A Late Valentine
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” ~James Baldwin
I recently spotted a squirrel outside my bedroom window just a sittin’ atop the fence for a good long time whilst bellowing these long sustained squawks, three or four in a row, followed up by a kind of tut tut tut clicking noise. Then I saw them the next day in roughly the same place making this same sound, AND the day after that. So I looked it up and apparently this is the mating call of the female, announcing that she is good to go, boys.
I even saw her out in the rain one time, proclaiming her fecundity by belting out her siren song, unfazed by the fact she was getting soaked, her tail becoming so water logged that it started to drape over her head……..
…..making it look as though she was donning a wig!
I call this one ‘Andy Warhol Looks a Squirrel’….
Squirrels aren’t generally fans of seagulls but this one apparently loves the band ‘Flock of Seagulls’…..
You have to admit that this is BY FAR the best impersonation of Donald Trump by a squirrel you’ve EVER seen in your entire life, no?!……..
I found this squirrel’s unflinching commitment to finding a mate even more romantic than that steamy rain scene from ‘The Notebook’……
I thought it was pretty darn interesting that me witnessing this proclamation of squirrel love coincided with Valentine’s Day…….or more appropriately, with the defunct holiday that pre-dates Valentine’s Day —I’m speaking of course of the ancient Roman fertility festival known as ‘Lupercalia’, held annually from February 13–15, starting as early as the 6th century B.C.E., if not earlier.
Lupercalia was a big deal back then, there was even a special order of young male priests, called Luperci, who trained specifically for this festival.
To kick the festivities off, a bunch of guys and the Luperci would go up into the caves where it was believed that the founders of Rome — twin brothers Romulus and Remus — were suckled by a she-wolf as babies.
Wait, let me back up.
The story goes that Romulus and Remus were born in the ancient Latin city called Alba Longa, which was in close proximity to the future site of Rome. The twins’ mother, Rhea Silvia, was the daughter of a former king of Alba Longa. The god Mars had come to Rhea (who was a virgin at the time, they always are) and told her that she will give birth to the new king and Mars would naturally be the one impregnating her. Hmmm, that story sounds vaguely familiar somehow, I just can’t quite put my finger on where I’ve heard that before (but gods sure do like to put their fingers all up inside virgins, and how!)….
So when the current king heard about this he ordered that as soon as the twins were born they be killed. But the henchman who was supposed to take the babies down to the Tiber River and drown them couldn’t go thru with it so he just put them in a basket and let them drift away downstream because he saw it once in a movie and it worked out fine, so. Then Tiberinus, the god of the river, took mercy on the tossed tots and guided their basket so that it became caught up in the roots of a fig tree (symbolism I won’t bore you with). Then a mother wolf came along, found the babies, rescued them, took them up to her cave den and nursed them (more symbolism). [This myth of a she-wolf feeding humans goes back even further than Lupercalia. There was an ancient Italian civilization that preceded the Roman Empire — the Etruscans — that also told stories of she wolves nursing human infants. So if you were an Etruscan reading the Romulus & Remus myth you’d be like “Umm, hey now, that’s OUR story.” But the ancient Romans were the ultimate plagiarizers, and truly excelled at adopting the traditions, ideologies, art, and religions of other cultures and passing them off as their own.]
Also, some woodpeckers (symbolism!) helped out with feeding the babies, as depicted in the painting below by Mr. Peter Paul Rubens.
For any other babies, being raised by wolves would’ve been good enough but these were future kings we’re talkin’ about here and so that just wouldn’t do. So then another God, Lupercus, got involved. Lupercus was a protector deity, the god of Shepherds and fertility, who watched over flocks. He was associated with the god Faunus (or they might be one in the same as they are both depicted as having horns or even being half goat). And Faunus is the equivalent of the salacious Greek God Pan (fully half goat), so you know any festivities involving Faunus or Pan were going to be hella full of straight up flute-blowing revelry, mirth, and sexual unabashedness. Boner-killing Christianity later tried to pin Pan as a devil because of the horns I guess….and the fact that many ancient sculptures of Pan depict him offering up a truly inspiring erection for all who may need it.
Anyways, back to Romulus and Remus…..so the god Lupercus nudged a local shepherd in the general direction of the deserted infant twins’ whereabouts and when the shepherd found them he promptly took them home, named then Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter, and the twins were raised as commoners, totally unaware of their true regal identity. Then as adults the truth came out, they found out their real names, a bunch of shit went down with their uncle the King of Alba Longa and after failing to take their rightful place on the throne of Alba Longa, they fled to start a new and better city of their own somewhere else and they thought Hey what better place than that cave (which they had named Lupercal) where they had been originally breast fed by their adoptive she-wolf mother, Lupa (latin for female wolf). But once there, the two of them started quarreling over which exact hill to start building on and that’s when the gods interjected yet again and really pitted the brothers against one another to the point where Romulus ended up effing killing Remus and becoming the first king of this new city. It’s unclear why the gods let one brother win over the other, but maybe simply because ‘Rome’ had a better ring to it than ‘Reme’.
So now back to the Lupercalia festival. Like I said, the men and the priests would head up to the historic cave (Lupercal) where Lupa had nursed Romulus and Remus long ago.
They bring with them two male goats (representing fertility, sexuality, and or the god Lupercus/Faunus/Pan) and they also bring a dog (representing the she wolf, Lupa)……and proceed to kill them as a sacrifice to the spirit of Lupercalia. The men were anointed on their foreheads with the blood of the slaughtered animals and then handed a milk soaked piece of wool to clean the blood off, but as you can imagine it just made even more of a mess. Then the young men were forced to laugh for some unknown reason, perhaps to lighten the mood from the all the bloodletting and smearing of bodily fluids all over their noggins.
Next up was cutting the animal hides into strips which they would then fashion into both whips and thong speedos. Then they got naked, slipped into their fetching new goat skin g-strings, strutted back down into town, and commenced with streaking thru the streets and frenetically snapping their animal hide whips at all the single ladies because it was thought to increase fertility but also because it’s just a rollicking good time.
The whips were called “februum” or “februare” (which were named after an even older purification festival called Februa).
At this time there were only 10 months in the Roman calendar, January and February didn’t exist yet, which meant ancient Romans always had to pay full price for mattresses since there was no President’s Day yet either. When the calendar was eventually expanded to 12 months, the month which included Lupercalia was named February after these, uh, sex whips (You don’t learn that one in school!).
The ladies apparently loved the spectacle of it all. They gladly bared their backs or put their hands out to be whipped by the men. They pretended to be scared, like children feigning fear of the tickle monster. Pregnant women would push down single gals to get in front so they could be whipped first because it was thought to ensure a successful birth.
Then all the eligible women would write their names on little clay tablets and put them in a big pot and the men would draw a name (a precursor to valentine’s day cards) and then the couple would spend the rest of the festival together drinking and makin’ da love and if it went well they stayed together from then on. It should be noted that Lupercalia was for the noble class only, lower classes were not allowed to participate (…..until much later when the whole thing was seen as crude by the nobles…but was also still considered necessary in order to appease the spirits so they made the commoners do it instead).
But despite it being a classist, animal sacrificing, lady lashing key party, all in all it still honestly sounds so much better than anything we have today in regards of how to meet potential romantic/sexual partners. Today we swipe right or left, but it’s not even a physical swipe. Gone are physical bodily rituals, rituals that are acted out — rituals that cast us in the grand play of Life, rituals that included everybody (well, everybody who was a noble that is), rituals that served a greater purpose, rituals that were in tune with the cycles of Nature. Lots of animal species start the mating season around mid February so the Romans were right to place Lupercalia around that same time. It was in the air. And they knew it. We don’t know shit now. Most of us are living so out of sync with Earth’s energies, with the seasons, so cut off from our own nature that was born out of those energies and seasons and that was in partnership with those energies.
Trying to find love or partnership or even a cuddle is exceedingly difficult for more and more people. We’re moving from ‘All the Single Ladies’ to All the Ladies are Single Now. There are more and more articles featuring single, never married women in their 30’s and 40’s assuredly proclaiming “I’m Fine, Really”. But are we???? Or is it easier to just accept and make the best of your fate rather than take on the daunting and depressing task of dismantling all of the social, political, and economic systems rooted in Patriarchy that have created the unnatural conditions that make finding and KEEPING a suitable partner increasingly unlikely.
“They” say that as a straight woman you’re more likely to die in a plane crash than get married after 40 but I renounced flying years ago so where does that leave me????!!! Guess I’m going to have to start flying again and hope I survive a plane crash in order to increase my odds of landing a hubby. Personally, at this point, I get so exhausted just thinking about even beginning to try and figure out how to even go about thinking about how to find any kind of available compatible life partner type person man and I ponder whether it can even ever workout in a tribeless nuclear family culture that promotes such dysfunctional hyper-individualism and separation for a highly social species such as ourselves. It feels as though this society were designed by some alien overlords that know nothing of the human condition, the human heart. Sigh. See, it’s exhausting.
Sing it Madeline!…..
It has always been a challenge for me to find a sweetheart but now in my mid forties, on top of not feeling pretty enough, smart enough, or lovable I have the added pressure of feeling too fucking old……..for men my own age.
For some time now — like for the last ten to fifteen plus years — whenever I am hit on by the mens, I am almost exclusively hit on by men at least 20 years my senior (save for that one time a few years ago when this 18 year old kid somehow thought I was 28 and the look of shock, horror and disgust on his face when I had to break it to him that I was older than his mother is permanently etched on my memory as a reminder that as a woman in this culture you can repulse men simply by being attractive to them in the wrong way). I hate feeling like as a straight woman in my 40’s, my only option is to just give in and date men in their 60’s and 70’s. I don’t mean to come off as ageist but I truly hate how this kind of age difference in heterosexual couples where the man is older has been so normalized that we tend to think nothing of it. When older men hit on me, I’m sorry but I don’t care how kindly they are or how well they know their way around a whittling knife, all I can think about are the straight single women their own age that are being totally left out in the cold. And I think about all the men I know of that have significantly younger wives/partners and how I don’t personally know ANY women who have male partners who are significantly younger than them and that just really really really blows, like a lot. In fact, in western countries, only ONE PERCENT of age gap heterosexual couples involve an older woman with a younger man.
I caught a little bit of the film ‘Moonstruck’ the other day. The chemistry between Cher and Nicholas Cage is so delicious that you don’t even think for a second about how there might be an age difference. And there is no mention in the story of their age difference either, it’s not even a thing. I had certainly never thought about it before. But out of curiosity I looked it up. Cher was playing a 37 year old, but in real life she was 41 at the time. Nicholas Cage was 23. That’s an 18 year age difference for those of you who freeze up when simple math is required. I couldn’t believe it really. I felt like writing a heartfelt letter to the Moonstruck casting director Howard Feuer and saying “hats off good fellow for breaking the mold!” But it didn’t really actually do much to break the mold because who would realize there even was an age difference there?!…. A 23-year-old Nicholas Cage had such a forlorn face that it looked as though his old soul had already weathered several lifetimes of pure tragedy…and then you have Cher who is basically an immortal being….so it really didn’t feel like there was an age discrepancy at all since both of them basically exist outside of time and space.
And I know I’m no Cher, but still, I would not scoff at a passionate, opera loving, tortured 23-year-old bread baker finding my inherit feminine wisdom downright irresistible and sweeping me off my tired feet. Yum…..
The closest I came to anything resembling this scenario was sometime back in the mid 2000-teens. There was a certain charming Trader Joes cashier/stock boy who flirted his little heart out with me every goddamn time I went in there. At first I was taken aback because I was in my late 30’s and he couldn’t have been much older than Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck. Oh, and did I mention he was fine as hell (I always knew Trader Joes had the best treats but daaaaaaaammmmmn). I found his good looks to be quite unnerving and I turned into a bowl of jello every time he even so much as looked at me, which is weird because Trader Joes doesn’t even sell jello. Listen, I was not suave in our interactions, like not even close, but this never seemed to deter him.
If you shopped at the Easton TJ in Columbus, Ohio during that time then perhaps you know whom I’m speaking of. Here is a close approximation of his likeness:
He had to be at least 6' 2". His nearly white, longish blond hair had curls so refined they looked as though they were carved from marble. It didn’t hurt that he also somewhat resembled my first childhood celebrity crush, T.V.’s William Katt, aka the ‘Greatest American Hero’ (I think the fact that Katt was a clumsy super-hero who flew into walls was part of the attraction for me, like that meant he was in my league or something). In fact, after my encounters with this Trader Joes Adonis I would often sing the ‘Greatest American Hero’ theme song on the car ride home…
We got plenty of stink-eye looks from both customers and upper management alike for holding up the line while the two of us gabbed (I’m sure it was absolutely sickening to onlookers) as he slowly scanned my items at the check-out (ha ha, I didn’t mean for “he slowly scanned my items at the check-out” to sound like a double entendre but hey, when in Reme). I’m not gonna lie, sometimes I even bought WAY more groceries than I needed just so it took him even longer to ring me up, lol. Sometimes I would actually try to avoid his cashier line so as to not cause a hold-up and went and waited in another line….but if he caught me trying to do that he shot his tractor beam blue bedroom come hither eyes at me and motioned with his head to get in his line, and I obeyed, baby. Or, if I was shopping and he was stocking (more like stalking) he would somehow find me and we would talk until I couldn’t feel my arm from holding my basket too long. I cannot for the life of me even remember one thing we “talked” about, lol. This went on for the better part of a year. Then one fine day after he was done ringing me up, he took my hand, kissed it and then bowed, and said “It’s been an honor and a privilege serving you.” I had no idea what was happening. My frozen confusion prompted him to say “This is my last day, I’m moving to California next week.” I really wish I could tell you that I said or did something super smooth in that moment but I didn’t….unless you count “awkwardly blurting out California, huh? That’s neat. Good luck! and then quickly leaving the store” as super smooth. I mean it did make total sense that he was going to California. I’m a solid Ohio 7 (well 6.5, but I’m rounding up). But in California, I’m maybe a 4 on a good hair day. But this guy was a California 10 so I don’t think his pristine attractiveness was even registering here in the Buckeye State! He probably was being relocated by the CIA because his displaced hotness was somehow a security threat. Anyways, after that “totally amazing” last encounter with him I then went and sat in my car in the parking lot for an embarrassingly long amount of time trying to figure out if I should go back in and make some kind of a move…..until so much time had passed that I just drove home, without singing the Greatest American Hero theme song. Rats! What a waste of a potential Moonstruck moment! Most probably the last one I shall ever get……
UNLESS Lupercalia makes a spectacular comeback!
There is debate whether or not St. Valentines Day was established by the church to snuff out all things Lupercalia. But it sounds pretty on brand to me for Christianity to do such a thing. But before St. Valentine’s was established by the church to take heat away from Luprcalia, Pope Gelasius tried instituting the ‘Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary’. Geesh, how uptight do you have to be to suggest that Mary mother of God was a dirty dirty unholy slut in need of cleansing? Christianity really wanted people to focus on the purification aspect of that time of year and not so much the lascivious randy-ness. But to separate sex from purification as if they are opposites, as if sex is wrong or impure, is one of the major ways in which humanity took a turn for the worse. Sex can TOTALLY be a form of purification. Spring and pre-spring pagan rituals and festivities were meant to arouse and awaken and yes cast out impurities that had built up over the winter months. But strict purification without the unbridled animalistic release isn’t healthy. They must go together.
And the original church-instated St. Valentine’s Day had nothing to do with romance and sexy times, it was pretty bland and stuffy, designed really as a boner killer, a real cock block to the perceived debauchery of Lupercalia…..but eventually the spirit of Lupercalia started to sneak its way back in to that day. And although it never reached the frenzied S&M level of streaking thru the streets in sacrificial goatskin underoos while whipping people right and left, starting in the Middle Ages that time of year came to be more and more about love again.
But as we know, as much as Christianity flagrantly hijacked pagan holidays time and time again in an attempt to control and suppress instinctual nature based rituals, it PALES in comparison to the ruthless co-opting number that industrial capitalism has pulled on holidays in order to cash in and make us all worship a new universal god. $$$
Because if you think Lupercalia sounds extreme or strange maybe try taking a closer look at modern day Valentine’s Day.
On this holiday, Americans spend:
$2.14 BILLION on gifts for their…………….wait for it………………………
……………………………………..pets.
The ancient Romans didn’t even do that and they had public statues like this……
Like, what even ARE these V-day gifts for pets? Lingerie for your iguana?…….Actually, that sounds adorable and I fully support such a novelty gift.
But when it comes to buying gifts for our humanoid sweeties we spend:
$2.3 billion on flowers.
$2.2 billion on candy.
$5.8 billion on jewelry.
$1.3 billion on greeting cards.
All in all, the tally comes to $23.9 billion spent on Valentine’s Day items and experiences. (fun fact: the UN just tried to raise $5 billion for the people of Afghanistan and were only able to come up with $2.2 billion, wah wah)
All this to say “I LOVE YOU”.
Apparently, love is not all you need, there’s A LOT of equipment involved.
But love is the answer, right? Who cares what it costs?! Spare no expense!
As Lily Thomlin once said, “If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?”
Many of us in western culture buy the roses and the chocolates and the strawberries and the lacy red teddies and the diamonds for our betrothed on Valentines Day but don’t think for a hot second about all the embodied energy and labor and destruction and suffering that went into producing and shipping this stuff.
We don’t think about the Colombian rose plantation laborer getting paid next to nothing — who’s being exposed to dozens of harmful chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers and preservatives…many of which are so toxic they have been banned in most of the rest of the world, including in the U.S. Over 80% of the cut flowers sold in the U.S. are imported and most of them are imported from Colombia. Colombian flower farm workers are predominantly young women and work 16 or more hours a day for a monthly wage of about $300.
We don’t think about the polluting fossil fuels used to get these roses all the way to your hands from Central America in refrigerated trucks. Transporting the roughly 100 million roses sold during a typical Valentine’s Day season from Colombian farms to U.S. florists produces an extra 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
We don’t think about children in the Ivory Coast of Africa who are harvesting and processing the cacao beans that will be made into that heart shaped box of chocolates. Many of these children get paid nothing, they are straight up old school slaves — some were kidnapped from their families or even SOLD to cacao producers by their desperate parents. Can you imagine being so poor that you had no choice but to sell your child into an industry whose end product is something called a Hershey “Kiss”???? Here is a young boy hauling cacao….
Right when Biden was making Juneteenth an official holiday, the Supreme Court was dismissing a case that would’ve held big chocolate corporations like Nestle accountable for the labor practices of the cacao farms they go into contract with. (WATCH THIS)
It’s estimated that there are 1.6 million of these illegal child workers in the Ivory Coast! Life is NOT like a box of chocolates, because by now we should all know full well what exact horrors we’re going to get when we buy non local luxury products made using slave labor.
We don’t think about the Latino farmworker in California or Florida, working their fingers to the bone from sun up to sun down on their knees or hunched over, frantically picking strawberries for piecemeal wages…they get paid by the berry, not hourly — which is degrading and insulting on so many levels.
We don’t think of the garment factory workers in India or China or Haiti sewing that saucy red lingerie. Workers in Haiti that make clothing for many big U.S. stores like Wal-mart have been protesting in the streets for weeks now, demanding higher pay….
So far one journalist has been killed and several injured by police. On Monday, February 21, the government raised the minimum wage of the workers to $7.50 an hour…..um, I’m sorry, I meant to say $7.50 A DAY!!!! The workers are still protesting, saying they will not stop until their demand of $15 a day is met….again, that’s DAY not hour. Some of them currently only make $2 a day. Just a friendly reminder that Hillary Clinton as Sec. of State made a deal with textile corporations operating out of Haiti that ensured wages would not be raised.
We don’t think about the V-Day jewelry sporting blood diamonds….or even about what treachery is lurking behind the diamonds that are deemed “non-conflict”or the ones that are “lab grown”. This CBS Sunday Morning segment is straight up propaganda for diamond culture. No one needs a friggin’ diamond! Stop acting like it’s just something we need to have as if it’s food or water….
We are simply not taught to think about such things. Besides it’s too painful. And we have enough to think about as it is already: Covid, Ukraine, Zendaya and Tom Holland’s height difference. But to not open our hearts to at least try and understand the bigger picture is dangerous, for we will just recklessly continue to perpetuate more and more suffering and damage in the process of trying to avoid our own. Thich Nhat Hahn said….
“Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.”
But the world has become so incredibly exhaustingly complicated that it’s friggin’ impossible to understand ALL that is happening. There’s not enough time in the day to take into account the endless lineup of faceless humans (and non humans) that make our industrial lives possible — mostly against their will.
It is not really within our species’ capabilities to understand the lives of those who are so far away from us — either physically far away or economically far — because for most of our existence as a species there was not such a drastic sense of there being far off “others”, and everyone around us was pretty much just like us, so that made empathy and sympathy much easier. Empathy and cooperation were necessary in order to survive, an “every person for themselves” credo wouldn’t cut it. But the cruel cold lonely sterile systems we live in today make it entirely possible to survive without directly cooperating with anyone OR without having to show ANY empathy whatsoever….in fact, those who are “winning” the most at these stupid systems have the least empathy of anyone out there.
What have we become that we have such little room in our hearts for the suffering of others, suffering we contributed to and are compliant and complacent with? Who are we without empathy? Are we still even human? The Nazis who worked in the concentration camps, they loved their sweeties too. They went home to their families, played with their kids, loved their homeland, just as you do. The horrors they were involved in were normalized and justified by extreme brainwashing. And you too have been subjected to such brainwashing, maybe even moreso — given the level of annihilation unfolding in the form of biodiversity loss, species extinction, pollution, and climate change. But it’s not just a brainwashing, it’s a heartwashing as well…..An unnatural conditioning of the heart that has trained it to think it can only love certain, limited things. That’s not how love works. Not to sound cliché, but Love is limitless.
As Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj taught “love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers.”
Simply put, in the immortal words of boy band wonder ‘Hanson’…..
“Where’s the love? It’s not enough!”
Rumi wrote (yes I just went from Hanson to Rumi, what of it?) “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Easy to say and do if you’re a 13th century whirling dervish poet dude but the world is much more globalized and convoluted than when ol’ RuRu penned that.
Today, there’s a complex of barriers that our hearts are up against, a cacophony of distractions and stressors and modern duties that stop us from consciously feeling what we are actually doing to ourselves, to our fellow humans, to bees, to frogs, to salamanders, to sea turtles, to orangutans, to giraffes, to corals, to forests, to rivers, to mountains, to the very Earth that sustains us.
I once heard anthropologist Helena Norberg Hodge say “Our arms have become so long that we can no longer see what our hands are doing.”
It’s so much easier NOT to check in with our hands, NOT to follow our elongated, westernized, grubby, industrialized arms and trace them to the factory farms, to the slaughterhouses, to the sweatshops, to the tar sands, to the cobalt mines in the Congo. And so very often, even if we think we are doing something good or right, the unintended negative consequences cancel out any positive effects it may have and so we can never catch up, we always end up in the red…….
But to just throw up our hands and ignore the damage we are indirectly doing to others and the planet is denying our heart the chance to express itself fully so that it may grow stronger and bigger, so fucking big that it breaks the shit out of that heart measuring device used in the old Grinch cartoon.
It’s also denying our hearts the chance to break.
“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.” ~ Mary Oliver
To make it you got to break it. But the more we avoid getting our hearts broken, the harder it will be later on because we will not have done the preparation- mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually- for what is coming, for what is already HERE. Our hearts will be so out of shape, so not up for the task at hand as things fall apart.
We are not equipped with the right tools or communal support needed to weed out all the shininess, the glamour, the glitz, the health claims, the beauty tips, the self help remedies, the life hacks, the quick fixes, the entertainment news, the celebrity gossip, the relationship advice, the airbrushed promises that our schizophrenic culture is offering. We are too easily drawn into the appeal of easily absorbed infotainment, designed to subdue us….or make us angry in ways that aren’t constructive.
If we had been raised to love the Earth, to know we are A PART of the Earth, to live as such, to develop our senses and intuitions, to honor our deepest animal selves, then we would have an easier time blocking out all the whistles and bells diverting us away from reality (or we wouldn’t have ever even let it come to this point in the first place).
I often wonder, when exactly did certain human populations start falling out of love with the Earth, with Life, with one another, with the great sacred Mystery? When did we part ways with wholeness, with interconnectedness? When did the word “wild” get invented and become necessary vocabulary for us to use in order to maintain the illusion of separation from what is viewed as “wild” vs. tame???
“We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and the winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the White man was nature a “wilderness” and only to him was the land infested by “wild” animals and “savage” people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it “wild” for us.”~ Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle
It’s like we were born into a loveless arranged marriage. We, for the most part, don’t get to choose what we love within this marriage. Cupid has been kidnapped by imperialistic colonial capitalism, gagged and tied to a chair in the back of some Amazon warehouse somewhere. The powers that be have confiscated his arrows, poisoned the tips and then riddled our bodies with pointed lies that tell us:
You will love money over the currency of Nature
You will love consuming over sharing
You will love bargains over quality
You will love possessions over freedom
You will love yourself over others
You will love celebrities over saints
You will love fiction over fact
You will love Christmas lights over the stars they are mimicking
You will love your phone over the Congolese children who mined the minerals inside it.
You will love your car over the people bombed for the oil making it go go go
You will love bacon over pigs
You will love dogs over protecting wolves
You will love your country over the land
You will love Amazon Prime over the Amazon
You will love a monotheistic masculine God over the fractal feminine energies that birthed Him
You will love the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, the Washington Redskins over the actual Natives, whose ancestors were wed to the Earth and understood the ways of the heart in a way many of us now are no longer familiar with.
Cheryl Angel, the Native Elder who graciously took me under her wing during my time at Standing Rock, says that in the Lakota language there is no word for love, only different ways to describe the status of what the heart is feeling. She says “Learning to express one’s heart is paramount to self knowledge and growth.” She spoke of how strange and confusing and limiting to the heart it is to use a blanket word like “love” for all these different things, which greatly flattens our experience. To say you both love a person and love a piece of pie is not good for our hearts, for we can’t possibly feel the same way about both (unless that pie is My mom’s famous apple pie!). She said using the word “love” like this gets our hearts out of shape, out of the practice of fully expressing our emotions in all their complexities and splendor. The result is an entire culture of flat-hearted, emotionally illiterate people who feel alone, lost and abandoned. And in a way, we totally have been estranged.
We modern industrialized humans are children of divorce, a divorce that happened well before we were born. Man took on mistresses: Agriculture, Civilization, Money, Architecture, Fossil Fuels, Technology and slowly stopped listening to Earth, slowly stopped attending to Her, fawning over Her, praising Her. And then man packed up their things — things made from HER body — and left.
Earth, she lost custody of us. We visit Her from time to time….but never long enough to really bond in a lasting way. Besides, she can’t compete with all the toys and doodads and processed snackfoods that our stepdad, Civilization, has at his tripped out pad.
It’s well past time for a zany ‘Parent Trap’ style switcheroo, one where we get these two crazy kids — Nature and Human — back together again!
We must muster up the courage to allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to fall madly in love with the Earth again, with one another, with LIFE, with living. Because what we are doing is not living. It’s a simulation of something resembling living. What we are doing can’t be described as surviving either, because surviving would suggest making due and scraping by until things get better. But things aren’t going to get better….floods and droughts and fires and famine will only increase from now on.
The common Valentine sentiment of “Be mine” sums up our dilemma…it’s possessive, domineering — it’s an order. It’s what got us into this mess. It’s what makes us think we have the right to buy roses or chocolates to show a person we love them even if it means contributing to suffering elsewhere, and even when we did none of the actual work to produce these things. When Meatloaf sang “I will do anything for Love but I won’t do that”, was the “that” he was referring to the taking down this voracious omnicidal death machine called industrial civilization? Because that’s really the only thing left to do if we are serious about reaching a higher love.
We need to change our Valentine message from “be mine” to….
“I’M YOURS. How can I serve you dear Earth, dear fellow humans, dear butterflies, dear whales, dear soil microbes, dear meadows, dear oceans, dear rainforests, dear deer?”
I know that’s a lot to fit on one of those little heart candies. But forget the candy! Focus up!
It’s too late to save a civilization that artificially keeps us alive like animals in a zoo. The very fact that we would even want to save such a destructive system founded on and maintained by inequality, exploitation and violence only proves the strength of our collective Stockholm Syndrome. We’ve fallen in love with our captors bigtime, and we’re told by them that there isn’t enough love leftover for the Earth, for the poor, for the animals, for the trees. Hogwash. Most sentiments and efforts to “save the plant” are really just about saving capitalism, saving this awful civilization, saving shit systems set up by long dead white men. Systems that tell us they love us…..while hurting us. That’s abuse. Systems that tell us we can’t live without them, that we aren’t strong enough or good enough or lovable enough to make it without them. (God, we are all such suckers for bad boys).
But we can, because we did it before, before all this ugliness.
It’s never too late to save ourselves, one another, and our hearts from the clutches of such a sad loveless civilization as this.
….Until that is, it is too late.
So what are we waiting for?
It’s too late to ensure a livable stable planet for much of the current and future generations. The greatest mass extinction the Earth has ever seen, the Permian Mass extinction, which occurred some 252 million years ago, killed off more than 90% of Life on Earth. Everything larger than a beagle bit the dust. It was caused by an extreme excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that took 80,000 years to build up. We have built up equivalent greenhouse gas levels in just 200 years. Earth has quite possibly never seen anything like this — such rapid far reaching change in such a short amount of time….And you dear reader happen to be here to witness it!…..only we aren’t….not really.
Why aren’t we asking all the time how it is we want to be conducting ourselves during such an exceedingly rare and precarious and precious time? In front of a goddamn screen?….in front of MULTIPLE goddamn screens at the same goddamn time???? We are so NOT present that the classic Joni Mitchell song that goes “You don’t know what you’ve got til’ it’s gone” is totally lost on us at this point because we don’t seem to even notice when “it” does disappear, unless that “it” is facebook going offline for half a day that one time. Our fake environment is so controlled that most of us haven’t a clue what has been lost or is being lost or will be lost.
“Men still live who, in their youth, remember (passenger) pigeons; trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.” ~ Aldo Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” 1947
It’s too late to bring back the Passenger Pigeon.
It’s too late to bring the salmon, the buffalo, and the prairie dog back to their original population numbers.
It’s too late to take back the carbon that’s been released into the atmosphere.
It’s too late to take back all the microplastics in the ocean.
It’s too late to take back much of what’s been done.
It’s too late for so much.
It’s just much too late.
As Carole King sang “It’s too late baby, now it’s too late, though we really did try to make it.” Except scratch that last part because most of “we” didn’t try to do shit.
By accepting this in all its glorious agony you can then start doing the hard, real, meaningful, and even beautiful work of preparing for what lies ahead, for what is already here but we couldn’t bring ourselves to look.
Doing the work of letting go of that which is strangling your heart.
Doing the work of coming back to yourself before this heartless culture got a hold of you (Your heart was biggest when you were little, remember?)
Doing the crucial work of grieving for what’s been lost, for what we are currently losing now and what we are in store to lose. As grief troubadour Martin Prechtel says “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” The more you do this work the less it feels like work and more like LOVE. The more you do this work the more you see it’s not too late for so so so much. As Anne Frank wrote….
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
So
It’s NOT too late.
It’s not too late to wake up from this industrial fever dream.
It’s not too late to see that this dream is a nightmare for so many.
It’s not too late to slow down.
It’s not too late to take a deep breath.
It’s not too late to imagine what regrets your very last breath will hold.
It’s not too late to open up.
It’s not too late to shut it down.
It’s not too late to give in.
It’s not too late to forgive.
It’s not too late to apologize.
It’s not too late to re-prioritize.
It’s not too late to stop.
stop pretending.
stop making excuses.
stop playing the blame game.
stop playing all the games.
It’s not too late to stop worrying about what others think of you within the context of a culture that doesn’t think.
It’s not too late to stop complaining and start rejoicing.
It’s not too late to stop wasting your life on what passes for life.
It’s not too late to stop taking things for granted and start granting wishes.
It’s not too late to stop participating in the madness.
It’s not too late to cancel the stories that no longer serve what is real and good and true.
It’s not too late to serve those who most deserve it.
It’s not too late to go with your gut.
It’s not too late to go against the flow.
It’s not too late to admit you were wrong.
It’s not too late to let go of being right.
It’s not too late to admit you were RIGHT all along (ha ha, see you KNEW it!)
It’s not too late to stand up for what your heart knows.
It’s not too late to question everything except for that one truth you have been conditioned to ignore.
It’s not too late to let your curiosity and imagination out of its state issued cage.
It’s not too late to obliterate the version of reality you’ve been force fed.
It’s not too late to call it like you see it.
It’s not too late to see what you are called to do.
It’s not too late to see that, yes, everybody may be doing the “best they can” WITHIN these horrid restrictive systems we abide by, but we absolutely are not doing the best we can outside of them.
It’s not too late to feel your life…even if that means feeling how painful and sad and stupid it is.
It’s not too late to say NO.
It’s not too late to say FUCK.
It’s not too late to say FUCK NO
It’s not too late to say FUCK YES.
It’s not too late to cause a ruckus.
It’s not too late to break unjust laws.
It’s not too late to admit there aren’t enough laws that could ever be written to make life as safe and just and sane as living in an egalitarian society.
It’s not too late to give up privileges you didn’t earn.
It’s not too late to start earning them.
It’s not too late to use those privileges to HELP.
It’s not too late to give back, even though you know it’s not enough, and it will never be enough.
It’s not too late to go from loving John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ to actually living it.
It’s not too late to get angry and proclaim “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”…And then seriously don’t take it anymore.
It’s not too late to watch this clip and shudder at the thought that it’s FORTY SIX years old and
NOTHING.
HAS.
MOTHER.
FUCKING.
CHANGED…….
FUCK.
It’s not too late to stop trying to “keep it together”.
It’s not too late to let your guard down.
It’s not too late to tell someone how you feel.
It’s not too late to tell someone how you REALLY feel.
It’s not too late to find out how you actually really feel.
It’s not to late to face the trauma you carry, instead of numbing yourself to it or displacing it onto others.
It’s not too late to realize, as poet John O’Donohue said “There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility.”
It’s not too late to lie down on the ground like a baby being placed on her Mother’s chest for the first time.
It’s not too late to appreciate what you have.
It’s not too late to admit you hate what you have.
It’s not too late to get rid of what you have.
It’s not too late to realize you need more than what is offered.
It’s not too late to ask yourself what it is you really want.
It’s not too late to understand that what you really want has very little to do with you.
It’s not too late to ask for what you need.
It’s not too late to BE what is needed.
It’s not too late to watch the birds or stare at a flower for as long as it takes.
It’s not too late to feel the rain on your skin, no one else can feel it for you, only you can let it in, no one else, no one else.
It’s not too late to give a voice to the voiceless.
It’s not too late to shut the fuck up for one goddamn second…or two.
It’s not too late to recognize the unrecognized.
It’s not too late to appreciate the underappreciated.
It’s not too late to grow up into an adult defined by Nature, not by Civilization.
It’s not too late to redefine responsibility for these times.
It’s not too late to runaway from home.
It’s not too late for a homecoming.
It’s not too late to reclaim your humanity.
It’s not too late to reclaim your sanity.
It’s not too late to awaken your senses.
It’s not too late to mend fences…or tear them down.
It’s not too late to reconnect with the dirt.
It’s not too late to reconnect with your body.
It’s not too late to reconnect with others.
It’s not too late to work towards building REAL interdependent communities.
It’s not too late to step into your power by realizing we are powerless without one another.
It’s not too late to find out what you’re good at.
It’s not too late to find out what you’re made of.
It’s not too late to test your limits.
It’s not too late to face your limits.
It’s not too late to play with kids, like kids do.
It’s not too late to dance until there is nothing left…..and then dance some more.
It’s not too late, as a straight single female to realize that “Maybe there won’t be marriage, maybe there won’t be sex, but by God there’ll be dancing!”……
It’s not too late to learn that you don’t need to “learn” to sing…..just SING! Sing a song!
It’s not too late to sit in silence.
It’s not too late to listen, like FOR REAL.
It’s not too late to scream at the top of your lungs!
It’s not too late to speak from the bottom of your heart.
It’s too late to wear your heart on your sleeve.
It’s not too late to go topless.
It’s not too late to go shoeless.
It’s not too late to try something new.
It’s not too late to try something old.
It’s not too late to be brave enough to be scared.
It’s not too late to take risks, real risks, big and small and in between.
It’s not too late to give up security, as Roldolf Bahro said “When an old culture is dying, the new culture is born from a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
It’s not too late to see that the quote I just quoted is written for people who are super secure (*cough*, comfortable white people). When in reality billions of people have no other choice but to live in extreme insecurity.
It’s not too late to recognize your immense security compared to so many others and use it to heed the words of Thoreau:
“Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
It’s not too late to take in the words of Hannah Arendt: “the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done” but those who say “I CAN’T.”
It’s not too late, as Howard Zinn wrote, “to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us.”
It’s not too late to consider, as Paul Goodman proposes, “suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”
It’s not too late to pay reparations (no matter how small), to that which has been wronged, from the Earth we have ravaged and raped, to the animals whose homes we have destroyed with our endless voracious sprawling (in the last 50 years, wild animal populations have decreased by 68%.), to the people who have suffered the most from centuries of Imperial colonization.
It’s not too late to start participating in the circle of life instead of blindly following this linear path of destruction we call “progress”.
“What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here, almost 60 years ago. I’m not going to live another 60 years. You always told me ‘It takes time.’ It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time. How much time do you want for your PROGRESS?” ~ James Baldwin
It’s not too late to shatter the illusion of separateness.
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” ~MLK
It’s not too late to seek beauty.
It’s not too late to make beauty.
“I’ve found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. Look at these things, then you find yourself again.” ~Anne Frank
It’s not too late to grieve your heart out….
“My acceptance of our probable decline opens into a more intimate and heartfelt union with life itself. The price of this opening is the repeated embracing of my own grief. Grief is something I move through, to territory on the other side. This means falling in love with the Earth in a way I never thought possible. It also means opening to the innate intelligence of the heart. I am grieving and yet I have never felt more alive. I have found that it’s possible to reach a place of acceptance and inner peace, while enduring the grief and suffering that are inevitable as the biosphere declines.” ~Dahr Jamail, ‘The End of Ice’
It’s not too late to consider that maybe we got the Grinch story completely backwards….
That maybe the Grinch was the wise one, and was rightfully skeptical, weary, and disdainful of the Whos down in Whoville, with all their accumulation of possessions and doo dad technology. He lived up in a cave for crying out loud, he was basically a freakin’ Luperci priest who aged out and got left behind by a newfangled materialistic culture. I didn’t see any factories in Whoville…..where’d all those decorations and gifts come from, huh? I didn’t see any farms, where’d that roast beast come from? I’ll tell you where, they were outsourced from Whereville. And life in Whereville is not great, it’s hard, it’s heavily polluted, cancer rates are high, the soil is depleted from growing all the GMO whobeans to force feed the factory farmed roast beasts. But I hear some of the workers in Whereville just got a raise from $2 a day to $7.50 a day so I guess that’s something….but not as good as a fair and just society where everyone pitches in to do their fair share.
I happen to know someone who lived in a cave for 14 years without using money and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he is one of the most if not MOST astute, thoughtful, creative, kind, capable people I’ve ever met. A real life Grinch! (in a good way, before he sold out and joined the Whos)
“Somebody once commented that our cities and towns could not function without money. But I say they and the world can’t function right now in the present system. Take classic American suburbia, for example. People don’t know their neighbors, and everybody has their own cars, computers, TVs, lawn mowers, washing machines, etc, etc, as well as stockpiles of food and land they could grow food on. All we need is right here, but the only thing that’s holding us back is not physical reality, but belief, dogma. What if we actually spoke to our neighbors and agreed to share, like we learned in kindergarten and in church? What if we realized we could share cars, computers, washing machines, have dinners together, etc, which would not only save us expense, but would save expense on the environment, and, as a bonus, put smiles on our lonely faces? Then cities and technology would start serving us, rather than us serving them. But what’s holding us back? Not reality, not scarcity, but only our thinking!” ~Daniel Suelo
It’s not too late to replace our empty corporate fueled “traditions” and bring back and/or create truly meaningful rituals that reconnect us with the Earth, with the seasons, with the stars, with the trees, with our own bodies and with one another. Without such rituals the human animal is functionally extinct (despite its large population numbers).
It’s not too late to die to our old selves.
It’s not too late to strike that last one and say it’s not too late to return to our old selves, our ANCIENT selves, the ones our DNA remembers, the ones that were stolen from us by the treacherous claws of modern industrial civilization, by the brainwashing of state issued education systems and by organized religion and by the patriarchy and by capitalism and by polarizing politics and by the nuclear family and by addiction and by Hulu Plus.
It’s not too late to be reborn into a self that has always been there.
It’s not too late to live before you die.
It’s not too late to live before EVERYTHING DIES.
It’s not too late to die in a way that honors what still lives.
It’s not too late for a different ending, one full of decency and dignity, humility and heart.
It’s not too late for beginnings that are truly new and not merely false starts.
“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” ~ Anne Frank
It’s not too late
For new endings
For old beginnings
For a great love story
For our hearts to grow “three sizes that day”
It’s not too late for the
Power
of
Love
Whew! Sorry, I know that was a really long winded, round about way of basically saying “Lookit! I figured out how to use my new video editing software!”…..
