Shelter

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. - Irish proverb from DailyGood.org

Retracing our Steps

It's becoming more and more clear that we've gone overboard with the perpetual growth/hyperactive model of civilization.   Retracing one's steps is not a bad idea when you've gone astray and see that you're about to go over a cliff.  It's not about going "back to the land." It's not about being a Luddite or nostalgic, it's a practical decision, a strategic decision.  It means that we draw upon the rich heritage of past cultures and present cultures other than our own very "sucessful" Western model of cultural and economic imperialism. 
Our culture tends to view the past as something that we have transcended, as something that we have improved on.  We like to think of all the ways that we have made progress, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But if it means forgetting or rejecting the past to the point that we no longer know who we are or how we got here, then we put ourselves in a very dangerous mental bind.  If to retreat means defeat and failure, if our culture must be the best and only culture, the winner, the greatest country on earth in every possible way, then we limit our ability to adapt.
Remembering who we have been can help us to imagine other paths into the future, to create new ways of life that will not reduce our world into a wasteland, but rather grow its beauty and vitality.

DailyGood

 Life shrinks and expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin

DailyGood: The Recovery of the Sacred, by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD:

Seeking the Manuscript in DC

Mission: to see the Chu Silk Manuscript in the Smithsonian’s Sackler collection.

First call, discovered that I would need an accession number, which I might find at the research library.

Librarian was nice but nervous, self-conscious in that way of high-end librarians.

Found beautiful images of the manuscript in their catalogue:

Three-headed man, twined serpents, the script all vines and flowers

Chris asked me: what is it about?

About the mythical significance of the turning of the year

About the meaning of time and the natural world

About dreams, visions, monsters

About the pleasure we take in our own minds and in silk, writing, painting

About a story we tell ourselves.

In Senator Inouye’s waiting room in the Capital:  animals of the zodiac painted all around the lower edge of the vaulted ceiling.

Animals and spirits are the same thing:  Anima, soul, animism.

The twelve gods of Chu dance through my dreams. 

I proffer my doctorate to propitiate the guardians & on my last day in Washington DC am granted access.

Seeing the manuscript is like meeting the finest edge of a forgotten world.  In the warp and weft of the silk is the wear of its two thousand years  of waiting in the dark.  Pigments have migrated, edges have frayed, dissipated, been lost into nothingness.  I am stunned by the beauty and precision of the calligraphy, how the ink has not faded but must be nearly as clear as the day it was written.  Also by the geography of each character, how much closer these characters seem to speaking of a numinous world.  They are graphs of concepts, not so much linguistic representation, but closer to the grail ­- to a drawing of cosmos in time, space, imagination, intellectual structure.  Each graph is a talisman and a knowing, a recognition of the possible structure of the world.   Each one has been won by a great effort of thought.  Each one is a theory. 

Flight to Albuquerque.   Beneath the airplane the vast landscape of the Mid West slides by.  Endless fields.  It is stunning to think that less than 2% of the population of the US farms these uncountable fields.

Great Conversation

http://www.chrismartenson.com/page/transcript-charles-eisenstein

Generation X represent!

Family Traditions

I'm lucky I only broke my ribs on the right side in 10 places, snapped my collarbone, and collapsed a lung.  It could have been much worse.  I hit the ground at very high speed and from a bit of an altitude after things went suddenly very wrong while riding a young horse this weekend.  It hurt much worse than giving birth, I can tell you that.  I count over the places where I might have decided differently and avoided the experience.  And yet this too is what it is all about, my life.  My parents and I compare notes on broken collarbone, broken rib experiences. My mother took a big spill chasing wild goats at South Point when I was about five. My father got bucked off his big red half-draft mare (the ranch's all-time top bone-breaker) and went back to work in two days, back to roping cattle two weeks later.  He's unbelievably tough, but he didn't break as many bones as me.

Warhorse

It is dusk and rains come across the Ka'u Desert.  The horses stand at the gate, hoping I will open it onto the new pasture, but they must wait.  This morning I went to see if the old gray mare, my father's "warhorse" in former days, had passed.  I hoped so.  She had fallen and could not get up.  Her time had come, but she had lingered, lying there under the sky.  I had put my hand on the gun to put her down, to put her out of her misery, there on the ground.  But a voice inside me had said no, that she would find her own way to the other side. Strong-willed horse, you were never afraid.
When I told my mother, who had fed her daily for the last three or four years and who could not bear to see her dying, that she had indeed gone, she said: "So she made the leap."
"Yes," I said.