to believe I was there, such a short time ago.

It’s even harder to believe it was the first time I was back in Germany since living there from 1985-1987 – what, 25 years? I once had my reasons for not going back, but those reasons are becoming less substantial by the year.

Hardest of all to believe, is how “regular” it seemed to be there, how absolutely normal and everyday the experience was. Granted, there were gewisse Unterschiede – certain pronounced differences – between my US Alltag and my daily life there, but many of them were more differences between a traveling routine and an everyday routine. Alltag ist Alltag, egal wo ich mich finde, meine ich. I have my routines, I have the ways I do things. And the world hat sich sufficiently geändert, that I now have at my fingertips most of the things I need to go about my everyday business… egal wo ich bin.

How different things are now, compared how they once were. The world has changed. I have changed. Who can say which has the most sway? It’s impossible to say, with everything so closely intertwined, the dynamics between me-and-it always interacting, always morphing, always bringing something new into existence out of that play, that interplay. Who and what has changed more, is impossible to say.

The one thing I hold for certain, is that this visit was both completely different and surprisingly the same, relative to my last time in Germany.

And with that, I close this small window to my world and head out into the day.

I’m back.

Cracking the Code Of Our Divisiveness (or Why I Quit Arguing About Politics) – I

And the storm rages on…

Political hurricane season is fully upon us. We’re winding down to Judgment Day with an almost apocalyptic intensity.

Just look at Facebook. Talk about escalation. Ho-lee crap.

Looking at the Right and the Left and factions in between, I cannot recall, in my nearly-50 years on earth, a time when we’ve ever been more clearly or more vehemently divided. Nor can I remember a time when we’ve been so publicly vocal about our disagreements. Maybe my memory is failing me. Maybe it’s always been this way and I’m just noticing it now. I do remember how things were with Reagan… and with Bush… and with Clinton, too. But at this point in time it seems to me that we are a more profoundly and more loudly divided nation than ever before.

And it’s not helping us.

Unless I’m mistaken, we are in some serious shite. That’s the one thing that everybody seems able to agree upon. And people who supposedly Know About Deep Things, are quite eager to proclaim that the very “Soul of America” is on the line. Whether or not our spiritual destiny plays into it, we do seem to be in pretty pathetic condition, as a nation – with our educational system supposedly teetering on the verge of collapse, our economy in the toilet, the jobs outlook dismal, our housing situation barely limping along, infrastructure crumbling, and countless people having to choose between meds and food, looking at the prospect of working till they die only to live for decades – even their whole lives – under a vast burden of debt, thanks to medical emergencies, educational aspirations that never panned out, or a bad turn of the market.

Everybody’s got a different explanation for why we are in such dire straits, and very little of it seems to square with what others are saying. The Right has one version of things, while the Left has a different story. And bring in other opinions – Libertarians, for example – and the cacophony gets even more dissonant. What everyone seems to agree on, is that none of us can agree with anyone else. And there is no end to the variety of clever-captioned photos and broadcast vitriol designed to ridicule, challenge and cow the opposition.

Do the different sides which alternately snipe at or confront each other head-on, really inhabit completely different worlds? You’d think so, from how people are talking. But it’s not like we’re located on physically separate planets – we’re living in the same country with a shared history and common lessons. And we are all in the same boat, no matter what we call it, no matter whom we blame. At a time in history when you’d think our common issues would unite us as a nation, all they seem to do, is push us farther apart.

I don’t get it. With so much at stake, how the hell can we be so divided? And what’s the nature of this divisiveness? What’s the source? At this time in history, when everybody agrees so heartily that so much is on the line – for this nation as well as the planet – how can we possibly be so incapable of dealing with our differences and working together?

How indeed?

Obviously, I’ve been giving this some thought. It pretty much consumed me during my most recent vacation (actually, my only real vacation in the past three years). I can assure you, there are more pleasant things to ponder during your supposed time off, than the fractious mess this experiment we call “America” has turned into. Especially when time off happens as infrequently as it does.

But since I did have a long, virtually uninterrupted block of time to ponder this afore-named shite in the peace and quiet of Cape Cod’s beaches, why the hell not ponder? In the process I came up with a few ideas that seem to make sense to me, so I’m going to put them out there, just in case anyone else is thinking like I am and feels like they’re the only one.

I’m not saying I’m right about any of it – I’m human, I’m flawed, and I’m aware enough of my shortcomings to be way more agnostic about my own fondly held beliefs, than I’m “supposed”to be. In a land of True Believers, the one thing I know with all my heart is that, as much as I believe something to the core of my very being, and as right as I’m convinced I am, there’s a pretty good chance I’m wrong about something in there… and that something won’t become clear until after I open my big mouth.

The best way to test it out, is to go ahead and say it. So here it goes.