Categories
General

21 Celli, Muktichakra 0 | A New Calendar For A New Life

I started this blog as a way to cope with the turmoil of COVID, going so far as to create a calendar to reflect the schism in time that I felt after COVID hit. Even though the threat of COVID is still very much present, I recently felt the need to create a new calendar to reflect a new chance at life that I’ve been given. Its now likely that I’ll be able to rent some land in a paradisial location where I can be largely free from the types of social interactions that lead to COVID, and where I can learn how to survive and thrive without the need to stare at a screen and click a mouse for hours every day. In honor of this opportunity, I created a new calendar that starts near the winter solstice every year. Each year will be called a “muktichakra,” which is Sanskrit for “cycle of liberation,” and each 30-day month will be named for a level of reality, with a 5-day month ending each year, offering a chance to pause, celebrate, and reflect. Leap days are used at 5, 25, and 400-year intervals and are placed at the end of the year.

The first year will start this winter equinox, and I hope by then to know for sure whether this opportunity to rent some land is definite. I’ve been inspired by this opportunity to end some unhealthy habits that seemed intractable, like obsessively reading news or social media, and I’m learning what I’m capable of when those habits are no longer holding me back. Even if this opportunity to rent land ends up not working out, the change it has caused in my life has made me confident that I can keep improving my life regardless of external forces. I just needed someone to believe in me, and in doing so I started believing in myself, and I will do my best to keep the spirit of this opportunity alive even if the opportunity itself disappears.

Categories
General journal

sun 20, moon 5, coronacycle 2 | my last will and testament

As I write this I feel free from something I can’t really name, but whatever it was, it’s been with me as long as I can remember. I have been having strange aches in “the normal” places today, and my mouth bled a tiny bit after biting the inner cheek, so maybe I’m pondering my own mortality more than normal. And the episode of Lost I just finished showed me the power of the Bible more skillfully than any preacher ever has, so perhaps that experience lifted a veil of some sort. Even though I’m not “meditating” as I write this, I’m able to breathe and be aware of my own breath more frequently this evening, especially after showering.

With Lain as my witness, I wish to be laid to rest here in the jungle. Ideally just my body under perhaps some cloth and dirt, with cremation a second choice, and a casket burial without chemicals a third choice. My body is already full of chemicals; I’d rather not add insult to injury by giving me an American chemical-bath burial.

In fact, if my body is tested and shown to have concentrations of certain chemicals that could harm the trees or other life near my burial site, then I suppose I should be dumped in the US with all the rubbish it’s put into my body over the years. Perhaps near my grandmother on my mother’s side, so we can get to know each other after death in a way we couldn’t during life (though I suppose, in a way, I could do that anywhere at that point).

If my body won’t pollute the surroundings with too much plastic or other chemicals, I would love to be placed somewhere near a sacred tree, even if it’s not one people go to regularly for sacred purposes. I invite people to speak at this location together, about life, death, me, them, whatever is coming up at this moment. We don’t get to say what we ought to to each other most of the time, for some reason. Maybe talk about that reason too.

At my wake/funeral/beginning of a long pause on (or difference in) our relationship, I would love to see people dancing and playing music and eating good food and doing whatever drugs feel right for them, and other people respecting others’ needs and emotions during this, and also removing themselves if they feel anger or violence coming up so they can find a way to handle those feelings. In fact, actually, this paragraph would be good advice just about every day.

On to the business of who will receive my vast tracts of land… just kidding, you’re on an anarchist blog site. What I do have is a bit of money in various banks and digital wallets. All of that should be split evenly between my mother and partner, who can then share it with my brother and father as the former two see fit. All my personal items can go to mutual aid or charities after my mother and partner have searched through it.

I’m grateful for anyone reading this, for my enjoyment of the experience here in this cycle was in some way due to your presence.

Categories
General

sun 16, moon 5, coronacycle 3 | a dyad in isolation

In an attempt to keep ourselves safe from COVID, we moved to another country and didn’t make too many connections in the new land; just enough to get basics. But that isolation might be weighing too heavily on our relationship. If, before moving here, we needed someone in our day to serve as a villain in our minds so we could feel superior in some way, that person is now the partner. If we needed to feel like a victim, the partner is the aggressor. If we needed to vent about our partner, our partner is the only person to vent to in-person (and venting over the phone to a third party is hard with your partner nearby). I don’t know if we were prepared for the realization of just how many roles we need other people to fulfill in our lives to keep our ego afloat. How much responsibility it takes to keep those unhealthy expectations from manifesting in ever-shifting ways (the ego is a chameleon).

Hopefully we’ll get better at this as time goes on, or perhaps part ways if not, but right now I’m relying on the Place itself to get through a particularly rough spot. The Place is just teeming with vitality and, today, a stunning 15 minute downpour with lightning and thunder that served beautifully as the outward expression of my inner world. This Place has become a non-human partner that I cherish as much as I would any human, and I look forward to developing that relationship further one day with less polluted land further from the city.

Categories
General war

War Against Accountability

The home page of Airbnb shows a giant neon pink banner asking people to help host 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

Where was AirBnB when Syrians needed a place to stay? What about the Yemenis, or Palestinians, or Afghans who need a home? This war is another reminder, like we needed any more, that European-led countries have never been held accountable for the racism of past centuries (which continues through today), and thus have never strayed from caring only about those who look like them. If you’re privileged enough to have the space to host a Ukrainian, think about letting someone from an even more war-ravaged country stay at your home as well. And maybe use your relative wealth to do what you can to end the war, not prolong it…

 

 

Categories
General journal

A 20 Year Flare-Up

I don’t know if Osama Bin Laden and those who aided him attacked the United States 20 years ago with hopes that the military-industrial immune system of the country would go into overdrive and start destroying the country from within, and attacking imagined enemies abroad. But that’s exactly what happened. And from where I stand, even though Bin Laden paid dearly for his actions, he won. After September 11, 2001, no ideal was so noble, no objective so necessary, that it couldn’t take second stage to the war on terror. And because terrorism is a symptom of the disease of colonialism/warfare instead of the source, the US wasted countless lives and resources to attack a hydra that its own actions kept fueling. This, of course, made a lot of money for those already in the military-industrial complex, or those who would join it over the years, but even those who benefited financially during this time now live in a severely diminished country, poisoned by its inability to properly diagnose what ails it.

Categories
General

Time To Go

When did you know it was time to go? To be the one who walked away from Omelas?

When the leader of the United States and all who supported him chose not to wear masks and not vaccinate and not social distance and not shut down the borders in time and not test and… and leave hundreds of thousands of people to die from a preventable illness?

When the country paid trillions of dollars to rich people to save the stock market when COVID-19 hit, while giving the rest of us table scraps?

When Monsanto poisoned us with RoundUp?

When DuPont and 3M poisoned the ground and the water for generations?

When you realized you were never going to have a million dollars, no matter how hard you worked?

When they burned thousands upon thousands with napalm?

When they burned Black Wall Street?

When they burned the cross on the lawn?

When you realized you had asthma because your parents were too poor to move away when Robert Moses put up a highway near your house?

…when will it finally be enough?

Categories
haiku

sun 22, moon 9, coronacycle 1 | the mire of delusion

a verse of the Bhagavat Gita. Caption below.
   When your intellect crosses
   the mire of delusion,
   then you will gain indifference
   to what has been heard and what is yet to be heard.
   Bhagavat Gita | 52

Cross the mire of delusion with me, out of earshot of the television, away from the screen you’re reading this from, beyond the cacophony of comforting voices you’ve surrounded yourself with. Look into the truth of your being, the mystery it presents to the world of named objects and concepts. Lean into the squishiness of your experience, avoiding the hard edges which attempt to define it at every turn. You, the “you” which cannot be defined, transcend this manifest existence. Your tentacles, your mycelium connections, stretch into realms not visible to the sharpest eyes, not audible to the most delicate ears.

Your vastness cannot
be contained by | this moment |
contains your vastness.

Categories
haiku journal

sun 10, moon 7, coronacycle 1 | two hurricanes

A hurricane has landed, but it’s hard to notice. The Republican National Convention is dominating national headlines, perhaps because people are interested to see how our political parties are going to respond to the uprising, which is itself a response to COVID-19 and years of police brutality and centuries of capitalism. In California, people are more worried about the massive fires, made worse by the inability to use prison labor because of COVID-19. In cities across the country, people are more worried about how the uprising and economic downturn due to COVID-19 are affecting their psychic and physical landscape.

So Hurricane Laura, a category 4 storm and the largest to hit the United States this year, will probably never make the front page news for most people. Hurricane Laura has been eclipsed by the hurricane of our social breakdown. What happens when we can’t see each others’ trauma because our own is so central, and visceral? What I’m seeing, in calls with friends and family, is increasing denial that anything bad is even happening at all, likely because people feel increasingly powerless to do much about the increasingly supercharged collapse of everything comforting they’d built their lives around. So it’s now that much easier for those in power to reconfigure memory and reality, since everyone is so desperate to cling to whatever false promises of safety and progress are thrown their way. I suppose this is how institutions like capitalism and patriarchy have always reproduced themselves, but it’s stunning to witness in real time.

i wonder what we
will call this land after the
uprising succeeds

Categories
haiku

taoist survival strategy

in times such as these
become shapeless like water
to survive the flood

Categories
haiku

my wish upon a dream

my tired eyes close
with hope that during the night
revolution flares