Your Horoscope for Today

Today

you will eat too much

and you sit too much

laugh and cry and browse through

photo albums sitting quietly somewhere

in your frontal cortex.

You will read at least one poem

or write an essay

maybe.

Our Clay - a poem by Naomi Wakan

 

Our clay

Based on the lines by Kuan Tao-Sheng

"I am in your clay

You are in my clay"

Am I in your clay

and you in mine?

I've never thought

of these thirty years

that way; not even once.

I've thought of making

good meals and a comfy home;

flowers from the garden

for the table, a good poem

occasionally, and royalties

to pay the mortgage.

Am I in your clay

and you in mine?

The question makes me uncomfy.

It's too exaggerated for

my English conditioning,

too demanding for something

I had taken for granted.

Still it won't go away,

so I start to count more carefully

the five to ten fruit and veg

I prepare each day,

read the odd book you recommend,

and self-consciously wash

the sheets more frequently.

I have sex a little more than I want,

and plump the pillows every morning.

Am I in your clay

and you in mine?

Still the question remains 

unanswered between us.

Besides the added zest

I am trying to add to each element

of our partnership,

is now attached guilt and shame

and embarrassment at my

somewhat less than perfect love.

Am I in your clay

and you in mine?

The quote has become a koan,

so one dawn I wake

in a fever of failure.

I note you are lying against me,

hand on my breast,

and I have a determined

arm around your shoulders.

Then, in an instant,

I know not how, all dissolves

and I ask myself in confusion,

Whose hand? Whose breast?

Whose arm? Whose shoulders?

And the tears run down over my clay

and your clay, your clay

and mine.

from Wind on the Heath, Naomi Beth Wakan. www.amazon.ca

Divine Heart

 

Struck by something—a recognition, a face I knew but had never met before.

A divine call in the heart? Love at first sight? The first love? The non-verbal.

His arms around me—a warm waterfall I never anticipated.

Yes it is possible to live for sixteen years and not know love. To be filled with

do this, and don’t do that! Holding oneself within, tense, afraid,

guarded, defensive, quick to shoot. The passage that is open to the world

can leave you pregnant with scorn, loneliness and poverty.

We were warned so often.

And what about the drive within? For fools and horses! 

No warning that love fills the street with a golden beam 

radiating in front of your feet, and thunder in your chest

you fear everyone can hear. 

And he is gentle the way he holds you so that nothing else can intervene.

when suddenly—danger on the grass! The ancient pull of desire fulfilling

the womb’s mission and the reptilian call louder than any other.

Stop I said. He stopped.

We walked that silence back to school. Then I did the unforgivable.

Sent him a note to say it was over, as if it was all his fault.

What the writing of it meant I do not know, but too soon realized 

the precious thing I threw away. Divine heart reaching outward 

onto streets where I wept out the vanities of who I was and was not.

After weeks of crying myself to sleep, my father quietly stood at the door

to ask why. My face in the pillow, he waited for words I could not speak.

He waited and waited and waited. None could be found, but in that tension

I realized that he loved too. Mind and heart connect at the place where

grief is mute.

(from Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016)

From National Observer

 

Phasing out fossil fuels, by the numbers

36,000 — oil and gas jobs lost since 2013 172,700 — job openings in Canada’s environmental workforceexpected between 2020 and 2025 61% — Canadians who support a Green New Deal $16.5 billion — estimated cost of a just transition in Canada, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives 69% — fossil fuel workers interested in switching to the clean economy $5.5 billion — estimated cost to rapidly upskill the entire fossil fuel industry workforce 9 in 10 — fossil fuel workers who say their skills can transfer to at least one job in the net-zero economy with moderate training - please sign on and support The National Observer https://www.nationalobserver.com

Rulers Have All the Power & None of the Responsibility

 

"In our extinction existence of invisible kings and wall-to-wall lies, those with all the wealth and power are completely free of responsibility, while their rank-and-file victims are made to justify their very existence to the system every day and pay through the nose for every misstep. None of the world’s worst people are in prison, and if you tell the police your employer stole your wages you’ll get a very different response than if your employer tells them you stole from the company." Caitlin Johnstone

This is a stark conclusion. It has always been true during the Colonial era. The pecking order has a system that simply blames the victims and sweeps their own misdeeds into a vortex of war and hostility.

But its still a mental illness to live in a constant state of power-worshipping patriarchy. Centuries of grooming people is not easily overcome. We tend to fall into yes-but reasoning to make us feel better. "At least we don't live in Afghanistan" we might say as if this is a separate issue rather than an outcome of contempt for life.

Even if we are privileged enough to have the food and shelter we need, we cannot see our own structural violence routinely meted out that keeps us apart and living in fear.

The Future is Waiting to Give Birth

"There are many good reasons to watch the unfolding catastrophe of our civilization’s accelerating drive to the precipice and believe it’s already too late. The unremitting increase in carbon emissions, the ceaseless devastation of the living Earth, the hypocrisy and corruption of our political leaders, and our corporate-owned media’s strategy of ignoring the topics that matter most to humanity’s future—all these factors come together like a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut driving our society toward breaking point. As a result, an increasing number of people are beginning to reconcile themselves to a terminal diagnosis for civilization. In the assessment of sustainability leader Jem Bendell, founder of the growing Deep Adaptation movement, we should wake up to the reality that “we face inevitable near-term societal collapse.”  Patterns of Meaning, Jeremy Lent

Lullaby For An Anxious Planet

Lullaby

Your heart swam through ocean to air

how to breathe where you couldn’t swim

no-one to show you how 

you were the ocean,  the plankton

and everything that flowed into you

also flowed out of you.

Now you gasp in the dry heat

on a sandy beach

and even though you can’t see it

everything from now on

will be a struggle

to find your legs

and catch flies for supper.

You will be told in many words

you are an isolated ego

fighting for survival until you die

and the only thing that will save you

is a good night’s sleep

and this lullaby.

(from Sleep With Me: Lullaby for an Anxious Planet, Ekstasis 2020)

The Politics of Belonging to Better Our World

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/why-george-monbiot-is-fighting-to-build-a-politics-of-belonging-to-better-our-world-1.5720535? 

George Monbiot has dedicated his energy and his writing abilities to educate us against the lies of Capitalist politics as they have developed over the last 40 years.

Nations that were once rich and powerful have become poor and powerless. We have been told we are isolated units competing for what we want because our leaders are oligarchs - people who have established their power based on personal wealth. We are broken said one of my cousins.

Monbiot acknowledges that the success of our species is based on our ability to cooperate.

This ideas program is clear and uplifting.

The Ideology of Human Supremacy - Jeremy Lent

 Human Supremacy 

"There has been a 68 percent decline in vertebrate populations worldwide since 1970, with freshwater species such as amphibians registering a jaw-dropping 84 percent loss. Insects have been faring just as badly, with reports of “insectageddon” from some areas that have seen populations crashing toward extinction levels—such as the Monarch butterflies that migrate annually from Mexico to the United States, and have declined by 98 percent over the past thirty years." Jeremy Lent

Almighty Church of Everlasting Power

 

Almighty Church of Everlasting Power

Almighty chorus for the dawn 

chickadees, hummingbirds and crows

send the moon to her next province

while a breeze whispers

wake up from your dreaming

—this is your morning. 

Church of Planet Earth 

waking for rolled oats and tea

and news from choirs

—birds, squirrels excited for reasons

I will never know, 

not being privy to gossip 

among hummingbirds in a garden 

I call mine because of a Deed

illegible to cedars

their branches crowned

with tender leaves, their 

Everlasting roots underground.

webbing the earth like a village map

roads over hills & valleys

spread quietly to feed earthworms, 

and five hundred species of insects

where thirty different indigenous languages

are spoken but not taught in provincial schools

because white settlers came in boats

and planes, believing they could survive

on green land and virgin forests

by crushing a universal mystery

into a system after centuries of war, 

famine and plagues

destroyed the homes they left behind.

Power is in your grief 

your conscience, the long poem

that was once the bible

before nuance was made redundant

—now that you have learned 

what power is not.

Chris Hedges on American Sadism - talk on Sanctuary

 "Why is the malaise of a dying civilization expressed through sadism rather than a kind of righteous anger? Here we must turn to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche warned that those who are humiliated and disempowered are poisoned by ressentiment. Because they have been stripped of agency, they lack the power to harm those who they believe harmed them.  In short, there is no cathartic release. Ressentiment is bred from damaged self-esteem. It festers and corrodes the soul.  The powerless, and here Nietzsche is writing about Christianity as a slave religion, must expresses their ressentiment obliquely and surreptitiously, hence the coded racism, Islamophobia and supposed yearning for a return of the traditional family and “Christian” values.  Ressentiment is produced by feelings of inferiority, failure, and worthlessness.  And this ressentiment, fueled by self-loathing, expresses itself through sadism, what Nietzsche calls “wrecking the will” of those who are weaker or more vulnerable.  Nietzsche understood that this “wrecking the will” of others imparts a perverted, sadistic pleasure.  He writes in On the Genealogy of Morals,that “to see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more. . . . Without cruelty there is no festival . . . and in punishment there is so much that is festive!”" Chris Hedges on American Sadism. https://scheerpost.com/2021/06/29/chris-hedges-speaks-on-american-sadism/?

Debbie Friedman Tribute - L'Chi Lach

I posted this because the song and singing is so beautiful. Debbie passed away in 2011 but her voice carries on. Also I hope that loving kindness will make blessings for us all.