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Abominable Candy Box

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I don’t have very many dreams any more – by which I mean stream-of-consciousness random-association imagery. My dreams are normally “visions” – conversations with other personalities that have a purpose and coherent outcome.

So this one took me by surprise.

It’s the end of the world. You know – disasters happening everywhere, people cowering in fear, bizarre monsters running amok. I am floating over the world, trying to figure out how to help. A distant harbor beckons, and when I reach the shore, I see a huge Valentine’s candy box float up out of the ocean. Yes: it’s heart-shaped and says “I Love You” on top.

I hesitate a little, not quite sure what to expect. I mean, it could be Pandora’s box, right? But a little nudge compels me to take off the lid. Yup. It’s full of abominations: slime-covered worms and twisted millipedes and gaping jaws grasping eagerly for sustenance.

The voices of the crowd scream: “Kill them! Kill them all!” But my face twists in befuddlement.

No. No, these too are God’s creatures. We have to learn out how to love them.

B-duh, b-duh, b-duh, b-duh. Dat’s all Folks!

Again?!?

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Jesus once said:

Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to rest.

I go many places, seeking to find a community that will recognize the opportunity that I represent. I’ve been in church meditating on the cross with my eyes closed, and when I open them the pastor said: “Every now and then the elders have to ask someone to stop coming to church, because they sexually harass everyone in the place.” At dance celebrations in five venues, people’s hearts have cried out for healing, and when I clear a space in which they can receive the love that is their right, organizers voice a similar complaint.

I try with the t-shirts. The one I dance in says “Danger: Angel gateways. Please play nicely. They just want to be friends.”

I used to put it this way: our society’s experience of masculine love is so impoverished that when people receive it, they go completely haywire. They have expectations, and project them onto the intentions of the lover. To me, it’s like being raped.

It is convention now to complain that the problems we face are due to “patriarchy,” but few recognize that the divine masculine is no more present in our culture than is the Divine Mother. That female spirituality has been driven out of the cultural limelight is actually an advantage in that regard: they practice their arts quietly in the background. But a man that dares to do the same is rejected and hounded.

Simpler forms of life have a certain clarity in that regard. Knowing that I seek nothing for myself, they flock around me. When a community gets it right, they press inwards, and then ask me to project the pattern outwards into the world. They want every fish, bird, animal, flower and tree to know what it feels like when people surrender their self-seeking and instead offer love. They want to know where it is safe to invest their strength, strength far beyond human strength, strength established from investiture in the earth over billions of years.

That is what I meant by “opportunity”: I am an amplifier pickup. Through that connection, people have the opportunity to make a serious dent in the problems we face. What most choose instead is to say “Go away.”

Trump-Washed

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I caught a little piece of an Oliver Stone interview last night. He was saying that after thirteen years of watching Trump be decisive and commanding on The Apprentice, very few except the politically sophisticated would be able to perceive the empty vacuum at the heart of his persona. Of course, about the time of the Access Hollywood recording, producers at The Apprentice let it be known that they had to work really hard to maintain that image. Trump was abusive during scenes, and arbitrary in his decisions. One of the challenges was building a back-story that justified his actions.

Coupled with this is the dominance of Fox News in Republican circles. Joy Reid was on with Chris Hayes last night, observing that the reason the Republican base still remains loyal to Trump is because Fox continues to tell them that the Russian interference scandal is nothing worth paying attention to.

Contrast this with Joseph McCarthy, leader of the Red Scare scandals of the 1950s. McCarthy would roll into town, make a bunch of baseless accusations against local politicians, and then leave. The press would publish front-page denouncements of McCarthy’s targets, followed by back-page retractions when the accusations were debunked. Lives were ruined by the asymmetrical publicity.

What undid McCarthy were the televised Congressional hearings. Before the cameras, he was revealed as a manipulative little weasel.

Of course, some among us see Trump in the same way, but his electorate has been conditioned to associate those traits with carefully-scripted moments of glory.

But what about his sons?

It was cathartic to see Donald, Jr. on Fox News last night. He came across as a whiny brat.

Trump, Sr. characterizes the meeting with Russian representatives as “opposition research” that “almost anyone” would pursue. If so, that’s an indictment of our political culture. Trump has long been cozy with organized crime figures, and draws his legal talent from a community of ugly intimidators – men that will not even bother to apply for security clearances that would never be granted. Is this where we have come as a nation? A political culture in which winning by any means possible includes crawling through the gutter with people whose livelihood requires corrupting virtue?

In the early hours this morning, I found myself musing that maybe Comey took the line he did against Clinton in part to create conditions under which that culture would be exposed. I know that it had invaded the FBI itself, where anti-Clinton zealots used Breitbart publications to motivate a criminal investigation of her family. This is a visible case of misuse of agency resources by political operatives, but what if elected officials all across the country are interceding in investigations to protect criminals that have contributed to the destruction of other candidates?

I personally don’t find that inconceivable.

J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI as long as he did because he had files full of the dirty secrets that elected officials wished to keep hidden. Could it be that organized crime has its own database at this point, and is securing its influence by blackmailing the political class? The Russian government – now the most powerful organized crime ring in the world – may not be motivated only by its foreign policy goals to attack our political system. It may also be extending its power through organized crime, and collaborating with U.S. criminals to corrupt not just our political class, but our entire culture.

Smoking Dope

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Matthew Walther at The Week argues that no smoking gun has been found to support the claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in its interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Walther (isn’t that the name of a gun manufacturer?) wanders a little, asserting that when the Clintons fly first-class for their global charity, they reveal their corruption, and so justify ongoing support for the President. I find that argument weakened, however, in that Trump flies in a private jet purchased with funds gained laundering money stolen by Russian kleptocrats.

And as for the central assertion: it’s going to be awfully hard to find a smoking gun in the radioactive crater left by the hydrogen bomb Trump has set off in American foreign policy. As Rachel Maddow has been laying out, Russia has been given everything that it could have asked for. Trump’s craven catering to a murderous tyrant is all the evidence required to prove his unfitness to be our head of state.

Or should that have been “cave-in cratering?”

Little Creatures

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As I progress through the video series at Love Returns, I’m having more and more trouble keeping myself anchored. Time and space, life and death, nature and design: it all winds together more thickly around my mind.

At Dance Tribe on Sunday, I felt disconnected, as though some part of me was missing from the experience – or something else was in control. Half-way through, I focused intently, and found myself thinking about the phytoplankton whose shells are dissolving. While higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide warm the air, causing the most immediate threat to human civilization, they also increase carbolic acid in the oceans. This is bleaching coral reefs and impeding the maturation of phytoplankton.

Phytoplankton are the base of the oceanic food chain, and the greatest source of the oxygen gas that we breathe to fuel our metabolism.

Their message was simple: “We can’t do it any more.”

I fell into a deep-rooted grief that built until I was concerned that it would disrupt the celebration. Taking down my gear from the shelves, I headed for the exit, only to be stopped by these lyrics:

Black lives matter.
Children lives matter.
Police lives matter.
Judge lives matter.

The grief spilled over, then, and I started sobbing, face turned to the heavens. After a time, another man leaned his head into my shoulder. I finally pulled myself together, set my gear down, and went back out on the floor.

It was different. My muscle cells seemed to float as though on an ocean swell. Bones forgotten, it was all about the tissue rising and falling, until I tumbled over onto the floor.

And then the second phase: protective tissues. Lower extremities anchored firmly as though to the ocean floor, my arms and head swayed in the air, fluid, the currents of the air rolling along and around them.

The then the final phase: shells, the calcium accretions that became our bones. Joints and alignments came into focus.

In Psalms, this echo rolls back from the Messiah:

I am less than a worm.

Not less, in that moment, but of and from. They are still inside us, those simple things.

And they are dying.

In the closing circle, we were asked to state our names and offer a word that summarized our experience in the dance. I blurted out my name, but concealed that word that was presented to me.

Destruction.

Crones

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A group of elderly women has been in my orbit for the last ten years, trying to manage my emergence into the world. Every now and then they surface in a concrete manifestation and claim privilege. I tend to sigh, but some of their pronouncements are prejudicial. I’ve decided to sound off against them.

I hate to have to say this, but when all is said and done, I’ll finally be able to do the work that I was meant to do only after the old ladies that seek to preserve order have presided over the complete collapse of human society and the global ecology.

Sometimes things have to change. It’s a delusion for either sex to believe that it can do without the other. Try to have some faith in the integrity of masculine love. You were meant to amplify it, but we can’t express it at all if you’re going to use it to amplify your fears.

And, yes, I do hear your convocations. My input to them is blocked by women that benefit from the status quo, and those of you that have direct access to me have not even begun to ask the right questions. I seem to have been categorized as just another man. What you don’t seem to understand is that my manifestation of those traits – to the degree that I do – is because the more powerful among your sisters have invested enormous energy in projecting such traits onto me.

You might take it as a measure of my strength that I am subduing them without your support.

That is why over the last fifteen years I haven’t pursued any of your romantic arrangements. I have given up on your generation, and my sisters’ generation. The future is closed to you, and I exist only to create that future. I see it – though dimly – through the trusting spirits of your female grandchildren. They do recognize me, and I am doing my best to teach them how to exercise the unique grace that love manifests in them.

We Can’t Say ‘Thanks’ Enough

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Brian Balke's avatareverdeepening

Life is the opportunity to participate in organizing spirit. Our bodies escort them about in clouds, and as we move amongst each other they enter into new relationships. Some of these are wonderful experiences: “Love at first sight” is a good example. Some of them are horrifying: consider the records of the carnival atmosphere at a public lynching.

At the core of our primary personality is a set of spirits that manage our survival. Through the mechanisms of our glands, organs, muscles and nerves, they coordinate the biological functions that allow us to control the world around us, and thus to sustain life. For most of the history of life on earth, this was as far as it went. Innovation in the integration of body and spirit was controlled largely by survival. With humanity, however, the possibilities exploded – almost without check. Using the mechanism of our brain, in each…

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Things Beloved

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ThingsBelovedI went out to Ventura yesterday afternoon for my Bikram Yoga class, and discovered that the Saturday afternoon class had been cancelled for the holiday. A picture in the window of a new second-hand store had caught my eye on the way up Oak Street, so I decided to check out the shops.

At “B on Main” I found two things. The first was a little silly – a ceramic glaze rendering of two mermaids. It’s hanging on the wall right now beside my other feminine objects. The others are objects of power, and they needed some lightening up.

And I found this. The store has a number of these messages, many of them about parenting. It reads like a child’s braggadocio. But my response wasn’t that of a parent. It wasn’t remembrance of my sons’ innocent declarations of affection that caused the lump in my throat or the flash of warmth on my skin.

I don’t buy things until I figure out where I’m going to hang them. Walking up and down Main Street, it occurred to me that this should go on the wall by my pillow. That’s kind of prominent, so it’s been working on me overnight. At first I thought that it was a declaration of my love for the world, and then I realized that it was a list of things that I loved. From there, it was only a short step to realizing that the qualities were not a description of my love, but descriptions of the things.

So now I read it:

I love the sky because it is blue enough to protect us from space, but not so blue that the light doesn’t get through..
I love the moon because it is just far enough away to move the ocean tides.
I love the sun for it is just warm enough for life to survive.
I love kites because they are the size for a child to fly.
I love the ocean because sometimes it is shallow enough to swim in, but other times deep enough to keep secrets.
I love trees because they are tall enough to give us shade.

And that is how I love all of you, dear readers. I love you for what you are.