House of Rain
when this version of the world is done

You built cities on a hill,
taller and taller;
you became the elite,
called us commoners. 

Your power is how fast
you can pass a stone,
shell necklace, electron.
Your worth is dependent

on trends, trade routes. Without water
you are a wisp on the wind.
Every crack of your whip ties you down
but we're just passing through.

Your reservation lines
fade on paper, hold only bones.
We're not artifacts, objects
in a glossary of ancient terms.

We are the spiral journey,
a migration. Returning
to the inverted mountain
we follow the pearl words

of water dripping in a cave.
When your pipes and wires are dust
we'll be standing on the shore
of a great interior lake.

—Stewart S. Warren

City of Rocks near Silver City, N. Mex.

 
City of Rocks 

Venus rises, Mercury follows.
The Dipper has set, emptied,
risen again. I rise
like red iron to the surface; 

have risen like the morning star
over soft pyramids of hills
and great swells of grasslands;
risen in the heart of wood burning,

through oak leaf starlet clusters,
sunlight speaking to rock.
In the first faint color of sky
coyote families crack into arias,

sing fallen rabbits back to heaven.
I'm at home here—pray and predator—
god godding into another blue
fire-edged, wild eyed day.

—Stewart S. Warren

Where are my slaves now?, you ask.  In front of the TV, of course, like good little children.

Is it really any surprise that a country whose economy was founded, funded and maintained on the capture, extortion and sale of human beings finds itself feeding on its own children?  It takes a lot of resources to feed the Maw; it takes a lot of batteries in series to run the machine. Copper Top, the nickname derived from Duracell Corporation and given to humans harvested for their bioelectrical energy in the movie The Matrix describes, not a futuristic dystopia, but the current psychic bondage and exploitation of people as an energy source in relationship to the Media Maw. 

Every time we participate in even the most benign interviews and surveys, many veiled thinly as quizzes (Are you a Pepsi Girl or a Sprite Girl?) we are telling the Maw exactly where to put the electrodes.  As Leonard Cohen said, “Old Black Joe is still pickin’ cotton for your ribbons and your bows.”  And now we might add, “And your babies give blood in the fields of the mall.”

So what’s the problem with exploiting the undeveloped sexuality of 9 year old girls, or manipulating the testosterone of adolescent boys by normalizing violence in TV wrestling?  They’re free to choose aren’t they?  Never mind.

If we waste our time with questions like, "Who’s to blame?," we continue to squander our energy on the Us and Them Game—just more fuel for the Maw, more postponement.  But schemes like trying to get everyone to quit buying gas next Tuesday or boycotting running shoes are equally ineffective.  A revolution based on one mind at a time, however, makes much more sense when we begin to experience the ground of being from whence we emerge and our potential for joy as we god our way into existence.  One mind, indeed.

Just pose the question to yourself and notice the mechanism of the mind reel as it throws up reason after reason why that would be out of the question, essentially defending why slavery is preferable to the un-experienced mystery of freedom.  And yet, and still, I invite you...

—treedog
 

Levitated.net contains visual poetry and science fun narrated in an object oriented graphic environment.  These pages are attempting to fasten a usable structure around a continually evolving computational ecology, so that it may be observed and enjoyed by participants of the network.

The Good Resting Mighty Place

Fine thinking loves
to learn dear thoughts.
Love is that resting place!
Soft mind that gives interest
to mighty sweet thoughts,
freeing the sleepy,
giving that good feeling.
Finding the answer will dearly
give the listener beauty.
Good that gives an understanding heart.
Fine thinking gives the sweet answers.
 

        --Marshall Ball (website here)                 

"In the instant of simply opening you experience that whatever you were struggling with is no longer there.  True openness reveals that the struggle – the problem, the bogeyman, the wound – is actually nonexistent.

The story is not transformed by openness; it is revealed to be actually nonexistent. The only thing that holds the story in place is the resistance to opening.

What remains, when what was feared or fought with disappears, is the openness of existence itself – the truth in the center of your own heart."

--Gangaji  (website here)

 

 

 

play a short video talk by Gangaji

Integral Enlightenment: Spiritual Practice for an Evolving World
The Great Integral Awakening Audio Downloads page
 

Calumet Says…

excerpt from The Song of It: A Travelogue of Norteño (see Books)

Of all the beautiful forms, grand and intricate, that the New Mexican landscape expresses there is one in which I always feel known and profoundly free, that of the grasslands of the Eastern Slope.  As the mural of Calumet on the Grand Avenue Building in Las Vegas reports, this is the place “Where The Great Plains Meet The Mighty Rockies.”  Perhaps it’s here at the entry to Norteño that the first two lessons are made so clear:  You must let yourself be small in order to enter, and, The land will choose what it wants to teach you, and when. 

The Eastern Slope has that trick of perspective that lets you look out and think you’re seeing it all in one sweeping eyeful—then something shifts: the light, the time of day, the wind, the cows, whatever, and it begins all over again.  Because last time you looked you were on that hill a quarter mile west, and it was that time of year, and it was that sky, and that thought was in your head, and as vast and complex as it all is, it begins to come to you that the fact of your standing there and what’s in your heart at the moment is having an effect on everything else.  It’s hard to form a solid thought around all this, and it’s not something to share with just everyone, but never the less, there’s a felt sense that it’s right, and it’s knowable, and it’s bigger than anyone ever let on.

—treedog