An Incessant Dialogue

To think is to talk to one self.
~N. Scott Momaday

I am plagued by a perpetually running self-dialogue from the moment I wake in the morning until finally falling asleep late in the evening. Not even sleep is always a respite freeing me from the incessant chatter as evidenced by the erotic dream I had last night that was, unfortunately, interrupted when I awoke to the ongoing monologue.

Trending Toward Insanity

Some lose all mind and become soul, insane.
Some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
Some lose both and become accepted.
~Charles Bukowski

For the longest time, I viewed the ideal human condition as one ruled by the intellect in the form of logic. This condition was elevated to its purest forms in Mr. Spock of the Vulcan Confederation, a species with lifespans more than double that of emotion dominated humans. Perhaps there’s a one to one correlation there. I believed eschewing emotions to be replaced by pure intellect to be the pinnacle of human achievement and primate evolution. I imagined it as a state free of debilitating emotion opening the mind to grasp the substance of any situation free of any feeling that could cloud pure reason.

Beatitudes > Commandments

We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace.
~Stephen Ambrose

I heard, recently, a person lamenting the fact that Christians fight to get the Ten Commandments given to Moses posted in public schools and other public institutions but say nothing about the Jesús gifted Beatitudes delivered at what they claim to be the greatest ever sermon, the Sermon on the Mount. Holding the separation of church and state sacrosanct, I believe neither should plague public schools nor desecrate the walls of public institutions as a way to innoculate against a religious oligarchy.

Exfoliating Our Dysfunctional Tribes

Tribal attitudes are the cause of closed minds, prejudice, and xenophobia. Therefore, I’m a universalist. I’m a citizen of the world.
~Robert Westbrook

I have spent the better part of my last years attempting to exfoliate tribal detritus from my mental alignment with the ultimate goal of being part of nothing so I can be part of everything. It is an undertaking significantly more difficult than it appears for tribalism is forced upon us starting from birth when we are labeled with a race, gender, and a family name along with a city, state, and nationality. It does not stop there. The longer we live the more tribes are utilized to define us. Hair color, Eye color, elementary, high school, and university attended, sports team supported, all affiliations, companies worked at. We are pegged into holes based on hobbies, interests, proclivities, and political persuasions. We are tribalized as single, divorced, married, single never married, single once married, widowed, separated, heterosexually married, and same sex married.

Harvesting an Afterlife

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies’ territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.
~Edward Abbey

There is one more day to pass before the year 2023 on the Gregorian calendar, a modification to the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caeser in changing the 1 to 46 BC. The Julian calendar was, itself, a derivation of a long line of calendars reaching back to the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian calendars of antiquity. That the Catholic Church usurped an existing cultural practice should come as no surprise. The Church has repeatedly repurposed history to drive its personal agenda and indoctrination of free-thinking peoples. It repurposed the Roman Saturnalia festival into Christmas, the pagan celebration of Spring Equinox and the honoring of the Goddess Eostre into Easter, and the virgin birth common in many earlier religions. If you can’t beat them with your manufactured version of truth then surreptitiously instill those ‘truths’ by stealing what already exists for the grand illusion of bringing one thing to an end and creating a new beginning.

Meaningless Fantasies

We all end up where we are supposed to be.
~Robert McCall

If one believes in an omnipotent, somewhat benevolent deity whose whims can be altered by petitions then one can make a case that everywhere we are is where we are supposed to be for the furtherance of the grand, universal plan formed by said deity before creation was kicked into play and time was instantiated. It is a belief that gives purpose, a feel good purpose, a purpose that can neither be proven nor disproven by finite man because the crutch is built upon a pile of rubbish without real substance.

Disarmament by Conservatives

You want weapons? We’re in a library.  Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!
~Dr. Who

It should come as no surprise adherents to the conservative party in the United States are reading the Hitler playbook and fighting to have books banned in schools, libraries, and even independent bookstores. It is a tactic, part and parcel, employed by dictators, autocrats, and totalitarian regimes throughout history seeking to marginalize those with whom they disagree and keep information from anyone that Could or would attempt to wrestle away their monopoly on power and the accompanying life of wealth, leisure, and sexual gratification stolen from the powerless in rape and pillage. A recent and ardent LGQTQ book banner has been exposed for engaging in regular FFM threesomes and her husband stands accused of rape. So much for conservative values.

Building Our Cages

Birds in a cage think flying is an illness.
~Alejandro Jodorowsky

Many of us humans are born free before spending our days, weeks, years, and decades building the cage in which we will reside for most of our lives, the cage that hems us in before blocking out the light from which wisdom grows. The cage traps us so gradually that we are oblivious to the slow erosion of our decreasing mental-spiritual freedom even unto being completely walled into a prison of our own making never to realize the light and our luminance has ceased shining into the world instead limiting our vision to the constricting cube that surrounds us wherever we are.

Tabula Not Raza

I am not sure I exist, actually. I am all the writers I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
~Jorge Luis Borges

As any engaged parent of multiple children can attest, being born with a Tabula Raza, a blank slate at birth is a complete and total myth as preposterous as the mythologies disguising themselves as religions, plaguing the world claiming to be anything other than metaphors on how to conduct life in a particular environment and point in time. True, we are born blanker than most beings as evidenced by the time between birth and independent living with the next longest childhood attributed to the ginger haired orangutan whose children don’t leave the nest until their early teens.

Physical Attraction

We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the death, the wedding more than love, and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in a container culture, which despises the content.
~Eduardo Galeano

There was a time, I freely admit, when I was lured in more by superficialities than substance. I was drawn to women for the proportions of their physical shape and the classical beauty of their faces where I should have been more focused on their character, a mistake costing me dearly in both physical and emotional distress. The reputation of the companies I chose to work for paled in comparison to their positive impact on society, leaving me wondering now how much more powerfully I could have impacted the world had I not languished in the superficial.

A God That Answers Prayers is Imperfect

I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.
~Terry Tempest Williams

I find the entire petitioning the lord with prayer phenomena to be nothing short of absurd. An all-powerful entity existing simultaneously at all points in time already knows what’s going to occur when the dominoes were set in motion at the onset of existence and they fall in precisely the order she perfectly designed. In either case, petitioning or not petitioning, destiny was already planned and fore known meaning the outcome is inevitable because it is etched in the metaphysical stone heart of a perfect Deity that is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow. In other words, more permanent and rigid than the hardest rock.

Hang the Promise Breakers

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
~Edward Abbey, Prophet

I am becoming increasingly disenfranchised with politics in the United States which means I, having grown up during the tail end of the Vietnam fiasco and the Tricky Dick criminal activity, am quickly approaching zero faith in our entrenched political construct. That Democracy and will of the people are little more than a buzzword and a pithy phrase designed to make us feel woo was pushed home recently in Ohio when a conservative government did not like a voter mandate to amend the state constitution and vowed to find ways to not enshrine the people’s will into the laws of their land.

Legacy is Cruelty

My delight in being forgotten is rooted in the belief that I don’t matter in the larger scheme of things, only that I tried my best to be a good human, failing repeatedly, but trying again with the soul-settling knowledge that my body will return to the desert.
~Terry Tempest Williams

There was a time when my ego was so fragile I cared about a legacy existing beyond the bookends of my mortal coil. I felt it was important that my family name propagated as deep into the future as its anchor in the past. It is only in the last year I learned the anchor is in shallow waters with barely any purchase on the shifting sands below. It turns out, my paternal grandfather changed the spelling of his family name from two S Olsson to single S Olson when he emigrated from Sweden to the US, along with a pronunciation change so drastic, that I barely recognized the name the first time I heard a Swede pronounce it correctly.

The Future is Tardigrade

There is a living organism, called a tardigrade, that has survived the five great extinctions on Earth, and it can survive in vacuums in space, and boiling hot water, and freezing sub-zero temperatures.
~Alycia Debnam Carey

Up until last night, I was aware of only one Earth mass extinction event. Well, two, considering the one we are in the midst of, instigated by the careless hands of man. I count this failure of the American education system being systematically undermined by right-wingnuts and their Bible as history delusions. And I blame myself for not reading more deeply about the historical mysteries of the blue rock I call home hurtling through space and time.

The Center is Everywhere and Nowhere

At the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center is really everywhere. It is within each of us.
~Black Elk

I am regularly astonished at the vast number of people seeking outside themselves for the godhead that dwells within each being from the nearly permanent rocks to the ephemeral damselfly that dies within a day of hatching and breeding. So short are their lives, they are born without a mouth to feed. They have one purpose and that is to mate and die after which their dying body slips from tree leaves before falling into the water where await schools of hungry fish eager to feed on the nutritious body…if that is, a bird doesn’t gobble them up while in the throes of their singularly focused mating frenzy. Let’s face it, feeding and fucking are the two primordial drives that keep species flourishing. If you don’t have mouth parts to feed that leaves fucking….without the oral components, obviously.

Liberty Supersedes Happiness

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
~Benjamin Franklin

That liberty was perceived as more important than safety by the country’s Founding Fathers should come as no surprise considering a popular slogan in 1775 was Patrick Henry’s famous proclamation, “Give me liberty or give me death!” The sentiment was enshrined in the Troutman Liberty or Death flag first flown during the 1836 Texas Revolution when the Texans stole land from Mexico. Liberty was viewed as a fundamental tenant, a core concept deserved by all people except the enslaved and the Indigenous, two groups viewed as without a soul thus nonhuman expendables who deserved no liberty and were frequently put to death.

A Balanced God

Bernie appreciated Ma’ii, the being who was both a trickster and a Holy Person, a disreputable character and one who offered guidance.
~Anne Hillerman

There is a certain je ne sais quoi about a being that combines holiness and tricksterness in the same personage that brings balance to the universe. A balance necessary as both fire and ice is when addressing the needs of the world, humanity included, keeping everyone on their toes, alert, alive, vigilant, sharply attentive, and attentively sharp. Unlike when dealing with a supposedly all-loving Christian version of holiness, mental gymnastics need not be performed nor rational thought suspended to explain the reality of pervasive evil in the world.

The Tempest

Is my feeling of being hopelessly lost in the world because my soul is divided against its house?
~David Olson

I don’t know if ‘lost’ is the correct word to capture my state of discontinuity and disconnect with the marrow of life. Preoccupied may be closer but is missing the essence of disconnectedness. There is also perplexed or bewildered. Closer to capturing the almost perpetual disquiet disturbing my soul. A better term may be angst or a variation thereof. I am a Swiss cheese riddled with holes where my angst goes to ruminate on my place in the world, a place I wish meant something in the great scheme but I am, we all are but insignificant grains of sand in the cosmos. Not sand, per se, but the microscopic gaps between the minute granules filled with emptiness, nothingness.

The Wonderfully Woke

I used to work with some wonderfully woke designers who helped me evolve into a more fully functional human being.
~David Olson

For years…for decades, if I am honest…I existed in a world bounded on all sides by me, myself, and focused on I. My needs, my desires outweighed all other parameters driving my actions. I’m unsure how many people I damaged with my selfishness leading to the flaming crash of my own existence leaving me an isolated wretch during an era of my life when aloneness was tantamount to a personal hell. From the depths of that personal agony, I forged a path to adjust my focus from inward to outward learning to feel my emotions and start caring about the emotions of others by viewing the world through their eyes.

Something Sacred is Growing

In the Lakota language, children are called Wakayaja or Wakan Icaga. (Something sacred is growing).
~Ernie LaPointe

I learned long ago that words matter in profound ways. Unless they are woven into a tapestry of nothingness by politicians ensuring they can never be held accountable for any promises they uttered. The nuance of words, their tone, and their implications not only capture existing perceptions but also create realities outside our wildest imaginations. Encouragement opens minds to achievement just as surely as criticism unbridled destroys the soul with the hunger of an aggressive cancer consuming the physical.