Gen Z Doesn't Wanna Have Sex

Wrong Stories and Solastalgia

Hello friends. Hello family. Hello fellow travelers, drifters, orphans, honored members of these sacred in-between times of perpetual melancholy, mindless meltdown and indecent decay, of long over-do endings and the all-too gradual collapse of empire. It is good to be here with you. Together, much is possible.

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I write to you now with the same confused heART I imagine most of you have also grown accustomed to bearing of late. How limited the english language is when it comes to articulating the Holy, the more-than human, the sensual, ever-emotional spillover of matter o’er ancestral echoes. Indeed, there is no word I can think of, other than possibly, *solastalgia, that comes anywhere close to accurately describing the toxic cocktail being served up for all now by those rather unpleasant ghosts in power, the very ones most infected by the *wetiko, amnesia and centuries of unmetabolized grief we so often wax poetic about here. To be sure, high on the Rebuilding of Culture To-Do List, is to re-generate meaningful languages again, ones not founded entirely on business efficiency, corporate consumerism and systems of misogyny but ones rootied deeply in reciprocity, memory and dare I say it, love. Like so many of us, I too have failed to remember the old linguistic traditions that eloquently kept alive for centuries the plant-based blueprints for hope. Fortunately however, not all have forgotten, so I pass the mic, as I often do, to our beloved sibling, Báyò Akomolafe…

The pillars that held up the usual are trembling under its weight.

As the fires rage, we will not just need to fetch water, we will have to become water. We will not merely claim sanctuary, we will make sanctuary. We will braid with the threads of temporalities that do not travel forward; we will tell stories in the Dionysian spaces between mushroom clouds.

We will host grief as an ally, our tears as regal emissaries of a world that exceeds clarity, and our falling to the ground as an invitation to listen to its forlorn music.

Our raft-making won't stop the fires from flaring up, but it may teach us how to sit with the heat without burning away. Only then, at the threshold that Esu and Osun nourish with their cosmic intimacy, will we realize that the world was never ours to fix, only to feel. That the trembling was not a sign of failure, but of fermentation. That the end of the usual is not catastrophe, but a stranger choreography where every collapse composes a new rhythm, a fugitive score for those willing to dance offbeat.

At that threshold, where Esu laughs and Osun weeps honey, we might re-member how to dwell in undoing. How to speak without anchoring in mastery. How to love without arriving. And how to co-compose with the broken, the spored, the singed, and the strange.

There, we won’t rebuild what was lost. We’ll compost it. We'll make meals with the confetti once reserved to decorate the victories we imagined were exclusively important.

We won’t find the future. We’ll feel for it, barefoot, with stories for soles.

And maybe, just maybe, in the midst of smoke and myth, we’ll learn that sanctuary is not a place, but a practice, a way to become-with a world that is never not broken.

-Báyò Akomolafe

Wetiko devours Right View, leaving bad story in its wake. AI will not save us.

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Where to even begin? Well, right where we are I suppose. In the middle. In the ancestral ashes of what could have been. On the awkward sidelines of a lost horizon where for so very long, we did know where to begin, we did know who we were, where we were from and what we were here for. Yet being no different than any other journeyer into life, the inevitable eclipse has shrouded wisdom beneath the veil of *Maya.

To live is indeed to die and without night there can be no day. Tides rise and fall. Seasons change. For a brief and strange moment a poorly dressed, rather obnoxious handful of chemically monocropped inheritors of stolen wealth have erroneously persisted on believing that they are in control, beyond natural law. Yet as that meme floating around social media that grossly oversimplifies a profound teaching of the historical Buddha proclaims,

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

-Siddhartha Gautama (possibly)

So here we are, at the crossroads of decay and re-birth, transformation inevitable, as it always has been. It seems somehow more shocking now only due to the outrageous blanket of undeserved privilege shielding many from seeing clearly The Way Things Are. Yet The Way Things Are cares not about our self-inflicted ignorance. In fact, Truth could care less whether we understand its reality or not. It doesn’t give a shit. It just is. Love loves. Mother matters and She always wins. Life goes on regardless of our capacity for understanding what real power is, utterly uninterested in our dramatic attempts to be big. The overlooked, slowly moving stream eventually carves a canyon. leaving the old landscape unrecognizable.

The greatest challenge for modern people seems to be how to re-insert themselves into The Big Stories. For too long we have been so far from the actual plot that on those rare occasions when we are actually met with reality (think of those glorious, empty-highway COVID times), we view normalcy as abnormal. We seem shocked that beings who have been attacked, overlooked, ridiculed and mocked for generations might retaliate at some point. We are perplexed when suddenly the eARTh can’t grow what we want anymore because we neglected to appropriately feed all the necessary conditions that allow life to thrive. We wonder why so many youth are suddenly depressed, why Gen Z isn’t interested in sex, why kids bring guns to school and why god-fearing, christian rapists like Donald Trump rise to power, the reasons for all of which being glaringly obvious.

Modernity is suffering from an intergenerational case of, what Aboriginal scholar and author, Tyson Yunkaporta refers to as Wrong Story. (Do yourself a favor, take a moment and click this here link. Read/listen to the interview he did for Emergence Magazine to understand more what Wrong Story is.) The results of being initiated within a culture whose narrative is saturated with Wrong View are indeed quite tragic. Yet nevertheless, life goes on. Cracks in the sidewalk present themselves, allowing seeds to find nourishment in the most unlikely corridors of insanity and forgetfulness, miraculously sprouting hope as Martín Prechtel often says, for a time beyond now.

I spent the last few days with my family visiting Pgak’yau (Karen) friends in the “hill-tribe” village of Ban Nong Tao, Thailand, about a three hour drive from our little farm here in Chiang Mai. My wife and I were very fortunate to be invited to come at a time when the people of Nong Tao were coming together to plant rice. Unlike most modern farmers however, this was no simple affair and required the intergenerational, initiatory act of reciting poetry through songs now sadly on the verge of extinction.

Now, the tricky part here, dear readers, is that in order to gain entry into The Big Stories, you must tangibly penetrate into the living core of the tale, which can only be done face to face, hands in the soil, the wind buzzing with song. This is precisely why most of these stories were never written down. Not because land-based people were ignorant but on the contrary, they knew the limitations of the written word. Merely reading a story won’t get one very far and in fact, could potentially do serious harm. Consider Gen Z, watching porn all day, no longer yearning for anything real. You see too much too quickly and you risk having no idea what you’re actually looking at. To the uninitiated, the medicine bundle just looks like a bunch of useless seeds wrapped up in a worn out handkerchief.

So no, I won’t tell the story here. Nor will I share any pictures. As an orphaned people longing for home, we need to learn to be patient again, to build a strong foundation, slowly, atop an appropriate longing for the kind of cultural majesty our ancestors knew, before we can expect but to be invited to sit on the stairs outside the gate. We must learn once more how to earn the privilege of being invited by The Way Things Are to humbly ask permission, to listen and wait, to not merely “take” a photo and pretend we understand something, or that we “experienced” anything at all.

We must learn to court properly all the myriad beings of the Seven Layers beneath the earth, as well as The Seven above. The layers of soil, of water, of wind, rock and fire, of gravel, sand, and iron. All the living creatures therewithin. The Stars. Time itself. We must bow before the Great Story and know that we are not the main act, but have been graced with the noble responsibility to help generate balance. We must learn how to ask the right questions again, if we ever are going to receive the right answers. And if we ever wish to hear the Right Stories, we need to learn once more… how to listen.

The long song of the old women still hums in my ear. It took me ten years to be given such a grand gift. Now what will I do with this? Become, as Frank Fools Crow often taught, a hollow bone, allowing the still, small resonance to journey back from whence it came, to remind the seeds, and me how to live for a time beyond now. Such transmissions are not for us, after all. They are borrowed from our grandchildren, with hopes that we will uphold agreements long ago made between Earth and Sky. Tab’bleu

Masters of living well in a Place; Pgak’yau farmers at home, alive in Story

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I weep again for Palestine. I weep again for all the living wisdom traditions now dying so swiftly, before our very eyes. I cry for Iran. I cry for Sudan. I cry for the tigers, the elephants, the rivers and the soil. I cry for the scared little unloved boy inside Donald Trump’s broken heart. I cry for the unmetabolized grief of Israel, the monsters and ghosts now roaming widely, unfed for so long. I ask for forgiveness from all my Latino brothers and sisters. From all the great people who originally walked the holy lands of Turtle Island. I see you all, in the smell of rain on dust, in the sight of clouds carrying rains from long ago. I vow to learn as much as I can about your people, respectfully, as much as I can about your cultures, your beautiful overlooked lifeways. Not to steal them but to find an echo. To be an ally.

I won’t allow my government to convince me that you aren’t beautiful. I will do my research and learn herstory well. You will stay alive. Your seeds will be dispersed far and wide.

13 Thank Yous.

All blessings.

No evil.

“Life and land are the same.”

Pati’ Joni Odochao, Ban Nong Tao

…or, help a starving organic farmer out and add a lil’ somethin’ to the virtual tip jar! Cheers!

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Terms you may not be familiar with used in this essay:

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Wetiko is an Algonquin term for a cannibalistic spirit that embodies greed, excess, and selfish consumption. It represents a psychospiritual disease that can possess individuals, leading them to act against their own best interests and harm others in a cycle of self-destruction.

Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (solace or comfort), 'solus' (desolation) with meanings connected to devastation, deprivation of comfort, abandonment and loneliness and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by negatively perceived environmental change. A distinction can be made between solastalgia as the lived experience of negatively perceived change in the present and eco-anxiety linked to worry or concern about what may happen in the future (associated with "pre-traumatic stress", in reference to post-traumatic stress).

Maya, in Indian religions, refers to the concept of "illusion" or "magic," indicating that the world we perceive is not the ultimate reality but rather a deceptive appearance. It is often associated with the idea that everything is subject to change and is spiritually unreal, contrasting with the eternal and unchanging reality.

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:::Giving Thanks:::

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***As always, I must tip my hat in gratitude to my mentor, Martín Prechtel who has so patiently helped keep alive seeds in ways that are beyond what most of us can begin to comprehend. May he be continually blessed.

You can find some of Martín’s generous offerings here:

Teachings of the Flowering Mountain - Martín Prechtel

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And A deep bow to Josh Schrei, of The Emerald Podcast who has been generously teaching me about the power of Myth for some time now. Please take some time to listen to Josh Schrei’s recent, timely offering:

On Powers, Great and Small - The Emerald Podcast, Josh Schrei

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And many blessings to fellow traveller, Báyò Akomolafe. Please hold on tightly, but not too tightly, as you gallop into the cracks and Dance with Mountains with him:

https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/

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:::Book Review:::

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The subtitle of this weeks article was lovingly stolen from the book (of the same name) recently published by Land Body Ecologies that beautifully gethers together endangered cultural seed stories in a time where the worlds outlooks are rapidly homogenizing into one bland view. Our dear friends from Ban Nong Tao were represented in this book as were the views of many other needed cultural warriors. Here is a brief synopsis of the book:

When the land is sick, we are sick

For Indigenous peoples, climate change is one more catastrophic loss on top of decades of land abuses and intergenerational traumas. The exploitation of natural resources under colonialism has consistently marginalised and dispossessed communities around the world whose ways of life are based on the land. Environmental changes, often labelled as 'protection' or 'development' measures, have forcibly displaced many Indigenous people from their homelands. Extractive industries and neo-colonial green energy projects are altering delicate ecosystems, harming the health of both the humans and non-human beings that inhabit them.

This book examines where land, territories and the human body are sites of simultaneous trauma and the ways in which different forms of ecological degradation unmoor us. Starting from solastalgia, a form of mental distress caused by environmental change and one's feelings of inability to prevent or reverse land sickness, the Land Body Ecologies collective present reflections from people living through environmental changes, and propose cultural rights and practices as a mechanism for survival, revival and healing.

You can purchase this book here:

Stories of Solastalgia (Paperback)

Vivien Sansour, The “Seed Queen” of Palestine

#mayallbeingsbehappyandfree