I dissolve
#CEASEFIRE. grow up. come together. Release:::::::::
*a small note from the author: This weeks essay was hard for me to write. I can't stop replaying images in my mind of children stuck in our inability to #ceasefire. Forgive me if this goes on too long and lacks the cohesiveness you may yearn for. I see no cohesiveness in the world now. Only chaos. Yes, I still find beauty in the breakdown. We must. This is what we can do. I love all of you. Be at peace... GP
For anyone who sat through but five minutes of the recent Republican debate, it will surely come as no surprise as to why I rarely tune in to mainstream media anymore. I am still attempting to regenerate the braincells that dissolved while listening to those talking heads promote, yet again, blatant ignorance. Now, don’t get worried. I am not a fan of Joe Rogan, Russell Brand or any other (leftist??) doomsday saints either. I’m not obsessed with conspiracy, nor am I on any quest to reveal the overlords of #fakenews. If anything, I question if the saturation of so-called “news” is enabling any of us to become any wiser anyway. For if we aren’t becoming wiser, more empathetic people after reflecting over information we acquire, what then is the purpose of seeking such information anyway? Mere hobby?
In an effort to help keep alive any vestiges of real wisdom heroically hidden in the shadows of this narrow-sighted realm of post-modernity, I’ve taken to studying the great mythologies of the more-than-white world, of meditating more, of staring aimlessly at the night sky for hours on end more, of watching ants and mushrooms turn dead spiders into dirt more and allowing such moments of queer reflection to transmute into life-serving poetry. There is no real goal to any of this. It’s more like a love song to a distant memory.
As someone who has worked within the realms of education for over twenty years who has a decent understanding of its general view, I must confess nothing I, nor any of my colleagues have ever offered students comes remotely close to offering insights into matters of real use as do the freely offered services granted us by Gaia. Modern educational institutions pale in comparison to the lessons granted by Her and are, quite frankly, all but incapable of preparing society to be able to, not only think differently but to tangibly act upon more beneficial principles than those adopted by our racist forefathers.
This is not to say however that educational structures cannot change. On the contrary, this is precisely what this is saying. They can, and must change. And this change, I feel, must pulse through the ancient vehicle of good storytelling, i.e. ritually embodied myth making capable of generating humility and maturity. From what I can gather, only well told Stories can do this. Intellectually understanding why things are the way they are wont cut it. An emotional love affair with all life is what is required of all educations now. Facts aren’t enough. Truth is bigger than facts. We need imagination too. Now more than ever. We need awe. We need to regenerate our forgotten ability to experience things as animate. We need grand stories. God is too big for just one religion.
A recent trip to the land currently referred to as “The United States” revealed to me many things. Namely, how small the main story being told there has become. Immediately upon entry there you can feel the implications of a disastrously boring tale being told. The overall anxiety of the general population, the pale skin, tired eyes, and short tempers, all signals an inner dis-ease that results from a single, uninspiring song, one that is outdated and was never all that exciting to begin with. The story of modernity. People are clearly stuck in its lifeless echo chamber, like listening to a shitty pop band play an awful lick on repeat. Countless well-intended people there cling tightly to the same bad story our parents and there parents before them were unable to let go of, the one that suggests the world owes us something, that natural resources are finite and solely there for our benefit, that beauty can be bought and that we are somehow in control of our destiny. This view leaves very little space for what all great Mythologies have his(her)storically know and expressed elegantly in a hundred thousand different ways; that in order to truly grow, something must first be abandoned. The Lindorm doesn’t turn into the prince until it sheds all its layers of thick skin. You don’t gain access to views of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible until you let go of your attachments to the previous one.
A great letting go is required of us both individually and collectively if we are ever going to truly “progress”. And, as the fantastic New Mexico family band Prehistoric Delinquent and the Relative Minors sing in their song “The Sun's Gonna Melt your Gun”, “Progress ain’t progress unless progress is love.”.
I don’t think I was fully aware before this last trip stateside as to how deeply the world has changed me. Saying such things, I confess, makes me feel disgustingly cliché. It’s become grossly hip to attach a similar saying to a cleverly edited IG post taken while vacationing to some fancy island resort where people of a different color serve cocktails to the privileged. And yes, I am privileged. No doubt this is why saying such things sickens me. But this world is this magical. The world Herself is our greatest teacher, our deepest lover… and she is us. Of course She has the ability to change us deeply, more so than any modern “school”. She is far superior to all our arrogant institutions and will outlive us all, continuing forever to make more beauty. It is up to us whether we recognize then who is right in front of us and develop the capacity to receive Her gifts as real transformative wisdom or waste it all on trite influencer memes.
The juxtaposition felt upon return to my place of birth was dizzying. The collectively-centered view of impermanence and acceptance of uncertainty of which I had adopted since moving to Asia over ten years ago was met with stark contrast there at the pearly gates of Empire where the self-centered western world’s awful myth that suggests somehow that things are secure and can be made permanent, that we can individually “pull ourselves up by the boot straps” and anything preventing us from doing so is the result of someone or something else getting in our way, well…let’s just say I could see clearly how different my view is now from how it was when I lived in Illinois, surrounded then by evangelical churches, Walmart’s, insurance companies, lawyers, republicans and American football.
I have changed. Very much so. The world, with all its beauty and terror, its infinite songs and myths and buzzing silences and endless complexities have all but dismembered me completely. As Grace slowly reassembles me through a painstaking tempering into possible maturity, it is at times hard to know how best to orient myself. Not entirely being any longer from here nor there is confusing. Yet, deep in the bowels of this curious unfolding have been found strange familiarities, blessed encounters with subtle sufferings unavailable to the technologically obsessed that suggest hope. Yes, dismemberment is painful. But new life offers new eyes. Life’s ever-evolving composition cannot been seen through dusty lens’. There is another view available, to everyone. It offers the very real possibility of meaningful and beneficial evolutionary adaptation. Sacrifice is required. Grief is unavoidable.
Living communally within an eco-village in rural Thailand for the last ten years has forced me to no longer identify as “me”. All that I am is now understood within the context of an endless, all-encompassing quilt of interwoven, hard to define relationships. It is understood now that if others fail, so do I. If another suffers, I suffer too. If my brother grows ill, I in turn become sick as well. And this view extends to the greater than human world also. For because it is known here that all life is connected, The River is not called by some inanimate term that suggests “it” is but a “resource” but rather exalted with the honorable name, Mae Nam, (“Mother Waters”) and we make offerings to Her before taking from Her. She is we, and we move with accordance to this sacred, relational knowing.
Growing up as a white boy in “America”, I was always told that “I” could do whatever “I” dreamed of, that the sky was the limit, yada yada yada. I was told that the way to achieve my dreams was to work hard and stay dedicated, to be strong and determined. Who can forget those adorable lessons we in America all learned from The Apprentice about how, by being tough and stepping on other, weaker people’s toes, by leaving them on the sidelines when they become burdensome to us, leads to “success”? I mean, that guy eventually became the President of the United States of America!
:::sigh:::
In coming of age, ensconced as I was in this wretched settler-colonizer narrative, I began to notice fewer and fewer of my countrymen able to maintain a committed relationship for longer than a few months, much less ones whom were truly dedicated to family, to community, to kinship. Media, our educational systems, sports, business and the entire modern zeitgeist at large glorifies the hustle, the player, the pimp, the freewheeler, the ease of a life with no responsibility. The commitments of community responsibility known by one whose seemingly simple dreams of feeding children are viewed by modernity as burdensome, unattractive and unsexy. The cult of the individual places little genuine value on these pursuits, for such selfless investments place the ego at great risk of total dismemberment making it quite hard indeed to achieve individual goals.
Such inefficient efforts as these require letting go of our personal wants and placing the dreams of others alongside our own, not competitively, but relationally. None of this makes any since within the realm of capitalist America. How could there be more than one winner?! So, “You’re fired!”, (or to put it a little differently, an inability to #ceasefire) as the CEO so often shouted out to his weakly minions, becomes a statement of strength, a willingness to hear other narratives on the other hand, a sign of weakness.
The nation that brands itself in diversity, calling itself, the “Melting Pot” of the world, now regularly excommunicates nations, smears entire ethnicities deemed incapable of doing our bidding. America, or so it seems, can now only be friends with people who think like us and give us what we want. Oh, but so too would we believe that even these so-called “friends” will probably betray us eventually, so off we go to build better security, stronger military, and script up more narratives that refuel feelings of scarcity, otherness, and fear.
I had nearly forgotten what such a plot line does to the nervous system. Whether looking at the political climate of a nation or how its people interact as a society, the stories we tell ourselves have massive impacts on our well-being. In Thailand, there is an overall view that the Thai people are all part of a big family and must look out for each other. Not because anyone is out to get them, but because kindness is important. It makes life more enjoyable. This is evident everywhere we go. My wife, for example, when boarding a bus in Bangkok when she was pregnant with our first child, was immediately assisted by several strangers. With great courtesy they actively made themselves available to serve her.
Asian culture places high value on children, the elderly, families, etc. Nearly everyone here knows how to help such people, and they do. You don’t need to pay people to look after your kids. People enjoy being with babies! They do it for free! Additionally people like to help pregnant mothers, the elderly, etc. and are skilled at knowing how best to help them. To be sure, modernity is changing this, and quickly, but overall, as a new parent, you can notice the differing interests and skill sets immediately. I feel cared for as a parent in Thailand. I do not in the U.S.
Our little eco-village in Chiang Mai operates in a similar way. We really are like a big family. A big, mistake-making, grumpy, tired, dedicated, and deeply loving family. To be clear, living in community is not without hardship. Especially when you aren’t used to doing it. It has been one of the greatest challenges of my life! Unlearning the solo/nuclear approach to living has been a real struggle. One must learn how to live with others just like one must learn how to do anything. Community requires communication, a willingness to share and allow other voices to be heard, an ability to not get your way, etc. It takes patience, dedication, and real effort. I fail regularly. There are things I really dislike about this lifestyle. I am, after all, a child of empire. It’s fucking hard to let go of privilege! Yet, the pros of intimacy far out way the loneliness that comes from having my own private world that tends to my every specific desire.
Our community is filled with many differing personalities, made up of people of differing ages, who speak different languages and come from vastly opposing socio-economic backgrounds. Some members of our community are refugees who have escaped war in neighboring Burma. Some are from affluent families in the West. Some are Buddhist, some Muslim, some Christian, some agnostic. Some identify as male/female, some as “they”. Some eat meat. Some eat only fruit. Some smoke marijuana religiously, some won’t even drink tea. We are diverse, complicated, and always changing. We carry within our village many stories. Our children learn all of them. We all do. All at once and all together. Because it seems the only way to move away from ignorance and fear, from the illusion of separation that makes us feel angry and alone is by diving head first into the wild, multi-cultural chaos of life itself, as it happens.
For a person who comes from a linearly thinking background like me, this approach to living and learning results in borderline madness at times, as preconceived notions of the way things are, are consistently challenged. Turns out there are other truths, multiple truths coexisting at the same time! Swirling about all around us are myriad valid narratives, mythologies and even gods! A single person may have many different places of origin from whence they come and no one’s retelling of any tale is ever entirely accurate. So, laughter is more necessary here than fact checking. We sing a lot. We wear ourselves out in the gardens and in the rice fields tending to our food together. We don’t have time to bicker over who is right and wrong. We rest well. As aggravating as it is to schools of modernity who love to latch on to systems and compartmentalize structures there simply is no “method” to how to learn in this messy, meandering soup of village unfolding. All we can do is collectively leap forth into its uncertain, unanswerable riddles, again and again and again, and be humble, shed, feed, remain open, release, shed again, receive and….let go.
The world is changing. There is no stopping this. And, thank the gods! For our inability to find awe within chaos and chance is a profound reflection of how poor our educations have become. If education teaches us nothing else, it ought teach us how to be courageous when encountering change and uncertainty. Yet, as several generations of uninitiated adults are now thrust into the world to “solve” our problems, graduates of institutions whose entire indoctrination unfolded within concrete classrooms void of windows or bugs, with no semblance of the natural world in sight other than maybe a potted plant or two, little chaos to be seen but lots of seeming control portrayed, it should come as no surprise then that few among us are comfortable in addressing life’s most basic and constant of truths: things change. And change, among other things, requires a letting go. We cannot change if we are not willing to let go…
So, how then do we sprout an ability to ask the direst of all questions, “What needs to be shed in order for new growth to sprout?” What if the thing that needs to be shed is…everything?
*Pentheus being torn apart by Agave and Ino, Vase painting of Euripides’ The Bacchae
…
Our attachment to worn-out views is killing us. And killing children too. Fully grown children who are well outside the womb. And their mothers. And their fathers. And our spirits. Modernity’s fatalistic views are preventing many of us from reacting properly. We are growing numb when we need to be growing tender. We are growing additional layers of thick skin when what we need now is to shed the already thick walls around us to reveal our more sensitive, fertile bodies, the ones capable of feeling, creativity, and love.
As so many great Myths reveal, we need to be disembodied. Even the Christ had to die before he was able to be reborn. We need to be re-minded that none of this is about us. Such a foreign notion in these selfish times. So attached we have become to our little stories, our opinions, and bloodlines. We have forgotten that all of us inter-are, that outside the windowless classrooms, corporate towers, air-conditioned, fossil fuel guzzling cars and energy sucking oceanside wellness retreat centers is a gnarling, twisted, decomposing underworld that is the very cause of all life itself. Yet, out of sight and out of mind, we grow forgetful. And the lords of this holy undergrowth grow resentful. We exist now only because of the decaying change of life’s inevitable passings. Because of the generosity of those who came before us.
It wasn’t that long ago when we all knew this truth deeply. We bowed to this truth and it served as the foundation for all our educations and from this knowing real cultures thrived, not the kind of bland, mediocre corporate “culture” people seem to aspire to today, but the unfathomably beautiful, life-affirming, and yes, death-affirming cultures that taught children how to grow into good adults capable of caring for the young, for the aged, for the land, for the water, for the air, for the dying, for the unseen, for the forgotten, For The Wild. Such teachings must be embodied, not intellectualized, politicized, or over psychologized, but lived into. And this cannot happen unless education is made elemental, mythical, and animate. And living, you guessed it…is dying.
May the bodies and songs and foods and dreams and hopes and sorrows and yearnings and struggles and laughter and all the little details of what therein lies between experienced by all those who have been needlessly killed in the madness unfolding in Gaza/Israel be composted into good soil and kept alive in new ways. May there loss not be in vain, but allow for the rise of a time of hope.
#ceasefire
The Suns Gonna Melt Your Gun. Written and Performed by Prehistoric Delinquent and the Relative Minors.
#maypeaceprevailonearth
I will have to take it in bouts but thank you for this! I’ve recently found refuge in classic literature ✨