The Phoenix

The Phoenix speaks to me through signs and happenstance—

like all good spirits do—through strangers’ words in passing,

increasing frequent emblems sidling through my glance.

“Do you really want to burn?” he asked, out-gassing

in a moment when my ego-mountain reared and rolled,

reminding me how much I still do care when former friends

judge and criticize my motives—so I’m told,

friends I’d have thought would know my heart and share my ends. 

But my ego-mountain, says the Phoenix, is volcanic,

filled with fire, destined, like Saint Hel’n, to blow her top.

Not much help, when my inner Pleaser starts to panic,

and shame informs me that my rhymescheme has to stop—

It’s not your business, says he, what others think 

of you, you must know this first, 

before any talk of death, rebirth or fire.

Your ego-mountain is a molehill, little man,

though crucial (like a cross), to understand desire,

to know who you are NOT, with all the masks you hold

before your soul to shape and mold perceptions rather

than let your spark be seen for what it is—

a singularity, infinitely hot and dense

from which escapes no light or sense

that prods each nodding ending to begin

and warms awaiting universes poised within.

“Do you really want to burn?” he says again.

“Once burnt, you cannot live in blissful ignorance,

cannot ignore the duty, debt or ken.

The path of fire is no easy, lazy dance.”

The question hangs like dawn and greets my everyday,

even as I reassemble sense and rhymescheme,

that Phoenix animates each step along my Way,

ignites whatever else it is that I may dream.

On Labor Unions, Militias, and Big Govern-business

Maybe I’m missing something.  It could be that I simply don’t understand, in a comprehensive way, the complex relations between government and commerce, between the ethics of the personal human conscience and the inhibitions enforced by legal mandate.  But even so, I see some patterns that I can’t help but point out.

For example, I often find myself, as a natural converser with people, meandering into conversations about politics, the economy, regulation, and so forth.  Such conversations are, of course, treacherous territory in modern America.  I was raised largely by Texans and Southerners and was often told never to talk about religion or politics.  Apparently those subjects are too emotionally charged to be included in genteel discourse.  But those particular subjects happen to be my very favorite, so they always seem to come up when I’m around.  Of course, in broaching those topics, especially politics, and especially insofar as politics relates to the economy, one immediately runs the risk of being branded either with the ominous epithet “Liberal,” or still more ominous “Conservative.”  Generally, I cheerfully run the risk and talk to people, and emotions get charged, and then I get to practice my conflict resolution skills, another hobby of mine.

Here’s the example I was making: When I do talk politics and economy with people, I often find that those who brand themselves “Conservative” hold great contempt for both labor unions and the government regulation of trade, indoctrinated into those opinions, I think, largely by that Great American and Friend of Freedom Rupert Murdoch.

And here’s where I scratch my head.  When I think about free market capitalism, which I’ve spent a modest amount of time doing, I humbly submit, it seems to me very akin to anarchy.  In Wealth of Nations, that great anarchist Adam Smith argues that it is simply the nature of competition that, in the end, the people will vote with their pocketbooks and the businesses that best supply the community’s needs will be the ones that prevail.  As long as government keeps its dirty hands out of it, that is.  It’s an interesting argument, and the Industrial Revolution has provided us with ample evidence for exactly how often the unhampered wealthy have been forced by competition to act in the best interests of the community.  (Only slightly less often than unhampered dictators have, which is to say, almost never).  And even more to the point, when I hear people argue that free market capitalism will take care of itself if the damned Big Government just quit regulating and let it do its Thing, I usually ask this question:  Do you believe in Anarchy too?  Do you believe that, if there were no laws, people would eventually do the right thing on their own?  That the powerful would never take advantage of the less powerful for their own gain?  I don’t often get an affirmation of that one.  Ironically, most anarchists I know are also dead opposed to free market capitalism.  Go figure.

Here’s another thing that I find befuddling.  A lot of zealots in the Church of Rupert Murdoch these days have been singing rabid hymns against the labor unions.  Again, maybe I’m just confused and don’t really understand these relationships, but it seems to me that if government regulation of trade is objectionable, that it places too much power and too many resources in the hands of a government that the Common Folk don’t have a lot of control over, then somebody needs to be around to keep hounding the big corporations.  Somebody needs to be organized enough to be investigating the board room decisions and clandestine behaviors of the big businesses that have such an enormous impact on the world.  If unions shouldn’t do this, and government shouldn’t do this, then who?  The clever, well-informed and level-headed American consumer?

More and more I think of big business like government.  In fact, I think that, in every real sense, the massive multinational corporations that drive our debt-based, fractional-banking, petroleum-dependent Cardhouse Economy hold most of the political power in the world.  As we saw with the Bailout in 2008, expecting the government to regulate unethical business practices is like expecting a standing army to keep an eye on the weapons manufacturing business, in case it gets too extravagant.  And if government regulation of business is akin to a standing army, then I think labor unions are kind of akin to militia groups.

Very few people these days really pay much attention to the history of the conversations around standing armies in this country.  In fact, very few people even know that the U.S never had a standing army at all until after World War 2.  President James Madison considered a standing army one of the greatest threats to liberty.  “The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home…The armies kept up under the pretext of defending have enslaved the people.”  And so it was throughout much of the first 200 years of this country’s history that the arguments against maintaining a standing army always prevailed.  That is, of course, why the Second Amendment was so important as well.  A standing army, argued the Framers, allowed a small number of people to command too much brute force.  Even through World War 1, this argument was maintained, and when the nation’s leaders decided to go to war, they drafted and trained troops then.

Hitler changed all of that, of course, that rascal.  He and Mr. Hirohito and Il Duce all made having an “ever-vigilant” standing army look like a good idea, which the weapons manufacturers naturally encouraged.  Standing army plus private arms industry equals lots of sales on guns and tanks and other fun toys.  But even as Eisenhower, on his way out of the White House door commented on the necessity of having a “defense establishment of vast proportions,” he also said famously, “we must not fail to understand its grave implications.”  Thus did he coin the term “Military Industrial Complex,” and thus did big business and government start sleeping together with a standing army as the bedsprings.  Sure, you could go back further than that to Woodrow Wilson and the Federal Reserve Act, or to J.P Morgan before that, but my point is, the squeaky bed of the Military-Industrial Complex reveals a much deeper sort of affair

That is to say, if Big Business is in bed with Big Government, then labor unions are one of the last protections that workers have.  Sure, we need to keep an eye on the ways that Unions have become like big Businesses themselves.  And sure, we need to be vigilant about those unions, especially the public employee unions, having too much influence in government spending.  But the American public needs to be vigilant about everything right now, and this vacuous idea that somehow big business is more trustworthy to keep the public’s best interests in mind than labor unions or elected officials is pretty preposterous to me.

And finally, I want to know what the hell happened since the last McCarthy-era Red Scare that made capitalism synonymous with democracy, when the international business conglomerates that dominate trade are looking more like empires than ever.  There seems to be a concerted effort to keep these kinds of questions out of our schools, out of our public debates, and even out of newspapers with any kind of circulation.  Am I really missing something?  

Maybe it's intelligent conversation...

Uncomfortable Truth: We Live in a Culture of Violence

It’s time we face some uncomfortable truths.  Last Friday, as the news poured in about Sandy Hook, I was teaching my peace studies class with my high-schoolers.  It’s a class which investigates the roots of violence and war on personal, as well as international levels (if that doesn’t sound important to you this week, I’ve got some questions for you.)  When I heard that those gunned down were largely 1^st graders, I lost it.  I’m a dad.  All children are my children.  And while those with the nation-wide microphones begin clamoring for answers and causes, responses and policies, oversimplifying the problem to gun control, or mental illness, I say we need to look with broader eyes at our culture.

In America, we have the blissful luxury of pretending we’re somehow different from the rest of the world.  Call it American exceptionalism if you like, the notion that somehow we don’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else; call it a sort of national Peter Pan Syndrome; or perhaps you prefer Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra—the idea that our simulations of reality have more meaning than reality itself. (Think “reality TV”).  Whatever we call it, it’s time we face some uncomfortable truths. 

TRUTH:  Children die.  Around the world, kids get gunned down every day.  They get killed during drone attacks on wedding parties in Pakistan.  They get hit by Israeli airstrikes taking out Palestinian batteries that were set up in schools.  They get forced at gunpoint to shoot family members to make them child soldiers.  It’s brutal, it sucks, and most Americans, if they hear about these things at all, might think “that’s brutal and it sucks,” but don’t take the time to put themselves in the place of those parents, or get pictures of the children’s faces to make it real.  And if we can ignore that reality, we will, because it’s brutal and it sucks.

TRUTH:  Our culture is obsessed with violence.  Consider cage matches, Call of Duty, snuff footage on the internet, a century-long foreign policy that thinks it appropriate to bully other countries with military force into doing what we want them to.  We are a nation of children with guns, given only the tool and driven by a foolish fuse to use it for a powder-flash of power that ignores the hour of consequence.  People like this guy in Newtown, or that guy in Aurora, or those boys at Columbine, or this kid over in Thurston (I won’t say their names)—they’re just acting out a national drama.  Feeling powerless, they’re trying to find power in the only way our culture appears to respect.  And until we can work on consciously evolving our cultural definition of power, we’re stuck in what Gandhi called the “law of the brute.”

TRUTH:  It’s a male thing.  The simple fact is that it’s not women who do these things.  Sure, we occasionally see a Squeaky Fromm or a Nannie Doss, but overwhelmingly it’s men who respond to conflict with brute force, who launch the missiles or pick up the assault rifles and go for a shooting spree.  As a man, I refuse to believe that there’s something inherently violent about testosterone, though I could be fooling myself.  I do, however, think we’re facing an epic crisis in masculinity.  If we cannot figure out, as men, how to evolve past that “meet you at the flag pole after school with our patriot missiles,” mentality, then putting an armed security guard at the door of every school in America will not prevent the next Sandy Hook.  The problem is not a lack of adequate defenses.  It’s a lack of adequate consciousness.

I wish I had better answers—I wish I had any answers.   Speaking as someone who has spent the last ten years trying to create educational models that reduce violence and teach kids peaceful ways of being, all I have are suggestions:

1)      Pay attention to how you speak to other people—especially your kids.  Do you use your words to dominate, manipulate or belittle?

2)      Pay attention to what you and your kids watch on TV or play on their Xboxes.  There are clear relationships between violent video games, saturation of violent images and a desensitization to violence in life.  What entertains us reveals a lot about what’s going on inside of us.

3)      Pay attention to how we create culture.  About 75% of our State standards for teaching history in high school highlight some war or another.  Is this because war really is the dominant force in history or because that’s what we’re taught to focus on?  Eisenhower didn’t coin the term “military-industrial complex” to be cute.

You might notice that all three of these suggestions start with paying attention.  If human beings really are conscious creatures, which I sometimes doubt when cynicism gets the better of me, then we are responsible for living and developing consciously.   That’s why I work in education, which is not about teaching Stuff, but in helping kids figure out how to ask the right questions.  And asking the right questions invariably requires us to face uncomfortable truths.

Flow

How often do angelic spirits speak through the mouths of passing strangers?  How often does the very wisdom we seek spill off the tongue of some random we pause to trade casual words with?  

Today I spoke with a stranger at the Y, who asked about my Aikido weapons, and after a brief exchange about Aikdo’s principles, harmony and energy, we quickly launched into the metaphysics of purpose.  Here was a sixty year-old man, living in “a broken down van,” who had given up a job at a nursing home because it was “oppressive.”  Having studied yoga and herbalism and alchemy for years, he was struggling to find his path.  “Where is the place for me in this world?’ he asked.  “How can I share my gifts and still make a living?”

Dazed after a long and strenuous day, I found myself in a bit of a trance, speaking to him of bliss.  “Money is simply a form of currency,” I told him, “of energy.  When we are living out our truth, living our bliss, we keep the energy of life flowing and we are provided for.  We have to trust that.”  I spoke passionately and firmly, and I can’t be sure the words were mine.  

He got excited, and said: “Yes that’s it!  Maybe what’s holding me back is that I’ve only put one foot in that flow, and I just need to put both feet in.”

“Leap, they say, and the net will appear.”

His smile was radiant.  “Thanks for the reminder!”

And yet it was he who reminded me.

It never ceases to amaze me how many things come out of my own mouth that I struggle to hear.  If someone else had spoken those very words to me in that moment, I would have said "thanks for the reminder!" and smiled radiantly.  How humbling and beautiful to remember that we all carry tiny fragments of the great Wisdom of Consciousness, and often all we have to do is listen to ourselves.

And, of course, stay open to the wise radiance of strangers asking the right questions.

Winter Solstice 2011

It is the Long Night, the heart of Winter, and the remoteness of the sun allows the shadows to rest more heavily on our minds. The shadows that whisper things like “hope is lost,” or, “life sucks,” or simply blur our sight to show the obvious flaws of our friends and loved ones. For countless centuries our ancestors have honored this Long Night with candles, and song, and the dogged love of green things, to remind us that, even when the Dark seems thick enough to pet, there is Light. There are children to be loved and tousled; there is music to be voiced; there is the memory and the anticipation and the presence of Warmth. In this Long Night it occurs to me that, if we can do nothing else, we can always breathe a Thank You: to Love, to Night, and to the forgiving Earth as She slowly swings around the corner and trudges once more toward Spring.

Do you Feel It?

I’ve stopped asking people if they believe in God. I realized, after many awkward negatives, and after even more detached dialogues about the dogmas of tradition, that the question is irrelevant. Or, maybe not irrelevant—it’s just the wrong question. (As we all should know by now, there is some special life-navigational magic in knowing the right questions to ask.). Therefore, the right question is: Do you feel it? It’s really much simpler. It’s perfectly clear to those have, and yet it’s vague enough to set a very different tone on the conversation with those who haven’t—or, at least, those who don’t realize they have. Asking someone what they “believe” in is a lot like asking them what football team they root for, or their favorite musician. At some point, people choose to establish a cognitive framework in their minds as to how the world works, what they like and don’t like about certain systems and songs and cities with football teams. They establish that framework, make it a part of their identity, so that, depending on the elasticity of their personalities, they might feel competition or animosity toward someone with a different team (or band). Belief, though it may be inspired by profound experiences of touching the numinous, is still a mental construct, a philosophy that requires thought and reason and varying degrees of logic. (That is, we all have reasons for believing something, however buried or irrational those reasons might be.) But the profound experience of touching the numinous has nothing to do with mental constructs. It is a feeling. A reality. A truth. Do you believe in trees? Do you believe in mosquitoes? Do you believe in life? For those who have felt that touch, that call, those who have brushed that otherworldly Presence, being asked if they believe in God is like being asked do you believe in trees, or mosquitoes, or life. If, even once, you’ve sat on the rim of a canyon watching the sun set and felt utterly connected to the forces around you, embraced by the sky and rooted in the earth, spoken to by the rest of life teeming around you, there is no Belief that can contain it. If, even once, you’ve felt an overwhelming love and awe at the beauty of a child, or a lover, or the world, no philosophy can adequately describe that. And, truly, when we try to, when we attach too many descriptions or ideas or rules or beliefs to those paradigmatic events in our lives, we have forced them out of their native domain of Spirit and into the rigid realm of the Mind where they cannot live. There is a reason the ancient Jews prohibited speaking the name of God. When we focus on names, or doctrines, or beliefs, we lose the rhythm, lose the thread; we start thinking and stop feeling. And, in the end, God is verb, not a noun; an action, a connection, a feeling. Do you feel it?

Thickening Morning

It is the thickening morning of my life, the heat of the gathering noon
Rippling around my still-smooth shoulders.
Some answers have come, though they always seem to take the form
Of a question, and thank the Mystery for that, for I’ve begun to think there are no answers, only the delicious flavor of the Question, and the journey is the pondering.
A koan in a monastery.
A path without destination.
But in the thickening summer heat, as my years near forty and high noon approaches,
It is the question of power that most preoccupies me.
Not dominion, but the unfolding coursing of life through the veins
And the deepening light of consciousness understanding itself.
The power we find to help others lift themselves out of the darkness
Of imagined powerlessness—this is the thread and the skein that weaves
The great web of life.
And it is life that we most fear.
Often it is the gentle securing line that enables us to believe that
We are safe, that life is safe.
The same nurturing cord of a parent that anchors us prevents us from
Embracing the stormy sea of life and thus robs us of our victory over fear.
For are they not one and the same: truly living and conquering fear?
It is the thickening morning of my conscious journey on this Earth.
My path unwinds before me, my very steps etching a course through a trackless
Terrain, which radiates out around me. It is a path I can measure
only by where I have been, and direction finds itself without meaning.
There is only here. And there are questions to be asked.

In a dream I was told that direction is irrelevant (forward/ inward; up/down).
I know a woman who insists that she never moves backwards,
As if retracing her steps were a hateful admission of error.
But how many of us turn back, if only to look for something
We might have dropped, and instead find something far more precious
we would otherwise have missed?
Life is too mysterious for absolutes, for always and never—which are dogmas
In the end, directions which must change with the forces of Wind and Terrain and
Guidance. And our paths stretch not only ahead, but behind, above, below.
The ultimate power is Attention, up-facing, down-turned.
The direction, of course, is irrelevant.