Passing of a Legend

Heart of Gold, Pete Seeger blessed all the world with grace, compassion, good works and good deeds.
I know that he will be forever remembered as one of the first clear (popular) voices for the uprising of people over profit. We owe our current inspiration to people like him. For teaching us that oppression and exploitation are wrong and that the power and control structure that governments wield over us is unjust.

Experience

I have been actively paying attention for more than five decades. This has been both a joy and a trial, a blessing and a curse. Frequently, I find information that has laid dormant for years, enamoring my mind, informing new growth and enlightening me about diverse subjects that have, seemingly, nothing to do with the past experiences or learning. In real time, the complex web of ideas that inform my moments flow with immediacy even though the ideas that my thoughts are based on may be very old. Over eighteen thousand days have rushed past my organism and some of the most important things that I have learned over all of that time were the things I learned first. what has accrued since those early days is what we call experience.

Exploring the idea that our conception of time and space are far more malleable than we have been led to believe. We are, as a civilization, experiencing a decrease in what we thought space was. This very post reaches out across time and space to strike a resonant chord with whoever reads it, whenever they do and wherever they may be. This is the same sort of timeless quality that the earliest cave drawings were adept at getting to. The basic shape of an idea that needs no process to decode. An event that touches our soul is experiential and when we seek to encapsulate that event with words, it can lose detail. Even if we get tot he point of sharing an experience, we will still bring our own filters and presuppositions with us to the event.

It is ironic that we hear and say many things about seeing things from a distance, or with the critical judgement of time, even that revenge is best served cold, and we say that time can heal all wounds, yet we often base our memories on the same ideas that we had at that far away moment. many of our traumatic experiences are inter-generational. It seems that our parents bigotry, hatred and ideas are able to capture our imagination and influence our thinking whether we want it to or not. If we really can learn from our experiences, it seems to me that we would be far further along our evolutionary path.

writing with the immediacy of most experiences is difficult because mere words do not affect our limbic system the same way that direct experience does. If I were to write about how, on my Great Lakes Awareness Project (bike ride around the Great Lakes) I was able to draft an RV down the side of a mountain, approaching speeds of sixty miles per hour, it might make people think that I was crazy, or that I was just half an inch of rubber away from near certain death, but the adrenaline certainly would not flow, giving you the timeless feeling of falling down a thousand feet in just a minute, ttrapped in the low pressure vortex of the slipstream. your hair would not feel tousseled, your thoughts would not clear and your awareness would probably not be turned up like an old Hi-fi system, feeling each pebble in the tarmack as it vibrated the handlebars. The bumper stickers that I would describe could not take on the vibrancy of color and the fascination  of geography that they did for me and even if I could adequately describe the event, you8 could not feel the pillow of air that hit me when I pulled out of the slipstream just to see what that would feel like. decelerating from sisty miles per hour to thirty instantly is something only a few people have ever felt. I can speak of an experience, but until you are actually in that place, doing that same thing, elements of the experience will remain a mystery.

Likewise, the experience of living for more than fifty years from my unique perspective, only having a finite number of words to describe my experiences and insights, as well as the lessons that have brought me a certain understanding of what all of those experiences mean would be just as daunting to suss out and detail for you. I was one of the children who participated in anti-war protests in the sixties. There were those who proffered that I was exploited by my parents for "effect". In reality, I was experiencing living with a damaged, PTSD parent, who was either a sociopath before he went to war, or war made him into one. It didn't matter to me which was true, but the war was creating pain in my life, even though it was "overseas" in the minds of the hawks. I detested the term dove for what we were. We were people who understood that war is never an answer. My understanding of the military industrial complex has not changed significantly over the intervening years, but my awareness of just how damaging war is to humanity has been filled in and colored more fully, allowing me to see much greater detail.

When I was young, I said that there were no heroes in war and that the only people to get anything out of it were the ones who financially profit from the pain of others. Now, I know that in spite of the fact that the only freedoms that warriors have fought and died for are the freedom to exploit others that is granted to the oligarchs. The wealthy classes that have no responsibility for the pain and desolation that they foist upon the 99% will always receive the lion's share of the wealth and power that war can secure. The fighting, the dying and the disruption of war never affect the ruling classes in any significant way, but the benefits accrue to them disproportionally. however, tyhere are heroic events and people who are involved in war. Their sacrifices and risks are borne out of their humanity, their commitment to fellow human beings and their fighting is not for a far off ideal, but the immediacy of helping those they care about on the field of battle. These heroic events are notable in both their rarity and in the fact that they can often be seen as a futile attempt to run the gauntlet like the character played by Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves. whether they are committing suicide or acting heroically depends on the outcome. All soldiers, if confronted with warfare long enough will come to understand that survival of the fittest is for those who do not understand reality. survival of the luckiest is the actual overriding truth behind all of our lives.

In my experience, there have been tiny islands in the stream of consciousness. I occasionally pull myself up onto one and rest from the tumult, but the clarity that I have found comes from being immersed in experience, keeping my eyes open to what surrounds me and lifts me up. when I bob inevitably to the surface, I try to aim for the light and fill my lungs completely with what might possibly be my last breath of air, but the calm pools that slowly draw me into great arcs are only temporary respite from living in the flow. In my process, I try to let go rather than clinging to the stumps and logs that float past me. In my line of work we say, "I will rest when I'm dead." and this is in a sense the mantra of all who seek experience. I heard a young punk say once, and I understood her meaning, even feeling pain is better than feeling nothing, at least one knows they are alive. In the end, I am happier having lived through some trauma and difficulty, it helps me remember what not to do and informs my gratitiude by reminding me that things could be a heck of a lot worse.

The most troubling thing for any parent is knowing that we cannot protect our children from inevitable hurts, challenges and difficulties, but we can also rest assured that if we give them all that we have to give, they will, perhaps be able to use their unique creativity, fortitude and strength to find their path through the river of life and if they are lucky, they will find an island to pull themselves up on when they are too weak or tired to tread water any more. We can each be islands in the stream, if we learn to love deeply, be still and offer support to those humans that we come in contact with.

Reflection

Protesters use mirrors to show the riot police what they have become.There has been a recent flurry of images showing protesters using mirrors to show police what they have become. We need to reflect on the truth behind the images. We need to reflect upon our entire way of being in the world. Power and control has not worked. Family violence continues, national, regional and state militarism, policing and warlordism have proven that they are not valid ways to control the population. Often, it is through reflection that we get the most accurate assessment of  our status or situation.

This post, in my original listing was akin to thought and was paired with it, but in so many ways it is completely separate and distinct. Reflection is like re-reading a favorite book or poem. The eyes that first experienced it are perhaps a bit clearer, our experiences change the meanings ever so slightly and time that has informed our lives may allow us to enhance certain aspects and tune out extraneous noise that is inevitable in our perceptual systems. Reflecting on old ideas is just as important as who we have become.

This past week, as we see growing foment and citizen movements attempting to wrest political power from entrenched elites, we have been bombarded with images and "news" about how a tiny fraction of moderately wealthy people are trying to help the disadvantaged. A counterpoint to this generalized " buzz" about our benevolent overlords, Now one of the wealthiest billionaires in the U. S. claims that the wealthy are getting a "bad rap" and are under threat, much like the Jews were on the eve of Christal Nacht.

It must be difficult to bear the heavy burden of a 150 Million dollar yacht.

As the rest of us see things, the thugs who make up the police force and the warriors who "defend freedom" around the world are only keeping the world safe for those who continually oppress and exploit us and the planet upon which our lives depend. Reflecting on these things before we let a single dollar, yuan, euro or bit coin slip through our fingers is essential to reigning in the power that the uberwealthy hold over us. Without our consumerism, their empire is crippled. Learning to live on nothing needs to become the watchword for people who are committed to leaving something viable behind for future generations.

I continue to advocate for planting trees, wherever you are, putting in smart gardens and learning to create a healthy life on our own terms, not the ones that the wealthy classes shove down our throats. Continuing to reflect on where we are in the process of evolution, the difference between wants and needs and where we want this culture to end up in the future will help inform our decisions moving forward.

Just don't get too enamored with what we see reflected, it is no more real than what we may see in our dreams, ironically for some, it is no less so either. When we take the time to reflect, it can often allow a bit of a respite from the stressful present, or the immediacy of experience. This in turn can allow our sore bodies and spirits to heal, for our organisms to grow and for our true selves to get hold of our attention in ways that the work-a-day world never really provide. To be good cogs in the wheel, we must keep our heads down and bear whatever burden the machine requires.

If I do not get back to this keyboard, remember, I only went away to make someone else's dream become reality. Help me to make mine a step closer to reality by supporting this blog. I do everything I can to keep advertizing out, so the common, commercial assault can be  kept at bay, but the only way that I can keep providing this blog is if those who care to read it can afford to help pay for the ability. I feel like a schmuck for asking, but rest assured, I will use every dollar I make from it to bake sawdust into biochar, enrich soils and plant trees for the future. This is one of the few vehicles that I can use to spread the word about what can be done to salvage a damaged planet, I ask you to frequently reflect on ways that you can help transform the world for the better. Not only my grandchildren are counting on us to give them a fighting chance, but their grandchildren are as well.

Meaning

Meaning is an interesting part of any written information, every oral communication as well is based on wanting to share information or meaning, how we accomplish this is often a compromise between what we have to say and the resources we bring to the expression of those ideas or messages. Even who we are with may determine what we mean separate and distinct from the words we choose to express them. One of my favorite expressions of really important information sidled up to it by an association, or a sort of simile. Ram Dass was speaking in Denver, many years ago and he quoted Ha Fiz the poet. "The fish trap exists because of the fish, once you have gotten the fish, you can forget the trap." Then, he went on to say that, "Words exist because of meaning, once you have gotten the meaning you can forget the words." Finally he asked all who were assembled, perhaps over two hundred, "Where is the man who has forgotten words, so that I might have a word with him." His meaning was clear, but to get it to come across, he had to back up to the loading dock of our minds and unpack quite a bit to get the meaning to be clear.

One of the problems that I find with conspiracy theorists is that they frequently fall down or run out of ideas when you ask them about what the myriad of conspiracies mean. Is the main point that there are those who want to bankrupt our world economy? Are they hinting that we need rebellion? Are they saying that the end times are upon us? What? I attempt to make my meanings clear, in all my posts. I frequently try to discuss, not only important topics, but I try to reflect upon the languages in which I speak and how the meanings behind the words extract specific truths.

I nearly always come back to the same several messages. I feel that if we want to call ourselves human beings, we should be practicing a more humanitarian approach to living amongst one another and be living in harmony rather than discord with nature. I know that it is a lot to ask, especially when we face the most unequal distribution of wealth in centuries, but one can always hope. Today, the news has come out that worldwide, the wealthiest 85 people own as much as (3.5 billion people) half of the rest of us. Never has the wealth gap been so large. What that means to me cannot be that much different from the many billions of oppressed people who slave away for their (that wealthiest sliver of a percent) enrichment. The meaning of even mentioning it is because as unequal as the distribution curve has been distorted, revolution is inevitable.

I joke with people in theater frequently about the fact that when what we do for a living begins to make sense, we need to be on our guard, or find a different line of work. Things can only go bad from there. The meaning behind the jibes is that landing a life sized helicopter onstage or dropping a chandelier from the ceiling just cannot make sense, except in our industry. Backstage, we continue to try to manufacture altered states of reality. Very little about that process ever makes sense. I remember many years ago, I told someone that one day they would sell water in bottles and it would cost more than soda. I was ridiculed and made to wonder if there might be something wrong with me. A much wiser man than myself once said, "All truth goes through three stages, First, it is denied, then questioned, finally it is accepted as fact." In my own pursuit of meaning, I utilize every means necessary to extract truth. I grasp at straws, communicate by smoke signals, try to grasp hold of what people may be wrestling themselves and help. sometimes I see my expressions of that meaning acting as an anchor, holding fast against murky delusions, thrust upon us by those who control the very language that shapes a deceitful, didactic social and political landscape.

When we learn that the vast majority of the population of the planet see the world much the same way. We need to understand why, perhaps then we can focus out efforts on creating the next big thing, simultaneously making our footprint as small as possible so that when the current structure topples it won't crush us. Unless one understands the art and science of sustainability, this meaning may be completely lost in translation because I mean that there is a relationship between our organism and the entire ecosphere. Punishing those who would act against the best interests of the rest of us is not enough. We need to take back our dignity and make our livings from things that they can never get their hands on. Buy nothing that will accrue to their greedy fingers. The ability to isolate criminals on entire islands or continents is over. We can no longer send someone out of the tribe or community. To have an impact on the ultra wealthy, we would need to practice an economic shunning so complete, that they will have a hard time buying a hot-dog or cup of coffee. The abuse and neglect that they have suffered is their issue. Dealing with that, not exuding power and control on the rest of us is the only thing that can possibly help.

I sincerely hope that this has some meaning for you...

Thought

This is just one aspect of basic thinking at work.

This is an exceptionally important idea to both myself and the cadre of friends that I have run with all of my life. I call them critters. One of our first discussions  when we all met one another was about how we need to start our own college. Every student would have to take and pass thinking 101 before any other instruction could be wasted on them. Simple things, like basic physics, getting along well with others and cleaning up after one self would be paramount in this class. The thought was, that even with people who were not well suited for intellectual achievement, could be sorted sooner rather than later, saving billions. (and a lot of wasted time and energy.)

Thinking, perhaps, cannot be taught but as an educator, I need to make every effort to help everyone to understand the concept behind powers of ten, how to follow up on new information to which you may not be accustomed, and to detect bullshit. Lord and lady both know that there is a certain explicit need for that in this part of our evolution as a species. I always want to reflect the thinking that we do all, in fact, have a shot at far loftier achievements if we all share what we have and try to help one another in making sense of our surroundings. This is the underlying motivation behind the not-for-profit that Nancy, Dar and I have founded, ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. We want to help people to find their way amongst the host of "green" products and services, develop a strategy for becoming more sustainable and contribute to  us leaving a better planet for the next seven generations.

Imagination is a type of thought that has the power to unleash vast reserves of creative energy leading to insights. Instinct is a form of innate reflexivity, able to work in realms not yet explored with any tools yet created, save for other beings. We can become a finely tuned instrument, seeking, finding and resonating with others like-minded folks. The purveyor of organic produce for example soon cultivates relationships with customers who value the food. Those who know me understand that I'm not a fan of the mushy headed "just think good thoughts and good things will happen" crowd. I frequently prefer a world view that says, think good thoughts and do good things to make the world around you more blissful. The deep meditative state or samadhi, extacy, whatever you call it is great for the spirit realm, but we all gotta eat, we all gotta breathe and we are healthiest when we drink pure water. The dance we weave within the universe either frays or strengthens the warp and weft within which we associate.

It is our task to master the art and science of knowing when and where to cut and cleave, and where to patch the fabric of life around us. The only thought necessary is am I amongst friend or foe, part of the fabric of life of playing a part in life's destruction? Whole cloth can be made of the tattered rag our progenitors left us, but only if we are willing to tear down the structures of ecological destruction and reestablish a relationship with Mother Earth, her creatures and operating elements and principles. Those wanting to more fully appreciate the meanings of these thoughts, how to stimulate, research and delineate our relationship to them or follow them through fruition must take hold of the world around us and create positive change, not just think good thoughts about what we wish could be. ECO-Tours are for those who are not faint of heart, not afraid to get their hands dirty and who feel driven to make positive changes to the world that surrounds us. Check out our blog at ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc.@blogger.com. We also write at Wordpress under the name The Otherfish Wrap.

The thought behind all of my writing is that we are at once, deserving of our birthright to clean air, water and soil, and responsible for the elimination of those who would squander that right for our destruction and the feathering of their own nests. -Shaman, author and futurist, planting seeds of revolution since 1971.

Emotion

This is a difficult one. Trying to decide what emotion is being conveyed necessitates being in touch with our own emotions as a starting point and as we have all seen, this territory lies almost completely unexplored by many. One of my favorite books when I was growing up was Emotion to Enlightenment. The back cover describes the jest of the book quite well. "As we expand our awareness, we slowly move from a world of ever-recurring conflicts, discord and suffering both internally and in our interpersonal relations, to a gradually growing sense of abiding joy and harmony with all that is." The authors, in their deep and abiding love for their readers, sought to guide us through the transition from being ruled by our emotive forces to reigning them in, expanding their scope and deciphering the electro-chemical status of our own minds and bodies, so that we might use our own emotive forces to illuminate our path to enlightenment.

There are more than enough sob stories and morose diatribes about lost love, the death of loved ones and the inhumanity and injustices expressed by individuals and groups upon others, upon our selves,but the overriding emotions behind all of these messages is one of the "unfairness" of it all. Even many of the stories and accounts that I read that try to deal with the positive emotions hold in them a sub-text about what we are missing, or how good things could get if only we would or could X or Y or Z. Little is written about the understanding that emotions are tools that we can use to read the territory of our souls or how we might unveil the inner workings of our organism by focusing on these transient states of consciousness. Perhaps that is why this book was so important and necessary for my own development. I learned early-on that any decision worth making is also worth the consequences.

Some claim that there are only two emotions, love and fear, but in spite of holding great wisdom, this may in fact be too curt a response to our inner lives. I recently had an in-depth discussion with a person who believed that our calendar was based on the life of Jesus. Their fear, I suppose was that if we odid not mak time by His death, our culture would cease to exist. I laughed heartily when explaining that The moons and weeks are all derived from pagan gods and goddesses, it put an immediate end to discussion. I must have strayed over the line into threat. My emotional attachment to the whole event was so slight that I nearly didn't mention it here, but it reflects the schism between a linear, perceptual model and the paisley fractal of honoring the multiverse.

I feel a deep sadness over the fact that many trend toward an awkward inharmonious single-mindedness, but rely on inane data to make decisions. Data, most frequently is arbitrary. The capriciousness of "knowing something because you measured it is preposterous. My heart aches when friends say that they have never had an experience that they could call spiritual. I physically hurt from the want that they too could feel the heartbeat of Mother Earth alive within them, to bask in the Milky Way and feel it clouding over the star field behind. Understanding the miracle of the human eye, a root of perception, tuned well enough to detect a single photon. Both humbling and exalting, for everywhere we look in nature miracles such as these abound, yet wherever the hand of man has fallen, unrivaled ugliness has become the norm.

Garbage Jewelry

These are the heart wrenching truths we must all confront in our own way, come to terms with in our own way, but the empathy we can have for one another when we are willing to talk openly about the reality with which we are confronted can be the beginning of a whole new conversation about how we interact with the Earth, her creatures and one another. During my years as a brewmaster, I gave rise to millions of generations of yeast. Amongst them I was a sort of lord, and master. When I put them into the compost pile after my time with them, I blessed the very ground they were to enrich. I have taken hundreds of tons of material out of the waste stream, put it to good use and the vast majority of that material was compost.There will be more soil around the places I have lived and I learned the importance of doing that from my grandmothers.

 The one from Up North just threw her potato peels and apple cores and melon rinds over the fence that separated her yard into mowed and untamed woods. She lived at the outskirts of town and it bothered no one. The city grandma from Down South though, she was hemmed in by neighbors and felt that her yard had to be a showcase. She would save all of her vegetable peelings and compost in quart milk cartons that she opened all the way at the top. When they were full, she would bury them systematically, first along the fence, then, a foot out or so, then two feet out from the fence, each time leaving her trowel where the last bin had been buried. After a few times down the garden beds, she would start back at the beginning so that over time, each square foot got a carton every few years. She was on that same lot for fifty years. Sometimes I think of how mush siol she built up and it makes me proud.

Just as I want to care for and help soil microbes to thrive, going about their important work of eating, excreting, absorbing moisture, exchanging gasses, and reproducing, I wish for all my fellow humans to be able to meet their full potential as well. To achieve this goal, we must first be offered clean air, clean water and healthy soil upon which to build our civilization. I have the same love for humanity itself as I do for the soil microbial community, the living universe/multiverse and this is the same love that I feel for all the gods and goddesses who reign. No ill can fall upon those who understand that we are the force behind the multiverse and the connections we make will have ramifications for at leats the next seven generations. Trying to carry across the idea of agape love may be difficult, but it is the prevailing impetus for every word I write. If not for the love of All, I would not have the desire to write.

Feeling

All good writers want to share something. We obviously have the feeling that our ideas are important, or we would just watch them drift away like clouds. Writers feel that their messages can help others, enlighten, or clarify murky topics that each of us needs to wrestle with over the course of our lives. Who has not heard the admonition from a writing coach or teacher who seeks to help us write better material, write from your own experience, or write from the heart. When we write about what we know, we often bump up against things we feel as well and conveying our feelings to others helps us to be clear about our meaning and perspective.

Separate and distinct from factual information are the emotive forces that we recon with, wrestle with and ultimately dance amongst. The root word, to feel cannot help but be an active player in virtually all writing. Most often, when writing fails, it is because the writer has not had any feeling, one way or another. I used to be troubled by certain types of writing because the editors seemed to wring all feeling from the work. I have given many dozens of interviews for newspapers and magazines for example that have come out as flat, uninformative and shallow pieces simply because the writer was doing their part in conveying events or ideas without having any feeling about them one way or another.

Worse yet, there have been dozens of letters to the editor that I have written that have been edited to make me sound like an uneducated lunatic. My arm and hand feel tired just remembering all the writing that I have done to try to get retractions or corrections published in local newspapers. Editorial policy is often at the heart of removing all feeling from stories. Perhaps when we learn to call things the way we see them, hold the oppressors responsible for their actions and allow reporters to learn enough to care about important issues, there can be a change in the written sources of information that we have available. It seems that we have become adept at allowing people to make up their minds without having their hearts and emotions informed at all. By simply pulling a few intellectual strings, we can often make the puppets, or "sheeple" dance to the tunes of the bigwigs.

One of my main reasons for writing comes out of a strong urge to find justice amongst the taint that the uberwealthy seem to put on everything. We had an interesting thing happen in Green Bay, Wisconsin yesterday. It helps to point out the feeling part of writing because it is not only an issue dear to the hearts of many, but allows me a chance to peel back the onion of meaning just a few layers. The NFL (National Football League), a multi-billion dollar "not-for-profit" organization has a rule that if a team does not sell out their stadium, the television broadcast of their game is supposed to be blacked out on local television. Tomorrow, the Green Bay Packers are supposed to play their first playoff game of the season, but three thousand tickets remained unsold. This, in a stadium that recently had over six thousand more seats added to the capacity. The expected game time temperatures being below zero didn't help ticket sales, but the threatened blackout caused a huge uproar in both the local media and in perhaps thousands of conversations around town. Judging by what I was hearing, there was a huge amount of disgust for the NFL.

We are each entitled to your own opinions, not our own truth.

The news downplayed the hostility that was being voiced by fans and nothing was said about the NFL other than these are their "rules". In the meantime, the three thousand tickets that were not being sold were in addition to the two thousand tickets that are being re-sold through the aftermarket resale agencies. This reflects the reality that over five thousand people who would normally attend just didn't want to sit in the cold to watch their team. The price of tickets remained firm at over $100 per ticket and the team asked for and was granted a twenty-four hour extension on the requirement for selling our all the tickets to avoid the blackout. This allowed a consortium of "business leaders" to organize a buy out of all the remaining tickets to meet the NFL's requirement of a sell-out, while only costing the big dogs around three hundred thousand dollars. These half-dozen companies immediately started advertizing the wonderful thing they did, and the news has been telling us that some lucky high school students were randomly selected to receive the tickets.

The overarching feeling in all of this is that we will all be relieved of the threatened injustice of not being able to watch our beloved Packers. The NFL's arbitrary rules, the corporate bail-out that is the massive ticket purchase and the frivolity with which area banks and corporations spend the profits they make off our transactions with them never came up. Instead of taking any of this seriously or asking the deeper questions about why these rules exist at all were left in the wind. The tiny flap that would have resulted from people having to listen to the game on the radio might actually have led to some positive outcomes, if we had been allowed to feel what was really going on. In a very real way, the Packers organization found a way to wrest a little more than an extra $300,000 from our community. If I printed up three thousand t-shirts that no one wanted to buy, what corporado would snatch them up so that my loss would miraculously be turned into a gain? Never mind the fact that the t-shirts would be about ten percent of the cost of all those tickets.

Ironically, just adding a few zeroes to the numbers can change not only the meaning, but the feelings behind what we allow ourselves to "see". My feeling is that if there are companies that can afford to squander a heap of cash for the sake of allowing the gamer to be broadcast, great. They can subsidize whoever and whatever they want, as long as it is legal. Where I get peeved, is when they turn around and take the cost directly off the top of their taxable income by producing an advertizement that turns the whole thing into part of their advertizing budget. Not only are they using their abundant cash resources to bail out a fellow corporate entity, but they will be receiving government consideration that exceeds the costs of their actions.

All the feelings that swirl around the "Green and Gold" are mixed up with this issue, so many will avoid the difficult questions. They dredge up feelings. Better to give a wink and a nod to those who really benefit from the team being in our town rather than asking why the organization pays no taxes. Not only that but it also seems to be better to pay a half percent extra sales tax for their grounds keeping expenditures and electric bill, instead of holding them accountable for their actions. This is one example of the fact that if you build it, sometimes people won't come.

Just like back in the day, when Bart Starr's son (who I had played with as a child) died of a drug overdose, nothing was said about how he got the drugs that he overdosed on from players, the news has a certain perspective, a certain feeling that they wish to convey. Although tragic, the news was never truthfully told. Letting the cat out of the bag about what the team really does, both on an off the field or what it actually represents for our fair city can never see the light of day. If it did, we would have to come to terms with some harsh and unpleasant truths. The annual report that the Packers organization releases about how much money flows into our city because of them neglects to include the true costs. Most of the money flows into increased alcohol sales, chain restaurants and motels, and investments in infrastructure that is only used ten days each year.

My feelings about this and other issues should be spelled out plainly. I wish that other writers could be so honest. Finding my own way through the mountain of feeling that our exploitation at the hands of oligarchs has created is helpful for me as an individual, but if I can share what I have learned along my own path with others, it has the power to be helpful to many others as well. Trying to remain true to my beliefs, honest about my own feelings and accurate in my perceptions guides my writing and my word choices. I only hope that they convey the depth of feeling that inspired my process. Learning to love those who would hate us can take a lifetime, but writing about the abject lack of humanity and compassion that floods the popular media only takes a relatively short time. In all honesty, the pathological nature of our attachment to our angst is just a cover for our true feelings that something unjust is afoot. I always have to remind myself  and my readers that people who can neglect their basic human instincts or compassion and humanity so thoroughly, abusing others so cavalierly, feeling justified in inflicting their abuses must truly have been hurt very badly as children.

Love may be the only salve that can heal wounds that deep.

This Month's Seven Topics

A friend helped me to understand writing in a whole new way. Her father had passed on a helpful way of looking at writing which aids us in our quest, to get to the bottom of true meanings behind words, clarify concepts conveyed by writing and decipher essential qualities, as well as shades of meaning that are hidden amongst the words. I would like to speak to each of these in turn, but let me start by listing the whole kit and caboodle, then taking a stab at elaborating each in isolation. Understanding critical elements and principles of each and every story we hear helps make sense of the written world around us. This detailed analysis can  help us to understand not only the context in which we communicate but to better see through authorial blind spots, veiled meanings and expectations that are lying behind all that is written. Making sense of our environment, finding the best ways to integrate words and ideas into our conceptualization of the world may be the deciding factor in whether we will act in time or not, in averting an ecological/economic collapse that rivals even this most recent catastrophe. Developing the discipline to look closely at the written word can be a life long commitment so fasten your seat belts and hold on to whatever you have as a point of reference today, for it may not be there for support tomorrow.

My friend's dad always started this process by asking three questions:
1.) What mood, feeling or emotion is conveyed by the writing?
2.) What thought or reflection is being conveyed?
3.) What meaning or experience is being shared?

These seven aspects of all written language are far more important than the individual words. Discovering the answers to these three questions requires a deft knowledge of the seven aspects and what sorts of experiences that writing can convey. This moon, I will be attempting to delve into each of these aspects in turn and try to make sense of not only the writing of other authors, but of my own expression as well. I frequently write without consideration of many basic parts of my world view, holding them instead in the words and phrases. I try to craft each post as a vessel, intended to carry much more meaning than mere words can express, I see them designed to teach, to inform and to share a bit of myself with others, but in reality, these aspects are often far more important than what I am trying to express. I see my own craft as specific, but it may be far more general than even I know.

Many of the issues that I write about and many of the difficulties that I refer to are things t I have known about for many decades. I once made a special label for all of my mother's aerosol cleaning products (around 1975) that said: THE PROPELLENT USED IN THIS CANISTER WILL TAKE TEN YEARS OR MORE TO REACH THE STRATOSPHERE. ONCE THERE, IT WILL CONTINUE TO DEGRADE EARTH'S PROTECTIVE OZONE LAYER FOR MANY DECADES TO COME, EXPOSING ALL LIFE ON THE PLANET TO DEADLY COSMIC RADIATION. That thirteen year old still lives within me. Of course, my world view has had vast areas filled in since then, but in my heart, even then, I knew the comfort that I always felt in the arms of Mother Earth as well as the pitiful sickness which came over me when I realized how much the juggernaut of "economic" expediency exhibited contempt for any sane treatment of the planet.

With  bit of luck and hours of thoughtful reflection, perhaps I can clarify my messages and convey the importance of all of us in finding a truly resonant voice with which to speak for the trees, the wildlife of all types and to express the fact that our birthright is hung in the balance for only one purpose, to line the pockets of our masters.

Mood, for instance is the sense of our current state of being. As writers, we are incapable of writing completely cold and objective statements. Our entire vocabulary belies a set of experiences and codifies a position with relation to the world around us. My chiropractor just this past week was confounded that in stagecraft (spotlight operators specifically) who focus light through our instruments use terms for what we are doing that are far more general than the words he uses for doing the same thing with x-ray radiation. Implicit in understanding the rift between our languages one must honor and respect both who is doing the talking and what they are trying to convey. We may say that we need to put the hot spot on the actor or that we need more intensity, or a tighter beam, or perhaps a happier blue, whereas his lexicon uses a term called occulation, passing the radioactive energy through an occulus, to create a beam. His work with invisible energy to expose film informs his understanding of what we do with light but he also implied by his amazement that we use "more general" terms and most of them are non-scientific to imply that our experiences with light are less exacting. In truth, it is more like the Eskimo language having dozens of words for snow. He "lights" one subject, the blank plates and it reacts like film, so his concern is getting the sharpest image possible in each and every exposure. His diagnosis often depends on seeing as closely as possible what can be difficult to reveal. He also uses a form of energy to "light" his subjects that is extremely hazardous and "science" has a vested interest in having him think of his own exposure relatively scientifically, or he might decide that it is not worth the risk to himself or his patients. Lighting technicians in the theater may light as many subjects as he x-rays in a year during a single performance and our intent and palette vary significantly depending on the mood we are trying to create. We can afford to describe increasing the intensity as "give him some more love, or love him up a little, no one has ever died from the application of photons, as far as I know.

The mood I am in when I write may be part and parcel of the written words, as in poetry or song lyrics, or it may be intentionally skewed, revised or inherently made to be obscure, just for effect. Setting a mood often requires description of or signalling to the reader, certain feelings, emotions and conditions that may not be integral to the message. For instance, when I wrote about my near brushes with death, the mood was intentionally incoherent and dreamlike, that is how my sense of self got morphed and my perspective within the moment seemed to be malleable as well, so that was part of the message. When we finally give up our normal perspective it can be a floaty experience and as the veil between life and death thins, ethereal meanings and messages can come through as if becoming apparent through a thick haze or fog. Even the feelings of smell and touch can be imperceptibly dulled. In my own case, there were times that I felt numb in some ways, but exquisitely aware and alive in others. Trying to share these sorts of events can be difficult because many of us are trained from birth to suppress instinctual or subtle interactions between our ideas and perceptual resources. In our public life, even the internal dialogue that leads us to any particular decision point is downplayed. It is partially captured, or decapitated actually in the phrase, "He is a man of action." what changes would be wrought if we just added the word "thoughtful" to that imploring maxim. I know that I would be much happier if people referred to me as a man of thoughtful action. How about you?

If not now, when? If not us, who? The mood that I am most interested in sharing is the one that impatiently knocks at the door of the ruling elite, calls out for justice and forgives their ignorance, yet stands for nothing short of awareness of the many ways our sacrifices have accrued to oligarchs. If I ever fail to communicate this mood, someone please remind me of why I write. Thank-you for your patience this moon and for taking the time to read my blog. Please support it with what you can. Donate, it will help me continue planting trees.