To be an orphan when your mother lives, breathes still, somewhere across a continent in a land called Afghanistan, the land of your longings, holding the silence of a disappearance fills you with a definite lack of mother, a dull ache, a running thread in the labyrinth, wrapped in the cloak of an abandoned eight-year-old, searching for the motherland.

Feeling my body around me as I breathe, I summon my molecules to stay here in this present now. I am scared of the stillness, knowing the best you can do is just  Be, your truest self, at any given moment. That hadn’t been enough for me. I should earn my keep for the privilege of being alive still, when so many I love are gone.

I am sorry for the cluster bombs that are being dropped on Afghanistan, the food, the transistor radios dumped on women, on children, scrambling in fields pockmarked with landmines, through hundreds of sorties, with prospects of more to come, we’re told. The face of a kinder, gentler warfare, no doubt.

I am sorry for all those souls who beamed up and out like flickering lights on September 11th, leaving in their wake the rubble, the devastation of the pain and suffering of us all hijacked and held hostage to bottom line imperatives.

September 11th is the journey back that brought me to Santa Fe over a decade ago following a stay in D.C. to attempt to deal with the losses of my family and of my country by looking at our policy towards Afghanistan. Such amazing continuity within this presidential dynasty. And we, Americans, flatter ourselves of our freedoms, like frogs unaware of the rising temperature in our aquariums.

My body is an open hand cupping the moods and inflections of my experience. My body is the sweetest cradle communicating its wishes and dreams and dis-ease. My body carries within it the wind of the outside I ingest through my breath, fanning out its medicine within me and re-emerging through the vibrations of my vocal cords as I speak. My body heals the past and seeds the future in this present Now.

What blood runs through me? Whose blood meanders through my veins subject to the syncopated pulses of the heart pump gorging and meting out the flow. The blood I have chosen to mix and transmit into the future through my son holds but one part of the story. There is an ebbing and a flowing that merges and moves within me as a liquid body. One of its vacillations is love and the other is fear.

My country’s flag flaps blessings of love in its every flutter carrying within it the multitude of the ways in which we divide ourselves. My country is the one I carry in my genes and the one I chose when I became a citizen here. My country… 

On this land I have planted new seeds from the old, which sprouted and grew. On this land I gave birth to Alexi who carries within him the genetic encoding of Moslems and Jews, of Afghans and Russians – all under one heading, for him: American. I remember his five-year-old illuminated face in the dawning realization: “You mean, I’m an enemy of myself?”

My country a struggle to continue Is this my country? What have I chosen? But I think I trust… I know I trust in something bigger than national boundaries. No easy answers anywhere. Nothing to grasp at. 

Just the rhythmic staccato of Hind helicopters pincers out, punctuated automatic rifles, cries of men in elation or glory, misled and misleading.

Just a hiccup, the contained sorrow of a child’s monumental grief.

And I am angry that my country has betrayed me. I am angry at myself for believing in what it promised… and the dream crumbled into dust, pulverized.

I have gleaned the possibilities in dreams of a landscape I have obscured for too long, covered up in a shroud to reduce the spectrum of motions and e-motions so that things be more manageably dulled. The social control of the editor, or the dictator… The power-over mentality that is so pervasive, I feel a black tar clot gobbing in my throat: Eat crow. Something is stuck there I can no longer swallow.

Something impatient stirs within me, like fire… like a vengeance not stopping its course, devouring what it covers, and I am totally disheveled now.  Something desperate, disparate, separate. What is it?

The Los Alamos fires of last year enveloped us here, turning us into parched fishbones…  The kind you can find in the Galisteo basin off the humpback rocks with petroglyphs where you can see the veins of underground streams and you witness the vanished ocean through its imprint in the sands. Is this our fate?

I am angry as hell, the fires of hell now burning my entrails. Blood Heat Raging Roiling WAAR.

My country spans the Universe.  I come from a star flicker coursing through a vast, breathing darkness. My spirit solidified a while here on Earth and for as long as is fit, I will make the best of it. Cherishing what I can and bearing witness to the rest with all the love I can muster.

Home are the voices of my ancestors coursing through my genes. Those whose lineage is captured in books on genealogy. Men, mostly, reverberating from deeds of violence.  History, after all, is written by the conquerors. As for the grandmothers of my ancestry, the aunts, the sisters, the daughters, a resounding silence. Just an absence, perhaps. A faint pulse, but beating still through my blood, though the pressure is low. Through my words I seek to ingest my bloodline, those ghostly voices coursing through me unspoken.

Home is the beating of the hearts of the unseen – the old, the dead, the infirm, the children- beating in unison to a collective fear that has become a habit. Home is my heart and the soles of my breathing feet resting lightly anywhere they might. Home is the hospitality of a stranger’s kindness.

Home is the heart of a terrorist who once was an orphan plucking for food through the rubble of the last invasion -Soviet, this time. Such a zealously executed plan this policy of scorched earth and booby-trapped toys for the children, of poisoned aquifers and decimated fruit trees.

The heart of a terrorist hijacking religion to connect to something bigger than himself for never having known the cradling of a mother or a human touch. A refugee of 6 or 7 taken in for religious indoctrinating, as was done here to the Native Americans in boarding schools, to dislodge them from their own mother tongue.

Home is the place of my discombobulated body in grief and anger and despair and hope, combined. Home is the land of my dreams that have seen the beauty that is yet to come.

Home is the very center of my heart, listening for the breath that is breathing us all.

No, none of this is my country.  Neither Afghanistan, the land of my ancestry nor America, the land of my citizenry. I am only journeying through here and on my way home

The post Sept. 11th- The Santa Fe Stories @ Firestone Theatre. October 26th & 27th 2001 appeared first on Ecology of Being Human.

Those same warlords, who hunkered for power in the void of the Soviet pullout, hurling rockets from the hillsides for years in the early nineties, holding Kabul hostage, pounding the city with impunity, left in their wake the remains of 50,000 civilians on the city streets, their ruthlessness rivaled only by the Taliban who came to follow.  Flanked by private armies and private jails now, they continue to reign supreme today switching musical chairs as alternating cabinet level ministers of defense, of interior, of energy and are so strategically placed as to disburse the largesses of the latest $10 billion dollars’ worth of foreign aid to their drug trafficking efforts.

These are the drug lords we’ve struck a Faustian deal with in post Taliban Afghanistan. Through the rule of the gun and of the mighty dollar, these are the candidates who elbowed themselves to the forefront of the parliamentary elections we so proudly brought to the Afghans with our invasion. The country now has the unique distinction of producing ninety two percent of the world’s opium supply, and cultivation has increased by one and a half times since last year at this time. It truly gives new meaning to Narco-democracy.

So much for the promises of reconstruction.  So much for the long-awaited Afghan Marshall Plan.  It never materialized.  We were too busy invading Iraq.   The flourishing drug trade is now the single biggest source of employment in the nation and makes up thirty five percent of the country’s economy.  So much for “staying the course”…

Five years later, the contracts that could have employed millions of Afghans in rebuilding their economy were handed over without bids to American corporate carpetbaggers, with abysmal results. It is now well documented that corporations such as Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root, and the Louis Berger group have had huge cost overruns and little to show for the contracts they’ve obtained in such places as Afghanistan, Iraq and New Orleans after Katrina.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan American stooge, has played a largely honorary role these past 5 years as titular head of the nation. He has seen what little power he has in the capital eroded by the regional warlords he appeases in exchange, but he sure dresses the part.  He’s been a colorful addition to the Bush marketing strategy, standing beside our imponderable leader, beaming gratitude, during the obligatory “State of the Union” addresses.  But he has neither earned nor won the respect of the Afghans themselves.  Nor do the convoys of his implanted Afghan dignitaries sitting pretty in Humvees or SUVs protected by DynCorp or Blackwater mercenaries sporting machine guns on the backs of trucks, inspire much confidence in the powers that be these days, as they race across the city in self-important daze.

As for the helpers, or should we call them apologists, those soft gloved diplomatic carrots, at any rate, to the military punishing sticks, also bestow their favors. Consultants’ fees pile on sky high to cook up more rounds of needs assessments, design culturally sensitive service delivery strategies to build up the capacity of their own pockets and present timid outcome measures to pad all the waste.  Still, the funding was approved by donor nations in the throes of combat fatigue. For who is to say who is more deserving these days?  Those in Darfur facing systemized genocide, the battered inhabitants of Banda Ace pounded by the waves, Pakistani families buried in the rubble of the latest earthquake? Iraqis?

No, you have to draw a line somewhere.  Admittedly, we started that one too, but we are under no obligation to pay any restitution for the damage we’ve inflicted. It’s a small price to pay for free elections and democracy. Never mind that we’ve either knowingly or out of sheer ignorance driven such a wedge in the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish social fabric there, that we are now looking at a full-blown civil war.  Not to worry, we’ve got a ready answer to this thorny problem.  We’ll just carve up the country in three, deal directly with the Kurds who now have the lion’s share of the oil, and hand over the rest of Iraq to the ministerings of Iran and Syria… Yeee hah!  Mission Accomplished, after all…  

Or maybe the Lebanese could use some help just about now that they, too, have known what collective military rage unleashed could do while the United Empire sat back and watched the Israeli invasion from the sidelines this summer.  But back to Afghanistan, where what is missing in action now are the billions of American dollars allocated to the Afghan people and appropriated by Congress for reconstruction, that have yet to find their targets. Not so the shock and awe of cluster bombings we unleashed when we invaded, so enticing to the children, but necessary collateral damage to rid the world of Osama and to free Afghan women.  Half a decade later, Osama lives still, the lucky bastard or was it purely luck –who can say- of that narrow escape from Tora Bora into the Pakistani sheltering harbor.  So much for the “track’em down,  and smoke’em out”  swaggering rhetoric.  Just look at the end results.

Necessary too is the pinpoint precision of missiles coated with DU, the depleted uranium that allows for maximum perforation. A few years later, babies with birth defects emerge for brief and troubled glimpses of our restless earth before giving up and receding back into Khak, dust to dust.   Kabul, the city, swollen purple, beats back the desert it has become. A brooding brown foam hovers stubbornly in the sullen clouds.  The wastes of humans in open sewers, parched in the searing sun, mix with the acrid purr of gas generators, car exhaust and auto-immune exhaustion, as the wind howls in a dust bowl its supplication to heaven.

Khak… is Afghan for dust. The foothills surrounding the city are pockmarked with craters, the ghosts of trees felled for heat and stripped right down to their roots.  The land is as barren as the women’s longing… for empty wombs, to stem the rhythms of babies birthing, babies dying.  A unique distinction in these parts, the world’s record rates of suicide in women. Here again, fossil fuel is the predominant choice.  Some stories just can’t bear digesting… 

The post “Khak” – Kabul, Afghanistan (Journal Excerpt 2007) appeared first on Ecology of Being Human.

Anxiety spread throughout the camp like wildfire. where they were to go, when they were to leave all remained in question.  they were simply told to pack up their meager belongings and to be ready to leave by week’s end, at the latest. they would find out where they were assigned once they got on the bus chartered to take them there.

A mother of five, whose children ranged in age from 3 months to 8 years old, complained they never even had a chance to respond.  the official made the announcement curtly and walked away from the gathered crowd, saying they would either go willingly, or be deported from greece altogether, their choice.

Set up in an industrial part of central greece, in an abandoned car factory about twenty-five miles north of athens, oinofyta camp was one of the early disaster relief camps.  at the height of its occupancy, about 750 families were housed here.  on this day, only 250 families remain, and these are the families who’ve just received the news that they too would have to leave soon.

The camp is staffed by youth from england, the united states and other parts of the world, who work as volunteers for the non-profit organization do your part, of the church of the latter day saints, whose founder lisa campbell has until recently been coordinating the relief effort in collaboration with a patchwork of other small non-profit organizations such as i am you and armando aid, who collaborate to piecemeal supports in various aspects of the camp’s daily operations, ranging from logistics coordination, to running computer labs, to teaching migrant children in four age-appropriate classrooms.

We’ve come here as part of the 9th team of volunteers who have been offering acupuncture treatments to refugees at this afghan camp and at the nearby syrian camp at ritsona through acupuncturists without borders. while my colleagues are setting up the acupuncture clinic in an area where 4 smoke detectors are alternatively bleeping their need for a new battery, i set out to recruit people who may benefit from an ear treatment.

People in the corridors, faced with uncertainty, are eager to connect:  hello. “who are you?”, “where do you come from?”, “what are you doing here?”.  all but “where are you going?”, the single greatest unknown question in these parts.

Four women stand in a cluster stunned like pillars in the midst of the children’s turbulence around them.  a young woman with a baby daughter in a stroller who’s just been told she’s been granted an apartment in athens with her husband, braves the envy of the other women.  “why was she chosen,” they ask.  it isn’t fair. she’s only been here eleven months. they’ve lived in limbo in this camp for nearly two years, and they’re now told they have to start all over again, in yet another camp. this is no way to live, to be treated like herding animals.

Once she is alone, the young woman tells me their apartment would be subsidized for 6 months and then they would have to find a way to pay the rent on their own.  each refugee is given a subsidy of 50 euros a month on a debit card for all of their expenditures.  given the dismal state of the greek economy, the lack of job opportunities, not speaking greek, having few marketable skills as well as having a baby, she worries how she and her husband would make it.  she fears living on the streets again as she did while she was pregnant and ending up back in another camp to start the process all over again.  a restless cycle of migration that once began from country to country has now shifted to moving from camp to camp within greece, as the magnitude of the need dwarfs the country’s ability to absorb the waves of migrants coming here.

The women are not interested in getting a treatment on this day, at this time of day.  they are worried about how to digest the news of their imminent departure.  they are worried about missing their turn in cooking their families’ dinner tonight as each family has a set shift of a half an hour to use the communal kitchen. only aziza is interested in receiving a treatment because it’s helped her in the past and she is struggling with pain in her stiff wrist, a swollen knee joint and shoulder tension.  the men, however, are more willing to try a treatment that may help them feel calmer, sleep better.

The next day:

A young hazara teenager who lost two brothers to the taliban, was sent away to europe with his younger brother because his family who pooled together thousands of dollars for their journey out, feared for their lives back home in afghanistan. He has been living at oynifita for a year and a half now and today, he was due to take an exam for his greek language class in Athens but he had to miss it, he says with regret. He stayed behind at oynifyta as if on standby to glean any news as to his future.

 “Here, the only way you get any help is if you are crazy.  And this life itself is enough to make you crazy.  There is no incentive to get ahead,” he said, “You are just stuck here, waiting in limbo for the rest of your life.”

Normally, he attends classes in Athens on weekday mornings from 9 to 1 pm in the hopes of being able to integrate Greek society and to find outside work.   He then returns to the camp to work in the afternoon as a tailor in the sewing collaborative here.  But that doesn’t pay much either and the roundtrip cost of getting to Athens from the camp is 5 Euro.  In the span of a few days, the life he’s known thus far is coming to an abrupt end and, once again, he doesn’t know the way ahead.

Marina at Oinofyta

Eight-year old Marina flips through the thin blue notebooks she’s filled over the past two years, through the additions and the subtractions, the drawings and the English words she’s acquired, as the contents of what she’s learnt at school at Oinofyta camp come spilling out. 

At the top of the pile is a parting gift her teacher has just given her, a handmade card of a heart a-glitter. The young English woman, a volunteer teacher who is studying migrant education for her college thesis back home, resumes sorting through the pictures, dismantling the colored garlands from the walls and packing up the remains of the classroom on this day, the last day the camp remains open.

Marina shuffles off towards the sheet-rocked cubicle that serves as her family’s home, housed inside an abandoned car factory in an industrial zone that has fallen prey to Greece’s economic downturn, to put away her treasures.

“You were here from the very beginning,” she tells me when she returns even though it is my first time here, and I realize she is referring to my teammates from Acupuncturists Without Borders who perform “Tebé Sozani”, the ear acupuncture that brings relief to grownups at this camp.

“This is the blue classroom,” she points, it used to be her classroom when she was younger. She is giving me a tour of her world as it is coming to a close on this day.  There are four classrooms in all, she gestures, including a geodesic dome that is for the bigger kids.

She dodges into one of the classrooms and drags out a cardboard box with a steeple roof taped onto it, representing a home.  She plunks it down on the ground and we crouch next to it.  She’s talking about the jostling of the crowds, the little friend she’d made before getting on the boat.  The one who was 6 years old, like her, and a “Bé Gona” (an innocent), so sweet that everybody loved her.  She’s racing now, talking about when the big truck backed into her friend, and how her mother cried and cried and cried and cried and cried and cried, even though she is now in heaven.

Abruptly, she walks away leaving the cardboard house behind, returns a few minutes later. A boy of about seven joins us and wonders aloud if he could get the teachers to give him some marbles now that they are closing the school.  Hopeful, he wanders off in the direction of the classrooms.

“Do you know how to play marbles?”, she asks.  She picks up a pebble and hits another with it. We throw some around while she continues:  The worst camp was called Moriah.  It was crowded and there was a lot of fighting there. A fire happened there once while she slept.  She slept right through it, she says with widening eyes.  But her parents were NOT asleep, and they protected her.  She continues, her face a gathering of clouds.  A family of five was not so lucky.  They perished in the fire before it was extinguished.  Even the two-month old baby died.

She studies my face, searches for my heart through my eyes. Meets it, nods and wanders off again.  This time she brings along a friend with a pink shirt who is a half a head shorter than Marina and smiles a delicate shyness.  “She was with me when we lived at Moriah camp,” Marina adds.  Her friend winces at the name.  “Though she was younger then. She is 6 and I am 8 years old now.”  They exchange a fleeting look. The depth of their bond is palpable. Slowly, they walk back to the factory with their arms around each other’s necks.

They re-emerge hobbling over the gravel each with a rollerblade on one foot, their regular shoe on the other, in a waddling lilting dance as they approach.  At Oinofyta, Marina continues, a twelve-year old girl was taken from her father one day by bus to study somewhere else and they never lived together or saw each other again.

She pulls out a laminated blue mask with a wooden spatula for a handle.  She places it over her eyes and peers at me from behind it.  “Here. This is for you,” she says handing me the mask.  “It’s something to remember me by.”

The post Oinofyta, An Afghan Refugee Camp In Greece (Journal Excerpt: 10/30/2017) appeared first on Ecology of Being Human.

Standing on the ground, you sense the invisible threads that connect your feet to the soil, to the roots of your own family tree, to the memory of the social organization of the generations of your ancestry, standing there just like a single tree within a community of trees in the forest. How rich is your soil? Do your waters quench and nourish your roots? Does the sun illuminate your knowledge? How responsive are your schools? How healthy your organizations and institutions?  How friendly are they to rearing children? What kinds of cultural norms and values are they creating for your children to grow into, to learn from? What is the messaging from the media and the political and economic world about what is socially valuable to the world?  What beliefs do you have about education & learning?

Imagine being a city, a modern counterpart to the forest, with its buildings organized around walkways and parks, a livable scale from one neighborhood to the next, with shops and markets delineating social spaces like any cell cluster, defunct shopping malls now transformed into communal greenhouses, all systems designed for inclusive participation, for collaboration, for emotional connection; cities managed as living ecosystems, based on ecological agriculture and urban food cultivation, in an architecture splicing nature with a sustainable benevolent technology.

Imagine the latter not being an oxymoron.

Imagine viewing history from the lens of an emergent future, learning from debunked myths on the competitive acquisition of resources and tallying its true social cost in terms of warfare and ecological disruption; Imagine learning from the effects of resource mismanagement on human beings, the planet and all its creatures; Imagine human ingenuity tasked with inventing technological advances that leave no nefarious footprint and reinvigorates the planet.

Imagine studying the adaptive behavior of societies and cultures living harmoniously within models of social cooperation and economic sustainability. Imagine economies of scale, maintaining balance between centralization and regional development, reassigning correct value to professions that enhance the social good.

Imagine economics as a resource distribution system that factors in the cost of the depletion on our environment to create what it manufactures. Imagine research and development priorities that don’t ignore the social and environmental overshoot they create.  Imagine a stock market that thrives from incentivizing economic connection, innovation, sustainability & collaboration as indicators of prosperity and global well-being.

Imagine a society designed around the well-being of its children, with family friendly workplaces such as paternal & maternal leave and job sharing practices. Imagine an educational system designed to provide the resources to keep generating children’s inherent curiosity & wonder.

Imagine a legal system that promotes social justice rather than social control, a social ethic based on the rights of nature and animal rights on par with human rights.

Imagine living in a world at peace. The mind would serve the heart; the masculine would protect the feminine & child, not occupy, as it does now, the economic center while banishing women & children to the margins of poverty; the warrior would collaborate with the healer;  emotional intelligence would marry ecological literacy.

Spirit would matter. We’d be living heaven on earth, aligning with the highest energy coming from the realms of the invisible, anchoring it into the three dimensional physical form of flesh and sinew and bone.  We would orchestrate our body as a living prayer, mining hardship as fuel for creativity. We’d be living in synch within ourselves, with each other, with the natural world as well as with the living memories we carry within us of long forgotten advanced civilizations.  

Imagine living as a full-fledged human being…

The post Seeing The Forest From The Trees. Imagine… appeared first on Ecology of Being Human.

Yet change for the better, beyond our wildest imagination, is possible.  We can transform beyond the chains that shackle us to the early wounds around which we’ve organized our sense of reality. We can grow far beyond our notion of what is possible, beyond even what we strive to reach.  And we can change these looping habits of mind or the incarceration of our addictions.

This is a time of reckoning, recognizing that our ways of living have brought us to the brink of bankruptcy ecological, financial, moral and emotional. So much of it has to do with a pervasive mis-use of power, zero sum games, competition & the win/loose propositions at play within families, organizations, institutions, corporations and nations.  What’s more, we blame the victims.

Our conventional approach to mental illness, for example, and to the “therapeutic good” points to the disconnection that has us look at people’s disturbed behavior and label it social deviance, without acknowledging its roots in the crazy-making, violent and unjust social and economic systems we’ve lived under that perpetuate cultures of despair, poverty, incarceration and servitude. 

We deny and suppress the magnitude of the collective grief we’ve been burdened with down the generations, which is the cost of the conquests of our forefathers seeking freedom and fortunes at the expense of an Other. We label incremental norms of powerlessness and alienation as mental illness and do our best to medicate the symptoms into physiological submission.

We can do so much better.  As human beings we have an amazing capacity to learn, to grow and to transform beyond the conditioning that has defined us thus far. We can remain compassionate to the truth of our origins, our family, our community, our country or our ancestry, no matter what we may have experienced. We can compost hardship as fuel for growth. And, in the words of Gabor Mate, we can redeem ourselves from the past. 

Awareness, unflinching acknowledgement, humility and compassionate justice could go a long way towards healing our collective wounds into freedom, if only we could take responsibility for the thoughts and actions we perpetuate.

What if each of us could learn to orchestrate the full creative power of the multidimensional selfhood within us in its direct, unmediated connection to whatever creative Source you name.  No religious or spiritual interpretations needed here, other than an innate connection to the memory bank of our inner wisdom,  and to the practices of aligning ourselves in congruence with the biological laws of the nature within us, standing as ourselves with our feet on the ground, opening the roof of our awareness past our solar system, out into the Milky Way, beyomd our neighboring galaxies’ common center, out into the ever expanding multiverse of the stars that we are, bringing heaven on earth through our physical form.

We can expand our understanding of the humanity we belong to.  We do not fully know who we are as human beings because we’ve been disconnected from our true inherent power in the petri dish of the individual or collective generational trauma and violence we’ve been conditioned by.

We can re-generate the right use of the energetic power within our bodies to fuel our health and our creativity. Releasing the domination paradigm that is finally meeting its expiration date, we can heal.  We can find the inner strength and outer joy of working collaboratively with others towards a common celebration of Life. 

Together, we can solve problems as win/win and globally-sustainable models, understanding that the welfare of a majority never comes at the expense of some, and that the welfare of a very few never comes at the expense of the whole. We can live more creatively, more expansively, more inclusively. And we can love so much better than we have.  We can do this!

The post What Can We Do About It? appeared first on Ecology of Being Human.

We are living a collective crisis of meaning as once distant waves of our aggregate past are coming to shore in the present moment, confronting us with the legacy of greed, conquest and domination we’ve inflicted on each other for millennia. And we can no longer bury the specter of those ghosts coming back to haunt us, as we did with our own human history, written by those conquerors who lived to tell the vainglorious tale.

The scale of our suffering is becoming apparent to us now as we mourn loved ones lost to pandemics & wars, as hordes of species fade into extinction, as forests burn, as wars we export to foreign soils disrupt the social fabric there, sending millions out onto roads of exile and migration knocking, eventually, on our barricaded doors, as our own children attempt to awaken us out of our addicted lethargy.

In the public sphere, everywhere on the news, we witness in horror the erosion of the values we thought we’d agreed on.  There are so many variants to the worship of despair, the litanies of alienation that we feel helpless, disconnected, numbed to the scope of the changes that need to occur.

The digital age has long replaced the mechanical world, artificial intelligence is becoming an emotional norm, and nothing compares to the brave new corporate world of surveillance capitalism and data mining we’re now ensnared in.  Who could have known that we’d move so quickly from being consumers to becoming commodities?

“Ladies & Gentlemen,  place your bets on the futures market!” (trauma manufacturing really is so VERY lucrative…)  In the absence of meaning, there’s always the short-term promise of achievement through the addiction du jour, take your pick, which gives so generously up front, then sends you the bill for the very fear you sought to avoid in the first place.

With every heartbeat on the news we witness another shooting, in our churches and schools, in concerts halls and shopping centers. We have become frozen in place by our addiction to violence. The chorus on the news rises daily to a crescendo of disbelief, hand wringing to the core meltdown of politics as usual, flooding our nervous systems with helplessness, as we watch incredulously from the sidelines the reality TV of revolving presidential dynasties.

America has become the land of the free-for-all, mostly benefiting the tiny few who’ve harnessed the sweat and tears of the poor and tapped out the veins of a middle class chasing an impossible consumer dream, to subsidize the swell of corporate margins that run the planet into deficit.

Our social conscience has been eroded by decades of war abroad, the toll on society apparent when soldiers returned home to inadequate responses to the physical & psychological wounds they both inflicted and endured, as families strained at home when parents were serving abroad, to maintain a precarious livelihood aggravated by the economic meltdown of corporations none too big to fail us. 

School systems serving children of veterans nationwide reported spikes in substance use and domestic violence at home.  Homelessness and suicide rates in our veterans skyrocketed, while funding for services was simultaneously reduced to largely pharmacological interventions. 

Military hardware, once used overseas, was recycled to bolster domestic policing efforts in our inner cities, race baiting, manufacturing fear, salting the toxic wounds, marginalizing, incarcerating and demonizing the most vulnerable in our society.

We could go on…         But let’s stop it here

We are living in a chaos of our own making

And it is time to (re)connect the dots…

The post What Is Happening? appeared first on Ecology of Being Human.

Like a living memory library ambulating on legs, we move through the world with our feet on the ground, moved by the tides of inner oceans, swayed by the melding of three rivers of our emotional life:  the dance between blood, and lymph and spinal fluids.

What if, as in the battery that runs your car, your electrical thoughts, were carried within the liquid intelligence of the cerebral-spinal fluid sweeping through your spine to nourish and irradiate your nerves and organs?

What if this were the place where the rubber met the road in your human form, where the energy of worlds unseen joined at the crossroads of our life’s physical journey? 

You think you breathe, but what’s breathing you? The breath of life itself breathes you in every breath you take. It’s a living co-creative collaboration in every moment.  

Your sensations, feelings and thoughts awaken the memory of your lineage, the theater of lives lived long before you and those loyalty patterns your body carries within your family’s genetic memory of health and dis-ease. 

What if your thoughts held the memory of beliefs you formed long ago you no longer remember?  Their memory sunk within the deep ocean floor-bed, weighted down by the massive liquid body towering above, so dark you can no longer see the light of the sun on the surface.  You may no longer re-member but those memories, those inaudible notes etched on the score of an emotional fabric that continues to pull on your strings, remember you.  That, too, is a relationship.

Decoding the language of your body’s memory allows you to cultivate the thoughts you feed instead of those that feed ghost memories sentenced to looping for lifetimes of incarceration, thoughts traveling in your bloodstream as hormones becoming global as they conspire to unlock chemistries of stress within your body in the form of cortisol, or oxytocin or any number of other chemical messengers that whisper to you in the dark.

Of course there are things in our life beyond our understanding and control. 

Yet we can orchestrate the circumstances of the awareness we choose to live by. We can recalibrate our moral imagination.  And there are layers and layers of consciousness to choose from. There’s the one that would have us seek safety and protection at any and all costs; the one that would value control at any costs; or that values power defaulting to competition or to creative collaboration; or to what may be truth; or to a consciousness that seeks a conditional or priceless love.  As human beings, we get to exercise this power to align our thoughts, our emotions, our energy and our body to choose … anything we choose, if we so choose. So what would you choose to create if you could live your best life?

It is up to us to live according to the interpretations of our experiences forged in the undigested memories of the past. We can replicate our frames of minds in perpetuity, or we can reach for the script of a consciousness as yet unknown.  There are no maps for this leg of the journey but simply a global invitation at this point, to gather in good company, sitting at night around eons of fires, sharing stories in the moonlight, warming ourselves around an evolving firelight, illuminating the darkness together.

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Plot your escape

from soggy thoughts

and unrequited grudges

Tear down the walls

that have sold you the lonely separation you’ve confirmed by rote

over lifetimes, again and again

A closed box of echoes

ricochet’s in the dank basement of your memories now surfacing from the South

hands palpating the black walls of sleep

a finger running along the seams

a sudden longing for freedom

a gliding hope to the light

You’ve been living a script of someone else’s making you realize, hemmed in

by the one you became through the eyes of

those who cared for you

as little as they cared for themselves

Come. Let go of the rags of worn-down d/illusions Find in their dangled frays

an inner place that expands in fractals

Feel the spring winds blow through your heart a soft prayer of belonging

as you breathe a tender sip

that irradiates your lungs

with the promise of a better dawn

There is a long night ahead, still

Better get out the candle and stoke the fire dance, make delicious meals to share

whisper stories in the darkness

to keep company to the eons that have passed … until tomorrow

Liberation

The promises of love

broken longings

are taking flight in the transmigrations of continents

One was shot down from the flock

“Who would miss it?”, says the stubborn voice of the wound

The dark loam of the form yet to be is silent, moist, certain of its fulfillment

What else is there to say but Be

In the gentle womb of buds tantalized

By life’s call to open To live, finally

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In sensing into this resolve more deeply within me, I wonder at the tone and fierceness of this particular voice that surfaces unbidden as I’m doing dishes.  “From now on, I refuse to be fueled by the flimsy fumes of hope,” it continues, hunkered down behind a red line it will no longer cross.  

Gingerly, I journey to the heart of this defiance, listening in for its message: The story of this earth and of our place in it is no longer a matter of hope or hopelessness.  It no longer means straddling between a nonchalant “business as usual” mindset or a doomsday “we’re fucked” scenario. Yet the fact that there is no hope anymore doesn’t mean it is hopeless.  It actually feels oddly liberating.

How do you remain sane in an insane world?  It’s a question that’s had me reflect on what we’ve come to define as mental health and on our understanding of the therapeutic process itself.  I wonder if I can be a party to this constructed charade any longer.  I feel, exuberantly, at the edge of the precipice of my own liberation.

How on Earth do you make sense of the senseless? How do you make sense of the cultures of despair and biological extinction that fuel our drive to consume holding out the promise of a deferred mortality? How do we justify the zero sum game that would have a few thrive at the expense of the whole, of Life itself?  How do we make sense of our favorite exports in the form of war, strife, market perforation, economic enslavement, military dictatorship and yet exhort those who suffer from the tear in the social fabric to “go home” and face the consequences of poverty, discord, homelessness and migration we’ve sown?  

I wonder about the shreds of societal values that we content ourselves with, the narrow social norms we profess to live by or to stray from, the hypocrisy of normative behavior reinforced by religious or corporate institutions that never question the contexts of ecological, economic and spiritual sustainability.  It is time to throw off the yoke.

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I’ve come to understand that the goal is not to find our sweet spot within the consensual war machine, fitting in neatly between the bookshelf and the wall. The mother in me knows this.  My weapon of choice is the mute love I muster for this sorry humanity that we share.  I’ve never aspired to fit in with values I did not embrace, and I’ve been willing to pay the price of incomprehension, disparagement, ostracism and solitude.

I’m not looking to the past for its perpetuation into the future.  I exercise my power to let go of how I’ve understood my life to be.  I long for re-birth. I wonder what it would be like to turn a new page of existence for this phase of life, to no longer base my understanding of what unfolds through the lens of the self-referencing past I’ve already experienced.  What a liberation!

 I’ve been asking myself who I might be without my wounds or any of the grievances that fuel any residual bitterness I have? Who would I be if I forgave the rejections, the betrayals, the indifference or abandonments, the dismissals, the exclusions and lack of faith of others & society? Who would I be if I could ask for love and support, if I forgave myself for not being perfect, for not being able to fully express the love that is within me, for not measuring up to an ideal potential of myself I created but find too boring and burdensome to carry any longer? What freedom, just in time, just as the external matrix seems to be closing in.   

I’m plotting my escape from the corporate takeover of the consensual mind that thrives on the social fragmentation it manufactures.  All that is required, is to inquire within.  It’s not going to come from the outside.  It’s an inside job, from the inside out.      The question I have is: How do we create a new script for being true in the midst of the madness?  How do we embody the faith and values we hold in joy and creativity?  What do we love still after the rubble has cleared? And what gifts do we have to offer each other and the world?

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