JFK Fifty Years Since Passing (SOS form Texas)

It is sad to say that fifty years hence, many of the same conditions exist that JFK was committed to setting right. He wanted us to be a leader in the world, on the side of liberty and freedom. He wanted us to use our great might to achieve things that could barely be imagined and to further the ideals of science and humanity beyond the limits of thinking at the time. Using the Peace Corps to reach out a hand to the developing world, turning our police powers to weeding our graft and corruption in our own country and reigning in the military industrial complex were all part of the visionary beliefs and ideals of this one man. The vast majority of people in the United States of America believed in the same things, in the idea that we could be a leader amongst other countries around the globe and that something about us uniquely suited us to be the living example for others to emulate.

As we are seeing during the Presidency of Barack Obama, one man and his beliefs can never be enough to change our nation in any substantive way, especially if his intent is to make the country better. It seems that when one man wants to liberate capital and allow more and more of it to flow into the hands of the few, great strides can be made when one man has the bully pulpit, but when the same office is held by someone who wants to do the right thing, it becomes much more difficult to make progress in any real way. Whether or not the majority are with him, the one percent have just enough agents pleading their case to assure inaction. The withering of democracy has been planned and executed by a select group of people for decades. Now the fruits of this ancient political system have been collected by the richest and most powerful for so long that they have become addicted to their wealth and drunk with the power and prestige of it.

There may be no way to silence the conspiracy theorists, but that is not my intention here. What I would like to convey is the plausible possibility that sheer ineptness, laziness and stupidity often lead to far greater problems than could ever be maliciously planned. The last week or two has been spent rehashing the single bullet and the single shooter theory of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy but for myself I would prefer that we commemorate his life rather than his death. In the fashion of our current political climate and world view, the end is often more important than the process. JFK was perhaps wrongly portrayed as a figure of action. Even though he was sickly and somewhat frail, the images that were captured of him relayed a youthful vigor and as we have seen in other areas, what we believe is often more important than what is real. The worldwide love affair that people had with this President is in evidence on this fifty year anniversary, but what we loved could not be killed. He told us straight out that we could achieve greatness, but that we were responsible for that greatness. "Ask not what your country can do for you, rather ask what you can do for your country." still holds the power to transform our lives and those of the people living in the rest of the world, but aside from the current commander in chief, there are few who would be willing to utter those fateful syllables.

It would be tidy if we could point to organized crime, the Russian government or Castro as the puppet masters behind Lee Harvey Oswald's attack, but we cannot. It would be clearly resolved if we could link Jack Ruby, Oswald's killer, to someone who would have benefited from silencing Oswald or the President but we cannot. In the global depression that followed the assassination, we would have grasped at any straw to give the tragedy meaning. Some things just don't make sense. As we looked back this week, there seemed to be no meaning other than that we all felt a bit of our humanity die that day. The real meaning of Kennedy's life was what went unrealized. He was, perhaps, one of the most conservative Democrats to ever hold the office of President, but that gave him much greater respect amongst the party that was out of power. In those days, there was far less intransigence and ideological fervor in the halls of Washington politics. The representatives and senators, of his time, were brought up on a steady diet of compromise and statesmanship. today, an intellectual humanitarian would be shouted down and branded "socialist" (as if that meant they were unamerican). If JFK had been allowed to fulfill his term in office, many of our current problems may not have come to pass. Many of the changes that we desperately need and are still waiting to take place may have been dealt with in a more timely fashion and the terms of debate could have been forever changed.

It is a luxury to believe in the conspiracy theories, to think that those who felt most threatened by him and his administration would save themselves the hassle of dealing with issues that would reign in their power. Alas, it is a hard sell in terms of the availability of data, confessions, detailed lines of evidence and logical tie-ins that make sense. What matters most is where we go from here. In spite of the fact that we lost one of our greatest leaders, we are indeed a people, a nation and we had formerly been a nation of consequence. Rather than just a collection of banksters and billionaires who crash the world economy for their benefit, we are also a nation of compassionate individuals who have been lied to and misguided for decades. What we do know is that we are pretty much in free fall relative to the rest of the world. for one thing, China, France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Japan have made investments in high speed rail while we languish without it. another area in which we are failing is our educational and intellectual prowess. The very quality of our children is being degraded, their curiosity and adaptability, their entire love for learning is being stripped away and it is in evidence by the fact that more and more countries out perform us. The economic interests of the few have strangled our recovery as other parts of the world have begun to rebuild their economic interests in a more equitable way. The nation that JFK would have helped build is still possible, but without a charismatic leader at the helm and a cooperative stance being taken by congress, no change is possible.

A favorite saying that has come from the progressives over the years is that if the people lead, our leaders will eventually follow. What we need most is to get over our fears and begin acting like the planet and one another mattered. The greatest legacy that we are struggling with today is the killing off of our leaders when we were still able to envision what we wanted our nation to become. has had a difficult timeWhen JFK went to Texas, there were those who were committed to being the best, in spite of the clamor of well-funded interests that were destroying our nation for their profit margin.  SOS form Texas  has had a difficult time staying true to their ideals, but they survive because their morals and ethics align with the belief that there are things worth standing up for, reasons to be proud of doing the right thing and it is with happy heart that I offer this link to their organic cotton clothing line. i don't include this information to be another rude SOB, trying to get your money on this Black Friday shopping day, but rather as a friend of the air, the water and the entire biosphere. These folks offer a way forward no matter how difficult the path. When our world begins to crash down around us, as it did after JFK's demise, it is well to remember that we are not left to fight on our own. There is a massive cadre of people around the planet who are attempting to set things right. I honor that light within you! Blessed Be.

Changing Time

When I used to write songs, changing time was as simple as introducing a new time signature. When we had babies, it was as simple as making sure that there were enough cloth diapers clean and on hand, warming a washcloth and doing the ages old deed. If we remained diligent and aware, for the most part, it took a few minutes tops. When it comes time to get ready for a night on the town, as most men know, it only involves throwing on a new shirt, or perhaps changing pants and shirt if it was a particularly work-filled day. In the time it takes to blink, or eat a sandwich, life can change forever. Not just the mood, purpose or attitude we have toward it, but the whole of our existence. Just ask those who recently went through the destruction of the more and more frequent natural disasters. As fast as our world can be ripped asunder, it can rise up, out of an ash cloud and head for the stars. Changes are coming, but without our paying attention, and responding appropriately, we may miss the chance to make those changes with grace.



It has been a long time coming, but the new time signature of our lives will either take place with us all becoming fully aware, simultaneously, or with great dislocation and strife. We are the ultimate decision-makers that will have make up our minds about whether this will be a smooth transition or a more wrenching one. Like a tight group of players, we can make the change simultaneously and with fluidity, or we can clash, each making our own way through a fog of dissonance.


Some may not realize what just is taking place. With luck the majority will. If we can manage to jump time with awareness and grace, it will sound like a chord change accomplished by consummate musicians, if it happens the other way, the traumatic crash and painful dislocation will be heard around the planet. I have written about the coming of the age of Aquarius a time or two, but this is actually a date certain that is still about 150 years away. Like the full moon, which appears to last a few days, the dawning of this new age, which lasts 2600 years or so may take a few hundred years to"dawn". The flower children or Rainbows may have been the first wave, but as so often happens, what they actually were was quite different than what the powerful told us. Many of us (the current change agents) feel like aliens amongst human-kind, but for good reason. We are the first of several generations that will be needed to make the shift to the age of the water bearers.

A groundswell is taking place at this time. Native people from around the world are standing up to demand an end to their oppression and the violent extractions of "resources" that is and has been taking place. In my day, I found it better to speak of the resource base in terms of gifts. The gods and goddesses have smiled on us, in infinite and varied ways. Like finding a salt lick in the forest, each element and mineral has areas that hold concentrations of potential wealth or sustenance and in some cases profitability, but the way we often approach resource use is to believe that they (the resources/gifts) are solely placed in the landscape for our use. Native beliefs recognize the fact that the value of most resources are far more than their commercial value under a scheme of exploitation. The frackers are rushing headlong down the path of diminishing returns and will eventually deplete resources that they have yet to consider. Nothing will ever grow on their gravel pads and the areas around them will be affected for centuries, perhaps millennea. The same is being done by diamond miners, gold seekers, foresters, most agricultural corporations and those who extract and exploit every gift that has been bestowed upon us, attempting to convert it to wealth, power and prestige.

In the time it takes to read this sentence, the parameters that we once had assumed can be changed to include a new perspective. Again, if we all change together, we will be able to do it harmoniously. Failing that, there will be mass dislocation, strife and discord. In the future, we will have to honor the sanctity of the food shed, our trophic level, other beings we share the planet with, the cycle of water, of nutrients, of toxic chemicals in the environment and the energy cycles inherent in all life. If we continue to tell one another that wealth and greed are our inalienable rights, we will remain out of step with the planet and continue to defend the untenable position of extraction and oppression that has torn the ecological fabric of life on Earth asunder.

If We Had Only Been Paying Attention

The past thirty years have been a whirlwind of attacks by a very small group of people on the modern world as  a whole. If we look into the places we get most of our information from, the sources are, and have been, concentrating in nearly unfathomable ways.In the U.S. of A. over five hundred news services employed tens of thousands of reporters just two decades ago, many with foreign branches and each had a unique editorial slant or perspective on world events. Now, we are down to just three sources encapsulating 99% of all the news we get. Gone are many of the inquiring minds that used to find news in the making or researching topics of interest to us all. About the time that the religious right, compassionate conservatism and the proponents of trickle down economics took hold of our collective imagination, the rate of concentration of power in our media took hold as well. Never mind the fact that none of these ideas were based on truth, forget that they were ideas foisted upon our consciousness by power hungry individuals who were bent on amassing ever greater wealth, power and prestige. What has stolen the day has been a litany of lies and half-truths that would have been questioned and researched by an intact fourth estate.

These minority voices told us that teachers were overpaid, that condoms created teen pregnancy and that the road to ruin was paved with dollars spent on anti-poverty programs. These same powerful interests told the American public that government needed to be run like a business and that we are the most over-taxed people on the planet. They told us that through more testing, we could teach our children more effectively and that a one-size-fits-all approach top education would be adequate and cost effective. What the media neglected to tell us was that these ideas were created by their sole beneficiaries, the uber-wealthy. Creating a race of unquestioning automatons has been the dream of those winning the class war for decades and they seem to be getting their way in a very real sense.

By framing every issue as a two-sided affair, eliciting vehement hatred from the extremes on both sides and narrowing the discussion to either pro or con, we are left with only an either or choice of polar opposites. Either we are labelled as socialists (which has supplanted the old term "communist" in public discourse) or patriots, even though the far right has produced far more domestic terrorists, secessionists, anarchists and advocates of sedition than the political left ever did. We are left thinking that if we are compassionate or thoughtful about any issue, we are being taken in by those who are part of the problem and that the nanny state only allows incompetence and irresponsibility to flourish. In practice, the majority of vehicle commercials tell us that more torque and power are necessary, that twenty miles per gallon is "best in class" and that ram tough is necessary to get through ever more mild winters. We are told that the stock market is the best way to make quick money, even though it is just a gambling house built on a massive confidence game, run by the ultra-wealthy.

The coming crash will make the one six years ago seem like a fight in the sandbox by comparison. The irony is that the folks who have the biggest share of the pie will be the best insulated from any downturn. Downsizing from a sixty million dollar yacht to a six million dollar one won't be nearly as difficult as waking up and finding that your entire life's work will not allow us to retire. We have always been wage slaves and as more and more of us comer to terms with what that really means, investing in business as usual becomes less and less appealing. My fifty mile per gallon vehicle has sat idle for over a month because I have found ways to carpool and not burn an ounce of diesel fuel, vehicle share when errands need to be run and get around in other ways. The sharing economy is growing exponentially as people realize that the consumer culture that many of us have come to desire leads only to a dead end of exploitation and oppression. How many bass boats are actually required? Rather than everyone owning their own, having a few rental boats at each good fishin' hole is more than enough. The avoided costs that accrue by not having to transport all those boats, buy the giant gas guzzling trucks, storage and maintainence fees, in just a few years, would offset any costs. But learning to live within new limits comes at the cost of a very steep learning curve.

Almost everything we have come to believe, accepted as true, based our choices and decisions upon, need to be questioned, researched and looked at in light of the fact that the true nanny state has been created by the winners of the class war, foisting lies upon us for generations. When I was in college, learning to be a teacher, the brightest students learned and understood that any test, no matter how well it is developed, can only teach us what we already know. By design, they are limited and cannot ever teach us anything. The act, science and art of teaching lies in being able to stretch an individual's imagination, spread information amongst more minds and allow individuals to grasp information is a variety of ways, so that the largest number of students will be able to integrate that information. Tests are a completely different animal, they attempt to get those individual minds to line up, snap to and regurgitate specific discreet elements in a specific order and fashion. This can never prove proficiency or evidence integration of ideas that lead the subjects to be able to think or comprehend anything. The true proof of good teachers has always been, and will remain, the spark of recognition that occurs when students learn. Nothing on paper can prove competence, diligence or the ability to integrate new information. Any test that claims to do these things is being sold on false pretenses.

There has been a systematic push toward "common core" in education for the very reasons stated above. Even the news programs are lying about how and why the guidelines for common core were developed and by whom, so that we will allow them to further degrade education, determining the future in ghastly and unimaginable ways. A good case in point is that when I went to school in different states, they taught biology in different grades, so that I got two years of chemistry when I was supposed to get one of biology and one of chemistry. That did not prevent me from learning to sequence DNA when I got to college. If anything it made me avoid exposure to certain hazardous chemicals like formaldeheyde in favor of other toxic chemicals that were present in the chem labs. I did have to learn about Jacob Mendel and genetics on my own, but that did not handicap me in my ability to function in society. The one thing I was grateful for is that the whole idea of eugenics, which might have enamored me when I was young, was not part of my world view until I began to make choices about spreading my own genetic information.

There has been a push recently toward confusing freedom with choice. Having twenty-five shampoos to choose from, all of which contain toxic and hazardous compounds is not freedom any more than having thirty models of cars or trucks to choose from. Being allowed to utilize our full potential, rather than being made into drones and worker bees for the making of profit for others has much more to do with freedom than the size of our big screen tee vees. In my lifetime, far more sacrifices have been made in the realm of personal freedom than in all the generations since the founding of the U. S. of A. Those deemed "too big to fail" have sucked up more and more corporate welfare and the little guys who are ground to pulp under the weight of the corporate welfare state have been demonized as "takers", while the wealth continues to concentrate into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. A few of us have noticed these changes, but we have been effectively been relegated to the ranks of the "disgruntled employees", the impoverished, the class that we are told is the problem, not the result of one.This short video helps to understand the truth behind the pictures and pretty faces telling us that there is no such thing as class warfare.

Life Hacks

This is new terminology for something that has been around for ever. Several generations ago, people who were in the know just called it thrift. When I was coming up, I described it as living better for less. Pinching pennies, being stingy and home economics are other ways of getting to the same place.In any case, the results are the same. There is rapidly growing interest in forging a new society that is sustainable, or at least one which destroys less of the planet while meeting our actual needs. Some who are delving into this realm are motivated by different factors and there are a variety of terms that people use to describe the move toward becoming more self-reliant, self-sufficient or "green". This last term has always rubbed me the wrong way a bit, because it is more blatantly a code word than the others that there is an easy "fix" to very difficult problems. Those of us who have experience living lightly on the planet know that the self is an illusion. All of nature, and of course we are an integral part, are tied intimately to the whole in undeniable ways.

Life hacks often yield what seem to be conservation measures, unorthodox purposes for waste and/or additional uses for mundane items that have served their intended purposes already. I'm sure that some of the first paleolithic humans had mad skills in this regard. Those who were able to break from convention and find ways to survive were using life hacks before there were books, codified language or even instruments to write with. The first stick scribing in the soil conveying information was a sort of hack. In our daily lives today, we often forget that this is a part of who we are and not every want or need has to be met in traditional ways.

I remember the first time I saw a bar of soap, hung over a sink, inside an onion bag. This life hack allowed for several things to occur. First, it was right at hand, where it would be used. Second, it was hung in such a way that any excess moisture on the soap or bag could drip off and into the basin and because the whole affair was on a hook, dropping a slick bar of soap on the floor was an impossibility. It was clean and dry nearly all the time and preserved the bar for much longer amounts of time (and more hand washings) than a typical soap dish. I had discovered many years earlier that if you bought a large quantity of soap took it out of the box, and let it dry thoroughly before use, it would become harder and not disappear as quickly. The snot-like gel that would collect in the soap dish had always grossed me out and it seemed like a complete waste. The onion bag seemed to help preserve a very cheap, but vital, resource. The best thing about most of these techniques is that the intended purpose of the materials used seems to have little to do with the end use and yet, once the materials and techniques are paired in a new way, it seems that they were made for one another.

Something that has made the rounds on the internet is a cheap and fun technique for lighting. One of the age old problems with camping is that flashlights are mostly designed to produce a beam of light, this is great for task light, yet often what is needed is area light. Because headlamps are more and more cheap and available, more and more people are becoming aware of them, or in fact have purchased them for camping or other tasks, but if you put the headlamp on a gallon jug full of water, it refracts in every direction, making it a wonderful diffuse source of light. This helps reduce the risk of temporary night blindness that often occurs when a flashlight beam is inadvertently cast into ones eyes. This hack is so simple, yet so elegant it helps to exemplify the whole idea of what a hack is and why they are important.

Seeing things in a new way can often eclipse the way we saw the world before and once a person starts seeing hacks, many needs can be met with nontraditional tools, techniques and methods.

A friend described a good one for custodians, props people and those who need to fill a bucket from a sink. If you have a sink that is too small to fit a container (like a large mop bucket) under, but you would like to fill it, grab a dustpan and use it to shunt the water beyond the edge of the sink, channeling the water over the edge and it will fall into the bucket. Most of the time, if you are sweeping and mopping floors, you will have a dustpan available so that it will be at hand and made useful for this less orthodox purpose.

If you ever need a camp stove, or an emergency heater, there are dozens of designs for rocket stoves, tin can stoves and improvised cook stoves online. These hacks often take a bit of labor to make, but the rewards of cooking in a controlled fashion with re-purposed waste products is rewarding in and of itself. I saw an actual camp stove for sale just the other day for $65, using an old tin can or two is cheap enough that spending a few minutes fashioning a stove out of them would be a relatively high paying job, just for the avoided cost savings, not to mention that most improvised stoves use readily available fuel rather than expensive refined stuff.

I have seen a pair of flattened two liter soda bottles and string used as flip flops, bread bag twist ties substituted for shoe laces, bread bags sandwiched between two layers of socks inside a pair of shoes replacing boots in winter and discarded, worn out tires used for replacement soles on shoes. All of these are life hacks that can save money, time, space or just for being useful while keeping "waste" out of landfills. One of the trademarks of life hacks is that the first time you see them, it is an aha moment. There is a momentary thrill that comes from sharing the realization that this is an excellent, simple solution to what could have been a difficult situation.

Pot smokers have had this down cold for decades, possibly because they have had to get creative in the face of discriminatory laws against their type of smoke, or perhaps it flows from the creativity that can come from breaking mental boundaries. I have seen all manner of smoking devices fashioned from things like soda cans, apples, toilet paper tubes, pens, you name it. A favorite of mine has been the partially broken green stick that can be used as a tiny clip for holding the "roach" when it becomes too hot to handle.

WARNING: This next hack is not recommended. It is only to be used in extreme or emergency situations. Once, many years ago, I was driving an old car and the windshield wipers failed. The hack I used when it rained was to attach two shoelaces to the wipers and pull them back and forth. Because the car was a big old American one, I had to have a passenger pull the wipers back from the passenger side, but if they had a good sense of rhythm, we managed quite well.

Having a common-sense approach, some creativity, using all five senses, paying attention and being willing to break a few boundaries are essential to life hacks. I have seen car doors, lighters and tables used as bottle openers. I have used many tools and objects in ways that they were never intended to be used and I have solved problems that seemed insurmountable to others with just a bit of rope and some cylindrical pieces of wood. Understanding that our entire environment holds a vast tool kit can be liberating and utilizing things in new ways can save money and often a trip to town for hardware or specialized tools.

I don't care if you call yourself a survivalist, a prepper, a homesteader, or "green", these methods are something that everyone can use to overcome the consumer culture that we have been born into. When we begin to require more than a single use for objects, we can find great satisfaction in owning less, buying less and having more fun with what we do possess.

Reading The Crawl

I am amazed at the news that never passes the lips of the newscasters, but that makes the crawl. I know it sounds odd, but whether there is a large breasted blonde or a handsome dark-haired man delivering the news, my eyes are often on the crawl. I cannot count the number of times that the words, scrolling across the bottom of the screen mimic the words coming from the mouths of the "talent". The really bizarre thing is that inexplicably, some of the best (or worst) news never rises to the level of spoken word. Somehow in the infinitely wise judgement of the producers, it is quite acceptable to let the small percentage of readers in on some of the greatest secrets ever kept, as long as those who are interested in the heavily make-uped, moveable reflective surfaces pay no attention to those persnickety letters racing across the footer.

Yesterday, I was reading along and caught a snippet that surely warrants a serious bit of coverage, but in a flash it was gone, never to come around again. This happened again today and it left me wondering what gives? How do these tiny bits of real information make it onscreen in the first place if they are nearly immediately removed from the feed?

Today, I saw that the American Psychiatric Association deemed therapies intended to "cure gayness" as malpractice. Not that I place much stock in psychiatrists, I certainly wouldn't want one raising any child of mine, but the fact that the leader of the largest religiously-based "reprogramming" organization in the world (Exodus International) has admitted that no amount of prayer can change our "god-given" sexuality should be enough to convince even the staunchest anti-gay lobby that they are flying in the face of reality. This was one of those interesting tidbits that never passed the lips of the good-looking newscasters. Perhaps this is an attempt to sanitize the news for those who would be made to feel uncomfortable if they had to change their worldview, perhaps it is an innocent oversight.

I frequently lobby for higher levels of truth being made available for public consumption and seeing this sort of thing in print, if only briefly, is a start. In this case, however, we need to integrate a more humane discussion of this subject into our schools, homes, churches and indeed our government. This week we are seeing a flap in the U.S. House of Representatives because a majority of our representatives there want to extend the same protections from workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or status that we have for many other groups, but the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, will not call for a vote. The Senate has already passed the legislation and the President is ready to sign it into law, but the one guy who has the power to let the people be heard is holding up the show, presumably because his "morality" dictates that it be easy to remain bigoted and full of hate for a segment of the population that have exactly the same rights as everyone else, but who have been ostracized, made fun of, and shut out of many of the benefits that he himself has enjoyed as a citizen of our country. The truth is hard to determine exactly, but actions speak far louder than words and further inaction on this issue speak volumes about the character of this single and solitary man. They say that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The second and perhaps more terrifying blurb that came through, again only once, is that Saudi Arabia has sent millions to Pakistan for ramping up that country's nuclear weapons manufacturing capacity. Those who stay up on U.S. policies regarding nuclear proliferation know that our leaders are currently in a tizzy about Iran's supposed pursuit of weapons-grade uranium, but any country that seriously took on this challenge was able to do so within three years. Our representatives to congress and the last several administrations have been spouting this bullshit for decades. Recognizing that one cannot prove a negative, it seems counter-intuitive that a nation, hell bent on getting "the bomb" would release with great fanfare, a year or so ago, that they were finally able to create medical grade isotopes, which by the way, are much easier and far less costly to refine.

I can't tell you what to think and I certainly don't want to lead you down a primrose path to ruin like so many seem to be doing in the media, but I can tell you that reading the crawl can yield a bit more fullness to your understanding of issues. They may not give you the full story, but they definitely can spark a line of inquiry that lets us begin the process of discovery. The media used to have the self-imposed job of creating an informed public, but in my short half century, it has turned more and more into entertainment. In my humble opinion, this is for the good of only the oligarchs. I will continue to speak truth to power and I appreciate the fact that so many people worldwide take the time to read my posts. I continue to study and pay attention and hope that you all do the same. Great change often comes in a flash and when enough people hear and understand that the great imbalance in power that the world is being subjected to cannot be sustained without catastrophic results, perhaps we will step away from he escalating demise of the planet and her people for the enrichment of an elite that has never known want, never thirsted for anything but the finest quality everything and who have no qualms about grinding the rest of us to dust under their oppression.

Time Passages

Many may be familiar with Al Stewart's 1978 version of Time Passages whose haunting melody and enigmatic prose took many of us out of childhood and into a new time signature of life. These are the words.
It was late in December
The sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind
Go drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight
Well, I'm not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on
Are the things that don't last
Well, it's just now
And then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There's something back here that you left behind
Oh, time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight
Hear the echoes and feel yourself starting to turn
Don't know why you should feel
That there's something to learn
It's just a game that you play

Well, the picture is changing
Now you're part of a crowd
They're laughing at something
And the music's loud
A gal comes towards you
You once used to know
You reach out your hand
But you're all alone
In these time passages
I know you're in there
You're just out of sight
Oh, time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

The haunting message that I took from this work was that my own time was not only finite, but largely fictional. The stories that we believe to be true, the ones we tell ourselves, have an awesome power to change our behavior, to literally shape our brains (some say sculpt) and to influence both perception and reality in profound ways.

I once met a woman who had a uniquely overpowered drive to "make something of herself". She had passed the bar, attained mulitple degrees, including doctorates in both psychology and economics. She had pushed herself so hard into a rarefied social and intellectual strata that she was nearly out of touch with virtually everyone she came in contact with. The string of letters after her name was sickeningly similar to the rest of our materialistic world, just a hodge-podge of gluttony and excess.

In her brain, she had sculpted a masterpiece of "I am not worthy of love", based solely on her father not being there for her. When we sat with that feeling and took the time to go through the process of discovery with her about where the feelings of inadequacy that controlled her for nearly her entire life, it came down to a single event. At six years old, she had come home with a piece of artwork (in adulthood she told herself that she was neither creative or artistic) that she made with all of her love and affection for her father. She knew that he would be at home when she got there, so she had verily flown to his side to show him her work, running single-mindedly to show him her labor of love. In her excitement, all she could think was how proud he would be of her. Instead, he had gotten a call just as she got in the door and he dismissed her, saying he was busy with an important call.

It was not that she was unstable or had a pathological condition, but in her own mind, she had gone through a portal into a created universe. Her world from that moment on was based on the fact that whatever she attempted would never be good enough for her father and as desperately as she desired his love and affection, she always felt that she either did not deserve it or that she needed to prove herself worthy of the love that she felt went missing that day. This example sounds like fiction until we look a little harder into our own lives and our own experiences. Inside each of our brains there is a six year old child (in some, even younger) telling us a version of reality that served us decades or lifetimes ago that is completely made up.
In the terms of the EST (Erhardt Seminar Training) people, who now call themselves Landmark Forum, each one of us is a racket running machine, incapable of being anything but. The lies we tell ourselves are designed to placate the ego, mediate our internal conflicts and prove to ourselves that even our most outlandish actions are defensible.

Really, who needs a half dozen degrees after all? Well, if you have to ask, this six year old child-lady for one. as she began to liberate her thinking about what was true about her life, she saw for the fist time that the endless arguments and heartfelt disagreements that she had with her father during the course of her life were not because of any fault or crisis of thought that she was having, but because her father had a deep respect for her. From her new perspective, she was able to understand that the main reason her father debated nearly every issue with such fury was because she was the one person who he felt was his intellectual equal. Anyone else would have been unable to hold up their end of the debate. In his actions, he was actually giving her the love that the six year old inside had craved, but in an even deeper and more meaningful way.

Needless to say, when this breakthrough in her own mind was made, a floodgate broke that released a lifetime of tears and frustration and her hardened and cynical shell that she had constructed to protect herself from hurt was ripped away, exposing the character of the child she had so perfectly denied existed inside her for so long. She had created myriad ways of ignoring the desire to bond with her father, instead focusing on pleasing and proving herself to the world. Ironically, none of it had worked. She came to her Landmark forum neurotic, unhappy and longing for satisfaction that had always eluded her.

I was in poverty when I experienced my own Landmark Forum. for the better part of two decades I had worked harder and harder to pull myself out of poverty, but each time my earnings crept up to that imaginary line, they would raise the earnings needed to break out. I had experienced homelessness, squatting (living in a home that did not belong to me) and dumpster diving to keep my body alive. I had raised one child to school age and another was still in diapers, but we (our family of four) lived on less than five hundred dollars a month. The story I told myself is that I was not worthy of more. When I look back on those years of strife and financial turmoil, they were part of the rackets I ran on my own self.

Somehow, I had created a reality in my own brain that was doubly vexing. not only did I not feel worthy of success, but I also told myself that breaking out of poverty would require a relinquishing of my deeply held values. My plight was living proof that to succeed in this world, one has to knuckle under to the oligarchy, sell out to the man and adopt the abusive principles of capitalism. The irony here is that when I did sell organic shirts that I silk screened with my own original art, they flew off the shelves. That business went under because my source for organic cotton shirts was dealt a crippling blow by the Republic of Texas that passed a law saying that organic cotton could not be grown in their state. This was more proof to me that doing the right thing carried penalties that were out of my control.

I also sold protest pins and buttons that made a profit of many thousands of dollars over the course of twenty years, but a dollar here and a dollar there never leaves enough to invest or build a business. After all, how many "Kill Your Television", "No Nukes"  and "Wearing Buttons Is Not Enough" buttons do we really need? Much like my used clothing store, that I had in my dorm room in college, making money always seemed easy. I never gouged my customers and the product seemed to sell itself, because I concentrated on quality at fair prices. I'm the same person that I was back then, but I have sculpted my brain in new ways that allow me to focus on making a better living without sacrificing my deeply held beliefs.

Often the stories that guide our lives have been made up by a child and we have to ask ourselves the serious question, "How long do we want to let the hurt child inside make all of our decisions for us?"

Living in the now involves not only bidding adieu to past and future, but vanquishing the limits placed upon our lives by prior experiences. Not an easy task, I admit, but nothing valuable comes easy. Letting go is far more complex than the words imply, but rest assured it can be done. Our inner world determines what we are capable of seeing around us and how we perceive the world can be changed over time. Investing in clarity of thought pays incalculable dividends. Along your path, try to always remember that the universe is unfolding as it should.

Eclipse

On November third, we (of the Western Great Lakes Region) will be just out of the area that will "see" the coming eclipse. What we will see and experience will be related to, but not the actual phenomenon of discs overlapping. Eclipses have long been associated with supernatural forces, patterns that connect and sacred moments in time. Here it makes perfect sense to mention the coincidence of multiple pagan rites and associations with the thinning of the veil between the living and the dead, festivals of lights, if not ancestor worship, at least the re-dedication rites associated with the timeless goals of making the world a better place for future generations. Many groups make their resolutions early, because it can take a full six weeks to deliberately make a change that becomes lifelong and lasting.

As the Sun recedes from our days, we must forge a new identity informed by our core beliefs, most of which come from our ancestors. Some say that they are "recovering Catholic", or "raised Lutheran", but in fact all of our ancestors were pagan, back a very long time. We have many centuries more worshiping the seasons and the spirits of the many forces of nature than we do with monotheistic entities. New paganism is growing because it is easier to believe what you see, that we are all linked to one another and the Earth, as well as all of Mother Earth's creatures.

The slow moving moon will be relatively dashing across the disc of the Sun, giving brief respite to those who lie in her shadow. The brief respite from the solar radiation gives us pause to reflect on how we utilize the energy of our star. Thank-you Grandma Moon for this relatively rare intercession! Just before sunrise in my part of the world, there will be great change coming in. How others choose to utilize this relatively brief moment in time, of course, is up to them, but I will be making plans for new beginnings and recommitting to things that have needed doing for quite some time. Combined with the thinning of the veil, we must also realize that the passing away of those activities that are not working for the good of all must take place for our efforts to be effective.