Mowed Lawns and Bald Vaginas

Can Zombie Ants save us from modernity's peculiar perception of beauty?

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If you could kindly tap the ❤️ at the top or bottom of this newsletter it will make it easier for other people to find this publication. Ahéhee'! བཀའ་དྲིན་ཆེ།! 謝謝! Thank you! ขอบคุณ! شكرا ! תודה! Спасибо! धन्यवाद! Merci y Muchisimas gracias!

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A flood of ideas gushed over me this week when I began asking Source for what to deliver. These times are so strange, so monstrously misguided and off course that there really is no excuse for any artist to ever encounter “writers block”. There is so much to write about! We should all be artists by now! It’s dizzyingly easy to find fodder for inspiration in this post apocalyptic circus! I remember as a youth, growing up in the 90’s in a lovely, safe neighborhood in Springfield, Illinois, lamenting that the time I lived in was so boring. How I longed to have lived in more exciting times, like the 60’s perhaps. Well, as they say, careful what you ask for…

I considered writing this week about the madness continuing to unfold in Gaza, the deep mythical human truths revealing themselves in real time that remind us all yet again that, if the wounds of the tormented ones are not properly healed than the tormented ones becomes the tormentors. I considered trying to make some dark humor out of the grotesquely appropriate first official painted portrait of King Charles III since his coronation that was recently unveiled at Buckingham Palace that accurately portrays the monarch as though he was literally comprised of the blood of countless humans whose land, bodies and life-ways had be stolen and destroyed by his very bloodline. I toyed too with the idea of going deeper into the topic of modern “education”, for but one brief newsletter on such a vast topic, like the one sent to you a couple weeks ago, is rather silly (*stay tuned dear readers, a book on this subject is in fact in the works. Stay tuned!). In the end however, the story that resurfaced the most as I gazed out the window of these dreamy transitory times was not so much reflecting what is going on but what is not going on.

Something very central to life seems to have quietly drifted elsewhere while we were busy being entertained and complaining. Something very troubling is happening globally now that, curiously enough, appears not to be noticed by most. While we distract our precious human rebirth with sports, social media, gossip, war and rumors of war, Beauty itself seems to be sneaking away. And who can blame Her? Why would such an intelligent and divine lover, ignored and betrayed for centuries, choose to remain? As humans mindlessly consume the dream of empire, wandering yet further from the shores of Nature, of any semblance of true belonging, that which we once viewed as magnificent, sacred and worthy of devotion is now understood to be dirty, repulsive, and strange.

Nature is perfect. Just as She is. She exudes a limitless creativity that is incomparable and beyond words. Able to adapt to any situation. Able to give and able to take away. Able to induce wanderlust, identity, purpose, awe or sheer, blood curdling terror and overwhelm. It is in fact She who is in charge, not us. One need only visit the ancient metropolis’ of the world now reclaimed by the jungle to be reminded of this inescapable, eternal Law. Our ancient selves knew this so deeply that the very languages we spoke were founded in a holy awareness that resulted in magical speech that required all thoughts to pay homage to this life-serving Truth. Wilderness, and by extension all things in their natural state, was seen as holy and beautiful in a way that for many was inconceivable. As such, countless religions surfaced where from within elaborate rituals were formed to bridge the gap between the simple magic of humans and the tremble-inducing beauty of The Wild.

Unmanicured. Chaotic and sensual. Irreverent, budding Life. Her dense impenetrable dark green mystery. Her intoxicating smell and ever-oozing, life-giving juices. Untamed, untrimmed rivers filled with hope, ensconced by voluptuous peaks and smooth valleys hiding secret lands only accessible to those willing to know Her most sacred stories, to live and die by them, making life and our meeting with it, an eternal echo of beautiful law.

Yet something terrible happened. Something so sad that it resulted in us no longer being able to but even recognize beauty, much less understand Her. And soon we transformed into the senseless beings most in the so-called “civilized” world are today, amnesiacs who prefer convenience over dancing, pornography over romance and time-honored courting. Paved roads, Under Armor T-shirts, fast food, chemical fragrances, mowed lawns and bald vaginas over elegant story-filled, hand-spun robes, meandering forest paths only fit for horses hooves, ritually grown foods, forbidden landscapes and the moist, erotic forest of a females secret garden.

Nowadays everything looks the same. Every town from Portland to Bangkok has a hipster barbershop with a taxidermic deer on the wall and a cool bro wearing a white t-shirt and tight jeans ready to give you a fade and a beard trim. GMO corn covers nearly every mountain and valley. Starbucks is just as present in so-called “communist” countries as in the capitalist themed ones. Music is essentially the same universally too. It doesn’t matter if it’s K-Pop or Taylor Swift, everyone is wearing the same clothes, dancing the same twerky dance, hypnotized by the same boring drug of choice that was force fed us all by the all holy algorithm: modernity.

And what does beauty look like to modernity? In a word, unnatural. Nothing about modernity is natural. Processed foods, synthetic fibers, electronic beats. Even war is largely played out like a video game, with drones and myriad other Nature-crushing technologies. Far removed from the natural intactness we once knew, the very things that for the majority of our human history provided us with joy, inspiration, courage, purpose, Story, adventure, all dreams and sacred longings, our very survival, have now become so removed from our daily lives that most among us no longer even recognize Her. And when we do see Her, we are embarrassed, frightened and even disgusted.

So we mow her down. We burn her undergrowth. We shave off all her hair, forcing her to bend to our will and when this still doesn’t fill the self inflicted hole in our soul, we create AI programs to construct for us parallel digital universes, fantasy realms filled with forever young, cartoon-like nymphs to beckon submissively to all our misplaced yearnings to be loved. But none of this is love. This is the final chapter in a long journey away from Source that ends with not only an atrophied ability to remember how to grow food for ones self or to be able to hold a conversation well with a stranger or play but one song on a hand made instrument, or cook a meal or cry when a baby is bombed, or to feel, well, to feel anything at all… dear beloved siblings of the world… it ends with the lonely, disembodied, fully disintegrated ability to see Beauty when She is standing right in front of our face, and us, alone in our fancy, unnaturally clean, air-conditioned living rooms, genuinely attracted now to the artificial.

Strip malls. Suburbs. Parking lots. Porn. Dollar marts. Drive throughs. Botox. Gucci. iPhones. Vape pens. Headphones. Tesla. Los Angeles. Aspen. Shanghai. Dubai. Cheap flights. Gasoline. Drone technology. Automobiles. Vaccines. Hamburger Helper. Papa Johns. Throw away cups. Plastic bags. RoundUp-Ready. KFC. The Republican Party. The Democratic Party. Mega-Churches and Club Med. Full Moon Parties on Ko Pha-ngan. Industrial Farming. “Land management”. Wal-Mart groceries. Public Education. Law and Order. Justice. Science. Industry. War. Apathy. Laser hair removal. Mowed lawns and little bushes trimmed to look like elephants. Facebook. Tik-Tok. Amazon. X.

Beauty, my dear friends, is another thing altogether. We have been conditioned by all kinds of strange stories to believe that up is down and right is left. Now so many of us buy into modernity’s silly myths that we are beginning to genuinely be attracted to the unreal. Elders, those heroic beings who have weathered so many of life’s vicious storms, hunched over like an aging mountain and covered in wrinkles like rivulets of the Grand Canyon were once viewed as living encyclopedias, their decaying body not seen as broken but as beautiful evidence of a life fully lived, a highly sought after badge-of-honor. In a natural state, those who carry wisdom are, naturally, revered, not shunned, not feared and sent away. But with few opportunities nowadays to interact directly with anything in its pure, authentic form, our ability to recognize natural beauty is fading.

We don’t feel that any of this is strange. Many don’t feel anything at all. And those who do are considered to be “depressed” and encouraged to seek help from experts to help them get back to “normal”. A very curious cycle indeed. Pressured into normalizing the insane, our reaction to what we ought be attracted to is now one of aversion. What we ought find aversion from, we are attracted to. Disoriented, our senses dead, we believe what we are sold. We honor the unhonorable and barely even recognize true brilliance when it passes our way. We arrest those who speak truth and ignore entirely those who miraculously manage to hold on to the natural ways, only calling on them when its time for an olympic opening ceremony or some other showcase of illusion.

We passively go along with the faulty plan long enough until eventually, we find it to be true. Fast food starts to taste good. Genetically modified corn doesn’t make us sick anymore. MSG doesn’t make our mouth hurt. An expressionless woman who has starved herself, covered her face with chemicals and draped her body in threads sourced from unknown origins is considered sexy. Land that has been deforested and covered in thousands of little ticky-tacky boxes is considered to be an appealing “place” for a good “home”. A man who is uncomfortable around others, incapable of being actively courteous who spends his entire life chain smoking bad tobacco in a shadowy corner of reality is deemed handsome and mysterious. The only rite-of-passage offered to young people is a “dance” held in a high-school gymnasium followed by getting drunk, losing their virginity and passing out. We hire professional photographers to document the occasion and then proudly send them off to seek “higher education”. (I won’t go into the absurdity of the modern university, the courageous youth occupying campuses worldwide are doing a mighty fine job of painting the picture.)

As humans, we adapt. If we live close to water, we learn to swim well. If we live in cold climates, our skins grows thick. Our capacity to learn new skills and even grow entirely new capabilities is remarkable. Yet eventually, if what we are adapting to is unreal, we cease being real too and slowly we become something else altogether.

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Bayo Akomolafe asks us to consider the warning posed to us by Zombie Ants:

“In a 'death spiral' (otherwise called 'ant milling'), ants seemingly become fixated in a lethal cycle of sorts. Entomologists believe that some kind of pheromonic accident occurs when the cartographical chemical loops on itself, compelling the ants to keep going round and round, probably intensifying their pacing in the hopes of arriving home.

But they rarely do. If you were an ant, it would be very difficult to shake yourself free from the trance of a death spiral. On the other hand, it would be dangerously easy - it seems - to believe that the next unrelenting step would bring you closer home. In most death spirals observed, the ants march in their crazed continuity, sometimes for days, come rain or sunshine, and then die out of exhaustion, the hopes for a safe arrival lingering over their little bodies like pheromonic ghosts unsure of where to go.

The ant's death spiral is a multi-species phenomenon, involving human onlookers and their speculations about ant society. Who knows how it comes to be that ants seemingly march in a circle - sometimes as large as a football stadium or as small as could fit on an office table - and then die afterwards? It's impossible to say for sure what is happening. And yet, we would be remiss if we didn't heed the ancient warning to learn from ants.

What do death spirals tell us about the constancy of the modern quest for solutions to critical civilization-baring problems and the subsequent realizations that these applications often retain the logic of the problem, perhaps even fortifying the conditions that led to the issue in the first place? 

Perhaps we can begin to speak about 'anthro-milling', not just ant milling: the enlistment of expertise and human agency in territorial patterns of repetition. A trance that whispers we'll be home - if only we persist in what we already know.

Because one theoretical way an ant can break out of its trance is if it became infected by a fungus, like ophiocordyceps unilateralis - the zombie-ant fungus. Once infected, an ant breaks away from holding patterns and strays, getting lost in the forest, far away from incarcerating concepts of arrival and the anxieties about identity. Somewhere mandible-deep in the underside of a leaf, the zombie-ant becomes an art-form for fungal sporulation - no longer ant nor fungus, but now a curious living-dying betweenness that produces new kinds of worlds.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for us - citizens gestating in modern demise - to think along with the monstrous, to think along with the edges, to map out new realities.”

I have a friend visiting me now from Nepal. He recently went traveling throughout Rajasthan and several tribal regions of Pakistan where the divine poetry of people like Kabir is still widely expressed through well preserved oral traditions. These traditions, too often unrecognized by mainstream “education” and “culture”, tell of the need to marry the mystery, to wander away from the known. It is good that in overlooked corners of this monocultured world, still kept alive like seeds preserved in hand made jars are ecstatic rhythms and wild dances that, when the right conditions come together remind us of why we are here.

We are here to make beauty, in honor of Her.

As she is,

Wild, and free.

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#maypeaceprevailonearth