It’s Cold Out There Everyday
It had been snowing while I prepared for a photo shoot on an early January day. As a therapy of sorts, I’ve taken to doing these odd lone makeshift Naturey fashion shows at a friend’s cabin along the Kokosing River. We industrialized domesticated humans don’t adorn ourselves and others with leaves and blooms and mud nearly as much as we should be doing.
As the feathery flakes fell outside, inside I was trying to figure out a non toxic way to adhere the red leaves of a leftover Christmas Poinsettia to my eyebrows, as one does.
FUN FACT: The red part of a Poinsettia is not actually a flower! Whaaaaaa!? I know! So the Poinsettia belongs to the Euphorbia plant family, and the thing to remember about Euphorbias is that if it looks like a flower and acts like a flower it’s not actually a flower, but bracts pulling one over on you! Sucker! Man, you are so dumb. But hey, HEY, look at me….it’s not your fault, ok? You were raised in a culture that schooled you on the ins and outs of how to survive within the context of a completely made up thing called the economy instead of cluing you into the goings on of your local Ecology. The economy is the shitty big budget play within the much much better critically acclaimed but rarely seen play called Real Life. The economy is kind of like cosplay but instead of cool costumes made out of pelts and grass you have to wear cargo pants.
BRACT FACT: So a bract is nothing more than a kind of modified leaf. The actual flower on a poinsettia is very small and look like little multi-eyed aliens wearing fake yellow wax lips…
The bracts are green for much of the year, but as the northern hemisphere begins to tilt away from the sun and the days become shorter than the nights this lack of light causes the bracts to turn red. This helps the plant save energy on flower production, letting the already fully formed bracts do all the work of attracting pollinators with their bright colors (red and white are the colors most easily seen by pollinating insects and birds). As the days start to grow longer than the nights again, the plants switch out of reproductive mode and the bract color fades. And one more quick factoid, the Poinsettia gets its namesake from a war hungry, Indian removing, Andrew Jackson confidant, white supremacist flora burglar.
INDIAN REMOVAL ACT FACT: The first thing you should know about one Mr. Joel Poinsett (born 1779) is that he was super horny for war — always experimenting with building rocket bombs and lobbying heavily for a national gun powder factory. Due to Joel’s strong penchant for killing people, President Martin Van Buren appointed him Secretary of War in 1837 (huh, funny how there’s no Secretary of Peace, oh well). During Poinsett’s 4 year term he managed to expand the military by a third, which helped lead the way to creating the largest organized crime family in all of human history, an armed mafia that now has over 800 military bases worldwide (when all other nations only have a combined 30 some bases) and stocked with enough bombs to blow up the entire planet several times over. Poinsett would be mighty proud if he were alive today. And not just for that! He also oversaw the first ever Indigenous Pride Parade known as the Trail of Tears. More Indians were displaced during Poinsett’s reign as Secretary of War than at any other time in U.S. history, clearing them out of the way so that white men would have more room to build concert venues for their boy band, ‘Manifest Destiny’s Child’ — who remain a one hit wonder with their single ‘Say My Name’.
Speaking of how everything is named after white dudes, Joel’s biggest claim to fame is for “discovering” a beautiful red leaved native Mexican plant while acting as a U.S. Ambassador to South America. “Discovering” in this context means of course “seeing what you like and taking it without permission and exploiting/appropriating it for your own gain”.
The Aztecs called this plant Cuetlaxochitl (Pronunciation: Kwe•tla•so•cheetl). It was used medicinally, as a dye, and ceremonially. It was a prominent fixture in the celebration of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec Sun God, said to be born right around December 25th, his birth bringing light and peace to the world in a time of darkness….hmmmmm, sound familiar? But Huitzilopochtli was also the God of War so that was probably the draw for Poinsett, who loved all things war. The Cuetlaxochitl flower only blooms during a short time around the winter solstice so legend had it that fallen soldiers would return in the form of Huitzilopochtli as a hummingbird to feed on the nectar of the Cuetlaxochitl.
Mr. Poinsett sent samples of Cuetlaxochitl from Mexico back to the greenhouses at his South Carolina estate, an estate where he also kept the many African slaves he owned. Whilst in Mexico, the dude meddled so goddamn much in local matters not only there but thruout Latin America that people across the region actually started using the term Poinsettismo to describe any “officious and intrusive conduct”, a term still used to this very day! When he was finally declared a persona non grata by the Mexican government he had to flee for his life back to his slave run plantation. But don’t worry, he still made a small fortune cultivating and selling the Cuetlaxochitl by establishing it’s rightful use as a way to celebrate the December birth of the Son of God instead of the old silly backwards way of celebrating the December birth of the Sun God because that would be crazy. But by the time Poinsett came across the Cuetlaxochitl, its legacy had already been somewhat co-opted and corrupted by the Spanish Colonizers as early as the 16th century, who had renamed it flor de noche buena, and insisted it represented the Star of Bethlehem and the blood of Christ.
The wild poinsettia is native to the mid-elevation tropical dry forests of Mexico and Guatemala and can grow up to 10 feet tall. Before colonization they were found growing everywhere in those areas but now most wild populations have gone extinct.
The wild ones still in tact are those growing on inaccessible Pacific-facing slopes in steep canyons where they are naturally protected from modern human disturbances. Thanks to Poinsett and other white colonizers, the Cuetlaxochitl is one of the most exploited and hybridized — I’m sorry, I’m being told the PC word is “cultivated” — plants in all of human history.
So ANYWAYS, as I stuck the Poinsettia bracts to my……dammit…..I wash thee colonized nomenclature from thine tongue!
As I stuck the*ahem* CUETLAXOCHITL bracts to my brows (by way of chap stick if you care to know) I couldn’t help but think about how snowfall feels so bittersweet now.
SWEET in that I love the power it possesses to aesthetically purify anything it covers, even the grimiest city surfaces.
And BITTER in that my Ohio childhood Winters bore much more snow than today…..just like the Summers back then carried many more Monarch butterflies on its warm breezes.
As the skies fill with evermore heat trapping particles, smoke, toxins, planes, drones, and the cock shaped rocket ships of billionaires, they are being equally emptied of wings and snowflakes.
But it sure is mighty hard to contemplate the profoundly troubling possibility of the END of snow when it’s sandwiched between travel destinations and celebrity news, as if they are of equal importance.
The fresh falling snow was starting to stick, softening up sharp edges, plumping up all surfaces with a lush ripeness--it was the summer of winter. The white buxom blanket was growing pregnant with the vernal pools of Spring.
I had the inkling to try and conjure up some kind of vague Pagan like Goddess vibe for my photoshoot….not that I knew how the heck to go about doing such a thing, just who did I think I was?
Even though Imbolc (February 1st) was still weeks away I thought perhaps I’d try summoning Brigid, the Celtic Goddess associated with that holiday. But I didn’t really know too much about her and the prospect of calling up a stranger felt awkward, plus I already felt pretty darn ridiculous for getting all gussied up to go strike a pose outside in the freezing cold.
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Imbolc is the pre-Christian mid-winter festive Celtic Irish holiday that helped everyone keep their shit together until Spring returned. Man, we really had such better ways to keep our spirits up thru hard times other than just the current standard of binge watching ‘Friends’, alone, using a patchwork of Costco sized snack bags as a weighted blanket.
But Imbolc was eventually hijacked and watered down by the Christian holiday Candlemas, and then Candlemas was hijacked and watered down by Groundhog Day. And Groundhog Day will all too soon be replaced with ‘Hit the Ground Running Day’, marking the time we peek out of our panic rooms to see if there are any roving zombies afoot so we can high tail it back up North because come March much of the lower 48 states will be too hot and or flooded and or drought ridden to live in for half of the year.
According to Irish mythology, Brigid is a member of something called the Tuatha De Danann, a supernatural race of beings who were supposedly kicked out of Heaven for being too awesome. In search for a new home they ended up settling in Ireland. Whoa, a supernatural race of beings, you say? That sounds way more interesting than boring old candles and groundhogs! Geez, what happened to us? We used to be so cool, man?!
Hey now, hold up there, who said groundhogs aren’t interesting? Because they are legit interesting as all get out and it’s a damn shame that the vapid emptiness of modern day Groundhog Day isn’t filled with reverence and awe for how amazing this pudgy creature truly is. Did you know their dens can be up to 66 feet in length, and that they make rooms inside their dens?….including bedrooms and bathrooms. How cute would a Groundhog Home Makeover Show be?!…It could be called ‘The Den Commandments’ or ‘Now and Den’.
They build their dens with multiple exits and design them so that the tunnels always bend at right angles so that if a predator happens to get inside, the groundhog can run behind the corner to hide and wait, and if they see the predator’s head pop around the corner *BLAM* they slash it in the face with their claws! And boy do they have claws…because they do a tremendous amount of digging. And all this digging is great for soil aeration which gets oxygen to plant roots, helping them grow. AND their burrowing brings minerals up from the subsoil so that plants can utilize them better. This one time I had planted a row of mustard greens in my garden. And there was this one freak individual mustard plant that took off like the dickens. It grew to a height of 6 feet, I kid you not, it was like a mustard tree! It outlived all the other mustard plants and was darker in color too. When it finally died in the early winter, I inspected the roots and came to find there was a groundhog burrow directly under that plant! Solid Gold! And another thing…..animals that aren’t especially good at digging but still require dens — like chipmunks, otters, weasels, certain snakes, foxes and coyotes — often rely on abandoned groundhog dens for shelter and raising their young. See???? Groundhogs deserve accolades galore! But no, we are either trotting them out for some stupid publicity stunt….
….or trying to eradicate them, or wrongly calling them “Woodchuck” which is an insult to both them (they don’t chuck wood) and the Native Languages that this nonsensical name was corrupted from. This misnomer is most likely the bastardization of Indigenous names given to the animal, such as: wejack, woodshaw, woodchoock, or the Algonquian (or perhaps Narragansett) name ‘wuchak’. Or the settlers actually mistook the groundhog for another animal called a Fisher (in the weasel family), and then just English-ized the Cree word for Fisher, which is ‘otchek’. But gotta give it to Whitey, once they commit to a name, even if they come to find out it’s completely bogus, they do not back down.
“I don’t give one shit if this turned out not to be the West Indies after all, I already started calling you people Indians, the guys back home love the name, so just get used to it.” ~Christopher Columbus
The Groundhog shadow tradition was one brought over from Europe. But over there it was hedgehogs and badgers that were used, since Groundhogs are native only to North America. The Cherokee have a Groundhog Origin story about a dance it did to outsmart some wolves that had cornered it. The dance worked and the Groundhog escaped into its den but not before a wolf bit off its tail as it dove down the hole, explaining why Groundhogs’ tails are so short today. See, Nature based cultures often have myths that help explain the Natural world, stories that are often about an animal for the animal’s sake, as to honor it. Juxtapose this with heavily human centered colonizer myths based on either demonizing the animal or talking about what that animal could do for us.
And by the way, the real reason Groundhogs are coming out of their dens in February is because the males awaken from their hibernation to go a’courtin’. Groundhogs are “true hibernators” meaning they can lower their body temperature down to as low as 41 degrees Fahrenheit and slow their heartbeat down to 5 beats per minute! Take that Bears!
But male groundhogs pull themselves out of this deep deep state, most likely with little tiny alarm clocks set to play ‘I Got You Babe’…..
Once they wake up, they leave their dens and go out and about laying down some “ground work” for the upcoming mating season.
They make house calls to the dens of all the single ladies in the area and talk themselves up, doing their best to “Demonstrate Value”…
Once they have scoped out their potential mating partners and checked out the competition, the boy Groundhogs go back down into their dens to hibernate for another whole month to rest up until go time. The timing of Groundhogs is just impeccable. They mate for just about 10 days in early March. If they mate too soon or too late the babies will either not have enough food or enough time to fatten up by next winter. But no, we make the groundhogs’ February emergence from their holes all about us and our schedule, instead of honoring what it’s really about: Impressing girls in the hopes that they will do it with you during Spring Break.
* * GROUNDHOG INTERLUDE NOW COMPLETE * *…
………That is, right after you watch this goodness!
Brigid’s earliest Gaelic name, ‘Breo-Saighead’, means “fiery arrow”, but Brigid means ‘Exalted One’, which suggests she is a solar deity. A Solar Deity is one that represents the sun and its aspects. The Lakota, for example, have a solar deity called ‘Wi’, who is associated with the Buffalo. The Buffalo was as central and life giving to the Lakota as the Sun. But unlike many other mythologies, the Celts believed that the Sun was actually feminine, and it was the light born out of the Sun that was masculine. But thankfully we now all know the real true factual story of how the feminine was born out of the rib of Adam. In case you needed a reminder, man ALWAYS comes first (that’s what she said).
Brigid is the Goddess of the Sun at Dawn, both the daily dawn and the dawn of Spring. She is the Goddess of fertility, birth, and rebirth. She is at once a Fire Goddess AND a Water Goddess……Eternal beings were just more complex back then (not like this one-trick-pony god we have today). Brigid’s birth is said to have ignited the first ever flames. She’s the Goddess of passion, poetry, healing, crafting, architecture, and invention. Oh, and wells and waterways too….and also sheep.
She is said to have invented “keening”, a kind of grieving that involves a special vocal lamenting for the dead accompanied by rocking, swaying and or clapping. She’s very emo. She is known to watch over cemeteries because she apparently came up with a special kind of whistle you do in the dark to dispel fear. Funnily enough, another name for the Groundhog is ‘Whistle Pig’ due to the high pitched whistling noise they occasionally make. I wouldn’t be able to call myself a die hard ‘They Might Be Giants’ fan if I didn’t take a moment to play this ditty right now. Was Brigid their muse????
And check out the angelic Julie Andrews. Damn, now that is how you summon the spirit of Brigid!….
And I didn’t forget about you, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins! Brigid takes many forms….
The custom of throwing coins in a well and making a wish is thought to have originated with the Imbolc tradition of bringing treasures to bodies of water as an offering to Brigid. But so often when throwing coins in a fountain today, as is true with so many of our empty sad pathetic actions, we leave the Goddess/Divine/Sacred/Magic/Emotion out of it. Unless of course, you’re a Goonie….
As you are starting to see, Brigid has it all, she contains multitudes, a goddess of many and varied talents. She was known for being whatever you needed her to be. Oh, she’s versatile.
Because of this, she’s considered a ‘Triple Goddess’ — she can sing, she can dance, she can bless the birth of baby lambs! She’s the original Triple Threat!
Triple Goddesses are capable of embodying 3 archetypes: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone (which means wise old woman. Huh, funny how the word “crone” came to mean a nasty, horrible, disagreeable wretch of a woman, it’s almost as if this culture hates women and wants to suppress their inherent wisdom or something. Naaah), and they can shape shift between these forms as needed. Usually, Triple Goddesses have 3 separate names depending on which persona they are sporting.
But Brigid is so seriously dope that she kept her name no matter what form she was rocking, much like Cher.
In Scotland, Brigid was also associated with snakes and there was a Spring ritual of waiting for a serpent to emerge from their hole to predict the weather. Sound familiar??????
MIDWINTER GODDESS SHOWCASE SHOWDOWN: Cailleach VS Brigid*
[*all parts played by moi….not that I see myself as a Goddess…. I’m a lesser known Saint at best — I’m thinking the Saint of Misfit Bridesmaids Dresses rescued from the Thrift Store]
There is another Celtic Goddess, Cailleach, or “Veiled One,” who ruled over winter. Cailleach is often depicted as an old hag with blue skin and white hair, her clothes adorned with skulls. She rode a wolf across the sky bringing ice and snow across the land. She brandishes a wand capable of snuffing out any signs of green.
Some stories say Cailleach and Brigid are one in the same (since they have never been seen in the same room at the same time) and that Cailleach simply melts and transforms into Brigid on February 1st. Others say the two of them duke it out in the ultimate girl fight and if Brigid wins there will be an early spring but if Cailleach wins there will be more winter weather to come….this is where women’s mud wrestling originated from. Some versions of the myth have Cailleach taking Brigid prisoner in a cave starting on Samhain (October 31st, aka Halloween) and then on Imbolc, Brigid makes a daring escape. Another myth has Cailleach drinking from a well of youth and Benjamin Buttons her way back into becoming the young supple Brigid again…..
Yet another folklore tells of Cailleach going outside on February 1st to get more wood for her fire. She has the power to make the weather temporarily warmer for her outing. So, if the weather is fair on February 1st, it means she successfully got her firewood and you should take advantage of the warm day and get more firewood too because it means the cold weather’s sticking around a while longer. BUT, if the weather is bad on February 1st, it means Cailleach has overslept, and missed gathering more wood, so she’ll just go ahead and make the winter end soon. Sound familiar? See how these olden stories have now been reduced to mere trifles, to former shells of themselves? And with the over-simplification of these myths comes a great loss of our own human complexities and depth and unique understanding of our world.
Myths were born out of a longing to make meaning and joy out of what was required of us to survive, in order to find and know our place within Nature and the Universe. Myths helped us deepen our relationship with Earth. They helped connect us with the energies and forces turning the Circle of Life. And myths were ways in which to preserve and pass down wisdom and to help keep our moral compasses in fine working order — pointing true North, towards Santa Claus..
Modern industrialized living has almost completely severed us from these myths, and in turn from the land, from the water, from the stars, from the cycles of Nature, from our own true nature, from our inherent and passed down wisdom. We are now outcasts, estranged, exiled, clueless tourists at best……at worst we are invaders, hostile aliens who do not come in peace.
Too many traditions and myths today are centered around consumerism or stem from religions totally detached from Nature’s ways. Or they are cheap knock-offs of the original myths.
As Joseph Campbell [He’s like if Mr. Rogers and Indiana Jones had a baby and that baby was an old man who knew a shit ton about world myths] writes in ‘The Power of Myth’…..
“Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function,… realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery….The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned — showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through…. The third function is the sociological one — supporting and validating a certain social order…. It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world — and it is out of date…. But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to — and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.”
So can we get back to a world alive with healthy functioning myths? Myths that help us return to our humanity before the world completely falls apart? Probably not. Or maybe. Fuck if I know. There are so many bitch obstacles preventing us from returning to a lives rich with living working myths, there is so dang much depriving us of aliveness (like this fuckin’ screen, fuck!). There are of course still human beings living today that never left that realm of constant direct contact with the elemental forces, with the mysteries and magic and heartbeat of Nature, with true aliveness……
…….But their numbers are few and dwindling fast as this Great Nothing encroaches upon these last true holdouts, where they cling to the remaining unmarred fragments of the Living World, like the wild Cuetlaxochitl clings to the steep cliffs in Mexico. Meanwhile, the domesticated Poinsettia is forced to dance for us, to serve our baseless whims and wanton desires, used to dress up our shallow stolen holidays.….
And we too, are forced one way or another to dance, to hustle, to work, to slave away our precious lives for this sick sadistic senseless culture……
….no longer are we permitted or encouraged to serve Nature, to serve each other. And the stories we now tell fail miserably to make sense of and bind us to the aliveness being crushed by the dead weight of Civilization. A weight that holds our hearts down, prevents them from opening up to the many far flung horrors that make our daily industrialized “lives” possible.
So much of Nature has been desecrated to the point where, at our current population numbers, it would be next to impossible for ALL of us to return to lives completely rooted in Nature.
It’s pretty hard to foresee things getting better anytime SOON when it was recently discovered that ALL rain water now contains “unsafe” levels of FOREVER chemicals.
But once again, this HUGE and unsettling finding was made small and inconsequential by this piece of shit gaslighting infotainment based society and its failure to prioritize anything in a manner that would get us to even consider stopping the insanity of our modern lives.
But don’t you worry because scientists are developing ways to rid water of forever chemicals by injecting it with hydrogen and shooting it full of UV rays, a process that I’m sure uses ZERO energy and causes NO other additional ill outcomes that would then require even MORE technological “fixes”. And even if these fixes do cause more harm, who cares, it’s not like we can just up and stop making and using non stick cookware coated with forever chemicals? What are we savages???
…Sigh, if only we all still were.
“Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.”
~ D.H. Lawrence
Folks, it may appear that new things are always happening but as long as we are trapped in this lifeless Life dictated by the “invisible hand of the market” and by governments set up to make it easier and easier for those at the top to control and use us, then it’s really just more of the same shit, over and over and over and over and over and over again. The same dumb day repeating, ad nauseam, just like in ‘Groundhog Day’.
Folks, it may appear that new things are always happening but as long as we are trapped in this Lifeless Life dictated by the “invisible hand of the market” and governments set up to make it easier and easier for those at the top to control and use us then it’s really just more of the same shit, over and over and over and over and over and over again. The same dumb day repeating, ad nauseam, just like in ‘Groundhog Day’, especially for black people……
Okay campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties cause its cold out there…its cold out there every day.
So cold.
Even as the planet warms “faster than expected”, breaking heat record after heat record, there is still such a lonely coldness that penetrates us.
But no matter how cold and lonely we feel it just never seems to be quite enough to bring us to the breaking point where we finally break the monotony and all help each other get under some blankets or something and warm up. But no, we just keep going along with this shit show, this royal poop parade to end all poop parades.
And just like in the movie Groundhog Day, we cannot move on from this cold lonely repetition and into a real tomorrow until we LET THE FUCK GO. We have so so much to let go of. It’s daunting to know where to even start. I recently used shampoo for the first time since 2010 because I needed to wash out some “naturally derived” temporary red hair dye I had used for one of my silly photoshoots. Man, I had forgotten what it feels like to suds up like that. The lather, the smell, the way it makes your hair all fluffy after it dries. I felt like a pretty prized Shih Tzu.
I had consciously let go of shampoo years ago and guess what, I was fine, never thought about it, didn’t miss it. But using it again I can see how people will not want to give it up. But I’m here to tell you that I did give it up and I lived to tell the tale!……Well, I have found myself single for 10 of the the last 12 shampoo-free years….but correlation is not causation, OK?!…..and besides, who needs a life partner when you have moral absolutism as a companion, right? RIGHT??????
Shampoo is a wasteful non necessity (yes, even the “organic, botanical extract loaded, sulfate free” brands). Like most of Capitalism, shampoo creates a problem and then provides the “solution” — -what a spectacular mother fucking racket. Shampoo strips your hair of it’s self cleaning oils and coats it with chemical build up. After a couple few days of not “washing” your hair with shampoo it starts to become oily, which we have been trained to view as “dirty”, but this over secretion of oil is a response to the damage done by the shampoo, it is your hair’s way of trying to return to it’s naturally balanced state. Once you get past that initial oil secretion, your hair will return to a non oily state on it’s own, but we never give it a chance. Plus we never think about the energy and materials used to make shampoo or all the plastic bottles created, nor do we think about what happens when we wash the shampoo out of our hair — once it goes down the drain it has to be dealt with, has to be neutralized at water treatment plants.
One time when a woman I had just met found out that I don’t use shampoo she became somewhat peeved, telling me that “if everyone did what you’re doing then shampoo companies would go out of business!”
“Yes, I know” I said.
“And you’re OK with all the people who have jobs in the shampoo industry losing their jobs??????” she huffed.
“Yep. Let’s lose all the jobs so we can get back to reality and the real work that needs to be done.”
But seriously, so many of our so called western world “necessities” are actually luxuries, luxuries that just end up creating more problems, hence requiring even more “necessary” luxuries. So this is where we can start. Start by taking a hard look at what it is we truly need, ask why it is that we think we need or want a thing. We just have to keep giving things up — start small and work our way up — until we have returned to some semblance of what is REAL and TRUE. Only then can we fully summon those eternal beings waiting patiently for us to commune with them once more. The likes of Brigid and Cailleach have been out of commission for so long now. We don’t have to keep up this act. An act that is both literally and figuratively destroying the planet. A planet we once all revered and respected and protected and loved so hard it hurt and we told tales all about this love, tales of Groundhog Dances and Sun Gods, so many tales of this miraculous place we once knew so intimately as our home, a place where we made our dens as Shrines to the Earth, to love.
Now we live in a den of thieves.
Now we hog the ground……
1000 years ago, it is estimated that only 4 million square kilometers — less than 4% of the world’s ice-free and non-barren land — what is called “habitable land” — was used for farming.
Today Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. But 1000 years ago, there was also no suburban sprawl or lawns or car dealerships or factories or Cheesecake Factories or enormous open pit mines or golf courses or highways or parking lots or concrete jungles or resorts or airports or outlet malls or military bases or landfills or power plants or amusement parks. All this shit adds up to WAY more than half the land being used by humans.
According to a recent survey, modern industrialized human systems have damaged 97% of the Earth’s land.
Back to my photo shoot down by the river……
I walked out onto the deck and gazed across the water — made black by the contrast of the white banks and a blueless sky. With a softness matching the snow, I quietly let the name “Brigid” fall from my lips.
Nothing happened.
*
*
*
But then….something kinda sorta happened?
Yes, something definitely happened, uh, maybe.
Oh but then suddenly, almost as if being instructed by some unseen director, I found myself darting back inside! I slipped out of the white gown I had planned on wearing and poured myself into a little red number I had brought along!
I needed to wear red, I was told by the maybe something. So I cannibalized the potted CUETLAXOCHITL(the not Poinsettia) there in the cabin and plastered two of its red bracts right above my eyes.
I looked insane to myself in the mirror. I looked like a second rate, minor league Destroyer God. I loved it. I swear my vision became sharper.
Once properly adorned I stepped back outside donning my flaming attire to greet both the dark waters of the Kokosing and the light waters of the snow.
Fire and Water, baby! I didn’t even know it at the time, but it was all SO Brigid. In art, she is often depicted next to water with a crown of flames.
For as long as I can remember, Nature has always been a place I went to for refuge from the buzzing, binging and beebopping of industrialized “life”. Nature was always a place that brought me joy, peace, and grounded-ness.
But more and more often, when I am in natural settings I feel anxiety come on.
It’s an anxiety markedly different from the climbing-the-walls tension I feel in urban settings- that’s more internal, happening inside of me. This anxiety I experience in Nature enters into me from somewhere else, or even grabs hold of me as if to shake me. When I’m in Nature now — without the distractions of modernity — it’s as if I can’t help but feel more of what is happening to Her.
I spent the Spring, Summer, and Fall of 2019 housesitting alone in the mountains of Northern New Mexico. I unknowingly got a head start on the self isolation and social distancing that we soon would all experience (well, not all of us, not “essential workers”, but they don’t quite ever get to count as “we”, do they? Side Question: Shouldn’t all jobs be essential ones? And essential to what exactly? Can’t help but think we sure botched a critical self-evaluation opportunity with Covid there, oh well).
Before coming to New Mexico I had reached a point where I was at a real loss at how to effectively use my one life to help stop the mindless destruction of our collective Mother and begin to heal the damage done. But duh, OF COURSE I was at a loss, because we’re not meant to ever be a “one life”, we are meant to be part of a whole, part of a continuum, part of something bigger than our one self. But the various “wholes” I had tried to be a part of over the years — the environmental clubs, the activist groups, the marches, the movements, the petitions, the campaigns — they all fell short, way short, and even those organizations with the initial best of intentions declined pretty quickly into dysfunction, delusion, over compromising, and toxic culture.
So I had come there to New Mexico to escape. Honestly, I am not proud of using what privilege I have to hide.
The cool climate of the mountain forest ecosystem, with almost daily brief monsoons, made the ethereal mojo of Spring last up until Autumn there in the highlands of New Mexico.
Because the weather was always so unbelievably goshdarn pleasant, I made a point to spend the vast majority of every day outside, as to “commune with Nature”, but unfortunately the reception is pretty weak for us modern industrialized dum dums and so it’s not always easy to get a signal.
But the more I “communed”, the worse I felt.
But I tried to feel the worst in the best possible way I could, if that makes ANY sense.
I had a daily ritual of visiting this one very large conifer stump on top of a ridge. It had been cut down at some point but it was hard to know when exactly. Maybe 15 years ago, maybe 50??? But the rings revealed that this being had lived to be around 305 years old before it ceased to live.
Everyday, I would go and kneel in front of this wooden gravestone and imagine the world it inhabited as a sapling. To be safe, I picked the year 1714.
1714:
No United States.
No Groundhog Day.
No large scale Poinsettia industry.
No photoshoots.
No planes, trains or automobiles.
No movie called ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’
1714: No plastic yet. No pesticides. No cement.
The rain was not yet laden with forever chemicals and it fell cleanly over at least 60 million buffalo who roamed all across what is now the U.S. (by 1890 there were less than 1000 buffalo, by 1902 there were only 23 individuals).
1714. Commercial coal mining was just starting around this time. By 1750 coal production had increased by 50% since 1700 (and nearly another 100% by 1800. And another 500% by 1850). The population of New York City was only around 5000 in 1714. The total population of European Colonizers here was only around 275,000, and with them were 25,000 African slaves. It’s tricky to know how many Indigenous peoples were here at that time but I have read that by 1700 — around the time this tree first took root — up to 90% of the original Native population of the Americas had already been wiped out, mostly from disease brought by Europeans.
I had been foraging some wild edibles on my daily walkabouts, such as Stinging Nettle, Mountain Mint, and Oyster mushrooms. But one day I had the impulse to ask the mushrooms I was about to harvest if it was OK to do so. In the past I had sometimes done this because I’ve heard that’s what you are supposed to do if you want to be a good conscientious respectful forager, but I had never received an answer from them either way so I just always figured it was OK??? Part of me always felt sad that I could not communicate with the plants and trees and fungi like I assumed our ancestors could. But mostly I just thought the whole idea of us industrialized humans asking a wild plant if it’s OK to pick them is ridiculous considering we never ask permission for the bulk of what we take. No one is asking the Congo if it’s OK that children mine her rare Earth minerals for our phones. No one is asking the Niger Delta — a once thriving Mangrove ecosystem — if it’s OK to fill our gas tanks up with her oil. No one is asking the 1 out of 4 sea turtles with unsafe levels of plastic (as if there could be a “safe” level) in their bellies if it’s OK to keep buying disposable shit we don’t need. No one is asking the Orangutan if it’s OK to chop down their home to grow palm oil for all our unhealthy junk food. No one is asking broccoli if it’s OK that it was cultivated and hybridized into the freak of Nature it is today. Because asking broccoli isn’t sexy.
We don’t dare ask these bigger questions, because we know there is no way in hellfire that anything would ever willingly give consent to be raped or poisoned or exploited or driven from their home. And besides, it’s very difficult to ask permission for most of what we take because the transaction is not happening right in front of us in real time. As anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge says “Our arms have become so long we can no longer see what our hands are doing.”
But that day with this outcropping of oyster mushrooms I felt like I should ask for permission….and to my surprise I got a definitive NOPE.
Then I started asking the plants I had been harvesting — like these Nettles, the greenest healthiest most robust patch of Nettles I ever did see (Magpies roosted above them, which I think helped fertilize them) — if it was ok to keep doing so.
They all said no.
So I stopped.
I started spending even more time with Stump.
I imagined what the forest of its sapling-hood must have been like: chock full of giant trees as old and big as this stump once was. Since over 90% of “Old Growth” forests are now gone (those that remain in North America are mostly found in Alaska) it means that so few of us humans have a living memory of this kind of ecosystem. The trees themselves don’t remember. When stump here had reached the end of its life it was one of the last of its kind- most of the trees I encountered in this forest now were young, the oldest being no more than 50 or 60 years old. Most forests today are devoid of older generations of trees, of grandparents and even parents. They are a community without elders. Can a community without elders even be called a community? Or are we looking at a ‘Lord of the Flies’ type of situation.
“If you go to a desert, you will hear this mysterious voice: Be wise, protect your forests!”
- Mehmet Murat Ildan
And even though we know all this, we cannot stop chucking wood….
And chucking…..
And chucking…..
And chucking……
Between climate chaos, unchecked deforestation, and the spread of diseases I wondered if these woods would ever again be full of big old tall trees like Stump had been. I had this terrible feeling of showing up super late for this spectacular, tits-up balls-out breathtakingly beautiful raging party that had already ended and now there’s all this crap to clean up but no one wants to do it so they just go party somewhere else. But before too long, we will eventually run out of party venues though.
The after party scene was not strong there. In all the time I spent outside during those 6 months I lived next to that forest I saw surprisingly little wildlife: an occasional squirrel, some deer, some elk, one black bear that I thought at first was a big dark rock. I saw two coyotes: one on the very first day I was there and one on the very last day I was there (such a coyote move btw). I barely saw or heard any birds- mostly ravens, magpies and the occasional Redtail hawk steadily soaring high up against the blue sky like a kite. I once saw a mama Turkey and her chicks waddling by. I just had this eerie feeling of “where is everybody?”
They’re gone.
Of all land mammals on Earth, only 4% are wild undomesticated ones, the other 96% are comprised of mostly cows and a big brained hairless ape who have a real hankering for hot wings. I’ve read that if Alien Anthropologists from another planet came here after we had gone extinct they would think that chickens ruled this planet due to all the chicken bones. Of all birds on Earth, TWO THIRDS are poultry.
So I would sit with my Stump friend, asking them all about the copious populations of diverse wildlife that they surely saw in their early life — the mountain lions, the bobcats, the wolves, countless birds and innumerable insect species — only to watch them all dwindle over the decades and centuries. And Stump watched, helpless, as their own tree family diminished as well, perhaps never to return……Perhaps this is how many of the Native human populations of North America must have felt as their world came down. That rich prolific era is over, but one would never know it without a culture of recognition, without a culture of sitting with tree stumps, without a culture of asking, of remembering.
Those iconic lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s come to mind….
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone
….but such words are lost on us modern industrial humanoids. It was already gone when we got here. We can’t miss something we never knew!
And those who came before us, and those who still live in what biological richness remains, they know full well what they got, what they had, and they don’t need to lose it to realize how good it was.
~ ~ ~
After my housesitting stint in New Mexico wrapped up in late 2019, I went to California for a spell and then up to Seattle, Washington to visit my very good friend, Jen, pictured here lying face down on the floor after receiving a blouse she was particularly jazzed about. The girl knows what she likes and it’s vertical stripes.
So if you may recall, that area of the country was like the ground zero of Covid in early 2020, where the first U.S. case was reported. And that’s just where I happened to be and no one was being told to social distance or wear masks yet (just make sure you wash those hands and bags of Doritos!) and wouldn’t you know……
I up and got it.
And I have not been the same ever since…….
That’s right……..
Long Covid, baby!
Long Covid really is more of an umbrella term for all the various and many symptoms that can develop after someone gets infected with covid (even if their infection was mild — as mine was — and even if they were asymptomatic).
“They” have just recently recognized 6 subtypes of Long Covid.
But it’s estimated that nearly half of all people with Long Covid have developed ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). Yep, that’s me. And I find the technical terms used to talk about CFS symptoms, such as “post exertional malaise” and “brain fog” do not adequately describe this condition. Malaise sounds like some kind of gourmet sauce you pour over steamed asparagus, not an exhaustion so extreme that you want to throw up or kill yourself but can’t because both those things take way too much energy. And “brain fog” makes it sound like your mind is strolling thru a quaint Welsh meadow full of mist, not struggling to remember the word for pencil with the same amount of mental fortitude it takes to solve one of those ‘Good Will Hunting’ math problems.
There is no known cure for ME/CFS, there’s only “managing symptoms” — yet another wonderful and helpful euphemistic term.
For the last almost 3 years now I’ve been unable to do much more than lie down. Never have I felt more like a barnacle on the barge of industrial civilization. In my previous life I was able to distract myself from my own barnacle-ness by keeping super busy doing things like growing lots of my own food, or living “off grid”- even though I was still mostly dependent on these artificial life support systems we live by.
But without the busyness, my current existence feels as if it has absolutely no meaning….and that’s because it doesn’t have meaning, at least in regards to stopping the destruction of the planet and easing the suffering of all Her children. My life exists, as does yours, to keep the fake world alive, not the real one.
A mental health “expert” would probably say I’m “depressed” in lieu of the correct language for what I and so many others are feeling here in the drawn out beginning of the ENDING of so so much. How can we even begin to talk about all of this without the right words? We are sorely lacking language that gets at the heart of what is going on…..language such as “keening”. There isn’t a “growing mental illness crisis”. There is a VERY appropriate emotional, psychological, and spiritual REACTION people are having to the breakdown of both society as we’ve known it and the ecological systems that made this society possible.
The mental illness crisis is not something in our heads to be treated, it’s a HEALTHY RESPONSE to an unfolding environmental catastrophe the likes of which humans have never seen since we arrived as a species….an environmental catastrophe the likes of which INSECTS have never seen, and they’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years! All because we were sold on the idea that our lives would be infinitely better if our pots and pans had a coating on them making them easier to clean.
So listen, I’m not super jazzed about living but I wouldn’t say I’m suicidal (again, the correct language forsakes us). I want to live, I do. But this isn’t living! We are humans, not barnacles. My will to live isn’t low, my willingness to live in this wretched sorry excuse for a culture is low. I desperately want to kill the industrialized traumatized run down version of myself and be reborn as the real me. I want that for all of us. I want to murder you all. I want to put us out of our misery and the misery we are causing the Natural World with our weird simulated one. We have outlived our welcome.
With each passing generation our lives are brought to us less and less by way of the inherited accumulated wisdom of those who have come before, and more and more by way of the insane irrational systems dependent on the exploitation of both other species and of one another, and fueled by the rampant annihilation of our collective Mother.
We industrialized humans have been ripped from Her womb before we were even conceived, we are no longer born of Her, raised by Her, learn Her living breathing language. We are now the offspring of a cold mechanical Civilization that teaches us to speak a dead language.
How can we ever really love or feel loved by a parent such as that? No wonder we don’t feel real. Only a culture that feels so unreal would create and tell tales like Pinocchio, The Velveteen Rabbit, Toy Story, or any situation where artificial intelligence “develops self awareness”. The latest Zombie movie isn’t about zombies, it’s about us. Don’t you see that WE’RE the zombies! [and have you noticed the zombies depicted in film in recent years are these super fast, charged up, hyper zombies — not like the old school slow ones. I think this speaks volumes to how we are expected to hustle more than ever]
We’re the androids/inanimate objects/wooden boys in these stories! And thru these characters we’re living out our deep desire to feel real again, to feel alive! These stories are cries for help, not entertainment! We wish and hope and pray to come to life, but it’s near impossible within the context of a culture that destroys Life, a culture that cuts us off from Lifelines, a culture where communicating with and thanking the ancestors has been replaced with Ancestry.com. That once massive bank of accumulated sacred wisdom has been reduced to DNA stats and fun facts about some quirky famous distant relative, nothing that would help guide us back to a way of living that is in alignment with Nature.
And so the torch of the ancestors grows dimmer. It’s in danger of going out altogether if we continue down this dark path of mindless destruction, where we never stop to notice our own shadows, never even coming out of our dens at all to see if we still have one.
We are so homesick…..
….And I believe more and more that nearly all ailments and diseases and mental disorders come down to this. We want to go home, but can’t.
Even though our home, our Mother, is RIGHT. THERE.
Industrialized civilization cashes in on these longings to return home, and we end up being even further led astray from the Motherland.
Martin Prechtel writes…
“By developing even more effective and entertaining methods of escape that only burn up the earth, the air, animals, plants, and the deeper substance of what it should mean to be human, by competing to get ahead, we have created a brakeless competition that has outrun our innate beauty and marked out a very definite and imminent “finish” line.”
The Human Species has lost so much in such a short amount of time. The simulated reality most of us reside in, built on competition instead of cooperation is so incredibly new to our species. For most of our existence, like over 95% of our time on this planet, we lived with an Indigenous worldview
We’ve only been living in this effed up Dominant Worldview for a hot minute (and getting hotter by the day).
I believe, on some level, all of us in are in a state of constant grieving for what we can FEEL in our bones should be there but isn’t.
Our bodies are not designed to hold this much longing, this much grief without a way to move thru it, to process it, to LEARN from it. And so we opt to just pretend to not hold it at all. BUT IT’S STILL THERE. We need to work the grief out of us so that it doesn’t remain stagnant and fester inside us unexpressed, its lessons never coming to light.
“To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful.” ~Martin Prechtel, from ‘The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: A Mayan Tale of Ecstasy, Time, and Finding One’s True Form’
But we have lost these methods of grief metabolization.
When is the last time you danced for hours, when is the last time you chanted all night, when is the last time you made something beautiful with your hands, or had a conversation with a stump, or laid on the ground looking up so the cosmos can put you in your place, or “keened” for it all as Brigid taught us?
It took me a couple years but I no longer really grieve for what the Long Covid has taken from me, I try to focus more on what it has given me: an opportunity to SLOW DOWN……Which I recognize is a huge luxury to do so without starving or becoming homeless.
I don’t even really like to say I have Long Covid because I would like to move away from the mindset that diseases are these separate entities. Diseases are reactions our bodies are having to unfavorable circumstances, to toxic and absent relationships, diseases are warning bells that change is needed. Gabor Mate explains it well here…..
So yes, I’ve come to see my Long Covid as the Earth forcing me to STOP, to REST, to GRIEVE (Viruses do serve an ecological purpose, including population control).
But it is not easy. It is quite lonely, as most people are not there yet (most people won’t even have the time or interest to read any of this painfully long rambling essay of mine— -but they will definitely find the time to tell me it’s too long, lol).
“Someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience. People have quite enough reality to bear, by simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth, taxes, and death.” ~James Baldwin from ‘I am Not Your Negro’
So many of us “cannot go there” either because circumstances don’t allow it OR they don’t actually want to stop grinding for this culture because Stockholm Syndrome, because we tend to identify with our captors.
My Long Covid condition makes people sad and uncomfortable, and I think it at least partly has to do with the fact that I’m not “participating” in this culture nearly as much, I no longer am playing my role in it. I now have more time than ever to point out all the ways in which this society, this Industrial Corporate wet dream, BLOWS CHUNKS.
It’s not even that we are exactly separated from Nature by this culture, because that’s impossible to become totally disconnected from Nature (although plenty o’ Billionaires are striving for just that with their delusional cockamamie flight of fancy idea of going off and living in space condos).
It’s more that we are no longer allowed or even shown how to participate IN Nature, WITH Nature, AS Nature. We’re taught that visiting Nature from time to time is nice, and that recycling is an important way to make yourself feel you are actually helping matters. But mostly, we are chiefly taught how (and forced to) participate in the man made systems that are dominating this Earth and destroying Nature. But the thing is, our Natural instincts are still there, it’s just that they are being suppressed, manipulated or applied to the context of our Industrial Domestication.
And our natural tendencies, that would otherwise be helping Nature, are wasted on a staggering amount of utter meaninglessness, like this Beaver going thru the motions….Building a dam made of Christmas decorations in a hallway contributes absolutely nothing to healthy living ecosystems, whereas a real beaver dam does, BIGTIME.
Just like our natural tendency to “forage” does nada for the benefit of Earth’s biodiversity when we do it at the grocery store.
But in my loneliness I do often feel the presence of a company, an affinity with the likes of a keening Brigid, or the tears of Quan Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, who cries with the world.
When is the last time you rested, like really RESTED??? I’m talking about a DEEP REST. I don’t think it’s actually possible to fully rest as long as the impossible demands and fake obligations and responsibilities put forth by capitalism lord over us.
Every so often, I do an internet search of “Long Covid”. Without fail, at least one if not all of the top five search results that come up frame Long Covid within the context of how it is hurting the “work force” or about how much it’s going to “cost the economy”, which further solidifies in our psyches the dangerous notion that capitalism is primary to our survival, a belief that comes at a great cost to Nature, to the survival of LIFE itself.
“Work force?” Ha! How about a REST FORCE.
Capitalism will NEVER EVER NEVER provide real solutions to the complex problems it has created.
“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.” ~James Baldwin, from ‘I am Not Your Negro’
Capitalism cannot be reformed, cleaned up, “greened”, or made to operate in an equitable way. Because the ONLY way capitalism is able to exist is by way of extraction, exploitation, slavery and injustice. If a just and fair form of capitalism could exist then it would render itself obsolete because we wouldn’t need it anymore because we’d just be all doing that thing called SHARING. You know, that thing we teach Kindergartens to do. But it doesn’t matter what we instruct kids to do, they will just end up mirroring our behavior, and the vicious cycle of capitalism (the opposite of sharing) will continue.
Capitalism will never let us share, not fully. Nor will Capitalism let us rest. EVER. It will run us ragged and then sell us endless products to help us rest better. It’s like Amazon or Apple pledging that they are doing everything they can to “go green” when the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY to do so is to simply stop, to SHUT IT THE FUCKING FUCK DOWN YOU MOTHER FUCKERS.
~ ~ ~
As I started the Brigid photoshoot, my body grew cold but there was a heat that kept me going, and it had something to say!
I rushed inside and started feverishly dictating, still in costume. It’s taken me months and months and months to edit down everything that came out that day! (Yes, this is what my writing looks like edited down, eek!)
I saw a meeting of the Gods. They were converging in a grand hall next to a great River. It wasn’t quite as nice as a Hyatt Regency Hotel Conference Room…but still, pretty nice.
Some of them were in quite a panic.
A few of the Destroyer Gods had called an emergency council of all Deities.
Shiva was giving the Keynote address. Shiva is known as “The Destroyer” within the Trimurti, the Hindu trinity which also includes Brahma and Vishnu.….
**********
“Good Day. I thank you all for coming. Thruout time, Destroyer Deities like myself have always harnessed the sublime powers of Nature and the cosmos in order to further expand, maximize, and progress the complexity, ingenuity, integrity and diversity of Life, by way of destruction to bring about evermore creation.
But, my friends, the current extinction event brought on by the senseless endeavors of certain wayward members of the human race has bewildered the best of us.
Some are calling what is happening a war: A war on Nature, a war on the Deities. But just ask any God of War if this is like any warfare they’ve ever seen before.”
Ares, the Greek God of War interjected…..“Tis true, any war worth engaging in has unspoken rules employing tactics that honor your enemy, that honor the art of combat. Plus wars have victors, but there will be no victors here.….not that anyone listens to me anymore ever since Mars replaced me and won’t let me even…”
Mars, the Roman God of War cuts off Ares “There will be no winners in this war, only loss, only the threat of there being nothing at all. Any war worth engaging in has unspoken rules employing tactics that honor your enemy, that honor the art of combat. Plus true wars have victors, but there will be no victors here.”
“That is literally what I just said!” shouted Ares.
“That’s a very good point, Mars” said Shiva.
“Yoo hoo, can anyone HEAR me????” asked Ares, arms waving.
Shiva continued “So this is not a war at all. And it’s seems so much more than an extinction”.
“It’s an extermination” said Ares.
“I’d say it’s more like an extermination” concluded Mars.
Shiva nodded, adding “Yes, you’re right Mars. And some of these humans today, even with all their blindness, are still at times quite able to recognize and name what is happening, calling it “an existential crisis”. As in NOT existing. As in ceasing to regenerate, to transmogrify and take on new forms. As in breaking the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
The extent and voraciousness of their destruction is like none we’ve ever known. This isn’t your classic asteroid hit, volcanic eruption, ice age, or run of the mill fire/flood/famine.
This is something new and frightening and we just can’t make heads or tails of it…..Like literally if this keeps up, bacteria might not ever get a chance to evolve again into creatures with heads and tails.
There’s the sheer volume of destruction, sure…
I mean, there used to be 4 billion American Chestnut Trees in North America and then we turned our back for one second and poof, all gone. There was once 60 million buffalo in America, which these new humans quickly brought to near extinction and promptly replaced them with over 94 million domesticated cattle that have just completely decimated not just the land but the water. There’s a huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico from all the farm run off from the crops grown to feed the blasted things. Most rivers and streams are too polluted to directly drink from anymore. Greenland is melting bonkers fast. And just when they start to get a grip on what’s happening they get pulled back into the most insignificant fabricated drama.
The invention of the Keurig alone could result in enough damage to undo all that good hard work we put in on the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction Event! Do they not realize that event, which sent the dinosaurs packing, is what opened up the dancefloor for mammals to cut a rug, resulting in the evolution of humans themselves??? And now they’re throwing it all away for single serve coffee???
Their actions, if left unchecked, won’t just wipe the canvas clean, but wipe out the canvas itself.
It’s not just the speed and quantity of the destruction that’s the problem, it’s the QUALITY that’s really disturbing. It’s a total hack job. It’s all over the place. These people simply have no work ethic when it comes to the art of destruction!
These new humans are cloning the hell out of anything they can, injecting fish DNA into tomatoes, splitting atoms like there’s no tomorrow, emitting loads of electromagnetic fields, dredging the ocean floor for rare earth minerals, crocheting sweaters for trees and lampposts, it’s effed up. They’ve gone and dug up so much compressed dinosaur sludge and then just burned it willy nilly like it’s their goddamn job to warm the planet at such a terrifyingly rapid rate where nothing will be able to adapt fast enough to the infernal heat. Or they do perverted things like turn that liquid dinosaur juice into plastic….including, somewhat ironically, plastic toy dinosaurs! The amount of plastic they’ve created is greater in mass than all land animals and marine creatures combined. There’s so much plastic now that tiny bits of it are absolutely everywhere: in the ocean, in the soil, in the air, in the places they foolishly thought would remain pristine no matter what……
Plastic has even been found in the placentas of their unborn babies — which is disrupting their endocrine systems — and this finding is still not enough to bring plastic production to a screeching halt. These plastics along with a cocktail of other man made toxins are lowering the age of puberty. These chemicals are even changing the sexes of fish and amphibians! Few among us Gods have the power to change the sex of a being, but these humans have accomplished this feat just by putting those unassuming plastic rings around the tops of new jars of peanut butter, you know the ones I’m talking about? It’s like a totally superfluous ring that isn’t even doing anything but creating the illusion of safety and purity. It’s just stupid enough to be the most maniacal thing we’ve ever encountered.”
“Yeah”, Old Testament Yahweh chimed in “Back in my day, destroying the world was simple: you just commanded some gullible jagoff to do a bunch of busy work like ‘Hey you, you with the white beard, go wrassle up two of every kind of critter and put ’em on a big wooden skiff!’ Then you turned on the waterworks, the entire earth flooded, bing bang boom, everything got rebooted no problem. You throw a rainbow up in the sky, promise them you’ll never ever do anything like that EVER again — wink wink— and you’re good. Or you start a locust plague, yada yada yada, they starve for awhile, they learn their lesson, done and done. But now, humans have made the business of destroying way more complicated than it has to be. I mean, plastic rings over the top of Peanut Butter lids? What? What is that? They just go about it all in this backassward convoluted way that just ends up burning SO. MANY. BRIDGES.…and also burns up all the bridge building materials! It’s fucking weird and gay. I’m at a real loss here, I got nothing. And another thing…they are getting real “tolerant” of the gays, which really gets my sacrificial goat. They got some nerve using MY rainbow, as a goddamn symbol of….”
“OK OK Yahweh” interrupted Shiva “that’s enough out of you. Don’t you have some smiting to do or something, the grownups are talking. Anyways, as I was saying, these new humans don’t seem to get the whole point of destruction, how it’s supposed to be done in a way where Life is renewed, made stronger and more resilient than before. After every extinction event, Life came back more robust and diverse than ever.
But again, it’s so frustrating because they’ll do something that makes you think they DO get it, but then no. Like they have this animated movie they just absolutely love with this catchy song in it called “The Circle of Life’. Ok, sounds good, right? They even made the movie into a Broadway musical and then back into a live action film from the Broadway musical, they just can’t get enough of it. But it’s so blatantly derivative of our whole original deal. Disney even trademarked the film’s catchphrase, “hakuna matata” which is Swahili for “there are no worries”, which couldn’t be further from the truth. There are more worries than ever and so many of them don’t seem to care! The circle of life is being disrupted in every possible way at every possible level by these current human systems. At every chance, they go and cut the great circle with a million different kinds of sharp objects and then they hammer the Circle out into a flat straight line, and if the ends of the line start to curl up towards each other to try and form a circle again, then they hammer even harder. They create oxymoronic, schizophrenic headlines such as this one….
They do not seem capable of questioning the ever continuous non stop building of their manufactured world. Stopping is not even considered as an option. It’s astounding. “It must keep being built” is a given, a baseline motto upon which all opinions arise. The only debate allowed is in the HOW — how to keep building — not whether or not they should keep building at all, when it is ABUNDANTLY clear they should STOP BUILDING NOW and just use and share what is already built. And what they call “building” is nothing of the sort. It’s destruction. Actually, it’s not even destruction because, as we Destroyer Gods know, with proper healthy destruction comes the promise of further creation out of the compost and ashes of the destruction, often more complex than before. No this is an annihilation we have on our hands. And if left to their own voracious devices there will not even be ashes left when they are finished. There will be nothing. Truly nothing.
So I’ve gathered you all here because we Destroyers Gods are swamped.….and not just because the humans have drained most of the swamps so they have more room to grow corn syrup and build golf resorts.
As these new humans come up with evermore ways to annihilate, there are new Departments of Destruction forming all the time. We just can’t keep up with it all. Here is a small sampling of just some of the new categories that have been catalogued thus far, and many of them currently have NO DEITY monitoring them at all due to a personnel shortage:
• Food waste, Celebrity Chefs
• Disposable Diapers, Bottled Water, Those Plastic Rings around the tops of new jars of Peanut Butter
• Elon Musk
• Marketing Executives, Microplastics, Microwave Popcorn
• Gender Reveal Parties, Genocide, Gaming
• Noise Pollution, Light Pollution, EMFs, EDM
• Yachts, Yahoo, Yoohoo
• Carpeting, Concrete, and other Impermeable Man Made Surfaces. (They literally have a paint store that sports a logo of a gigantic can pouring liquid plastic over the entire planet with the tagline “Cover the Earth”. We Destroyer Gods could not even make this shit up if we tried.)
• GMOs, CAFOs , FROYO, living by a code of YOLO
• Lawns, Laser Hair Removal, Hypoallergenic Cats
• Elon Musk
• Polycotton blends
• Monoculture, Monotheism, Monsanto
• Manifest Destiny, Man Caves, Men
• Genital Mutilation, Bull Semen Extraction, NASA
• Dams, Drywall, Drycleaning
• The Enclosure Acts, Private Property, Private Dancers
• Blooming Onions
• Decline in Apex Predators/ Increase in Sexual Predators
• The Container Store, Content Creators
• Forms, Paperwork, Duplicates, Dittos, Documents, Receipts, Toilet Paper, Paper Towels, Paper plates, Paper
• Shark Fin Soup, Turducken, Milk (all varieties except Yak)
• Greenwashing, Whitewashing, Acid Washed Denim
• Coral Bleaching, Clorox Disinfecting Wipes
• Landfills, Landlords, Landrovers
• Mountain Top Removal, Mountain Dew
• Elon Musk again
• Social Media, Corporate Media, Mixed Media Art Degrees
• Starvation brought on by U.S. Sanctions, Bakeries for Dogs
• Yankee Candles, Colonization
• Real and Perceived Scarcity, Planned Obsolescence, Antiques Roadshow
• Ocean Acidification, Email Attachments
• Anything “Flavor Blasted” (trademark, Frito Lay inc.)
• The Military Industrial Complex, Apartment Complexes
• Glade Plug-ins, Rape
• Church and State
• Overfishing, Catfishing, Imitation Crab Meat
• The School-to-Prison Pipeline, Pipelines. Also Schools & Prisons
• Money, Attractive Young Women wearing Mom Jeans
• Data Centers, Dating Apps, Daddy Issues
• Sweatshops, Sweatpants, Sweaters for dogs
• Aircraft Carriers, Disney Cruises, Pig Farms
• Radio Ads
• Whiteness, Wokeness, Whaling, Water Sports
• Bitcoin, Groupons, Kohl’s Cash
• Logging & Blogging
• Shrinking of the Amazon/ Expansion of Amazon.com
• The Electrical Grid, People who say they’re “going off grid”
• Elon Musk, again for good measure
• Human Trafficking, Traffic, Tesla
• Trophy Hunting, Trophy Wives, Kids receiving Trophies for “Participation”
• Junk Mail, Male enhancing drugs
• Instagram, Instapot, Instant Gratification, Spanx
• Cargo ships, Cargo Pants, Cars
• Nuclear Waste, Nuclear Families, IKEA
• Weapons of Mass Destruction, Straws
• Morning Disc Jockeys
• Febreeze
“And more subcategories of destruction are popping up all the time” said Shiva despairingly. “We are so short staffed that we had to bring in gods and goddesses from other jurisdictions just to fill in so we don’t fall too behind with tracking it all. Here’s live footage of Pomona helping out at one of our monitoring stations. She usually just resides over Fruit harvests, jams, jellies, that sort of thing. So she is WAY out of her element here, the poor dear……
So we are humbly asking all you non Destroyer Deities to please step up” pleaded Shiva. “We need all Hamsas on deck, folks. It’s crunch time. What happens next could make or break us.”
A single slow clap was heard coming from where all the Underworld Gods were sitting.
“Yes Osiris” sighed Shiva “do you have something to add?”
Osiris stood up and started slowly pacing with his hands clasped behind his back.
“Great speech, Shivy Baby, but as far as I’m concerned, these ding dongs are too far gone. There’s no reaching them. Don’t believe me? In the year 2021, some of them were shelling out $85,000 for ONE Superbowl ticket while their fellow countrymen waited in food bank lines for hours. Democrats are taking money from Republican Super PACS to stop Progressive Candidates. The more that Police kill unarmed black people in America the more funding they are given to assault the homeless. Human trafficking rakes in $150 Billion smackeroos a year. This collapsing star of a culture is beyond a lost cause. It’s a joke. I mean, there’s about to be an explosion of mining for all the shiny things they “need” for their “green” energy “revolution”. They are about to start overturning every last pebble to get at anything that they think could be remotely used in some way to keep their insane insatiable “production” culture chuggin’ along in perpetuity. If they even TRY to replace their fossil fuel infrastructure with what they mistakenly call “renewables” it’s game over man. They will never ever stop renewing their contracts with their corporate masters, never stop hitting the refresh button on this shit show they created. If you think there is any hope left, I just have two words for you: Space Force. Remember how Democrats and liberals made fun of this project of Trump’s?
And they were right to mock it, but once Biden got in there he not only kept it in tact, but threw even more money at it!
…..Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people are left to die very year because they can’t pay for medical care. I say let it all completely go to Hades, let the computer chips fall where they may and us Underworld Deets (short for Deities) will take it from there. I rest my case…in its final resting place…which is in Hell…which is where I will see all you suckers soon, very very soon.”
Osiris, looking satisfied with himself, sat back down and fist bumped Persephone.
“Don’t you see that if something isn’t done then there will be no Underworld left either!” Shiva retorted. “Having an underworld requires having a WORLD to BE UNDER!”
“Shiva is right” said Tartarus as they slithered forth from the dark matter that was hovering in the back corner of the convention hall.
Everyone gasped, as Tartarus has never once spoke before.
Tartarus was less of a deity and more of a primal force. Tartarus had spent a lot of time in the Underworld but never fully belonged there. Some ancient Orphic sources and old mystery schools regard Tartarus as the infinite first-existing entity from which the Light and the cosmos were born. The Greek poet Hesiod said Tartarus was the third of the 3 great primordial deities, along with Chaos and Gaia. And rumor has it that Tartarus was the uncredited 6th Beatle (after George Martin), I mean how else could those chaps write all those hits in just a few years without the help of at least one primordial deity? C’mon.
“Listen,” said Tartarus, who appeared to be slowly melting, “I’ve been here since pert near the beginning and golly I thought I’d seen it all, but the malarkey these humans are pulling is totally whack-a-doodle-doo and it needs to be nipped in the bud, pronto. I’m losing dangerous amounts of primordial goo by the light year over here and it’s not like I can just swing by the nearest Universal Corner Store and pick some more goo up. This is limited addition, Grade-A, primo goo. What happens if I keep melting? If I keep losing goo? I don’t think any one knows the answer to that. It’s a conundrum for the ages.”
“I told you we should’ve NEVER pulled the ice back enough for them to start up farming!” yelled Nootaikok, the Inuit God of Icebergs and Glaciers.
“Take that back!” shrieked Demeter, Greek Goddess of Agriculture.
A frantic chorus of holy hubbub could be heard throughout the room, with blame and accusations flying, it grew louder and more and more charged with fear and anger, the sound and sight of thunder and lighting filled the Hall.
Shiva cut the lights to try and regain some order.
Just then a kind of whistling could be heard ringing thru the darkness. The bleats of sheep cut through everyone’s hectic chatter, and all fell silent.
A clear aqua spring babbled up from beneath the floor.
There was a warm glow and the crowd parted as the Goddess Brigid glided in on a bed of flames….
She took the stage, and began to address the gods.
“Blessings to you on this Imbolc.
Not long ago, I was a highly revered Goddess who wore many hats, floating and flitting wherever I was needed.
But now, now there is so much senseless birth and mindless death with nothing much betwixt the two that amounts to anything I’d call LIVING or DYING.
Without dying there can be no living, without living there can be no loving, without loving there can be no grieving.
So many of the humans have stopped grieving, and so to pick up the grief slack my former vast repertoire has been reduced to keening. All day and all night I keen. The entirety of my existence is now spent wailing and shaking for all that is being lost. And it seems as though I can never catch up, the loss just keeps coming, faster and faster. It’s exhausting. I am depleted. I have fallen so behind on all my other duties. And as a result…..
Rivers have been damned and are drying up. I have failed to keep the waters flowing freely.
Freshwater mollusks have decreased by 83% in the last 50 years alone. I have failed to protect them, to be their shells when they have none.
Spring is coming earlier and earlier now. I have failed to hold it steady.
Architecture has turned to utter rubbish, it stings the eye and offends the heart, offends the hills and Mountains and Suns that once inspired the structures of humans. They build nothing but useless shrines to themselves now.
Fertility is diminishing, sperm count is decreasing, and yet there are more humans than ever. I have failed to uphold quality over quantity.
And the poets I once inspired now speak in snarky tweets and rudimentary memes. I have failed to inspire them.
I have failed. I have failed! I HAVE FAILED!!!!” she keened, ripping at her short red sheath dress, which then broke apart and turned into a flock of scarlet birds who flew off and brought back Juniper berries, weaving them into a long blue gown for her.
“Babe, don’t waste a tear on these humans” huffed Yahweh. “They’re not worth it. They’re all dirty rotten sinners and whores and cheats and Lepers that deserve what they get.”
Jesus snapped back at Yahweh “Well Pops, Maybe if YOU tried keening for once in your stupid life you’d see there’s more nuance to it then that! But no, you just have one mode: Angry Dad!”
“Well you sound pretty angry yourself there, my boy” stated Yahweh.“Looks like the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree of life…..you know, the tree that chicks like Brigid here ruined for everyone when they just had to go and eat that apple. I was saving that apple for when Mel Gibson got here!”
Jesus’s voice became shaky “I swear to Dad that if I was still on Earth I would turn over so many Daddamn tables right now!”
Yahweh shook his head. “I granted you the power to perform miracles, literal fucking magic, and all you ever want to do is throw furniture around like a dirty Mexican wrestler. Pathetic.”
“That’s racist! And it’s better than your go to solution of ‘Hey let’s just drown them all or put them thru some effed up test or turn them into fucking pillars of salt!’ What even is that?!” cried out Jesus. “By the time I came on the scene they were a Daddamn mess thanks to you…..stoning people to death….and all the raping — ‘Here’ they would say to me ‘Rape my daughter, I insist’. No one could even remember what it was like to be as the lilies and sparrows are! You know something, Mom was right about you, you’re nothing but a big bully! I hate you!”
“Pfft. She liked it” retorted Yahweh.
“OMD! No she didn’t! You’re so stupid! It’s called consent, look into it you dick! Ugh! I wish I was never born! I’m so out of here! C’mon Holy Ghost, let’s jet!” And with that, Christ stormed off.
“What a disappointment that kid turned out to be” said Yahweh.
“Ok, ok, can we get back on topic please” said Shiva.“Brigid my dear, do you think you could stop keening for a sec and tell us more about why YOU think these humans have stopped grieving, have become so unreachable, so mindlessly destructive?”
“I don’t know” bewailed Brigid. “I DON’T KNOOOOOOOOOWWWW!”
Then Isis, the ancient Egyptian Goddess of Wisdom, approached the front of the Great Hall.
“I think I know why” Isis began. “It’s not like these new humans don’t know what they’re doing. One of their scientific reports just a few years ago said that if seawater warming isn’t stopped immediately then ocean ecosystems will start collapsing sometime in the 2020’s, followed by the collapse of land ecosystems in the 2040’s. But I’m afraid science is a bit of a bust, it’s just too abstract, void of emotion and heart, it sets them adrift, it has nothing to offer them that tethers them to their innate sensibilities, the sensibilities we bestowed upon them. Knowledge without a way to weave it into moral fibers gets lost on the way to becoming wisdom, just blows away in the wind. Without wisdom there can be no responding. Passivity takes hold of the masses, while those most motivated to accumulate power within the void easily become slave drivers, and these slave drivers don’t even need to use much force. People simply acquiesce.
I do say, something terribly important is now missing.
“YESSSSS!” Brigid belted out. “Something’s missing! Something vital has been LOST! BUT WHAT? WHAAAAAT?!”
Isis continued “Many of them are self aware enough to know how to label their shortcomings. They’ve identified what they call the ‘Intention-Behavior Gap’: the disconnect between knowing what you need to do and actually doing it.
The mere act of denouncing something like say, Climate Change, gains them praise from others and this praise fools their brains into thinking some kind of accomplishment has been completed, when nothing in the physical realm has been done to stop warming the planet. This kind of thinking breeds an “awareness culture”. The poor dears have awareness coming out of their ears, but nothing productive ever comes from it because they already got the reward of affirmation from others for raising awareness of the problem, and so they are left with no real incentive to actually follow thru with any significant action that actually would address the root of the problem. They simply no longer have any systems in place that would help them bridge the ‘Intention-Behavior Gap’. And there are powerful forces at play that want to keep it that way. As far as we can tell, these forces are not coming from any of our guys here in the spirit realm. This is new territory. The humans may have unleashed these forces but they definitely don’t know how to stop it or control it.”
“Yeah, even us Trickster Gods are like Dude, this isn’t funny anymore” interjected ‘Anansi’, the African Spider God of Mischief. “Too far.”
“They are trapped in systems of their own making.” stated Isis.
“Yes, trapped!” keened Brigid. “Just like Bill Murray’s character in ‘Groundhog Day’. They can’t move on to a better tomorrow! We must help them move on! We must! Or all is lost!”
Brigid’s attire grew even more blue….
She wept “Alas, but there are so many of them, how to get thru to them all?! So many of them and yet they are so lonely…Why?! Because,” Brigid answered herself “they have let themselves become isolated and divided in a myriad of ways: From their ancestors, from their families, from other species, from their true communities, from the ground, from the sky, from holy waters, from us, from their innate nature. What they refer to now as “human nature” is anything but, it’s actually a grave aberration from their true human nature, from their quintessential human-ness, from their unique strand of Lifelight that once did contribute to the Earth’s rich tapestry.
However, all is not lost yet, otherwise they wouldn’t keep telling stories that aim to remind them of sacred truths, which can still be found in even the most mainstream popular stories, such as in the film ‘Groundhog Day’.”
“What is with you and this movie?” asked Shiva “You’re like, obsessed.”
“Because” whaled Brigid “‘Groundhog Day’ is as good a blueprint as anything for the changes they must make! And that fact that they still have the impulse to tell and listen to such moral stories as ‘Groundhog Day’ shows that the muscle memory is still there.”
“But these stories are not enough” said Isis.“Morality Tales are dead upon arrival without systems in place to fully live them out. Otherwise, people just get stuck in the storytelling.”
“Woe is me, you are right, Isis” sighed Brigid. “There’s no way out of this! All is lost! I fear the worst!”
Her dress began became a veil of tears…
“I too am a’scared somethin’ fierce” lamented Tartarus “if something isn’t done and done soon, I don’t know what in tarnation we’re all gonna do. But let me tell you, we must figure this out or it will be mighty bad. Heavens to Betsy, there goes some more of my goo.”
“I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean “bad”?” Shiva asked Tartarus.
“Welp, try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light” explained Tartarus.
“Total protonic reversal?” asked Isis.
“Yes ma’am” affirmed Tartarus.
“Wait, isn’t that from ‘Ghostbusters’?” inquired Shiva “You guys are really mixing your Bill Murray metaphors here. Ok, so, the humans are stuck. How do we get them unstuck?”
“Just like Bill Murray gets unstuck in Groundhog Day!” sobbed Brigid.
“You keep referencing that movie like we know! No one here has seen it!” screamed a frustrated Shiva.
“We have” piped up all the Trickster Gods in unison.
“It’s our favorite” explained Loki, the Norse God of Mischief “Well, that and Mr. Bean.”
“Oh” said Brigid somewhat defeated. “Well should we just all watch it real quick?”
“Listen, I’m afraid there’s no time for that!” blurted Tartarus “Any nanosecond there’s going to be
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies.
Rivers and seas boiling.
Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes…
The dead rising from the grave.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria!”
“Now that’s definitely from Ghostbusters” said Shiva
“Nope, it’s from me. Ghostbusters stole it from me.” Taratarus defended.
“Brigid, why don’t you just QUICKLY tell us what happens in the movie and get us all up to speed.” suggested Shiva.
“Ok, ok. So Bill Murray is stuck in the same day, everyday he wakes up and it’s February 2nd…” started Brigid.
“And which Trickster God, pray tell, is responsible for this mayhem?” inquired Isis.
“Yeah, that isn’t made clear in the film” explained Loki “they don’t give credit to any of us, which is kinda a pretty big slight but it’s still a solid prank. But Bill Murray does at one point believe HE is a god, which is adorable….”
“See! This is what’s wrong! They have cut us out completely! They are so self centered, so in love with themselves!” complained Osiris. “There’s no redeeming them!”
“Wait wait wait” pleaded Brigid “we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let me start at the beginning.”
Brigid transformed into her Maiden form……
“When Bill realizes that he seems destined to live the same day over and over he starts to have fun with it. He passes the time with earthly delights enjoyed without consequences or guilt since there is no tomorrow” narrated Brigid.
“Just like many of the humans are doing now!” realized Shiva
“Precisely” confirmed Brigid “but then he moves on to using his circumstances as an opportunity to trick the woman he desires into caring for him. And she does start to warm up to him. There is one day when he feels as though he finally has her. But getting what he wants is not enough, he still wakes up stuck in the same day. Feeling lost and unsatisfied, he then turns to suicide to try and escape his purgatory…..
But even killing himself over and over does not allow him to move on to a new tomorrow.
Because he thinks it’s the woman’s love that he wants! It’s not. What he wants is to be something different, something better.
One day, after having done himself in countless times only to live, he tries to convince the woman of his godliness by showing her how much he can predict what is going to happen next in this day that he knows forwards and backwards by now. She’s amazed by how he can predict what is going to happen seconds before it does, and demands to know how he is doing this — is it some kind of trick, she asks?
He replies “Maybe the real God uses tricks, or maybe he’s not omnipotent, he’s just been around so long he knows everything.”
Then he tells her the truth of being stuck in the same day, as he has told her so many times before.
But this time she believes him.
This trust allows them to spend an authentically wonderful day together, because he is not trying to manipulate her anymore. He is starting to let go of that, and when humans let go — of the desire to possess, the need to control — it can open up the path to becoming themselves again. But it was that trust from another that allowed him to take that first step.
The humans today largely no longer trust each other anymore.
Without this trust, they will not be able to help one another escape the perdition they are destined to repeat.
Towards the end of that first authentic day he spent with the woman, Bill says to her…
“The worst part is that tomorrow you will have forgotten all about this.”
I believe this is speaking to how humans are aware of the fact that they can’t remember what it is they need to remember in order to move on!”
Brigid gestured to ‘Meng Po’. In Chinese Mythology Meng Po is the Goddess of Forgetfulness, whose task is to ensure that the souls who are to be re-incarnated have their memories wiped clean so they do not remember anything about their previous life or their time in the afterlife, as to not be overwhelmed. She does this by concocting a special soup that she serves to those about to return to the realm of the living. No one but Meng Po knows how to make this magical soup, for only she knows the secret ingredients… but it’s said to taste pretty much exactly like Lipton Cup-o-Soup.
“Meng, what if you were to stop serving your soup?” asked Brigid. “In so that they DON’T forget before they are reincarnated. What if they NEED to remember the mistakes they are making, the ruins they are forever creating and repeating. The humans have managed, against what we thought possible, to create a hell on Earth, so maybe they need to remember this in order to move forward. They’ve largely cut themselves off from all forms of ancestors, to the point where they don’t recognize them when they do come across them — like how they dig up the ancestors and carelessly and unceremoniously burn their bodies, eons of wisdom gone in a flash. What happens when they run out of ancestors? What happens when new ancestors are no longer being created?
Without the ancestors informing them they are lost, they are perpetually starting from scratch. Maybe it’s time to reveal to them more than we previously thought they could handle.”
“Yes, perhaps I could concoct a new soup that will help them remember not to keep repeating these same destructive patterns” thought Meng Po aloud “Hmmm, I’m thinking maybe a Lobster Bisque, but with like sour patch kids in it too, they won’t forget that.”
Brigid continued recounting the story…“On the night of the authentic day spent with the woman, Bill confesses his love for her while she sleeps….
But the next scene has him waking up once again on Groundhog Day, alone. He’s still stuck.
His confession of love wasn’t enough to make tomorrow come. Because it was not really love. It was admiration and infatuation rooted in wanting to have her. It was not about her, it was still about him. In his confession of love he expressed not feeling worthy of her — low self esteem is just the twin of selfishness, two sides of the same coin of self involvement. But you can’t blame humans for this kind of thinking, they are led to believe they are alone and have nothing but the self. How terribly tragic and bitterly cold. Bill’s experience is that he and he alone is reliving that day. But that’s how all humans feel today! But they are not alone. The culture they are trapped in dependent on everyone feeling alone to some degree. If they can slay that illusion they can start to come back together again.
Now Bill thought for sure that confessing his love to her, which he didn’t even have the guts to tell her while she was conscious, would be enough to make tomorrow come. But when he woke up alone again, he was not disappointed this time. That step was important in him embarking on the work needed to become a better person, a real person, a person not trying to get what only he wanted, but to find out what was needed of him by those around him.”
Just then, Aphrodite arose….
…and added “Yes, when the humans say they love the Earth, most do not mean it, because they can’t mean it, not within the context of a culture that relies on the destruction of the Earth to maintain itself, not when their immediate survival requires they abide by the irrational cruel laws and unloving customs of that culture.”
As to upstage Aphrodite, Venus also stood up….
“The bulk of them do not know the Earth like they once did” said Venus in a breathy voice. “It’s hard to love something or someone you do not know, that you have no direct relationship with — a relationship steeped in intimacy and trust and acceptance and respect. What they call love for Her is too often just a kind of fetishization.”
“You would know all about fetishes, I’m sure” snapped Aphrodite at Venus “you slut.”
“Well at least I don’t slut shame!” retorted Venus.
“Stop it you two!” demanded Brigid as she continued on….
“These poor humans, just like Bill Murray professing his love to the woman, lack both the confidence and humility to actually love. So much unpacked, complex, layered, chronic, generational trauma is working against them, and unlike Bill Murray, they don’t have eternity to sort it out, plus Bill is able to remember his past lives, learn from them, whereas they are groping in the dark for something, ANYTHING remotely familiar. And the unnatural world they inhabit hands out poor substitutions for the familiar. And so the trauma and deprivation just keeps piling on, survival mode takes over and that can shut us Divine beings out like nothing else.
And so after who knows how long, perhaps centuries, Bill Murray has finally become the best version of himself.
He and the woman spend another wonderful day together.
First he starts out by giving an on air speech for the Groundhog Day festivities that reflects the progress he has made in regards to developing insights…
“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”
Then later in the day he perfectly carves her face into a block of ice, barely having to look at her while doing it.
He knows her face so well by now.
But humans have stopped looking into the face of their collective Mother, the face of Father Sky, the faces of one another. They are strangers in a strange land.”
“This is true,” said Isis “the average American child can’t name even 10 wildlife species native to the bioregion they live in but can identify over 1000 corporate logos.”
Brigid went on “Then at the end of their long perfect day together Bill says…
“No matter what happens now, or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now because I love you.”
And this time he means it.
He honestly doesn’t care what happens next because he is fully unapologetically occupying the present moment.
This is the secret, the answer.
It’s a misdiagnosis to say that humans are no longer living in the now.
They ARE living in the now, it’s the quality of their now that’s the problem. Their now is utter tripe. The way in which they use this word has stripped it of all meaning.
NOW used to be much much more expansive and forgiving. It stretched out in every direction. Now was informed by a past rich in the ancestors’ accumulated experiences and cultivated wisdom.
But their now is being informed by their past traumas, by falsehoods, by fear, by a dangerous viral amnesia.
Now used to swell fruitfully into the future. The Lakota Tribe lived by a creed that always considered how their actions would effect 7 generations from now, as to ensure they themselves would someday become good future ancestors for those who came after them.
But the now of today is so small, so rigid, with clear boundaries that prevent them from a wholly and holy self realization.
This constricted form of now is strangling them. It’s strangling all other beings too, including us.
Now used to be a river where the past carried them to where they are and the future pulled them to where they needed to go…to the sea where they would evaporate and become the clouds and rain down over the land and back into the river again. But these humans have damned the river of now, only letting thru what they think they need. This great Now River is even starting to dry up before it reaches the sea, breaking the great continuum of self sustaining nows.”
“You got all this from ‘Groundhog Day’???” said Shiva in disbelief
“Ok, so how do we help them feed the now so that they can move on to tomorrow?” asked Aphrodite “We can’t just force them to fall in love with the Earth again, or with each other, or with the trees, or insects, or even with us, right?”
“That’s right. I have no where near enough arrows in my arsenal for a feat such as that.” explained Cupid…..
…….“Besides I already blew most of my ammo on trying to get cats and dogs to fall in love with each other because I thought it would be cute.”
“Listen” said Brigid “they already have everything they need to move on.
…But sadly, most of their first steps towards the now are taken directly into wet cement, and before they can take the next step they are already frozen in place.
The smoke and mirrors of their fake contorted manufactured world makes it appear as though every day IS in fact a new day, but they are simply repeating themselves without fully realizing it.
One of the things that keeps them from the Now are the powerful false Gods they’ve created and given tremendous power to. And as we all know, it is very hard to compete with these imposter gods. Instead of renouncing these false gods — Money, Industry, Technology, Politics — they keep trying to figure out how to infuse divinity into them by worshiping them.
But it cannot be done.
One of the first things Bill Murray says to the woman after tomorrow finally comes for him is this….
“Is there anything I can do for you today?”
We must figure out how to ask them this, in a way that they answer truthfully. And hope they return the ask. They’ve forgotten it’s a two way street……But maybe so have we Deities.
They mold us as much as we mold them. I mean look what they’ve done to poor Yahweh.”
Hearing his name, Yahweh piped up “Yeah so that flick ‘Mud Pig Day’ or whatever it’s called sounds super retarded, but I gotta say I am a HUGE fan of that one clip from Arsenio where Bill is manhandling Geena Davis. I watch it whenever I can’t sleep and it calms me right down. And it took Gena Davis DECADES to speak out. Hilarious.”
“Great Yahweh” shouted Brigid “now you’ve ruined Bill Murray for me forever! Thanks alot!
“Listen” Brigid forged on “I am ashamed to admit that I personally have stopped listening to their wishes. I got to the point where if one more smart ass threw a coin in a fountain and wished for a Trans Am or thousand more wishes I was going to seriously lose it. So instead I dove deeply into my keening. But I fear that I’ve been using it as a place to hide, to escape, as an excuse not to face the daunting task at hand.
But not anymore!
Brigid’s crown burst into flames
I want to show the humans how to whistle in the dark again so they aren’t afraid to go there. They have been told that if they dare venture into the darkness then it will eat them up. They are afraid of getting lost in the despair. They are afraid to look at their own shadows, preferring to use Groundhogs as their avatars.
But the dark, the despair, is where they will find themselves again, find one another, find us.
They must understand that despair is just another word for the Now, as is Joy. They avoid all of it, and have built and maintained an Empire that has mastered avoidance. We must figure out how to invite them back into the dark.
We must dispel their belief that their death is the end, when in actuality it is a point in the grand circle. They are flatlining instead of circling up when they die. They go to great lengths to make sure their own death is the end of the line and doesn’t feed the circle. They embalm themselves with chemicals, seal themselves off in boxes buried too deep for any microorganism to make much use of them, cutting themselves off from even the most microscopic of miracles.
Many humans are prone to say that the dire state of the Earth is like a house on fire or a sinking ship.
But these are images of industrial civilization, undead symbols of flatlining, and so they will never be able to effectively convey what is actually happening to Mother Earth. Using such imagery will only lead to them using increasingly more industrial flatlining to try and solve the problem.
She is not a house or a ship or a factory.
She is a Mother, a Daughter, a Lover, a Sage, a Maiden, a Shapeshifter, a Trickster, a Destroyer.
She feels, she grows, she learns, she grieves, she dies, she is reborn….as they all once did.
But the humans no longer know how to properly treat their own human mothers, their own human lovers, their own human children (let alone all of Earth’s children), so how do we expect them to know how to properly treat Her?
As the woman in ‘Groundhog Day’ watches in disgust Bill Murray’s display of glutton, she recites this poem by Sir Walter Scott:
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Breathes there a man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land?
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,–
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“See! They know what they’ve become! They just don’t know how to stop!”
If the humans do not remember, and remember soon, where they are and who they are and what they are and when they are and why they are then we shall all go down to the vile dust from whence we sprung, never to return again.
If they can’t be coaxed to come out of the wicked den of Civilization and face their own shadows — shadows that are threatening to block out every last bit of light — then it’s going be be forever more weeks of eternal nothingness, endless more eons of nothing but bacteria and Tardigrades.
Things aren’t meant to last forever, but the current dominant culture makes them believe it can, that’s why they put no real limits on their destruction.”
“Excuse me there, young lassie” broke in Tartarus “I actually am meant to last forever, so. That’s why Tardigrades are named after me, they’ve survived every single mass extinction event on Earth and can even stay alive in space. Maybe you guys should’ve just made everything out of Tardigrades and kept it at that.”
Ignoring Tartarus, Brigid continued “And if we do not remember that it is we Immortals who are supposed to inspire them, guide them, to listen to them, then we are no better than they. When we damn them, we are only damning ourselves. They were not created in our image, nor the other way around. We both had a hand in creating one another. But it would seem that arrangement has been abandoned.
I used to be so innovative and fluid.
I miss the way I was.
But we mustn’t cling to how we were.
The world has changed, is changing, and so must we.
A new kind of collaboration needs to come forth between us and them.
We have to believe them when from the depths of their collective unconscious coos these lyrics — by way of soft rock band, Foreigner — requesting “I wanna know what love is, I want you to show me.”
Brigid began to sing, then Aphrodite joined her. And then Shiva. And then another and another until all of Divinity were joined in chorus…
I gotta take a little time
A little time to think things over
I better read between the lines
In case I need it when I’m older
Now this mountain I must climb
Feels like a world upon my shoulders
Through the clouds I see love shine
It keeps me warm as life grows colder
In my life there’s been heartache and pain
I don’t know if I can face it again
Can’t stop now, I’ve traveled so far
To change this lonely life
I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me
I’m gonna take a little time
A little time to look around me
I’ve got nowhere left to hide
It looks like love has finally found me
In my life there’s been heartache and pain
I don’t know if I can face it again
I can’t stop now, I’ve traveled so far
To change this lonely life
I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me
I wanna feel what love is
I know you can show me.
~ ~ ~
“We must show them” Brigid called out across the crowd. “They still believe in us! They do! Perhaps it’s us who stopped believing.
We think because we’ve been around so long we know everything, but we must surrender to the not knowing, and trust in these humans once more!”
“That’s lovely, really lovely!” shouted Tartarus, trying to be heard above the thunderous applaud that had erupted in the Great Hall by the River of Now “but spoiler alert, THEY MADE US UP. None of you are real!”
“Whooooaaaahhhh, is that true? Woooooow. Props. That’s a killer trick” said Loki who happened to be standing next to Tartartus “Totally did not see that comin’.”
And with that, Brigid raised a glass…..
And then she imploded in on herself like water being drained from a tub. Then from a single droplet her essence burst force with the flames of 10 million suns. She became an enormous firey wheel, spinning wool to weave an infinite tapestry so fine yet so strong that anything could me made from it. Anything at all.
What will you make to bring light and warmth to this cold dark world?
What shadows will you dare look at?
“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
