Living In Uncertainty

Right now, as of today, the 2023 Alberta, Canada wildfires have burned over 842,000 hectares that is casting smoke that can be smelled in Washington, DC.  
Meanwhile, Typhoon Mawar is bearing down on the island of Guam. This is a Category 4 Typhoon with sustained winds of 135 mph and storm surge expected to be as high or higher than roofs of one story buildings.
These are dangerous events that threaten lives and will destroy property totaling millions to billions of dollars. And these are just the latest in a series of serve weather events bearing down on the world--be it astounding flooding events, tornadoesderechos, fires, and many other severe weather events (click on link to see just the list of 1 billion dollar disasters in 2022).
Layered on to all this killer geologic events such as recent killer earthquakes in Turkey and Syria or the Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption and tsunami that impacted the entire Pacific Ocean in 2022. And now, Popocatépetl a massive volcano is waking up outside of Mexico City.
Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano eruption prompts evacuation warnings
Layer onto theses events pandemics and lockdowns
Layered on top of these events are mass shootings in the USA...a civilization so polarized, it's paralyzed.
Layer onto all of this the War in Ukraine with 18,280 casualties (6,596 killed and 11,684 injured -- stats by Radio Free Europe) along with nuclear saber rattling by the crazy tsar Putin driving Russia into the ground and North Korea accompanied by Xi Jinping, China’s very uptight and control freak ruler, eyeing Taiwan

Human beings have always lived in uncertainty. It is only recently we feel it isn’t normal to feel uncertain about something.

But what if we need uncertainty to thrive?

Uncertainty has largely been replaced by routines made very predictable and reliable by all our technology. Living life today is so much more predictable than living it just 70 years ago, much less 150 or 700 years ago. Some may say modern human life is downright boring until something unexpected, unplanned, unpredictable occurs. Then, suddenly we may feel uncertain, anxious, uncomfortable, frighten. We want these feeling to go away because these aren’t the nice feelings we are suppose to feel in our technology rich, everything is at your finger tips society.

But wishing this to be so would be a huge mistake…

Do you want to know why?

Well, I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to let you dwell in a place of uncertainty and let you see what you find out.

However, I will provide a few road markers, if you are willing to take the voyage into the uncomfortable space of being uncertain, not knowing, a place that feels more than a little bit unhinged.

Are you a voyager?

E5 The look of today “Enigma” Unofficial Music Video

Let’s find out what your look of today really is? Let’s dive into if it may be possible to imagine and see a different look… another way to live a modern life? Does this make you feel uncertain? Is this a bad feeling or a good one? Why?

Let’s explore some more….

Constant Emergency

The first road marker on this voyage into uncertainty comes from Humankind Public Radio in an episode called Constant Emergency.


This audio documentary explores what constant emergencies do to people. It delves into what living in constant states of anxiety and fear does to a person’s psyche and sense of wellbeing. One thing we know is that constant states of emergency translates in our bodies as constant Fight or Flight mode. Being constantly in Fight-or-Flight can generate unrelenting stress and anxiety that can further translate into violent self-talk as well as violence to others.

Image from: HumanKind Radio | Constant Emergency
Have we entered an age of unrelenting chaos? As we grope for a “new normal”, has humanity reached a kind of turning point?
It feels that way — in the wake of the Covid pandemic, intensifying impacts of climate change, the war in Ukraine, mounting threats to our democracy, repeated mass shootings and so much more.
In this timely audio documentary, you’ll hear inspiring stories of survivors. We also listen to health care providers, clergy and others who offer specific guidance to help people navigate these choppy waters. They conclude that new, hope-giving possibilities are emerging.
You’ll learn about a fascinating group of caregivers who travel to trouble spots and train local residents in proven techniques that can help people to heal from trauma. In the lyrics of folksinger Carrie Newcomer: “there’s something holding steady and true, regardless of me and you.”
In this provocative Humankind program, we consider:
1) What resources are needed — for emotional and physical health and for the functioning of our communities?
2) What are ways out of thinking that, in all this commotion, we’re in a downward spiral, with no other options?
3) What simple self-care techniques can relieve the tensions now being felt my so many?

-- HumanKind Radio | Constant Emergency

Following are quick insightful impressions I gleaned while listening to the speakers:


Insights From Melissa Barnett

Each of us carry a full spectrum of emotions concerning our environment that range from love, fear, grief. And there is a lot of unmetabolized fear out there. My perception of the forest had changed after coming back from the fire. Instead of seeing quiet and green and calm, I saw fuel for fire resulting in panic. It was primal fear and hard to be there after the fire. After a catastrophe, isn’t having one’s faith shaken meant to do? Shouldn’t we re-think our patterns, our behaviors, or beliefs?”

“Working with children who came back after the fire, we did art, deep breathing, connection with animals, being outside and looking around their family and friends to see who is there to support them and thinking how they can help them.”

Peace begins with me.” — Say this as a mantra while you breathe

Melissa Barnett
yoga instructor Sonoma, California


Insights From James Gordon, MD

“Training people who are former caregivers (doctors, mental health workers) but also training teachers, preachers, household workers. First step is to shut up and focus on breathing, being here and now. This is a concentrative meditative exercise that calms down the flight or flight response. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure. It calms activity in the amygdala (responsible for violence) and places focus in Frontal Lobe (responsible for compassion, kindness). Deep breathing also activates cranial nerves (responsible for recognizing emotions in others) and frontal lobe come into function when we breathe slowly. When trauma is overwhelming, people go into freeze effect. People release neurotransmitters and disassociate from what is happened. It is a life saving response, but being constantly in freeze response it is deadly. We get people up and moving, maybe dancing, and something shifts inside. A man from Sarajevo who witnessed his entire family massacred after participating in Dr. Gordon’s deep breathing, relaxation, and dancing for the first time was not oppressed with visions of his family being killed.”

“To help people feel safe again in their lives requires hope, an internal shift that our lives can heal. Many people who have suffered trauma believe their is nothing they can do to change their lives. Trauma disables the healing aspects of our brains and minds.

James Gordon, MD
Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Washington, DC


Insights from Rev. Susan Beaumont

“For a vast majority of people living now there is a longing for simpler, easier, and more pleasant times. There are some eager to rush forward to resolution, but most want to turn back. There is a lost of hope. This is process of disintegrate of systems for new things to emerge. We have to live in this in-between place for the new thing to emerge. It is very hard to sit with Not Knowing. Lost of hope is biggest problem because we loss the ability to be creative in fixing what is wrong. In addition, there is a rush to restore the status quo. We have to remain unsettled so we keep creating, we keep innovating, but rather institute old practices as the New Normal (fueling the fire of collapse). For leaders finding the balance of feeling unstable and stable is very difficult.”

“New community needs to emphasize compassion and teach people how to sit with others and be present with each other in suffering without wrapping it up and putting a pretty bow on it. When people are in need, people benefit most simply from another person willing to listen and be present to the other person’s suffer and suffer it alongside of them… no solving, so strategy. We can be in it but not of it. We can surrender to the circumstances instead of rallying against them and then let it pass through us. A lot of our suffering comes from rallying against them.”

Rev. Susan Beaumont
Troy, Michigan


Insights From Nichole Warwick

“Grief is the BIG Elephant in the room. Not wanting to sit with our losses and our grief. Grieving is a sublet, multi-level process. Went through Al Gore’s Climate Change course, but after seeing so many images of devastation I was overwhelmed and grief struck but I couldn’t articulate it or see it in myself. So there was an element missing in the course for a long-time after I just couldn’t land what it was. A few weeks after the Climate Reality class, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and then I understood what was missing. We live in a culture ill-equipped to deal with grief. Our culture wants people to hurry up and get back to “normal”. With this diagnosis, I didn’t have a choice about my grief. With the tsunami of feelings and emotions, I had to take my time and process is it all.

“It takes courage to see the things we don’t want to see. It take courage to act and show love to people in pain, experiencing loss, or trauma. Look for ways you can help others and this grows your courage to endure your own pain and trauma.”

Nichole Warwick
Sonoma, CA Community Resilience Collaborative


Insights From Sabrina N’Diaye

“Something amazing always grows from bad experiences. There is this tree that grows in the middle of abandoned buildings and rubble. I have witness the darkness and I have witnessed the beauty that rises through it. Sit with yourself, be with all of your feelings and emotions, do not run away so you can be there to see the tree when it rises. When I think of all the people I admire, all of them had to walk through trauma. When I’m doing my work, it is to remember I am supposed to have the experiences to make me afraid, angry, frustrated, joy, love, and laughter… (all of this teaches me who I am.)”

“When feeling overwhelmed, I let myself cry when I hear another person’s story of pain and trauma. I give myself permission to feel what the person is feeling. Also, so many leaders of countries are hurting people. I cannot change the President of Russia, but I can change how I talk to my husband and my children and everyone around me and this changes the energy around us.

Sabrina N’Diaye
Psychotherapist, Baltimore, Maryland

Zen Bones: Being in the Way

The next road marker comes from one of my favorite philosopher-entertainers, Alan Watts. This is a podcast series hosted by Mark Watts, Alan Watt’s son. This one in particular is essential for understanding the beauty and value and necessity of uncertainty.

Alan Watts: Zen Bones – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 5 – Hosted by Mark Watts | Be Here Now Network

To learn more about this podcast series, visit the Be Here Now Archives.

Passionless Activity

The third road makers comes from the Library of Consciousness (I love the name of this website-resource). I was looking for something Alan Watts said for my story, so I have highlighted nibbles from this transcript from one of his lectures.

To read the whole transcript in its entirety, go to DO YOU DO IT OR DOES IT DO YOU?


On Living By Rules

“To act without being motivated by the fruits of action, [this is the way to get out of the wheel of karma.]”

“So long as you’re looking for results—be they good or evil—you’re still bound [by the laws of karma].”

“The word dharma—sometimes meaning “the Buddhist’s doctrine,” or a certain way of life when you talk about a person’s svadharma—you mean “their own function.” We would translate svadharma as “vocation.” Sva is the same as the Latin sus: “one’s own.” Dharma: “function,” in this case. “Operation,” “way of life,” “style of life,” “profession,” “trade,” “role.” It means all those things. And the one thing that dharma really never means is “law,” although it’s often translated that way.”

“Because, you see, you don’t get the idea of law until you move to a culture where order is based on the idea of obedience. In the West, you see, the origins of law spring from where? The laws of the Medes and Persians, the Laws of Hammurabi, the Laws of Moses, and later Roman law. The only healthy legal tradition we have in the West is British common law, which proceeds in an entirely different way from code law.”

“Because, you see, the difference between code law and common law is that code law is laid down by the wisdom of an all-powerful ruler who tells everybody how they must behave, and they must obey him. But common law is evolved by discussion of particular cases rather than referring all the time to abstract principles which are put down in words. And the judge—the good judge—is a wise man, a man with a sense of equity and fair play who arbitrates an issue which is debated in front of him. And from the precedent from which he creates by his decision, common law evolves. You see, that’s a more organic way of producing law. The code law system, which we inherit from our most ancient theological backgrounds, is a tyrannical method of law by imposition.”

“And so you must understand that—in both Hinduism and Buddhism—there is really no fundamental idea of obedience to a personal ruler. Certainly not in Buddhism. A little bit, sometimes, in Hinduism. But even then we get terribly mixed up because, for example, I was talking of the Bhagavad Gita: this is often translated “The Lord’s Song.” Now, for Bhagavān (or Bhagavāt in Sanskrit) “Lord”—as an English equivalent—is quite inappropriate. Because a lord is one who lords it over you. Bhagavān is a title of reverence and respect and love. “The Song of the Beloved” would be much better, in a way—although it’s not quite correct from a strict point of view. We don’t really have an equivalent for this word, the Bhagavān.”

“So although, you see, there has been—in India itself—tyrannical rule, and although the Arthaśāstra (as a manual of politics) gives directions to a tyrant as to how to govern by absolute power, going along with this exposition of this very Machiavellian point of view to government is the constant advice of the sage: yes, this is what you have to do in order to fulfill your office as a ruler, but never forget that you’ll never succeed. The more you try to rule things by force, the more you will stir up violence against you. And so you can never hold on to your power and your possessions; it will always flow away from you.

On Living With Uncertainty

“So there was one of those great rajas of ancient India who asked a jeweler to make him a ring that would restrain him in prosperity and support him in adversity. And the jeweler wrote on the ring: “It will pass.” But when we come to the deep cosmological and metaphysical ideas, we don’t have law in the Western sense, and therefore nature is not looked upon as something which is an orderly system because it is obeying a commandment.”

On Backward Thinking

And we get into the same confusion when we imagine, for example, that money is wealth. Here we have fantastic wealth, you know, and we have the technological possibility of making everybody on Earth the enjoyer of an independent income. We can’t do it because people say, “Where’s the money going to come from?” Because they think money makes prosperity. It’s the other way around: it’s physical prosperity which has money as a way of measuring it. But people think money has to come from somewhere, like hydroelectric power or lumber or iron, and it doesn’t. Money is something we invent, like inches. So, you remember the Great Depression; when there was a slump? And what did we have a slump of? Money. There was no less wealth, no less energy, no less raw materials than there were before, but it’s like you came to work on building a house one day and they said, “Sorry, you can’t build this house today. No inches!” “What do you mean, no inches?” “Just inches! We got inches of lumber, yes. We got inches of metal. We’ve even got tape measures. But there’s a slump in inches as such,” you see? And people are that crazy! They can have a depression because they have no inches to go around, or no dollars. That’s all a lot of nonsense!”

There Are No Separate Events

“There are no separate events. This is startling to people. But it’s really quite easy to see that there are no events in nature, because you can ask very simply—let’s take something called an event: how do we demark it from other events? At what point, shall we say, were you born? Were you born at parturition? Or when the doctor slapped you on the bottom? Or cut the umbilical cord? Or when you were conceived? Or when your father and mother were first attracted to each other? When was it? When did you begin? There’s no way of deciding except arbitrarily. And for legal purposes we say you were born at parturition. And that’s when the astrologer casts your horoscope—except that other astrologers disagree and want the conception time, and say that’s the real beginning. There isn’t a real beginning. It goes back and back and back in an inseparable continuity. When are you dead? That’s another big argument. And you can get all kinds of ideas about that.”

Point-Instants Are Imaginary

“So once you see that an event is a term in an intellectual calculus—calculus being the way of measuring, say, curved formations by reducing them to point-instants and counting it, you see? But actually, the point-instants are imaginary. The curve wiggles along and it doesn’t stutter from point to point. But in calculus you make it do that. So just as there are no point-instants in the curve, so there are no events in nature. Nature is a constantly fluctuating pattern. You can only designate particular wiggles in a pattern arbitrarily. You can count a convex formation as one wiggle or a concave formation as one wiggle. Then you decide if you call it—if you give the convex properties the title of “wiggle,” you have to deny it to the concave properties, and vice versa.”

Have You Ever Watched A Snake Swim?

“When a snake swims, there’s nothing more beautiful than watching a snake swim in water. Lovely motion! But, you see, it wiggles along. And its wiggle is conceivable, you see, as convex—or was it concave? This way and that way and this way and that way. Now, which side of the snake moves first hen it wiggles? See, it’s very easy to see there.”

Now When the World Moves, What Starts First?

“Now, when we interact with the world, what moves first? Who starts it? The objective world or the subjective world? But they are related as this to that. You can’t have an object without a subject or a subject without an object. Can’t have something known without the knower. And that gives the show away. There isn’t any real distinction between the knower and the known. There’s two ways of looking at something, yes; two poles of a single process. But the knower and the known are subsumed as the knowing. And all life is knowing, being, becoming. And it isn’t something, in other words, that works by the idea of “all this happens because someone shoves it.”

What Is Karma–Really?

But if it’s your karma, everything that happens to you—put it in another way: everything that comes to you is a return to you of what goes out of you. Yes, obviously that’s absurd if you confine the definition of yourself to your voluntary, conscious behavior. That’s a ridiculous definition of one’s self. One’s self, by any stretch of the imagination, must involve far more than the conscious and voluntary aspects of our behavior. And if we see that it involves, intimately and inescapably, the behavior of what we call the “other,” the “not-self,” the “environment,” and see that these two are moving together like the two sides of the snake when it swims, then you get a very curious feeling. And you have to be careful of it if you’ve got a Western background.”

Holier-than-thou People

“Because this is what happens to a lot of people who play around with psychedelic chemicals. There are many, many cases of inflation among these people. That is to say, when you get this sensation that the two sides of the world—the inside and the outside—are moving together, you may think: “I am ruling it!” “I am God” in the Western sense of the word. Therefore, your ego—instead of being, as it were, integrated and transcended with all this process—merely assumes vast dimensions, has megalomania, is blown up by the mystical experience. And so you get the holier-than-thou people going around who seem to think that they’re above all human conventions and have no obligations to anyone or anything: because they’re divine, and they can do as they damn please.”

Choosing the Lesser of Two Evils

What they haven’t realized is that doing as you will isn’t a new kind of behavior that you suddenly put on and say, “From now on, I’m going to go around doing as I will.” You have to realize first that that’s what you’ve always been doing. And you could look at this from a very simple point of view—it’s not a complete point of view—but you can say: “Well now, what about the people who did good and who did the things that they didn’t want to do?” You know, everybody’s mother said to us, “Darling, sometimes we have to do thing we don’t like.” Well, what about that? Well, you can always say the kid obeyed the mother and did the thing that it didn’t like because that was the better part of wisdom. In other words, if he hadn’t done that, something worse would’ve happened. And we choose the lesser of two evils. And when you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose the lesser of two evils, then you say, “I want out of here!” and you take the easiest way; you take the line of least resistance. So that’s your doing.”

Praising and Blaming

““That’s not my fault, that’s your fault!” And so we go around apportioning faults to everybody. Because if we’re going to apportion praise the good things people do, you can’t make praise mean anything unless you also go around blaming. Praise and blame go together. Supposing everybody was acting in a praiseworthy way and we praised everybody for everything—they’ll get tired of it. They wouldn’t even notice it anymore. So, so long as you’re going to get a kick out of being praised, you’ve got to go around blaming, too. It’s very simple.”

Sermon on the Mount

And Ananda Coomaraswamy once described the life of the liberated being as a perpetual uncalculated life in the present. And you say, “Wow! I don’t think I could do that.” That saying of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount about “be not anxious for the morrow.” The uncalculated life. “If God so clothed the grass of the field, will he not much more clothe you, faithless ones?” And I’ve never met a preacher yet who would really take that up. They all say, “Well, of course, that’s too hard a saying for most of us. It’s not practical. Everybody has to take thought for the morrow and calculate.”

We Are Just Kids WithPlastic Steering Wheels

“Well, at this point people can go in two directions. There’s one class of people who will say, “Alright, let’s live the uncalculated life. Let’s not make any plans.” And before you know where they are they’re living in a filthy pad, and scrounging around, and living on petty thievery, and so on. This is the usual thing. This has got into it the wrong way. The first thing to do is just as I said: whether you like it or not and whether you know it or not, the relationship between you and the environment is always one that is harmonious. So, in the same way, you are always living the uncalculated life. And you have to find out, first of all, that you’re always doing it, and that what you call your calculations and the things you did were funny little rationalizations. In other words, your ego has about as much control over what goes on as a child sitting next to its father in a car with a plastic steering wheel that is turning the car the way daddy drives it. Because, as I pointed out, most of the functions, most of the goings-on in you, around you, the circumstances of life, have nothing to do with your ego at all. And you don’t even know why you make up your mind to do certain things. We know superficially; we have a few ideas.”

The Pretender — “It’s All Fake”

“So whenever you do a thing like that, you see, you make a forced change. Now, if the change is to happen in the same way that a seed (at proper season) breaks open and sends up a shoot, see, it comes from the whole force of life itself. Now, when you see that, without your having to do anything—see?—you are living the uncalculated life and you’re only pretending you’re calculating it and arranging it, then—as it were—you will have a grasp of the total situation. And you can allow it to produce changes in action which are not forced. So this is why there is always a trend in every kind of spiritual doctrine which says something about grace. Divine grace. There must come about something in you, a change, which you can’t produce. And if you try to produce it you will be a victim of spiritual pride. But on the other hand, all teachers at universities are saying, “You’ve got to make an effort.” There’s some discipline. There is something you must do. Well, that’s the only way to get it across to people that you, as a separate effort-maker, are a myth, are a phantasm. Because if you really try to control your mind and only think the thoughts that you think are good thoughts to think, you will find that you’re going ’round in a circle. Krishnamurti’s awfully good at pointing this out. When people ask him, “How do you meditate?” he says, “Why do you want to meditate?” “Why are you concentrating?” “Why are you saying prayers?” “Why do you think you should believe in God?” And it always comes up: “Because I’m just a son of a bitch. I’m out for my own good, and this seems to be the way.” So he says, “You see? You don’t have any genuine love at all. It’s all fake!”

“My Basis for Moral Behavior Is Pure Selfishness”

And so you have to find, first of all, where the genuine love is. Now, you love you, don’t you? That’s genuine. I won’t argue about that. But then, when you start from this—I gave a talk some time ago to the Air Force; their camp or lab where they make weapons, do all the research. And they got a bunch of us there who were ministers and philosophers, and they had the nerve to ask us: what was our basis for moral behavior; personal moral behavior? Well, I said, “My basis for moral behavior is pure selfishness. And I’m talking, after all, to realistic people here, and I don’t think we need be sentimental and beat about the bush. After all, you’re all warriors and fighters and so on, and you know how rough things are. So I’m going to say to you, frankly: I’m out for me. But, of course, I don’t do it in a tactless way. I don’t go around and hit people over the head and say, ‘Give me this’ and ‘Give me that.’ I’m much more subtle. I say good manners, and ‘please,’ and ‘how nice you all are,’ and so on, and finally people feel massaged, psychologically, into a state where they’ll give.” But then I said after that, “There’s some things that bother me. The first one is: if I love me, what do I want? And furthermore, who am I?”

I Cannot Experience Me Without You — To Love Another, Is to Love Myself

“Because if I’m going to be realistic about getting what I want, I’ve got to be pretty sure what it is that’s me, and what is the state of desire in me. If I am desire, you see, if I am a center of desire, what’s it all for? Well, I think of all the things I want. Well, it so turns out that none of them are me. I might say, “I want dinner.” Doesn’t mean I’m going to eat me up. Any pleasure I can think of is the enjoyment of something that I haven’t thought of defining as myself. Because I like my sensations, I like what happens to my body when I take a fine wine and down it. But then, what’s the difference between my body and the wine? If I say I like the wine, I also mean I like me and the wine together; the mixture. But then I don’t eat you, or a friend, or a lover, in the same way as I drink wine. I live in association and like this. But then I’m loving things that aren’t formally supposed to be me. And as I go into it—in other words, as I investigate what I mean by “me,” I find that I can’t put any limits on it; that I cannot experience “me” without “you,” or without the “other.” They’re inseparable. But you don’t find this out until you investigate it, until you really go into the question: “What do I want?” And that’s the most important investigation anyone can make (which I’m going into in the next session): the question of power. And all these military men, they think they want power. And so I said to them some very subversive and undermining things without anybody knowing it until long after I’d left!”

What Do You Desire?

“Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do? And when we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, “You do that, and forget the money.” Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living; that is, to go on living doing things you don’t like doing—which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And, after all, if you do really like what you’re doing—it doesn’t matter what it is—you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something: to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are. But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like, and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is: we’re bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living, in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to do the same thing. So it’s all retch and no vomit: it never gets there!”

What Do You REALLY Desire

“And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: what do I desire? Well, when we answer that question in a naïve way, we figure out that what we want is to control everything: to create girls that don’t grow old, apples that don’t rot, clothes that never wear out, conveyances that get from one place to another instantly so we don’t have to wait, power available to do anything that you could conceive and do it just instantly; like that. To get this funny technological omnipotence. But if you take time out to think about that, and really go into it with your full strength of imagination and find out whether that’s where you want to be, you will soon see: that’s not what you want. Because the moment you have a situation where you are really in control of things—that is to say, in which the future is almost completely predictable—you will see, as I said last night, that a completely predictable future is already the past. You’ve had it. And that’s not what you wanted. You want a surprise. You don’t know what that’s going to be because, obviously, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you did. You want a pleasant surprise.”

Putin’s HELL… And All Other Tyrants Who Want to Control Everyone

“Imagine the situation of Big Brother: Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Heinrich Himmler. To be glued, day and night, to a highly defended office with telephones, television screens, watching, peeking, spying on everyone and anything. Getting all this information together. Why, you could never leave the office! I mean, a character, I suppose, like J. Edgar Hoover goes home in the evening. But when he’s back home, you know, there are guards sitting outside the door, there’s that hotline telephone going to something. He’s always having to be in control. And he can’t take any time off, he can’t go for a walk in the park with a friend, or go innocently to the movies, or sit down and just relax and have an undistracted party in the baths at Big Sur. What a pauper this guy is! Completely deprived! Because he wants to be in control, because he wants power. People are frustrated in love; if you’re jilted. There’s a natural tendency in a human being to seek power as a substitute. And that’s a very negative thing. It’s like having a bad temper, to seek power after you’re frustrated in love. You should try and get back on the love beam. Because nobody wants power!”

Psychic Technology — Now That’s Power!

“Now then, when Oriental philosophy and religion was first introduced to the Western world, it was introduced under the auspices of people who were fascinated with power. It was introduced in the latter part of the 19th century, when we had heard all about evolution and how the human race was going on to ever greater heights, and we would eventually develop superman according to Nietzsche or G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Remember all that early fantasy of where evolution would lead through the development of technology. And so, at this time, people like H. P. Blavatsky were talking about the mysterious wisdom of the East, and they phrased it, they commended it to us, in a technological spirit: that there was psychic technology, that there was something, that you could go way beyond anything that could be done through the physical sciences. You could cause your physical body to disintegrate to another level of vibration, and then transmit it and reassemble it somewhere else. You could live as long as you like because you control the fundamental processes. You could determine, if you decided to die, where you would be reborn, exactly. You would be a complete master of life. And so there are still innumerable books being sold which present Oriental philosophy and religion in this light. That charlatan, Lobsang Rampa, who writes about Tibetan mastery—people read that because they think that there may be a way of beating the game.”

Thinking Psycho-Technology All the Way Through to the End…

“So, therefore, the wise men of Asia were represented through this kind of propaganda as masters of life; as, for example, people whose emotions didn’t bother them, who could put up with any amount of pain by simply turning off their feelings, who could foretell the future, who could read your thoughts, and who were above all kinds of ordinary human frailty. Well, when I first met Buddhist priests, Zen masters, swamis, all these wise men from the East, one of the first things that impressed itself upon me was that they were perfectly ordinary human beings. They had bad tempers, they were fussy about certain things, they just acted as I would expect human beings to act. And so, at first, I was very disappointed. I thought they had feet of clay, but they didn’t come up to these promises of psycho-technology.

But after a while I got to realize why not: that they had already thought all that through. They had thought through what might be done if one had all these powers, and had decided that wasn’t what they wanted. The powers of this kind, in Sanskrit, are called siddhi. But there is hardly one decent scripture or text on yoga that does not say, again and again: if you get siddhi, ignore them. Go on to something else. These are only the foothills. These are, furthermore, not only foothills, but they are seductive, blind alleys. Won’t take you anywhere at all.”

Do You Really Want That Plastic Doll? That’s All?

Now, I think that this is the greatest possible lesson for the Western world to learn, because we are so hung up on the idea of power, of control, of being able to make everything go the right way, and we’ve never thought it through. When you get control of it, what are you going to do with it? Supposing I’m an alchemist and I have a whole secret closet full of love filters; very potent ones. And if I see a desirable woman, all I have to do is to offer her a cigarette or give her a glass of wine with one of my secret potions in it, and instantly I’m her master. Now, when I think that through, what would I do with a situation like that? Because all I’ve got, again, is that plastic doll that, when I push it, it does what I tell it to and doesn’t have any comeback. What you always are looking for in things is where the surprise is there, where there’s a comeback. And you say, “My god, this thing is alive! It has a will of its own. It is not in my control. And I would like to have a relationship with something like that, because it would never be dull.” And also, you would feel true affection. After all, you can make love to yourself in a mirror. You can have one of those Dutch wives; you buy them in a place in Kobe, where you get these rubber girls that you fill with hot water. And sailors take them on long voyages. But what an awful thing, you know, when you realize that this thing has no surprise in it, no thing that it does on its own, you see?”

Pursuit of Pure Pleasure Leads You to the Naraka Worlds

Because, you see, pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you into what the Buddhists call the naraka world; that is to say, to hells. When you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit, the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain. So naturally, you descend from the deva world at the top of the wheel to the naraka world at the bottom, where it shows all these beings in states of torture. Now, of course, the priests say—when they’re bringing up children—if you do bad things you will end up in the hell world. But this is a very inadequate way of showing how one gets to the hell world. You get to the hell world as a result of not knowing what you want, as a result of thoughtless pursuit of pleasure which ends you, eventually, in the pursuit of pain. So if you’re in the hell world, that’s where you want to be!”

What Do You Really, Really Want?

So then, we ask the question: if the motivation of power-gaining disappears—you’ve seen through it and you know that’s not what you want—what other motivation takes its place as the origin of actions? And it seems to me that the answer here is compassion. Simply because, when you want to relate to another living being, what you really are asking of them is that they be in the same situation that you are. You want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems, your fears, and your delights. You don’t want a doll, you want another “you,” another “self,” because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are. And so, then, at once, when you see that that is the case, and that the most interesting thing in the world is the relationship with these others, and you can see at once yourself in the situation of all the other people, and then you think: no, I don’t want to control these people. I would like them—yes—to be controlled in the sense that they were happy to do the things I would like them to do. But obviously, I can’t force that. Because if I forced it, they wouldn’t be happy.”

This Is the Magic We Have Lost

“But there is, despite a lot of foolishness that goes on this, is a sound thing, you see? That there really is no greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being who is other than you and not under your control to do for you what you want—because they like it. As you, on your side, would want to do something for them in that way, and so as to give pleasure to the other person. Just take, in sexuality, where you get a kind of a critical example of this: the biggest fun in sexual relationships is giving orgasm to women. And if that doesn’t happen, many men feel disappointed. Because a thing that they really wanted to do was to give pleasure and get their own pleasure out of giving it.”

Othering of the World

“So you see, it’s really, in a way, the same idea as the Hindu idea. When the Christian speaks of God giving the creature freedom of will, the Hindu says: no, God gets lost in that person and gives up power. And it’s really the same thing. It’s the idea that the all-powerful surrenders power. So that the more you give the power away, what you’re really doing is you’re “othering” yourself. Now, the more you “other” yourself by giving power away, the more of a “self” you are. Because “self” and “other” are reciprocal. So you find that people who, through a sādhanā (a yoga-discipline), have overcome their ego, have transcended the ego, are tremendously strong personalities. You would think, theoretically, they would all be non-entities and to lack entirely what psychologists call ego-strength. But actually, they’re nothing of the kind. They are—every one of them—unique. They’re all quite different from each other. And they are very, very (what I would call) strong characters. Because the more they have given it up, the more they get it.”

A Lovely Irresponsible State To Be In

So, in this way of thinking—let’s put it in another dimension for a moment. Let’s suppose we’re thinking of a relationship that is not just of people. People are very obviously other and independent of one’s ego. But give it to everything. Say to everything—which, of course, is going to include as much of yourself as you can objectify. In other words, your stomach, your intestines, your everything, you see? Say to it all: “Now it’s your turn. Let’s see what you’re going to do.” Let it happen. You know? You do this complete let-off of control. And you find that you—I have to put it in a provisional way first—you get the sensation that everything else is living you. It lives you. That you’ve given away control, you see, to everything else. It’s a lovely irresponsible state to be in.

Bllwp! In giving away the control, you got it.

But then, you see, you do the flip. Bllwp! In giving away the control, you got it. You’ve got the kind of control you wanted. That’s to say, where you had a loving relationship to the world but you didn’t have to make up your mind what it should do. You let it decide. Now, do you see: that’s how your bodies work. You don’t have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are going to do. You’ve delegated all that authority. If the president the United States has to lie awake at nights thinking what every official under his command is going to do, he can’t be president. He’s got to make an act of trust in all those subordinates to be responsible and carry on their things in just the same way as you make an act of trust to all your subordinate organs to carry on their functions without you having to tell them what to do. And this is the secret of what we will call organic power, as distinct from political power. Lao Tzu puts it in this way:

The great Tao flows everywhere,
Both to the left and to the right.
It loves and nourishes all things
But does not lord it over them.
And when merits are accomplished
It lays no claim to them.

— Lao Tzu

“Let’s see what you’re going to do.”

The more, therefore, you relinquish power—trust others—the more powerful you become. But in such a way that, instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything, you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else, and they carry it on for you. So you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning. You can even tell it: “I want to wake up at six o’clock,” and it will wake you up just like an alarm clock. This seems a sort of paradox to say this, but the principle of unity—of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe—is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe. That will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever. The way to become one with the universe is to trust it as an other—as you would another—and say, “Let’s see what you’re going to do.” But in doing that, you see—in saying that to everything else (that you have been taught to think is not you), you are also saying it to yourself.”

All the segments above come from the Library of Consciousness assembled by Organism Earth. I stopped at 1:28:18.

History Is Over!

The final road marker comes from an episode from Throughline titled: History Is Over!

As the end of the 20th century approached, Radiohead took to the recording studio to capture the sound of a society that felt like it was fraying at the edges. Many people had high hopes for the new millennium, but for others a low hum of anxiety lurked just beneath the surface as the world changed rapidly and fears of a Y2K meltdown loomed.
Amidst all the unease, the famed British band began recording their highly anticipated follow ups to their career-changing album OK Computer. Those two albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, released in 2000 and 2001, were entrancing and eerie — they documented the struggle to redefine humanity, recalibrate, and get a grip on an uncertain world. In this episode, we travel back to the turn of the millennium with Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood and the music of Kid A and Amnesiac.

Kid A & Amnesiac

Radiohead: The Making Of “Kid A” And “Amnesiac” | Throughline

Soundbites from this episode of Throughline

 “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” — SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “THE MATRIX” FISHBURNE: As Morpheus

All I’m offering is the truth | The Matrix [Open Matte]

“I’m not a bum. I’m a human being.” — SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1

The meet-up of Neo & Trinity | Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss | The Matrix Resurrections

  “What is internet anyway?” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3

unrecognizable hacker with smartphone typing on laptop at desk
Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

“You know, progress is not necessarily a good thing. Our success was not necessarily a good thing…” — YORKE

photo of golden cogwheel on black background
Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels.com

“Into the next century, anxieties will increase.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6

woman sitting in front of macbook
Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com

“Fire coming out from all over.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7

fire burn wallpaper
Photo by Emma Henry on Pexels.com

The risk of the virus expanding worldwide.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8

people wearing diy masks
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

New cold war.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9

an old soviet lun class ekranoplan on the ground
Photo by Ilya Sobolev on Pexels.com

A field of tears.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10

knitted hat lying among debris in ukrainian city
Photo by Алесь Усцінаў on Pexels.com

Sea level rise.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11

high rise buildings
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Millions still struggling to be free.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #12

shirtless black man fighting with ropes in studio
Photo by Ayodeji Fatunla on Pexels.com

There’s no question that we must feed the monster. Because the monster has already won. It’s like a movie, but you can’t stop it unless you wake up.” — YORKE

a model covered with paint looking fierce
Photo by imustbedead on Pexels.com

Florida is where WOKE goes to die.” — Ron DeSantis

underwater photography of woman
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

You need to name it… name the fear, the dread… and it will begin to diminish.” — YORKE

grayscale photo of woman peeking on planks
Photo by Rene Asmussen on Pexels.com

There’s always a sense of dread and a need to get beyond that fear so we can imagine and express a world that can look different than now.” — YORKE

traveler standing on stone monument in desert
Photo by Spencer Davis on Pexels.com

One Last Thing to Ponder on Uncertainty

What is the opposite of space element?

Neither. Space is best thought of as an empty vacuum, and the opposite of space is density. It doesn’t matter whether it’s earth, water, gas… anything collection of atoms starts to develop a gravitational field, pulling more atoms in as well as space.

AnonymousQuora
gray and black galaxy wallpaper
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

It really is quite spectacular that we are even alive at all. Perhaps, uncertainty is the rocket fuel that powers us into the unknown so we can know. And anyone who really pushes the limits and explores knows how much we need each other in this voyage… perhaps now more than ever before.

Feature Archetypal Animation

Image from: Graphics Nature Blue | uroburos |

Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

Painting Applied Painting Street Painting Image | uroburos | Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

Humanity Development Ripening Cosmos Science | uroburos | Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

Tiger Budgie Tiger Parakeet Photoshop Image Editing | SarahRichterArt | Sarah Richter  •  Deutsch  •  Member since Oct. 21, 2015

Dancers Dance Folk Dance Team Party | uroburos | Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

 Ellipsoid Graphics Mounting Element Graphic | uroburos | Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

Unless….

What did the Lorax mean by Unless?

Image from: Are You a Lorax? | By  Jim Fitzpatrick – March 12, 2012 – Newport Beach Independent

This story had a deep and lasting impact on me. I was a child when it came out. I loved it the most of all the Dr. Seuss books. But it also troubled me. It felt very different from The Cat In the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, or Oh the Places You’ll Go.

It felt like a puzzle that needed to be solved and time was running out!

I felt that the one word the Lorax leaves behind for the greedy, old Once-ler was the key to solving the puzzle! But, what does it mean? Unless…what?!!

Dr. Seuss tells us what the Once-ler thinks Unless means at the end of the story. The Once-ler thinks that unless someone like the boy cares a whole lot, the world will never change.

It seems so simple. Surely, I felt as a child, there are bunches of children just like me reading this book and understand the message and will care enough. Surely, we the kids of the 70s get it, and when we grow up, we will change the world and avoid catastrophe.

But, we didn’t. Here we all are, 52 years later, and the world has not changed course. It remains fixed on the same course that it was on back in the 70s when Seuss first published The Lorax. In fact, it feels that we are all speeding ever faster… and to what? The End?

Clearly, the Lorax means something entirely different in his silent message he leave to the selfish, self-absorbed Once-ler. Clearly, Unless means something different than what the Once-ler thinks. But what? What do we need to do as humans to avert total disaster… perhaps even the end of the world as we know it now?

Quick Recap of The Lorax

Image from: ‘The Lorax’: A Campy And Whimsical Seussical | By David Edelstein – March 2, 2012 – Fresh Air

The young Once-ler arrives in the forest where the lovely Truffula Trees look like lollipops and the cute fuzzy Bar-ba-loots bears play alongside the beautiful Swomee-Swans birds and lovely humming fish!

Image from: Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax: Movie Adaption Information | By Carey Bryson — 3/17/17 — LiveAbout

But instead of seeing the incredible beauty all around him, the young Once-ler cuts down one of the incredible Truffula Trees and makes a Thneed!

What really?! A Thneed… this is the thing that everyone needs!

Dr. Seuss uses the Thneed as a symbol for the modern world’s obsession with fossil fuels. And Seuss is certainly right about this, gas-fuel-oil is truly something everyone needs in the world we have made.

There are lots of Once-lers in the modern world making millions and billions of dollars harvesting fossil fuels for all the things we need in our slick, fast-paced modern world!

Image from: ‘The Lorax’ review: Surgery was done on this Dr. Seuss | Published: Mar. 01, 2012 — OregonLive

The Lorax confronts the young Once-ler saying:

"I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs" —
he was very upset as he shouted and puffed —
"What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?"
Image from: The Badness of The Lorax Is a Shock | by David Edelstein – MAR. 2, 2012 – Vulture

But the Once-ler does not hear the Lorax. Or rather he hears him but ignores him proclaiming he has a right to make money from the trees!

Image from: The Lorax | IMDb

The Lorax rallies all the animals and tries again to make the young Once-ler listen and understand.

Image from: It’s Seusstastic! How The Lorax Saved Hollywood | By Richard Corliss – 3/4/12 – Time

But there’s no stopping the happy young Once-ler. He cuts and chops and build a factory to make even more Thneeds! And then the Lorax is forced to come back and to tell him this:

'I'm the Lorax who speaks for the trees which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please. But I'm also in charge of the Brown Bar-ba-loots who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loots suits and happily lived, eating Truffula Fruits.'
Image from: the lorax | By Alison on June 18, 2011 – a tree grows in brookline and a teacher blogs about it

Nope, the Once-ler won’t listen. He builds an even bigger factory, and one even bigger than that one.

Images from: the lorax | By Alison on June 18, 2011 – a tree grows in brookline and a teacher blogs about it & Teaching Climate Change With The Lorax and The Jungle | By Mark Gozonsky on Getting High-School Kids to Read and Care About the Climate in Unconventional Ways — 10/21/19 — Literary Hub

Soon, the Lorax comes back with another dire message telling the Once-ler:

"Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke! My poor Swomee-Swans...why, they can't sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat."
Image from: Final #PostABird fact for #BlackBirdersWeek Day 2. Do you know why the Lorax sends the Swomee-Swans away? Because there is too much smogulous smoke. | Twitter

The Once-ler shrugs and continues chopping down the beautiful Truffula Trees and making a Thneeds.

The Lorax returns again. Now it is the Humming-Fish who can no longer hum.

This time the Once-ler gets mad and shouts:

'Now listen here, Dad! All you do is yap-yap and say, 'Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!' Well, I have my rights sir, and I'm telling you I intend to go on doing just what I do! And, for your information, you Lorax, I'm figgering on biggering and biggering and biggering and biggering, turning MORE Truffual Trees into Thneeds which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!'
Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

Not long after this the Lorax does the thing that sticks in my mind and haunts me to this day. He builds a small platform underneath the Once-ler’s factory, waits for the Once-ler to look out, then without a word, the Lorax picks up the seat of his pants and flies away disappearing through the last blue hole in the polluted, ugly sky… and that is thatUnless...

Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

So What Did the Lorax Mean?

Dr. Suess says many years after the last Truffula Tree is chopped down, the now very old Once-ler thinks the word Unless means:

Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

But, it hasn’t worked. Hope is not enough. To fix this mess, it take action.

Are We Even Capable of Changing Our Fate?

Do we really need to destroy our planet before we care enough about it to fix it?

I know, I know, the seed the Once-ler throws down to the boy is a symbol of hope and we all need hope to Do The Right Thing. But quite honestly, do we really know what the right thing is that we should be doing?

And nature will do just fine after humans are gone. Kind of like 2067, an Australian SciFi film, where that is exactly what happens.

2067 – Official Trailer
Starring: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ryan Kwanten Writer/Director: Seth Larney By the year 2067, Earth has been ravaged by climate change and humanity is forced to live on artificial oxygen. An illness caused by the synthetic O2 is killing the worlds’ population and the only hope for a cure comes in the form of a message from the future: “Send Ethan Whyte”. Ethan, an underground tunnel worker, is suddenly thrust into a terrifying new world full of unknown danger as he must fight to save the human race.

I think the Lorax is telling us something else. I think the Lorax is warning us about ourselves and that Unless we learn how to let go of bad ideas, we are doomed to create the world we are speeding ever faster towards making. The one that will kill us.

What Is the Lorax Warning Us About Ourselves?

I think it is Shame; toxic shame to be specific.

Shame is an emotion of civilizations. We feel shame, and it is necessary to feel it. Feeling ashamed motivates us to improve ourselves. It motivates us to take care of the people around us, so that we to treat them with kindness, dignity, and respect.

No one wants to feel shame. Of all human emotions, shame is perhaps the hardest one to endure. Because of this, it is one of the scariest, most loathed, most feared emotion in our human tool box.

If shame had a color it would be the color of pee. Listen to Snap Judgement, and you’ll understand.

My Big Pee Break

Actress Diona Reasonover was on the brink of her big break. But she never expected it to happen while she was on her vacation.
Diona Reasonover is an actress who lives in LA, you can check out her writing on “I Love You America” with Sarah Silverman on Hulu.
Produced by Adizah Eghan

Note: Diona had a knee injury and could not make it to the bathroom on the plane before others beat her to it. Then, the plane begins to descend and the flight attendant not very understanding. So you’ll need to listen to how Diona solves her dilemma.

Bearing Witness

The episode before this one is worth a listen too: Date With The Devil. This one touches on the topic of how ee always hear about the people who survive a disaster and who often give credit Jesus or God for their good fortune, but we never hear about the people who made the exact same calculations, believe just as much in a higher power, but ended up dead.

I think we have become a bit lopsided in thinking about our survival as individuals and as a species when we hear only miraculous stories of good fortune, good luck, or good timing that allows a person to avert a tragedy.

But what about the people who don’t avert disaster? What about the people who get killed?

D. Parvaz touches on this in a very different story. It is a scary, tormented, horrifying, heart-wrenching story about people (through no fault of their own) do not make it. Indeed, they are murdered by monsters. That’s what humans become when they don’t digest and assimilate all of who they are as a human being. This means seeing the good in one’s self as well as the bad in one’s self. And yes, shame is one of those things.

People who refuse to feel their shame, fear, guilty, or whatever makes them uncomfortable will project them onto other people. People who don’t feel shame will do shameful things, horrendous things. They are no longer human because they have thrown half of who they are away.

So, don’t thrown your shame away! You need it. You really, really do… and the Lorax understood how desperately humans need to feel shame and other parts of themselves that make them truly capable of being human.

The Hidden Shame That Threatens Our World

This article is about toxic shame.

John Amodeo (a psychotherapist for over 40 years) describes that how not dealing with our feelings of shame there are far-reaching, destructive consequences.

He says, “When shame lurks outside of our awareness, it can become the driving force behind the destructive rage, blame, and violence that is damaging our world.”

Have you ever encountered someone who is boiling with a seething rage bubbling just under their human-looking skin but really what is lurking underneath is a monster ready to explode at the drop of a pin?

Consider the shootings this past week.

  • A teenage honor student who knocked on the wrong door was shot.
  • Cheerleaders who accidentally opened the wrong door of a car late at night are shot.
  • Teenagers who pulled into the wrong driveway and were turning around were shot, one died.
  • Children playing basketball and their ball rolls into a neighbors lawn are shot at, one father lost a lung after getting shot in the back.

Amodeo describes shame as the felt sense of being defective and inadequate: “it as an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

Shame has also been defined by Gerhsen Kaufman as a breaking of the interpersonal bridge. As human beings wired for connection, we dread isolation. Children fail to thrive when they don’t feel a safe and secure connection with caregivers. When healthy attachment is ruptured, a child feels unworthy of love and acceptance. This unbearable shame can lead to a mad scramble to prove our worth in distorted ways that often dehumanize others.
In a 2016 article, shame expert Bret Lyon, who leads Healing Shame trainings, describes how intolerable shame can be transferred to others:

“Driven by the need to keep the feelings of shame at bay and away from themselves, people can exult in their contempt and cynicism—finding a curious kind of gratification in it… In extreme cases, runaway contempt can cause people to lose sight of another’s humanity. Even their right to exist. This has led to extreme behavior, in Germany and many other places.”

The Hidden Shame That Threatens Our World

Amodeo drives home the point of toxic shame, the very same one that I think the Lorax is trying to drive home to us with his message Unless. Amodeo writes:

When the drive toward personal “success” or being superior becomes dissociated from our humanity, we seek gratification in ways that will never really satisfy us. We become disconnected from our souls, as our innate longing for love and connection curdles into a desire for status, money, or power. These substitute ways to seek gratification often spiral out of control—taking us on a perilous journey away from our fellow humans—and away from our true selves. This desire for a narrow self-gratification overlooks the reality that we are inescapably interconnected.
We can observe this shame-driven dynamic in our fraught politics, where looking good replaces being good (truly caring about others). We can see it in political and business leaders competing to amass the greatest wealth and power, which often translates into a race to see who can be the most contemptuous and divisive.
Some political leadersand followers who relish the thrill of belonging to a group that has special knowledge and that is superior to others—have so thoroughly dissociated from their vulnerability, their humanity, their hearts, and their souls, that they have no compunction to deny the rights of others, or, as we've seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, committing atrocities without any healthy shame to check their behavior.

The Big Choice

So… what are we going to do? Are we going to save our beautiful world full of life or are we all going to drown in a Yellow Sea of Seething Shame?

This is a job that requires every person on the planet to do. Every living individual needs to claim their shame and proclaim proudly: “I am human! I do stupid things! I learn from them! I become a better human because I use my shame to grow!”

Or, you can lock yourself inside a dilapidated husk of what used to be your humanity… deny your shame, cast it onto everyone else around you as you fake being a perfect human being.

But, your performance is nothing more than a rickety, glittery, shiny shell of who you used to be. Inside there is nothing to balance you out and make you human. You have become hollow; a garden hose flowing with seething shame disguised as rage.

On A Related Note

My college roommate from College of the Atlantic shared this story. It is closely related to the responsibility of each and every person to do the invisible work of sustaining and maintaining psychological as well as social health, which takes daily work.

Kicked out of the university lecture
Subject: Legal studies.
First lecture.
The professor enters the lecture hall.He looks around.
"You there in the 8th row. Can you tell me your name?" he asks a student.
"My name is Sandra" says a voice.
The professor asks her, "Please leave my lecture hall. I don't want to see you in my lecture."
Everyone is quiet. The student is irritated, slowly packs her things and stands up.
"Faster please" she is asked.
She doesn't dare to say anything and leaves the lecture hall.
The professor keeps looking around.
The participants are scared.
"Why are there laws?" he asks the group.
All quiet. Everyone looks at the others.
"What are laws for?" he asks again.
"Social order" is heard from a row
A student says "To protect a person's personal rights."
Another says "So that you can rely on the state."
The professor is not satisfied.
"Justice" calls out a student.
The professor smiling. She has his attention.
"Thank you very much. Did I behave unfairly towards your classmate earlier?"
Everyone nods.
"Indeed I did. Why didn't anyone protest?
Why didn't any of you try to stop me?
Why didn't you want to prevent this injustice?" he asks.
Nobody answers.
"What you just learned you wouldn't have understood in 1,000 hours of lectures if you hadn't lived it. You didn't say anything just because you weren't affected yourself. This attitude speaks against you and against life. You think as long as it doesn't concern you, it's none of your business. I'm telling you, if you don't say anything today and don't bring about justice, then one day you too will experience injustice and no one will stand before you. Justice lives through us all. We have to fight for it."
“In life and at work, we often live next to each other instead of with each other. We console ourselves that the problems of others are none of our business. We go home and are glad that we were spared. But it's also about standing up for others. Every day an injustice happens in business, in sports or on the tram. Relying on someone to sort it out is not enough. It is our duty to be there for others. Speaking for others when they cannot.”
                                      -- Shared by Liza Hall -- 12/4/22

Feature Archetypal Animation

Music: How Bad Can I Be (From “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax”) — Geek Music

We’re losing time

In this version of On Our Way by The Royal Concept at the end the chorus includes: “It’s 9/11… It’s 9/11…” and included in the original lyrics is the phrase “the sky is burning…”

Those Happy Golden Days — On Our Way: CO Days

We Have Lost Our Way To Our Hearts

I believe songs communicate essential inner symbols that can heal the soul. Some songs weave complex meanings that are numinous and stir recognition of inner and outer truths that have deep meaning to the entire species capable of this sort of cognitive recognition of meaning. To me, On Our Way is such a song that can be interpreted on multiple levels. One is it is a simple love song, but if you fall into the gravity of what love really is…then this song is much, much more because love is what holds everything we hold dear together. Love is how we weave our shared reality. Where the threads of love are shredded and torn asunder by hate, indifference, and “othering” (e.g., those radical liberals, alien migrant invaders), our shared reality begins to dissolve and disappear.

Now, We Are Shredding Our Shared Reality

Trump is a master of “othering”. He does it to get ahead, to stay on top, to grab power and keep power for himself and his loyal followers. In Googling examples of Trump’s “othering” efforts, I encountered an article considering what a Trump presidency might look like back in the summer of 2016, June to be precise when it was still not clear Trump would cinch the nomination. This paragraph is particularly striking…even haunting:

“In sum, Donald Trump’s basic personality traits suggest a presidency that could be highly combustible. One possible yield is an energetic, activist president who has a less than cordial relationship with the truth. He could be a daring and ruthlessly aggressive decision maker who desperately desires to create the strongest, tallest, shiniest, and most awesome result—and who never thinks twice about the collateral damage he will leave behind. Tough. Bellicose. Threatening. Explosive.”

From Atlantic article: The Mind of Donald Trump — Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity—a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency. Story by  Dan P. McAdamsJUNE 2016 ISSUE

Insights Missed or Simply Shredded

This old article further states the following insights:

Combined with a gift for humor, anger lies at the heart of Trump’s charisma.

And: “Trump appeals to an ancient fear of contagion, which analogizes out-groups to parasites and poisons.

And: “Narcissism in presidents is a double-edged sword. It is associated with historians’ ratings of “greatness”—but also with impeachment resolutions.

Photo: Mark Peterson / Redux — From Atlantic article: The Mind of Donald Trump — Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity—a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency. Story by  Dan P. McAdamsJUNE 2016 ISSUE

Basically, most of the country knew what we were getting into when Trump was elected as evidenced by the 2017 Women’s March.

Sustain the Flame — Promo of Citizen’s Documentary of the Women’s March
Sustain the Flame – Full (Best Version) Women’s March on Washington 2017

Here and Now: Trump and the Coronavirus

Now, here we stand almost at the other side of Trump’s Presidency and Bob Woodward’s book Rage has just come out with an explosive tape where all can hear Trump knew how dangerous the looming Coronavirus was way back at the beginning of February, but he gleefully tells Woodward that he likes to play it down. Indeed, he did more than play it down. He told us it was less dangerous than the flu while he brags to Woodward that it appears to be 5 times more deadlier that the flu. To this day, he mocks people who wear masks… a simple, effective way to protect oneself and others from inadvertently passing this deadly virus between us when social distance cannot be maintained. Even worst, he did nothing to prepare doctors, nurses, and frontline workers for the coming tidal wave of people who would become seriously sick from this virus or to protect our medical workers with the personal protective equipment they would need to treat very ill people safely. Since March, the daily death toll hoovers close to 1,000 deaths a day–many days, there have been more. The hot spots have spread out to every corner of the country with some regions gaining ground, only to lose it again.

Today, on 9/11/20, the death toll in the U.S. has eclipsed those of every other country, according to a shocking article recently updated by NBC.

Graphic: Coronavirus deaths in the U.S., per day — More than 190,000 people have died in the U.S. of COVID-19. Track which states are getting hit the hardest and which direction the country’s death rate is going. Updated daily. First Written: April 7, 2020, 8:12 AM EDT / Updated Sept. 10, 2020, 6:39 PM EDT
By Joe Murphy, Jiachuan Wu, Nigel Chiwaya and Robin Muccari

Honoring victims of the coronavirus pandemic: Every night, the PBS Newshour honors and remembers people who have died since March 2020 from coronavirus in the United States. On this day when we are also honoring and remembering the people who died during 9/11 nineteen years ago, this was the Newshour’s honor roll for this day in 2020.

Honoring victims of the coronavirus pandemic — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

College Students With COVID-19 Host House Party: Cops — And then this happened today, of all days! At the current rate of spread, new estimates of Americans who will be dead by January 1, 2021 are 410,451 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. by Jan. 1! This is less than one year people. If this rate of death was to continue for as long as the AIDS epidemic lasted (which is 38 years now), we would lose 15,597,138 Americans. To contrast this with the AIDS epidemic, 700,000 Americans died between 1981 and 2020 with 32 million people dying worldwide over 38 years.

Inside Edition: Police in Ohio say house parties are booming, despite restrictions meant to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Bodycam video shows an officer breaking up a party and discovering something disturbing. The Oxford Police Department says the people at the house attend nearby Miami University, where 1,000 students tested positive for COVID-19. Inside Edition Digital’s Mara Montalbano has more.

Here and Now: Trump and the Climate

Since Donald Trump has been in office, he has pursued “an unrelenting fossil fuel agenda, Trump has scaled back or eliminated over 150 environment measures, expanded Arctic drilling, and denied climate science.” — President Donald Trump’s Climate Change Record Has Been a Boon for Oil Companies, and a Threat to the Planet — BY VERNON LOEB, MARIANNE LAVELLE, STACY FELDMAN (SEP 1, 2020/Inside Climate News)

His denial is like fuel being poured on the fires burning out of control this very moment up and down the West Coast of California (not to forget the terrible fires that scorched Australia at the beginning of 2020). The BBC headlined: Trump on climate change report: ‘I don’t believe it’.

Sept. 10, 2020 — NASA’s Aqua Satellite Captures Devastating Wildfires in Oregon

Death toll jumps to 15 as record wildfires continue raging in California, Oregon, and Washington, U.S. [Now it is 21 dead] — Posted by Julie Celestial on September 11, 2020 at 13:43 UTC — The Watchers

“There are 24 massive fires reported in California, 16 each in Washington and Oregon, 11 in Idaho, 9 in Montana, 7 in Arizona, 6 in Colorado, 5 in Utah, 4 in Alaska, 2 in Wyoming, and 1 each in Nevada and New Mexico.”

Death toll jumps to 15 as record wildfires continue raging in California, Oregon, and Washington, U.S. [Now it is 21 dead] — Posted by Julie Celestial on September 11, 2020 at 13:43 UTC — The Watchers

Wildfires Rage in California and Other Western US States — By VOA News — September 09, 2020 11:12 AM

“About 14,000 firefighters are continuing to battle 25 wildfires in the western U.S. state of California that have burned more than 890,000 hectares.”

Wildfires Rage in California and Other Western US States — By VOA News — September 09, 2020 11:12 AM

Here and Now: Trump and Everything Else

I have written extensively about Trump and how he is twisting the awakening of institutionalized racism in American, how he is smothering the uprising of Black Lives Matter taking place all over the country and world (e.g., Naked Athena — Splendor or Spectacle, Black and Brown Lives Matter, My Hometown Is Minneapolis), and how he encourages cruelty that is directed towards immigrants and anyone he perceives not to be on his side. I will not do so here other to say that Black and Brown Lives Do Matter! When we discriminate and conduct violence on black and brown people, it is as if we are cutting off parts of our shared humanity.

The human soul is a clear place. The human body is a clear place. It is the human mind that has become cloudy and lopsided, in fact, it have become very diseased. We need all of us to heal the sickness we have inflicted on each other and our planet. We need to use our minds to understand science again, to do the hard work to seek the truth in complicated events again, and to follow the facts again. These three things are powerful tools (mind tools) that have help us humans survive a very complicated reality, and a reality that we have made far more complicated with our meddling in natural balances nature worked out over billions of years. Now, here we stand (Homo sapiens), about to undo these balances in the catastrophic ways, in a mere few centuries. We must think again. We must value the difficult work of thinking again, and of innovative ideas and inborn creativity all humans possess and bring to solving our collective problems. To not do this now, is to continue our headlong rush into ignorance, which is going to end in death on scales we can scarcely imagine, even in this year of so much death in 2020.

I Skipped My Senior Prom for Science — 2017

Back to Lyrics and Their Numinous Symbolism

We are young…” — Yes, we are a young species in comparison to just about every other species on our pale blue planets. Will we be the species to wipe out all the other ones?

“The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Living Planet Report 2020, published today, sounds the alarm for global biodiversity, showing an average 68% decline in animal population sizes tracked over 46 years (1970-2016).”

WWF Living Planet Report 2020 reveals 68% drop in wildlife populations

I’ll believe when the sky is burning…” — Well, they are now burning up and down the Pacific Coast and across the west in the US… forests, towns, and meadows are burning, turning the sky orange and red. Prayers to all who are in the way of these deadly flames of 2020 and to those who have lost their homes and lives.

I’ll believe when the storm is through…” — And, the COVID storm is still not through. We continue to lose about as many people every day as we lost on 9/11 nineteen years ago.

Prayers to all who have lost a loved one in the United States (over 196,520 Americans have died of coronavirus as of 9/11/20). And, prayers to all people around the world who have lost a loved one due to coronavirus or have lost their livelihoods or suffer from long hauler syndrome (916,337 have died worldwide as of 9/11/20). — COVID-19 CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC (This is a pandemic that has been handled so badly by Trump who has used it as a political weapon and continues to do so by sowing misinformation designed to stir up division, fear, and hate).

Prayers to the memory of all the precious lives lost in the 9/11 attacks carried out nineteen years ago, an attack also born out of hate … something that only grows in human hearts.

We’re losing time, time, time…”

– Yes, every day we let hate, fear, jealously, greed, and all the thoughts, feelings, and states of being human contain inside of us that seeks destruction win through our deeds and actions in the world, we are losing precious time.

— When we become so divided inside ourselves that we lose sight of love, courage, trust, generosity–we are losing time.

— When these human qualities become “the other fellow out there who is out to get me” then we lose our ability to heal from traumatic pain and to maintain healthy relationships to ourselves and to others, we are losing time.

—- When this inner divide grows so wide and so deep that all the love and compassion inside of us disappears from our inner reality, then we are destine to lose our balance and fall into this hole in our mind.

—– When this happens, we all destine to fall into this inner chasm we created in our minds and when we do, we will all die because the truth is we are all connectedinside and outsideus and other are merely illusions of mind.

—— We are running out of time to understand this and to take meaningful action to heal.

Lyrics for On Our Way by The Royal Concept

I’ll believe when the walls stop turning

I’ll believe when the storm is through

I believe I hear them say

David won’t stop writing songs

I never wanna shake their hands and stay

I never wanna shake their hands and stay

Oh no let’s go

We are young, we are one

Let us shine for what it’s worth

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way somehow

Hold me close, close, close

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re falling to the ground

I’ll believe when the sky is burning

I’ll believe when I see the view

I believe that I hear them say

David won’t stop dreaming now

And everybody clap your hands and shout

And everybody clap your hands and shout

Oh no, they shout

We are young, we are one

Let us shine for what it’s worth

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way somehow

Hold me close, close, close

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re falling to the ground

We are young, we are one

Let us shine for what it’s worth

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way

Hold me close

We’re losing time

Hold me close

We’re falling to the ground

Taxi drive the sun is rising

Damn the sirens, keep on driving

Flashing light, oh what a night

I miss her bed, I lost my head

And it’s sunning, we’re still running

For her rooftop, our last stop

Barefoot, naked, don’t you let me go

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way somehow

Hold me close, close, close

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re falling to the ground

We are young, we are one

Let us shine for what it’s worth

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way

Hold me close, we’re losing time

Hold me close, we’re falling to the ground

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Carl Wikstrom Ask / Magnus Nilsson / David Larsson / Filip Bekic / Povel Olsson

On Our Way lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc.

Special Note:

I make these videos to help me heal from the devastation I have been facing for the past 5 years that sent me into a deep depression, which became even worst 2 years ago sending me into a near fatal downward spiral… those who know me, know my story… those who don’t, it is enough to just enjoy the video(s) 📷 Stay safe everyone wherever you are in the world.

It Came From Inside — Promo — Tragedy Can Trigger Inner Renewal
It Came From Inside — Artistic Journey of Inner Facing Great Despair and Tragedy to Get to Healing

Appendix

A Self-Perpetuating Cycle of Wildfires:

The Daily (produced by the NYT) explores a pattern of building and rebuilding that has increased the destructiveness of the fires ravaging the American West. We are to blame for this. Us. Humans. We have created these systems and now we have become stuck in them. If we don’t take drastic, compassionate action to correct these problems, it can and it will get worst. Reality is complex. And, we humans have made it even more complex with our thinking that can created systems stuck in dangerous patterns.

California’s North Complex Fire has burned 254,000 acres.Credit…Max Whittaker for The New York Times

‘Unprecedented’ Pacific Northwest fires burn hundreds of homes: PBS Newshour

“Firefighters were struggling to try to contain and douse the blazes and officials in some places were giving residents just minutes to evacuate their homes. The fires trapped firefighters and civilians behind fire lines in Oregon and leveled an entire small town in eastern Washington.

The devastation could become overwhelming, said Oregon Gov. Kate Brown.

“This could be the greatest loss of human life and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” Brown told reporters.”

Red sky and thick smoke are seen in Salem City, Oregon, U.S., September 8, 2020, in this picture obtained from social media. Picture taken September 8, 2020. ZAK STONE/via REUTERS

Western fire crews grapple with resource shortages, misinformation in addition to flames: Fire command center burned Monday night in Oregon. PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

“These firefighters, commanders, and support staff are one of the many incident management teams that assemble during wildfire season to battle blazes throughout the West. Late Monday night, as winds picked up across the region, a fire broke out around their incident command post in the small town of Gates, Oregon. As the fire quickly spread, the group, which totaled about 380, many of whom were staying in tents and campers outside the post, began a battle to save their own building.”

Western fire crews grapple with resource shortages, misinformation in addition to flames: Fire command center burned Monday night in Oregon. PBS Newshour, 9/11/20
Western fire crews grapple with resource shortages, misinformation in addition to flames: Fire command center burned Monday night in Oregon. PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

Shields and Brooks on virus aid impasse, Woodward’s Trump revelations: These guys are two of the most balanced, deep thinkers that I watch as often as I can. Tonight, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week in politics, including the congressional stalemate over pandemic relief legislation, revelations from Bob Woodward’s interviews with President Trump and the political impact they may have and whether Joe Biden’s campaign message is resonating with voters.

Shields and Brooks on virus aid impasse, Woodward’s Trump revelations — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

Oregon’s governor on her state’s wildfire crisis and ongoing racial protests: “This historic early fire season is devastating in its scope and toll. With fires merging and moving closer to Portland, that city now has the worst air quality of any in the world. Officials say they need twice as many firefighters as they have now. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the crisis as well as her response to months of public outrage over racism and police violence.” — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

Oregon’s governor on her state’s wildfire crisis and ongoing racial protests — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

The unveiling of painter John Singer Sargent’s unsung muse: This is an uplifting story about how and why Black Lives Matter in every aspect of being. “When John Singer Sargent was commissioned to paint a series of gods and goddesses at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, he turned for inspiration to Thomas McKeller, a young black model. Little has been known about the pair’s relationship — until now. Special correspondent Jared Bowen shares Boston’s Apollo, an exhibition that was showing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before the pandemic.” — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

The unveiling of painter John Singer Sargent’s unsung muse — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBES: OIL SPILL IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

Sinking Deep

Do rivers weep? Does the Arctic Ocean feel the pain of pouring deluges of oil? Does it feel the energy dripping of deep magenta and cayenne red? Dripping with no respect of boundaries? Sinking deep within the depths of your layers? Nothing you can do as the oil rigs have collapsed. They gave way. They let go falling into a trust fall that you would catch them. And you did. Not that you had to but where else was it to land? The narwhals, the orcas, the humpback whales sent out their sonar communication, crying and crying but it was all too late. A lullaby far past the hours of soothing.

State of Emergency

The permafrost was melting. The structure gave way in the land of the Russian Siberian full of forests, tundra, mosses, reindeer, moose and caribou. Their domain too. All will be taken over red blood on lichen. Deep red on marina pristine clear waters. Tainted. We did it again, we keep messing up.

Today The Arctic Circles Is Blood Red by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

Falling Into The Oil

A State of Emergency is called in the region of Norilsk, Russia. Yet, isn’t already too late? Ambarnaya and Daldykan Rivers filled with purple highlights, violet and burnt red oxide. On fire. Bleeding. Damaged. Will it ever really clean up?

Falling Into The Oil by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

We Are All One

All of this is happening while chants for George Floyd are recited as a holy mantra all over the world. Black Lives Matter. We are all one. But didn’t we once know that in the beginning of time? How soon did we forget that lesson?

Witnessing The Death of Two Blue Horses by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

Death of Two Blue Horses

The drums are also beating, the heart beats of all, a pandemic is in the forefront, stealing lives and breath and we still are not fully listening are we?

Witnessing The Death Of Two Blue Horses by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

The Elders Are Listening

We are trying. I have to give us credit. I have seen you protesting. Thank you. I see you painting. I see you writing. I see you playing your violin all alone at night writing ballads for health care workers. Thank you. I see you baking non gluten free bread for the one whom is in need. I see you holding the hand of an elder listening and offering love.

The Lost Blue Horse Tribes — Their Eyes Never Forget — Northern Russia and Arctic in a State of Emergency by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

Thank you.

Ancient Walk About

I feel deep in the narrative are my blue horses. I felt they have been aware of the oil spills to come in their Motherland. They were there on their Ancient Walk About, they have been so many times. I know they are present, they knew there was a reason they were to gather there. Sadly a few did not make it, even though they have lived in that region for so many eons. They could not survive and they so very selfishly gave up their spiritual existence to help us.

They see it all in the Universal Consciousness of their eyes.

Their soul eyes.

The Ancient Ones. The Lost Blue Tribe of Horses.

They are here. Transmuting energy.

They have always been here.

They will continue to guard the North Lands, the Sacred Circle till they are no longer needed. But, for now they are needed more than ever.

They will continue to circumambulate the Arctic. They walk the cold lands with their Nordic Companions. They walk on this ancient walkabout and have been here in time without time. Timelessness. Eternal. The blue horses will continue to hold the Sacred Stories. It is their destiny. They showed up the day the waters turned crimson.

They are holding us.
They know we are suffering.
They will continue the walk about till we are no more.
They are weeping with us.

The Lost Horse Tribes See and Hear Us –Paintings by Donna Alena Hrabcakova (animation by Genolve)

Written on June 5, 2020
Alena Hrabcakova
Midwest USA

THE LOST BIRD TRIBES, LOST HORSE TRIBES, AND LOST LANGUAGES SERIES

“Painting to me is a truth, and maybe…a memory..” — Andrew Wyeth.

What a beautiful documentary on Prime on his life and painting. I have been self-isolating for some time due to several changes in my life and am examining the deeper purpose of ARTISTS in this time of complete uncertainty. What is our role as helpers when many are suffering? I do not have the answers but I know because we cohabitate on a living breathing planet we are all effected. I can’t imagine anyone could not be effected in some way. If the Earth suffers we suffer. Many things that are happening now my grandmother predicted, she has been gone 24 years and told me stories long before that. Anna Mae. Wise Woman.

I THINK SHE KNEW ALL ALONG. Watercolor pencils. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

The Lost Bird Tribes

I always loved moody weather. Fog. Rain. Snow. Gray days. Sun present then not. Today I woke to misty fog with raindrops and if you close your mind you can pretend none of what we face now has happened. Of course it’s an illusion. I still want to paint beauty now and my Spirit Birds. I think we are starving for it. I love to surround myself with flowers, vibrant colors, art, textiles, textures. Jungian analyst Ellen Sweeney my dear friend said to me: “Does this feed your soul, or your despair?” I am looking at that question each day as I remain isolated due to respiratory issues.


How can you feed your soul today? How can you practice lovingkindness to yourself and others? How can you love this Earth more? This living breathing home that sustains us? 
Tell me what is helping you as you stay home, reflect, and be present to this narrative. Sending love. Thank you for following my art. I hope it brings a breath of beauty to your day. 

Watercolor. THE LOST BIRD TRIBES AND LOST LANGUAGES SERIES. SPIRIT BIRD AND RAVEN COMMUNE. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

I woke up in the night full of fear, the only thing that shakes it off for me is painting, art, Romeo. I will continue to paint beauty even in the depths of deep uncertainty. My heart went to CA. Blair and I loved our bohemian community in Trinidad. I was lucky to do additional studies at The Center for Sacred Studies in the Guerneville/Bay area. The energy there is infectious, alive and free. I think of my dear friends there I love. 
This is based on a dream I had years ago where I was in Tehran. I was in an opulent store full of gold and women were in full burkas. I was the only Westerner there having no idea why I was. The women went outside in the street in unison, their burkas fell off and they became a flock of ravens in the clear teal skies…off they flew. Free. I never forgot that amazing dream and finally painted it. ONCE UPON A TIME IN TEHRAN…holding all of you in my thoughts….🌿

THE LOST BIRD TRIBES AND LOST LANGUAGES WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS. Acrylics. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Frida Kahlo suffered so immensely in her life. She survived a horrific car/bus accident, had so many surgeries, was lame and became one of the most incredible artist of our times. She had many miscarriages and despite the depth of her pain she painted continually. She endured alot with Diego Riveria which caused her heartache. She remains one of my favorite artists because she was so completely raw, authentic, bearing her soul in spite of her suffering. She could be not be caged. Her art was her partner too. I relate so deeply to that. 


We can not nor would I want to compare peoples suffering. It is all relative and when you are in the midst of it this is your personal narrative. I know many are suffering with worry, family, anxiety of the unknown. I will still repeat my mantra: WE NEED ARTISTS MORE THAN EVER AT THIS TIME. Whatever form that takes. Many of you are artists that follow my page and I thank you for what you bring to others. Who knows maybe in this time of creativity/adversity a great art exhibit, a novel will be finished, new music and lyrics will find new homes. Let’s hold that thought and exhibit what we did in these times to bring HOPE to others. Art is home. There is no place like home. Sending love to you from my studio. 💖

WHEN FRIDA WAS A BIRD — By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Pandemic Paintings

My first Pandemic piece about the Virus. I wrote several pages on this. In this dream I saw horses that were skeletal like I could see their features but they were bones and air. They were balancing one another holding all the energies dark thoughts, suffering, hope and rebirth. To the right is a figure already reached by the virus going through a life review. Re-remembering all memories. All good, bad and mundane needing to make a decision if his soul will stay or not.


The left is a nun like figure dressed in a habit and covered veil. In the beginning I saw a large black and prussian blue moth in front of her. She has a mask covering her mouth. She too is having difficulty breathing. The apparation then becomes this moth being. Expanding. Breathing. Cleaning our lungs and the Earth working on us thoroughly whether we feel Her or not. 


We are rebirthing a New World, we are One. This brings to our us to our raw truth, our essence. Feeling between the worlds something so much larger than us is happening….So much larger than us…Soul Beings this is a Ceremony that needs all of us. Lovingkindness. Thinking of all of you. 💖💖

Pandemic Sketch. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

I worked on this 2 straight days while reflecting on this virus. Here is a poem I wrote 19 years ago that I feel connects with this piece. 2001. Image and poem copyright. 2020. 

Mother of the Night
of my interior silence and shame 
of top heavy scarlet peonies shedding into your rich terrain
So tender to touch.
Mother of the Night
Whom hears our muffled cries yet knowing.
You stand beside me as the cool winds descend torrents of rain, 
fresh green upon my thirsty soul.
Mother of the Night
of dreams entering my consciousness, 
You are here.
This I know 
In my sojurn of hellos and goodbyes
of the completely unexplainable.
You know me inside and out.
Mother of the Night, 
I release my heart 
Amongst the astral skies 
Remembering last Spring’s weeping
This May at Peace. 
Mother of the Night, 
It is getting easier to breathe.
Mother of the Night it is getting easier to breathe.

*One year from now I hope we feel this next Spring.
Love. Love. Love.

THE LOST HORSE TRIBES. Acrylics. MOTHER OF THE NIGHT. With Horse Spirit. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Lost Horse Tribes

I wrote this on Dec. 6, 2001.


“Once I thought I would die of a broken heart.
Now I live because I am broken.”
The Horse Spirits of my dreams comfort me in my dreams. Awakening me at 3:33 a.m. to get out of bed telling me to continue to write and make my art catalogue. NOW IS THE TIME as my father always said.
It is my gift to others in these times. 
Artists creating in this New Age difficult as it is, we were made for these times. 
Here we are ready to change the narrative, adapt, build hope, bring light, love, perception & compassion through empathetic lens…May be shared. @2020.

THE LOST HORSE TRIBES AND LOST LANGUAGES. Painting on Bristol Board Palette filled with color and turned into this painting. Recycled art. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Lost Bird Tribes

Excerpt from my night monk hour poem: 

” Please don’t tell me you are not afraid.
Please tell me the truth. 
Not what you think I want to hear.
Not a heartless platitude. 
Emptiness. 
If you really and honestly are doing great
I want to know your Divine secrets 
Because the night hours call me 
Taking me down endless roads and universities 
With no names.
I never know where I am.
And tonight I feel so lost.” 3-28@2020. 
Fear of the Unknown.  #NeoVirusArt.
THE LOST BIRD TRIBES AND LOST LANGUAGES.

Morning Zen Mandala. PLEASE TELL ME THE TRUTH. ONE Hour paint and write. 3:30.a.m. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Rainy night
Pattering on my window to WAKE UP
Marc Chaghall visited in my dreamspace
He said, ” Be fantastically playful!”
The composition of my twilight hours painted itself
Two Asian Strawberry Finches 
A Blue Horse leaping into an ethereal Walk About
Interconnected
One Tribe.
They said to me their names were
The Awakening. @2020. 

Inspired by the great artist Marc Chaghall. 1887-1985.
Russian, French, Belarusian Jewish origin.
He painted ” dreams of our humanity.”
Colorist. Surrealism. Cubism. Expressionism. Modern Art. Symbolism. Fauvism. 
I am deeply inspired by his art. I would define my art as a Visionary Colorist Birthing The New Earth Movement. Loving Awareness, Donna Alena

THE LOST BLUE HORSES AND BIRD TRIBES — THE AWAKENING. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Lost Horse Tribes & Possibilities

If I lose HOPE I will have lost everything. 
What is something that brings you a sense of peace and hope today despite adversity? 
Loving kindness, Donna Alena. @2020.

SPRING BODHISATTVA: HOPE. Acrylics 36 x 24. 
THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBES. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Oh Empty Spaces
The Silent Night Hours
We are Living Texts of this time.
Breathing into this Holy Moment
Listening to my inherited narrative
Knowing this is the catalyst of
Infinite Possibilities. 

SPRING: AWAKENING. @2020. Acrylics.
Time of the Virus and Reflection. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

The Luminance Hour

From my journal I wrote this: 

The Luminance Hour has arrived
I think we deep down knew this moment was possible.
A sudden urgent STOP
Catching our breath
Hearing the words the Period of Impermanence 
The moment of Reconcilation.
We have no choice other than to 
Awaken. 

Morning Meditation: I Am Loving Awareness. Ram Dass. 10 minute a.m. sketch watetcolor pencils
Be Here Now iheart radio. 2020 By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Crossing the Atlantic with the Mermaids

To my Aunt Ann whom has been gone 23 years. When she was crossing the Atlantic, age 15 she said “the mermaids followed the ship to Ellis Island.” This was a devout Catholic woman whom believed in mermaids! Yes she saw them, yes they guided her ship. She was to live in West Mifflin, PA the rest of her life near her parents meeting my incredible Uncle Andy. I see these mermaids as beacons in the journey guiding us to new places, new homes. Something we all need!

THE MERMAIDS OF ELLIS ISLAND. Experimental art. 3 D. Molding paste is 
made out of broken shells, fiber paste, acrylics. @2020 By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Raven & Lost Horse at Night

Evening is when I love to paint. The lighting is uncertain, the colors a question.These are the Night Companions we cannot see that help us. Maybe we do see them, I imagine them & paint them like a novel. Someone asked me yesterday how disciplined should an artist be. I say draw, paint, and sketch everyday and when you do this for years you will witness the metamorphis of your techniques and art. I know these times are so difficult. Keep doing your art, don’t stop. We need your stories and dialogue!! 

WHEN THE RAVEN MET THE LOST BLUE HORSE IN THE NIGHT. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

The Story Begins

Good morning friends. My prologue to my book passed my editor’s approval. Chapters forming. Good vibes while I am home healing and painting please.

THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBE. @2020. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

I have been dreaming on it for awhile and have begun writing. Hint the story begins in Mongolia where the horses originated before crossing the Bering Strait. They were Medicine Helpers, companions, and nomadic travelers. May be shared. More awaits the story. 💖💖

THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBES: THE BERING STRAIT. Copyright 2020. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

She is a Mirage. She follows the Nomadic air. No-one owns her. The tundras are full of arctic moss, bearberry, and labrador tea cradling her feet where no map has existed. Like fog that appears and dissipates she is led purely by instinct in the North Lands. 

THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBES. It’s all a dream. SHE WHO RUNS WITH THE NOMADIC AIR. @2020. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Super Moon couldn’t sleep so I worked on the fauna and plant life that will be in the book. Another chapter ready for my editor. Will not share what I wrote but oh it is good, I feel it in my Slovak bones. This inquiry started when a 5 year old client asked me if flowers could talk. I said “of course!” He said “I knew it because I heard the dandelions today….” 

THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBES. Watercolor pencils. Encounter with the Tundra Flowers and Plants. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Another Blue Horse on the journey from THE BERING STRAIT. Imagination is such a gift. I think I have been writing and plotting stories since kindergarten. God bless my mom and dad. Dad used to tell me to publish my book! “I don’t always understand what you are doing but I am proud of you.” Eventually, he even bragged I was an art therapist! When I was 18 in college he begged me to not major in art. “You will never find a job.” Imagine his horror that I would be an art therapist. Well it took Post Masters work to be certified so I think he was relieved I would get a job. 30 plus years later out of college I am still creating art and doing art therapy with trauma and grief. It’s been a ride. Thank you dad and mom. All the family! 

From THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBES. @2020. ART AND IMAGINATION HEALS. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Almost finished. In the beginning blue horses roamed the lands of Mongolia and Siberia with unabandoned freedom. They were on an Ancient Walk About following the interior maps they inherited for centuries. Migration was something that was the divine makeup of their beingness. There were so many territories to roam. They could be not be stopped, owned, hoarded for this too was unattainable.

SACRED ROAMING. THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBES. 36 X 36. @2020 By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Water and Bones

She is composed from the Waters crossed long ago to a home unseen. Leaving everything behind not sure one would ever return. Her granddaughter became a vivacious swimmer and everytime she closed her eyes she saw her grandmother Bubbie and Aunt Aunt knowing they were in her bones, always present, a melody that haunted her softly in the blue light…

THE LIGHT IS BLUE. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

The Story Continues

Meet INGRID: SIBERERIAN HORSE RIDER. She comes from the lands of snow. The myth goes no one knows for sure how she ended up in Mongolia but she was seen with the Blue Horses. She was so fair and ethereal that the Original People called her Ingrid. She was the color of the expansive plateaus, caribou moss and the endless turquoise skies. This painting was started by Andrea Dawson-Johnston at my house as a sketch and I asked her if I could paint my interpretation she said yes and so she became a character in my book. So TY Andrea! Perfect day for her debut as faint tender snow is falling. Storytelling heals…

INGRID: SIBERERIAN HORSE RIDER. Painted on scrap lumber. Acrylics. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Vandana means Worship. She is a strong character, named after one of my dear friends from Graduate School. She is committed, brave, decisive based on instincts, allie to all birds, and a culture keeper, one who holds the Stories. First sketch of her so she might evolve and change. She is a dreamer of big adventures and nothing gets in her way to try! 


Dreaming Sacred Places & People

The original painting I will post below later. I painted it in 2018 and yesterday I went back in and updated it. 

Two times I was to go to Kathmundu and the Tibetan Plateau but both times I had siginificant life changes and could not go. Interestingly, the places I don’t go to I dream about. Do you dream of places you want to visit? I totally believe we can go their in Dream Time. I count on it! 


Yesterday, I dreamt I was there surrounded by Shamans, Inuit, Mongolian, Tibetan, and from India. They were so beautiful in their regalia from their homelands. I am leaving out a lot of details but when it was time to go I pleaded and cried for them to take me HOME with them. At first they were in disbelief that I wanted to do this then they knew I was very sincere. I asked them what my job would be. They said ” they would place me in front of one of the monk’s houses, people would come to me and my job was to only Listen.”


I know as an art therapist that has worked with trauma, and bereavement for years this is what I do. But this listening was different. It is Sacred Listening. Being present in everyway possible. No judgement. I felt this was very relevant with grief and the New Virus Age. I have had daily conversations with dear friends where they are there for me. I deeply listen to them back. Maybe in this time we begin to learn the true responsibility the sense of hearing and how we use it. 


I still hope to get to Kathmundu one day and place some of Blair’s ashes near the Himalayas. Meanwhile, I can dream…yes I can always dream….Love…..

WHEN WE MET IN KATHMUNDU. 2018-2020. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

It’s all a dream but it is getting closer to reality.
PAST PRESENT FUTURE.

In the dream I wear a Ukrainian cornflower blue crown. I am holding roses that will be planted on Great Zetal’s land. Added rain and rose water. 
Memories of all the Grandmother’s. Bittersweet. Based on a suggestion by Reda Rackley. Site of BONEWOMAN. Thank you Reda.

ZETAL’S ROSE GARDEN. 19 x 24 By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Based on a dream. I see the back of myself in what appears to be the future. I am wrapped in an ochre blanket. After so many questions, dreams, travels, I finally see the deepest desire I have revealed. I am sitting in Zetal’s village. Looking at the low line hills. The air is clear. The hour is sunset when I was born. It feels like a mirage, like rain softly falling. It feels so deeply familiar.

SITTING WITH THE OLD ONES. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

My niece will be giving birth during this pandemic. This is for the new mothers. The Ancestors that stand with them. The trees. The seen and unseen. This is also the rebirth of ourselves. The New Consciousness that the virus is teaching us. The birth of a New World. The knowledge that some cycles of life must fade, they no longer serve humanity. Birthing a new way of living. I hope you have made new decisions of living. 🥀💖

Birth of a New World. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

For all our Mothers here and on the other side. 

For All Our Mothers. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

SERIES FOR BLAIR. Third Anniversary nearing. Many many layers. I am bewitched by the Patinas of Eastern Europe. I was trying to recreate them to look like ones I saw in Poland. They form these lovely palettes of color naturally. Reference for fields of poppies in Slovakia.

SERIES FOR BLAIR. By Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Thank you for journeying with us!

In Times of Crisis, Look for the Lost Bird Tribes

During A Time of Crisis (Personal or Collective), Look for a Lost Bird Tribe

Whenever a person experiences a crisis or difficult period due to the death of a loved one, job loss, changes in family structure/cohesion, or anything that places an acute strain on the individual, the effects can ripple for years, decades, even the rest of their life. If a person has enough money, resources, and social status, they often get the help they need to weather the storm. However, a person lacking any or all of these supports, a time of crisis can quickly turn into a crushing time and potential collapse. In my experience during such a time, less robust friendships quickly dry up and disappear. If this happens, very often a person is left to tread the waters of distress alone in a growing sea of fear, sorrow, pain, grief, and abandonment. Digging deeper inside oneself is quite often the only pathway forward. This is when a lost bird tribe might show up. They are messengers and protectors of inner languages that have been lost due to overly busy and complicated modern lives. They remind us of what is really the most important to things to being alive.

One Lost Bird Tribe: Our Lost Inner Worlds

Right now, in the time of COV-19, hard times are being experienced by people around the world almost simultaneously. And these trying times are touching every echelon of society, even the very rich. It is a global crisis that is unprecedented in our modern age and one that is not only threatening human lives but economic systems that the Western World depends upon to thrive.

Just before COV-19 hit, there were big and little crises and civil unrest on the rise all over the world. One could feel this growing global turbulence and turmoil, but one could also still ignore it, concluding it was something happening in Hong Kong (the protests), not here, or something happening in Brazil, not where I live. Co-occurring with this was the rise of authoritarian governments in some of the most democratic countries in the world. People fleeing deadly wars (such as in Syria and Yehem), violence (such as so many countries of Central America), and starvation (such as so much African countries, Venezuela, or any place where conflict and lopsided economic systems ruled by the rich) were welcomed with closed boarders, walls, deportation, and blockades at sea. And, young people around the world who were making their voices heard about the dangers and coming crises of climate change were mocked, and even worse, ignored.

Rather than being brought together by our shared needs as human beings, rampant individualism seem rather to prevail–a type of focus that tends to tear at the fabric of our social structures rather than repair it. Before COV-19, the world seem to react to big and little crises more like a contagious disease to be contained. Barricades and a do not get involved attitude seemed more socially acceptable than providing help and care. And, watching crises unfold far away was strangely comforting as individuals went about their lives as business as usual.

What I am going to tell here occurred before the rapid rise of COV-19, but it is about dealing with crisis and it shows how Lost Bird Tribes can show up during such times to remind us of our lost inner languages–the ones that make us thrive and feel joy and help us heal. These powers come from inside. They are sorely tested during a time of crisis, but that is why the Lost Birds show up to help us find our inner reservoirs of strength, resilience, and wholeness. It is from a point of wholeness that all human beings are empowered to weather the most severe crisis or time.

Following are some of the Lost Birds I have found during my time of personal crisis as well as the ones my friend and colleague Donna Alena Hrabcakova has found.

The Lost Bird Tribe: How To Be Nice

After suffering another devastating personal loss when our beloved dog died suddenly and unexpectedly two days before Christmas. I barely had enough energy to go on any more. A decade of escalating crises had whittled me down to the point of personal collapse. The death of my father a year and a half before combined with the cruel act of my employer firing me while I was by my father’s bedside for 10 days before he died had left me at a point of psychology collapse. It is a place of collapse from which I almost did not pull out from. Many other things contributed to this as well such as most of my social support drying up, including friends, family, even pastors and bishops who looked the other way. But, my dogs did not look the other way. Especially my little brown dog that we called Cider. She stayed by my side night and day. She needed me, and I needed her. I know dogs died unexpectedly all the time. But, what made her death especially hard was that she had been there for me when everyone else was not.

I have written about and made a video (Tribute to Cider), so I will simply say after Cider died, I collapsed again, and it got really bad again. The only thing that pulled me through the aftermath of my father’s death was storytelling and art. And so, that was what I attempted to do again.

When a person creates a thing, it is natural to want to share that thing. One of the things I created was a one minute video. I used a template to create a short trailer using all the bells and whistles that iMovie provides. I selected a longer video I had made a while back about doing inner work to make a promo of. And so after making this, I shared it in several groups I belonged and in which I had shared very similar work previously. These groups had always welcomed similar work I had shared there before, or so it seemed. This time, one group refused to approve the video and another one deleted it. When I asked why the admin of the group that deleted the video, I was told:

“I did not see the link anymore between your personal experience and expression and the relation to us as a species in this time and place.”  

Really? That’s just plain mean.

The Lost Bird Tribe: It is OK to Get to Your Last Straw & Draw It!

That’s when I found my Lost Bird Tribe: The Last Straw Tribe. I terminated that friend on Facebook and left that group. Then, I purged many “friends” and left many “groups” because I finally realized a couple of things.

One of these things is that many of my “friends” were in a race to get to 5,000. That’s the limit of friends Facebook allows a person to have, but have you ever wondered how one person can really have 5,000 friends? Do you think the algorithms can even share your posts in such “friend’s” News Streams, even your most popular posts? But, I realized having them as my friend dilutes who sees my posts. And, these were individuals who even if they saw my post, they were not showing up for me. And because the algorithm feed it to them and they did not react, my post was shared less and less, meaning friends who might have seen it did not see it because the algorithms judged it unimportant. And so, these friends were really rather a burden to me. I was simply a bead on their necklace of getting to 5,000 friends, nothing more.

At the same time, I came to realize through a series of incidental conversations that I had “friends” not necessarily in a race to 5,000 but they had seen post about my dog dying in my arms as we rushed her to the vet, but they chose to stay invisible. They did not let me know they knew this, nor did they offer a word of comfort or support. They were just watching, which is a very odd feeling when you realize others are watching your pain. I know…it’s on me for sharing it. I take full responsibility for this. But, until this moment I supposed my friends were doing as I tried to do if I saw they were going through a hard or painful time. At the very least, I would let them know I saw their post. And most of the time, I try to leave a word of comfort or support. I understand that I miss many posts because I rely on the algorithms to show me stuff in my News Feed. I have thought many times that I should try to visit my friend’s timelines to make sure I don’t miss something important, but I always run out of time, just like everyone else does. And so, I rely on the algorithms, just like everyone else does. It is really a terrible way to be connected.

But now, I was realizing something I had not considered before: I had friends who were seeing my sad news but not letting me know they saw it nor offering a word of comfort or support. Rather, they were watching like voyeurs. If you look up the meaning to this word, it means a person who enjoys seeing the pain or distress of others. I began to feel like a Voodoo doll–a thing others can watch, perhaps even derive satisfaction or pleasure that the needles of pain and suffering were being visited upon me and not them. Have you ever watched a Reality TV show and said afterwards: “Thank God that’s not my life.” I began to wonder: Do we harbor as human beings somewhere deep in our collective psyche that our own personal pain and suffering might be averted by letting others suffer it for us? If so, this would be an ancient and unpalatable thing for a modern, civilized human being to admit, and therefore, it would have been forgotten by most. Indeed, it would have be buried deeply in our unconsciousness, but that doesn’t mean it went away…not at all, it’s still there lurking in our collective unconsciousness ready to pounce on someone else’s pain as if doing this could avert one’s own pain.

All this happened before COV-19 began its relentless march around the world, putting one country after another and another on lockdown. Before it became clear this was a global crisis that no one would be spared. If you are a human being, you are susceptible to becoming infected by this novel coronavirus because no one has immunity to it, and a vaccine may be many months away. It is an evolving situation, but so far this novel coronavirus appears to be 10 to 20 times more deadly than seasonal flu. Indeed, older people are more likely to go on to develop serve symptoms, but there are cases of younger people getting very sick too. And another novel feature of this virus is that some individuals may show little or no symptoms at all, but act like super spreaders.

This was, it is, a crisis that everyone is experiencing virtually at the same time. And, it is one that has removed almost every form of distraction we might have depended upon not to feel so bad about something we was or are experiencing. Sporting games have been shut down, bars and restaurants are being shut down, gyms and public spaces of every kind are being shut down. People must isolate, and if they got out into a public space, they must try to keep 6 feet distance. It is something we are not use to in modern, highly advanced, civilized societies, even though many, many people in the world have and are suffering much more everyday, but somehow we have managed to keep our distance from their pain.

The Lost Bird Tribe: Grow A Supportive & Caring Community Yourself

After this winnowing down of my online social contacts, I did something I didn’t expect to do. I created my own group. Yes, this was a crazy thing to do. I called this group: If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?  It’s a phrase Alan Watts said in one of his lectures. I started listening to a lot of Alan Watts after Cider died. I found his lectures strangely comforting. This particular phrase made a lot of sense to me as I was coming to terms with my fate and the world as it really is, and not how I wanted it to be. In a way, Watts was leading me back to one of my Lost Bird Tribes. He was helping me trust my inner knowledge and wisdom. He was helping me learn how to trust myself to take the actions I needed to take to heal me.

After creating this group, I invited a few friends who had stood by me. I really wasn’t sure what sort of group I wanted it to be, but I wanted a group that could honor differences between members with dignity and respect. I wanted a group that could foster deep conversations on issues that matter without being cruel to each other when we hit points of divergence on such issues as human beings are naturally going to hit because we are individuals. I had been in enough groups where I had seen the equivalent of online shouting (e.g., my idea or opinion is better than yours). It is a type of behavior that seems to have infected so many online groups and communities. I also wanted a group that could help individual members do things they felt deeply called to do but it can be incredibly difficult to do such a thing for doing so often requires a person to step back from the trappings and expectations of modern society and to live on shoestrings until something becomes self-sustaining, if it ever become self-sustaining.

The idea of creating a Swimming Pool for the Mind began to emerge. A place where friends can gather and share stories and ideas just like friends might do when they sit around a campfire. A place where we can grow a true sense of community like our ancestors surely shared when they came together to survive on the vast savannas and glaciers of long ago when humans did not rule the world. A place where we might discover moments of synchronicity that inspire or connect dots of thought or ideas. A place where we might go like a swimming pool to strengthen our body, but this was a pool for the mind to strengthen compassion, kindness, curiosity, and understanding. A place where we gathered to listen to each other and to grow in our individual beingness as human being living through extraordinary times that requires all of us to dive deeper inside ourselves and find inner lost languages and abilities needed right now to survive our times by making choices that regard the wellbeing and safety of others just as highly as the safety and wellbeing of one’s self.

The Lost Bird Tribe: We Are the Medicine of Now

Now is the time for our storytellers and artists and philosopher bloggers to shine a light forward; a way towards a kinder, a greener, a more compassionate future that has room for all living beings of Earth–the rich ones and the poor ones, the human ones and the non-human ones. We all go together and it is going to take every single individual making the choices that are as inclusive and compassionate as they can be to make it through our current crisis of COV-19 (e.g., maintain social distance and help to flatten the curve so that our medical systems don’t collapse and we do have enough respirators to help those individual who get severely ill from COV-19). It is going to take every single human being (rich and poor) to make personal sacrifices and choices to ensure and protect the greater good. We need each other doing this now to flatten the curve and avert the most devastating possibility this virus looks capable of inflicting everywhere where human lives.

And when our daily lives return to “normal” again, perhaps we can integrate some of the lessons we have learned about crisis and how we need each other most of all during these times. And, we can set aside our differences to flatten another curve of a catastrophic nature, the climate change curve, which also threatens human civilization as we know it.

Our individual choices hold the transformation power to hold COV-19 at bay and to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. This power resides inside of us. We are the medicine for Now. When we are going through a time of crisis, whether it is personal, regional, or global, the Lost Birds come to us through our nighttime dreams and daydreams, in visions and doodles, in flashes of insights and moments of intuition. They are the wings of wisdom that lift us above our circumstances to we can see a better way forward. They are the feathers of creativity, imagination, and artistry that reveal the buried treasures hidden in our souls.

They come in every shape and color. They can fly to the highest echelons of our minds or dive to the deepest, darkest parts inside our psyche. They help reconnect us back to the parts we have lost inside ourselves and show us how we to converse together again as one vibrant, alive Tribe of Earth.

What Lost Tribes and Languages wait to be discovered inside of you right now? Now is a gift of the most unique and unusual kind…it is the gift of time. We have all been knocked out of our usual routines and distractions. Perhaps with this time, you might catch a glimpse of one of your Lost Bird Tribes who can reconnect you with some of your lost inner languages. Now, you have the gift of time to venture an inner journey and become a legend. This is breaking the rules of modern life because if we truly find what matters to us inside, all the consumption and distraction and deadlines just might not matter so much.

Take now to recover a little bit more of who you are…who you have always been, it’s just been forgotten and buried by our modern, civilized life. Allow some of your Lost Bird Tribes to reveal themselves and show you beautiful things inside of yourself that can rejuvenate, inspire, and renew you, Now.

The Lost Bird Tribe: Be the Spark of Mutual Support & Understanding

One of the first conversations to emerge from this group was started by Founding Member Donna Alena Hrabcakova when she posted a couple of short stories and paintings that she called:

The Lost Bird Tribes and Lost Languages

— Donna Alena Hrabcakova — The Lost Bird Tribes and Lost Languages (Crisis and Lost Birds)

“TOP LEFT, AMERICAN GOLDFINCH, painted last night. I am deeply effected by the diminishing songs of the birds and I see less birds here in the Midwest these days. What would life be like without their sings and presence? So I dream of the Shamanic Birds whom lull me to sleep. Mourning. What will be their last proclaimation and who will be listening?  Translating for the birds. My last name Hrabcakova in Slovak means BIRD.”

— Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Night Shaman Bird: One Whom Flies With Elk

Night Shaman Bird: One Whom Flies With Elk — Donna Alena Hrabcakova

THE LOST BIRD TRIBES AND LOST LANGUAGES 
Night Shaman Bird: One Whom Flies With Elk. 
More birds to be posted with writings. Sketchbook.
Good morning my fellow artists!”

— Donna Alena Hrabcakova

The Lost Bird Tribe: Be the Nourishing Rain that Grows A Conversation

Donna Alena’s two posts inspired another Founding Member, Ulrike Schütz, to share this:

The Legend of the Rainbow Crow

“The story of the Rainbow Crow is a Lenape legend, symbolizing the value of selflessness and service. After a long period of cold weather, the animals of the community become worried. They decide to send a messenger to the Great Sky Spirit to ask for relief. The Rainbow Crow, the most beautifully feathered bird, offers to make the arduous journey. He travels safely, and is rewarded by the Great Spirit with the gift of fire. He carries the gift in his beak back to his people, but upon his return, he does not appear to be the same bird that he once was. The fire has scorched his plumage black, with only hints of his previous color, and his voice has been made rough and hoarse by the smoke. In this way, his sacrifice is commemorated.

Another name for Rainbow Crow is Many Colored Crow. This is in reference to the iridescent feathers created from the fire that scorched his plumage black, with only hints of his previous color that reflect when sun light strikes them.” — Wiki

— Thank you Marianne Connor for sharing the magic of the Rainbow Crow.

Ulrike Schütz shared this picture as well, and she told how she had taken it just after hearing the story of the Rainbow Crow. The sky was retelling this legend and the crows were flying in the formation of a bird/crow. If you look for it, the way the clouds are shaped and how this flock of crows are spread out, they look like a crow in the sky. Ulrike said over the past few years she has developed a kind of communication with the sky that she calls Skylistening. Not only does the sky listen, but it can answer, just as the land, earth, and all the elemental forces.

This is a beautiful example of a synergistic conversation and how we as individuals can learn to tap back into our inner reservoir of wisdom waiting to help us, especially when we are confronting a challenge or enduring a time of crisis. Birds have always been messengers in myths and legends from around the world. And that makes sense because they are boundary crosser. In the normal everyday world, they cross the boundaries between land and sky. In the inner unusual world of the psyche, they can cross between boundaries of despair and hope, fear and confidence, love and hate.

This is what we need Now: To catch glimpses of our Lost Bird Tribes who will help us reconnect to our Lost Inner Languages and Parts of ourselves needed now more than ever to weather the storms we face, whether they come from inside or outside or regardless of it is it a personal crisis or a global one.

Here are a few more Lost Bird Tribes from Donna Alena’s beautiful series.

Lost Bird Tribe: Raven of the Night

“I woke up and painted this Raven of the Night.”

“It’s message: Art heals. Art is the Medicine of our times.”

Narratives. Bards. Poets. Painters. Storytellers. I think its message is to fly into the night and listen for the birds who are always singing, even during the Darkest Nights of the Soul.”

— Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Raven of the Night

Raven of the Night — Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Lost Bird Tribe: Lone Bird — The Language of Aloneness and Authenticity.

“Funny we don’t ask people who are alone, tell me about that…the world wants to share stores of partners, families, children etc…but I want to know about you in your alone moments? 
Who are you? 
What do you do? 
What do think about? 
Meditate on? 
Listen to? 
Read? 
Spend time doing? 
What is your passion in the alone moments that get you out of bed? 
That determine you had a satisfying day? 
That determine your sorrow? 
Sadness? 
Dreams? 
Happiness? 
Bliss? 
What do you dream of??? 
Tell me more about YOU. 

Let’s get to the SOUL of you because isn’t that what we are really hungry, no starving for authentic connection? 

Now that I am alone, not by choice but by fate rolling the dice, I think alot about who are we when we are alone? And why are many terrified of that. I struggle, yes, but I am finding peace more day by day. “

Lone Bird

Lone Bird — Donna Alena Hrabcakova

— LONE BIRD. Watercolor pencils. Sketchbook.

“I think this could be a beautiful collaborative blog if enough of us wanted to explore these very important questions. What are your thoughts?”

— Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Lost Bird Tribe: He/She Whom Crossed the Bering Strait. 

“I saw this one with wider features. He/she was covered in paint and feathers and crossed the lands that opened Pangea when we were all one continent. No borders. Ethnicities of every sort. Thousands of languages exploring the unclaimed landscapes trusting home existed somewhere. This was done in the night and I love how the colors turned out.”

— Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Acrylics. *Nighttime is a beautiful hour to paint.

CROSSING THE BERING STRAIT: MIGRATION OF THE UNNOWN.

CROSSING THE BERING STRAIT: MIGRATION OF THE UNNOWN. — Donna Alena Hrabcakova — Crisis and Lost Birds

Acrylics. *Nighttime is a beautiful hour to paint.

Lost Bird Tribe: Riven

“I just painted my fav painting thus far. I am taking a painting class MOTHER EARTH my teacher is the amazing Michal Shimoni. My art has truly shifted by practicing her techniques along with personal shifts in my life. Title: RIVEN: INITIATION. Riven is a Hebrew and British name meaning to split or tear apart. I had a dream 2 weeks ago I was in a painting class. I saw a book in the room I wanted to read but was told I could not read it by the Professor. I took the book and plastered it into the painting. The title was JE NE SAIS PAS. Which in French means “I don’t know.” My Slovakian Bubbie always said this. In Slovak it is YE NES NUM. I think art is a great mystery into the Darkness, the Void, the Unexplainable Places, I call them the Ancestors. There the Divine Spark is lit. I never know what I will bring back. Art and books can never be censorsed as it so much bigger than us!”

“Riven represents an adolescent girl becoming a woman. She is composed by the forest, a deep enigma carrying this forbidden book with her Shamanic bird companion. I saw her in a jingle dress and feathers. I lived on an Indian Reservation for years. She was apprenticing for this Sacred Calling. These women are the Medicine Dancers. I am so honored I walked on Ojibwa lands for 7 years. What a gift. Something has shifted in my art with this painting. I don’t fully understand it but we will see where it goes. I am honored and humbled to share RIVEN. Are you going on a personal initiation also?”

— In loving kindness, Donna Alena

Riven

Riven — Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Lost Bird Tribe: SPIRITS IN THE TREES: HOOVER DAM

“I was inspired by Hoover Dam this morning. Horses, Elk, Shamanic Birds, Tree Goddesses cohabitating in these magical landscapes of trees… Watercolor Pencils. Inspiration from Michal Shimoni my teacher abroad and our MOTHER EARTH PAINTING CLASS. Today was a hard day so I am happy with this. 💘”

— Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Spirits in the Trees: Hoover Dam

SPIRITS IN THE TREES: HOOVER DAM — Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Lost Bird Tribes: WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS.

“Well this seems like 1,000’s of layers. I see her as Persephone rising from the Earth being reunited with her Mother Demeter. It appears she is half bird a shapeshifter of some sort. I am thinking as we isolate more I will try and focus on my art even deeper. The ARTIST voices are needed now more than ever to transmute this energy we are faced with. The day is so quiet with snow falling it almost seems like the pandemic crisis of this virus is at bay but we all know better. I used quite a bit of molding paste mixed with spices, coffee, rose oil, dirt and more. I have stated earlier that my last name in Slovak means bird. Seems very fitting since I have painted them so much. I want to hear your songs, stories, see your art, poetry, writings and musings. Let us embrace the alone time to really evaluate what is TRULY important. 💙”

— Donna Alena Hrabcakova

When Women Women Birds

WHEN WOMEN WERE BIRDS. — Donna Alena Hrabcakova — Crisis and Lost Birds

More Lost Bird Tribes and Languages
Individuals Who Are Following Their Creativity and Passion

Here are a few more individuals who I know are doing wonderful things by sinking deeply into what they feel called to do right here and right now. Really, this is all we ever have is Here & Now. It is at this point where we can transform ourselves and the world. Each of us holds a critical pieces to a better future and to a more sustainable and compassionate world. How are you going to use your gift of Now?

My friend Reinhard Hopperger is launching a new website called GreenerAndWiser. This is a site that gathers together in one place information on current events, climate issues, Native American wisdom, spirituality, society, technology, economy, and more–basically everything that makes Now so very challenging to navigate, especially as a global collective whose footprint covers every nook and cranny of our world and whose individual choices that add up to a massive collective choice could determine the fate of our world. He also has launched a Facebook group with the same name.

GreenerAndWiser — website and group

My friend Ben Roberts is growing a global community to explore the art of being fully human in a time of crisis. Individuals gather from around the world a couple of times through a series of Zoom calls that explore relevant topics impacting participants. There is also a Facebook group where people gather to share ideas as well as many other innovative social platforms being woven together to create a new type of social platform to harness the good each individual seeks to share and amplify it through this growing collective. It takes the form of a global gathering and gift economy for collectively navigating the complexity of our times in order to support action, build community, foster healing, and unleash generosity. To find out more, visit Now What?! A new series of Zoom calls are about to begin on March 23, 2020, so go check it out.

Now What?! website and Facebook Group

My friend Alex Lavigne-Gagnon is an artists, musical, and philosopher blogger. Through his work, he shows us beautiful ways to reconnect to inner landscapes of musical expression or color or words. Each of us can find these inner-scapes through the act of creating. Here are just a few of Alex’s beautiful creations.

Nuit blanche – Improvisation

And on Reverbnation: Jonas-Thanatos the Engineer is a selection of songs he has composed and produced.

Jonas-Thanatos the Engineer — Singer/Songwriter

My friend Hannelie Sensemaker Worldpainter Venucia is helping people reconnect to joy through the Joy Generation. Check out her website and YouTube channel:

My friend Jürgen Hornschuh writes thought provoking blogs and will soon publish a book entitled “Mach was!?” (Do something!?). He writes about the predicament of our culture, otherwise known as global industrial civilization. His book will draw upon the works of Daniel Quinn, John Michael Greer, Derrick Jensen, Thomas Henry Pope, Keith Farnish, George Gorman, and Charles Eisenstein, to name a few of the many sources of insight and inspiration for “Mach was!?”, which is a look at civilization from various angles in order to find out how we can face its omnicidal trip individually and collectively.

My friend Floris Koot also blogs The Gentle Revolution: Towards a revolution we all want to dance in, for a flourishing planet.

My friend George Chiger is a professional eater. Yes, you read this right. He trains as a competitive eater. This is a competitive sport that takes training. George is ranked 12th in the world. He is trying currently to reach enough views on his YouTube channel The Smorgasborg to monetize it. This will help him make this a self-sustaining profession. He dreams to leverage his success as a professional eater to help children and youth in the United States who do not have enough to eat to get enough to eat. If you are looking for interesting things to view on YouTube right now, check out George!

George Chiger on Porkroll & His Competitive Eating Journey

My brother is working to create innovative graphics for websites and social media that catch attention and are unusual and unique. He has created a self-evolving algorithm that evolves your original designs. All the moving featured images, website graphics, and even the moving spacers in this blog have been created using his WordPress plugin. He needs people to try things out and help him evolve it even more. If your interested, check out his website and for early adopters of the WordPress plugin, he may provide it free for a limited number.

These are just some of the people who I know sinking down into doing something they feel deeply called to do. Many have made sacrifices to do so. So find your Lost Bird Tribes, tell your story, create your art or music or movie. This is what leads us to the reservoirs of wisdom where our lost inner languages flow eternally, this is where we get our strength to survive practically anything. It is how we grow as individuals, how we find the courage to be compassionate, how we change the world.

Be the Most Creative You that YOU Can Be, Now, and Change Reality

In the Heart of the Sea of Grief and Guilt

Recently, my husband and I watched the movie: In the Heart of the Sea. It is based on a true story about a whaling ship the Essex that was rammed by a sperm whale in 1820. The whale sunk the Essex about 3,000 miles from the shores of South America. Several books have been written about this disaster then and since. The movie is based on a book of the same name written by Nathaniel Philbrick and published on May 8, 2000. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that same year. The movie does an admirable job dramatizing events that led up to the sinking of the Essex and the crew’s 90-day struggle to survive storms, hunger, and despair. The movie also depicts how Herman Melville came to write his magnum opus, Moby Dick, though there are some inaccuracies in this part of storyline as well as in the main plot (see the video below). I think it is interesting to note that Melville was born on August 1, 1819 (one year before the Essex sunk). He died September 28, 1891. Moby Dick was published in 1851, essentially the middle span of his life.

The movie begins with Melville tracking down the last living survivor of the Essex, Thomas Nickerson (this is not historically accurate). 

From Wiki: “In 1850, author Herman Melville visits innkeeper Thomas Nickerson, the last survivor of the sinking of the whaleship Essex, offering money in return for his story. Nickerson initially refuses, but then finally agrees when his wife intervenes. The story turns to 1820: A whaling company in Nantucket has refitted the Essex to participate in the lucrative whale oil trade, and 14-year-old Nickerson signs on as a cabin boy.”  Wikipedia: In the Heart of the Sea

According to the movie, the rainy night Melville arrives, Thomas is consumed by his inner demons because he has never spoken about his ordeal. It is eating him up from the inside and causing hardships for himself and his wife. After some back and forth about the money Melville is offering Thomas to tell his tale, Thomas finally relents. Melville is shown listening and taking notes while Thomas sinks into the memories that are haunting him. I will not retell any more of the movie, except to highlight a few scenes that stood out to me as relevant to me personally and to our time, which is presently 2020. This is exactly 200 years after the Essex was sunk by a whale, which is weird… but I’ll get to that later.

The first thing that struck me as pertinent to our time was the importance of whale oil to the life and commerce of the early 1800s. It was whale oil that lit the Western World from Europe to the Americas, and then following the fracture lines of colonization to light the entire world. The movie does an excellent job depicting how the whaling industry operated. It shows how the corporations of this time were eager to mine the fortunes to be had from whale oil. And, it would become painfully clear just how willing these corporations were of doing despicable things in order to safeguard their money, their hierarchical structure, and their systems of commerce focused on profit at all costs.

At the end of the movie, there is a scene that hints at the discovery of oil that comes from out of the ground. It is a nod to the fossil fuel industry that will soon replace the whaling industry in less than 40 years after the sinking of the Essex. It is also a nod to the transfer of blueprints from hard-hearted industry to another. However, before the whaling industry would decline, nearly every species of whale is hunted to the brink of extinction. I could barely watch the scenes in this movie when the men of the Essex successfully hunted and killed a beautiful bull whale, then stripped him of every ounce of fat he had, which they boiled down to make the treasured Nantucket whale oil. By 1820, whales in the Atlantic had grown scarce. Thus, the Essex had to sail around Cape Horn, a dangerous strait between South America and Antarctica, to reach the whales in the Pacific. But, even here the whales were being hunted aggressively, and so they were moving further and further away from the continents to get away from man. But, man followed them.

* * *

The next scene I feel is germane to our time was when the men were boarding the Essex in Nantucket Bay. On the docks, there is a group of pilgrim-like people who are praying for the men as they board the Essex. You can see this scene at 6 minutes and 30 seconds in the video below. The preacher is heard saying: 

“Oh Father (…) ensure they return safely with a full ship, so that the white flames of Nantucket’s whale oil continue to light our homes and fuel the machines of industry that drive our great nation forward as our noble species evolves…”

Clip of the Preacher’s Prayer from In the Heart of the Whale at minute 6:30

This video is from The Cynical Historian who brings up a very important point about framing.

As you read the rest of this blog, consider the different ways humans frame reality. We can’t help it really. It’s the price we pay for consciousness. And, there is a price for being able to make a choice other than what instinct would have otherwise dictated we do. Time is a framing device that our minds use to distinguish between a moment in the past and a moment yet to be. Money is a framing device most people who live in Western Civilization must use to make a living and to acquire a station in life. Western Civilization itself is a framing device (For more on this frame of reality, see How to identify imperialistic thought (Yurugu series #2)).

Frames are helpful because they encode observations about when something like this happens that follows. Frames serve as shortcuts in thinking that can help us make decisions quickly when we encounter similar situations again. But, all frames leave out critical parts of reality. And, it is these parts that get left out that can really mess us up when we encounter a situation that we really don’t understand… like the men on the Essex when they encountered a whale that was not acting like any whale they had ever encountered before. Sometimes our misjudgments and lack of seeing reality as it really is results in terrible consequences. What is being left out of the dominant modern frame imposed by Western Civilization?

This idea of our species being noble and evolving ever forward plays out again after the Essex has been sunk. The men have been adrift for many days and nights and days. They are surviving on a single piece of hard tact per man per day, and a very small one at that. They are also allowed a single swig of water each day. Since the ship did not sink as dramatically as the movie depicts, the men had time to strip the Essex of her sails and supplies, but only what they could fit into the smaller boats they took out to chase whales, now turned into their life rafts. However, these three boats were hardly big enough to hold enough supplies so the men might survive their 3,000-mile journey back to civilization, especially since they were caught in the doldrums of the equatorial region of the sea. Thus, it does not take long before the men are slowly starving to death. Just before anyone dies, they come upon an island. It is a deserted island, but it provides a short respite from their ordeal. Soon; however, they eat up everything edible on the island. So, they have no choice but to shove off in their little boats again to try to reach the mainland if they want to live. 

This is where the next scene occurs that I feel is closely connected to our time. It is the night before they are to set sail to try to make it back to South America. The first mate Chase speaks with the Captain Pollard about their differences. He is making a peace offering because he knows there is no other way to survive but to set aside all differences and work together from a place of unity. Chase comes from a working-class background. He is a man who knows his trade, which is whaling, and he is very good at it. According to the movie, he was supposed to have received commanded of the Essex, but it was taken from him because of his social class. It was given to Pollard instead because he came from a rich family within the whaling industry. But, Pollard did not know his trade, not like Chase did. Needless to say, there were problems. Pollard accepts Chase’s peace offering, but continues to cling to the idea of the supremacy of man saying something like… “God put us here to circumvent navigate the world and rule over all creatures.” Chase replies, “Does it look like we are so supreme given where we are at right now and what has happened to us.” Neither men at this moment has any idea how much worst their situation is going to get, but I think Chase senses things are probably going to get worse before they get better. And, they do get worse–-they get a whole lot worse.

* * *

After the movie, I thought I might dream about a white whale ramming the Essex. But I did not dream about a whale. Instead, I thought about all the signs I missed one month earlier when my beloved dog Cider died in my arms.

ALL ALONG THE ANCESTORS WERE GUIDING ME HOME. Whale, Sea Turtle, and Heron by Donna Alena Hrabcakova
WATER AND BONES. Women with Rib by Donna Alena Hrabcakova
Cider Dog
Cider-Fox by Donna Alena Hrabcakova — Alena drew this picture about 3 weeks after Cider passed. My husband, I, and surviving dog Sasha were on a walk retracing the last run I took with Cider before she died. On that last run, Cider and I saw a fox. Cider was thrilled about seeing it and barked so vigorously. One would hardly guess she would be dead in less than 48 hours. She loved looking for foxes, and we saw them many times in the months before she died. While we were walking, Alena felt this image rising and drew it then sent it to me. We both felt it was Cider’s beautiful spirit saying: “I am still here.”

That terrible night occurred two days before Christmas. Her heart was racing so fast and her breathing labored. Her body was suffocating because it could no longer keep up with the depletion of hemoglobin in her blood. This was because she was bleeding internally, but we did not know this. The signs were subtle, even the doctors to whom we took her dead body in hopes they could revive her said it would have been hard for them to diagnosis her in time to save her. The symptoms she had displayed, I completely misread and misunderstood. I will not recap this super sad story. You can read it in the previous blog post, but her sudden and tragic death set me back adrift upon my inner sea of sadness, grief, despair, and now guilt, growing waves of guilt. It is a sea that has steadily risen inside me after a decade of struggle that got a whole lot worst just after our family vacation in 2015.

This would be the last vacation our family could afford due to mounting unfortunate and deteriorating circumstances. Now with hindsight (and this movie), I can see that this moment was when our family shoved off from our desert island. We had no idea we had already been rammed by the whale, or maybe I should say the buffalo or bull–or perhaps the buffalos were trying to bring our attention to our imminent danger just ahead of us in time. This really happened to us that summer.

After this trip, every fragile idea and frame of reality we had ever harbored about what it takes to create and sustain a home and maintain safety and security would be shattered, one painful one after another for 5 years in ways that were unreturnable to what we had known before. When people find themselves in such circumstances, overwhelming guilt is inevitable for how else can one confront such devastating losses and continue moving forward? The only other feelings I can say that I was aware of underneath the guilt was terrible despair, overwhelming helplessness, and a rumbling anger… a dangerous anger because this type of anger can blow up into hate, especially when a person feels abandoned, forgotten, or even worst, discarded, dispensable, disposable.

So, you see, guilt is a pretty good armor during times like these because it masks these other more threatening and extreme emotions bubbling up from unfathomable depths and threatening to submerge one’s already shattered ego. At least by feeling guilty, a thin veneer gets created, making a papery barrier that insulates the conscious part of one’s self from those other parts where these powerful emotions churn–and where one can feel these emotions could transform into forces that could sink the listing Ship of Self.

When our frames of reality are first shattered, the feeling of being cast adrift on a vast and foreign sea is almost inescapable. And perhaps it is necessary for these old frames pretty much have to be shattered or abandoned, just like the Essex had to be abandoned after it was rammed by the whale. This is so because they have failed us in significant and fatal ways. After one abandons the mother ship that had been carefully constructed by one’s former smaller frames of reality, one is suddenly confronted with a vast and bigger reality–one that is a great deal bigger–like Pacific Ocean bigger. And, this reality can be brutal. When one finds oneself adrift on this great Sea of Misfortune and Sorrow and sailing in a boat that is too small to sustain you for long, or even worse, clinging to a piece of wreckage, pretty much the only thing you can do is hold on for dear life. One also lacks the most basic tools to navigate by, so it can be hard to get one’s orientation. It is a lot like the situation the men who abandoned the Essex found themselves in without their tools of navigation, or at least, very few of them, which they needed to find their way back to civilization.

If you can hold on during such extreme times, and there is no guarantee that you can because I am talking about catastrophic circumstances that happen to perfectly normal and good people. These are events that come out of nowhere, they cannot be predicted, and they occur through no fault or short coming of the individual (well at least not from our current frames of reality, the ones we are taught from birth and punished if we don’t follow the rules our modern systems purport… so there is a bigger thing going on). These are events that just happen, and they happen to everyone like weather. They are crippling events, even lethal, regardless of whether they originate from inside oneself or come from outside like the whale who rammed the Essex. Now, I understand it is hard to spot a person in such a state. After all, they have ventured outside of the normal frames of reality in which we have all been taught to operate and to stay inside. Thus, such a person may be as hard to spot as the men of the Essex who were 3,000 miles from where most of the other humans who could have helped them were congregated. However, if you do happen to spot someone enduring such trauma and crisis, it is essential to believe this person and be kind to them. Pay them extra attention, so they know they are not disposable like a piece of trash to be thrown away because they are broken at the moment. It is important to do this because these individuals have survived a disaster, and they now possess information about reality that those of us who have not endured such a trial of survival still need to know in order to grow.

It is difficult and draining to support a person in crisis. I will not lie about that. And, inevitably survivors begin to grapple with the whys: why me, why now, why my beloved, why is the world like this? This is hard too, and these are not easy questions to answer. In fact, often they cannot be answered, only endured. But, catastrophic situations might be essential for our collective survival because they force us to confront our most cherished ideas, beliefs, and frames of reality. They force us to grapple with the unanswerable and re-examine how we have come to our beloved beliefs and mental frames, but ones that have kept vast parts of ourselves submerged in our unconsciousness–good parts and bad parts. When we begin to see these parts as a whole, we start to understand how they are essential to be integrated into our growing field of consciousness. Both superior and inferior qualities are essential to help us make more balance choices and live more wisely. With parts of ourself still submerged, we tend to move through the world in a lopsided way. We get stuck just like the men from the Essex who got caught in the doldrums. We do not move forward any more. Rather, we go around in smaller and smaller circles. It is only when we confront and integrate these lost parts of ourself that we can begin to move forward again. And, if bad things continue to happen, we have grown a deeper reservoir of fresh water inside ourselves, this is wisdom, and we can draw on it to help survive and recover from our ordeals a little more quickly.

Eventually, as we continue to do inner work, we also confront the knowledge that what we did not know or understand contributed to the situation that caused us so much pain and suffering and to those we love. This can be difficult knowledge to bear. However, it is precisely this sort of knowledge that help us grow and transform ourselves and our situation. It is a choice of course to grow, and if we do choose to grow, then a lot of work is going to be needed to build a bigger boat. In fact, you are probably going to have to grow the wood, to turn into timber, to build your shiny new Ship of Self because now you are working beyond the frames of reality most people still must work within. This not easy. And, it can be very lonely. And, you need to build it yourself because only you have the blueprint for who you are and what you need to do. There will be many setbacks and challenges because no one has tried to be you before, and so you have to figure it out the hard way, which means lots of failures. So, I do not find fault with anyone who chooses to go back to a smaller frame of reality because, heck, it’s really scary out there. And, now the world has shown you just how harsh and dangerous it can be. And, it has also illuminated how utterly helpless you are. The biggest problem doing this is succumbing to a bunker mentality. So, moments like these tend to mold and shape us in the most significant ways…for the rest of our life… and these choices can ripple backwards and forwards along our thin strand of time… the one each of us spins and contributes to our shared reality.

But, if you choose to build this bigger Ship of Self, then just like Captain Pollard had to confront the idea of human beings a noble species put here by God to circumvent navigate the world and rule over all other creatures, you have to confront it too because it is an idea that forms some of the foundational aspects of Western Civilization. But, are we really so noble? Do we really possess the intelligence and wisdom needed to rule? I wonder if our species might have been better named Homo intelligentes rather than Homo sapiens. It seems to me we are still trying to get there…to wisdom.

STANDING ON MY ANESTRAL LANDS: GIGLOVCE, SLOVAKIA by Donna Alena Hrabcakova

I can say with absolutely certainty that I am not noble enough to rule the Earth, nor do I possess the intelligence, or more importantly the wisdom, essential to reign as a supreme being. But now I want to transition from this speculative stream of thought, to say 2015 was also the year this movie In the Heart of the Sea was released. I didn’t see it then. It turns out a lot of people didn’t see it then. 

“In the Heart of the Sea was one of two flops released by Warner Bros in 2015, the other being Pan.[20] It grossed $25 million in North America and $68.9 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $93.9 million, against a production budget of $100 million.[3]”  Wikipedia: In the Heart of the Sea

But, had I seen it in 2015, I would not have the thoughts I have now here in 2020; not that they are anything special, except possibly to me. During, these five years of mounting misfortune, wreckage, and deepening despair, I often saw myself floating on a piece of wreckage on an endless sea that I dubbed the Sea of Sorrow. It was an inner sea; I drew it many times, as the image below shows (see blog The Sea Within Us). It was also during this time that I came to understand how this sea had been created by my own unconscious choices, but I was not alone in these choices. I had been taught to make them by my culture, by the collective systems within which I must abide to survive. These are carefully crafted frames of reality created by mere mortals who were crafting corporations and all sorts of other systems to run our shiny new modern civilization. And, there are many systems that rule our civilized world: systems of commerce, systems of class, systems of favoritism, chauvinism, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and many other isms and frames used to exclude certain people while elevating others.

The Sea Within Us by Bébé

And so, this is why I very much relate to the suffering and hardships of these men of the Essex. Though I must admit I also rooted for the bull whale protecting his pod after the men harpooned one of his females who had a calf. One might say I am divided individual, and Carl Jung would agree with this. Indeed, to be human is to be divided inside. It is another price for being consciousness. How we resolve this divide can determine everything.

After the bull whale successfully saved the mother and her calf, my sympathies returned to the men and their dire situation. Sure, they were surrounded by water, but it was water they could not drink. Sure, the sea was filled with abundant food, but it was food they could not reach. It was rather as if they floated on a vast desert, and actually that is what happens inside of us when we accept frames of reality that are ultimately too small for who we are and what we ultimately need to do in our life. The men of the Essex had most definitely ended up in the middle of the Pacific partly due to their own poor choices, but in a greater part, they ended up their due to the priorities and short-sightedness of the industry for which they worked. A system of commerce hungry for whale oil that made it impossible for the men to turn back home until they had filled their ship with this precious oil. A hunger that would soon be replicated in full within the nascent fossil fuel industry about to burst out of the ground–imagine that.

* * *

The next day after watching this movie and not sleeping very well due to my great guilt over Cider’s death, my husband and I went for a run with our older surviving dog Sasha. I pointed up into the sky and said: “Look — that cloud looks like a White Whale.”  

Cloud Shaped Like Whale — Masterfile

This was not the cloud I saw, but I think we have all seen clouds that look like White Whales at some point in our life. Captivated by the movie, and now by the cloud, a thought popped into my head: “The world has been struck by the White Whale again.”  

It is clouds, is it not, that are being screwed up by climate change? Either they are growing too big and dropping too much water causing torrential floods, which are only supposed to happen every 100 years or so, but now seem to occur every other year around the world. Or, it is clouds that blow up into mega-typhoons and hurricanes that are far more devastating and deadly with terrible winds and tidal surges. Or, it is clouds that just don’t form at all, evaporating before they can release their precious water further inland from the sea, leaving the land dry and parched and extremely susceptible to wildfires and devastating famines due to droughts that never end.

KOALA — I Weep for You Australia by Donna Alena Hrabcakova — This is just one of the precious species we are losing every day…

Today, we live in a modern world that is populated by nearly 8 billion people, most of whom no longer understand the wisdom of our ancestors or the people who still live closely connected to nature and understand the balances necessary to sustain life. We live in a world where we no longer hear the wisdom of animals and life all around us, really enveloping us and sustaining us. We have become a people who are blinded by ideas of success, glory, and riches to be had in our grand new industrialized world. It is a world we created, but one begotten by short-sighted schemes and greed. And, there is a price for this too.

Recent data shows 2019 was the second hottest year on record.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Screen-Shot-2020-01-20-at-12.44.03-PM.png
Popular Science — 2019 was the second warmest year on record—here’s what this means for our future: New government data shows climate change is (still) heating up — Kate Baggaley, 1/17/20

As our man-made world, powered now by fossil fuels rather than whale oil, pushes nature’s delicate balances ever more out of whack, balances that nature worked out over billions of years, our framing of reality is snapping–just like the timbers of the Essex splintered after the whale rammed the ship. It is 200 year since the Essex sunk, and in this incredibly short amount of time, Earth is breaking, all because of our extreme enamoration with oil and coal.

PBS NEWSHOUR: Could bushfires erode Australia’s climate change ‘inertia’?

The price for our collective short-sighted industriousness is going to be paid by all of us. No one will be spared the consequences of the choices made for far too long. We have changed the world to our liking, but it’s not to the liking of life. Despite this, corporate interests guarding their profit margins stay the course, like Captain Pollard going straight into the hurricane. It is a course that supersedes the needs of life on Earth… a dying Earth… an Earth rammed by the white whale. But this time, there is a twist to the story because this time we are the whale. We are the ones ramming our ship that is carrying us through the vast and desolate emptiness of space, and believe me, if we have to abandon this ship, where we end up is going to be a lot harsher than the Pacific Ocean, probably unendurable. This whale that is living inside us feeds on the powerful emotions that are found in great abundance within our inner Seas…of Sorrow, …of Despair, …of Grief and Guilt and …of Helplessness and Hate. Believe me, or don’t believe me, but modern life is full of people who have fallen into such seas.

If we happen to catch a glimpse of how our personal blindness and short-sightedness has contributed to this current moment, it is often overwhelming, and so, it is quickly concealed or we blame someone else for our sad and sorry fate. But soon, there will be no one else to blame. Soon, our individual seas will spill over and merge with every other sea spilling over to create one gigantic wave of despair for this will be the only emotion left to feel, if we survive that long. Much of this will be because of what our small frames of reality have wrought. Most likely, it will be a prolonged and brutal odyssey, just like the men of the Essex endured… unless we wake up, unless we change our frame of reality, unless we put aside our differences, unite, and help each other do the inner work essential to survive what is coming next. 

This is not easy or pretty work, but what lies ahead of us is not easy or pretty either. Even though the situation is dire, each and every one of us can take action this very moment. This action is to heal ourselves and to help others heal. It requires one magical, elusive ingredient, which is love. It begins by self-love and being gentle with yourself. Love is what can stop this wave of destruction. But, love is work. 

This is what I have learned about healing love:

Is quiet, unless it needs to roar.

Is kind, but not stupid.

Puts others needs above ones own needs and desires, but sees through false appeals for assistance and insincerity, then it simply nods and chuckles.

Listens, hears, and understands what others say.

Waits…sometimes a long time…without judgment… if judgement is necessary, love has a good argument with the Self… and pays attention to all the information, good and bad, then weighs it fairly with the intention of discovering truth and implementing justice.

Rearranges time to do the right thing… rescue a stray dog, listen to a lonely person, help someone in need… these are the moments that really matter… when someone else’s needs truly supersede your own.

Is inclusive knowing all beings are utterly dependent on each other to survive and thrive on Earth.
Protects the rights, dignity, and well-being of all living beings.

Penetrates through everything… it is the great mixer of the universe, but even as it passes through every visible thing in the universe, it does not change or destroy a thing or being in any way, not like hate does, which also penetrates everything, but when it does, it rips things to pieces… love unites, bonds, supports, comforts, and sustains.

There are many other qualities to love. I still need to learn more. But, I am ready to keep learning. I am ready to deconstruct and reconstruct my frames of reality daily, if needed. Are you ready to do intense inner work? Are you ready to build a bigger Ship of Self by growing your own inner strength, resilience, wisdom, and capacity to love deeply? All of this is absolutely essential to be ready for the Great Transformation or whatever is supposed to come next because it has begun. There is no time to waste. Earth has already started listing severely to the side from the ramming we have given her.

THE EL CAMINO OF GRIEF. 
A dream of me in my Russian fur hat on ancestral land — by Donna Alena Hrabcakova
WHEN YOU BECAME LOVE AND BLISS. Blair in the afterlife — by Donna Alena Hrabcakova



* * *

One final thought on the importance of doing inner work since I’m all worked up about it. Many people think that we are on the cusp of a Great the Transformation, a Shift, or Metamorphosis, or Great Awakening of Gaia…but if we have not done critical inner work to get ready for it, to grow big enough for it, whatever you think is coming next, will not necessarily be what you think it is supposed to be. Nature does not care one wick for the transformation of consciousness or even if we survive as a species (case in point, note what happened to the dinosaurs). If we leave it up to Her, we might just all be transformed into Banana Slugs (see the 2nd song in the video below: Muy Tranquil — it’s at about 8 minutes… ah Cider is in this video! It is a concept video for one of the characters in the story I am writing).  

We are the ones who stepped across the Matrix of Minds into consciousness (I explain what this is in the story I am writing, which you can read when I finally get the 1st book out; otherwise, just make up your own explanation). Now, we must make a choice. One of the choices is to learn how to love ourselves fiercely. And, I am not talking about narcissistic love. I am talking about the kind of love that leaves us in great grief when our loved ones are taken from us through death. This is how we save Earth. It begins with you. It begins with healing yourself, and then helping others to do the same. It is time-consuming, messy work, and one slides backwards all the time, it’s very frustrating… but one does not give up and one does not wince when another to small frame of reality is shed. Of course, this is painful, but without pain we do not grow.

I have included my friend Alena’s paintings, lots of them, because she is showing us through her art how to get back to inner, deeper spaces inside ourselves through dreams and visions and imagination. It is only here where we can see inner storms rising and circumvent navigate them in order to survive them. It is here where we learn that we can live a lot more simply and happily than we have been told. It is here where we can learn how to see, feel, taste, and hear our way back to what is really important, and that is love. When we love fiercely, we fight for truth and justice. We fight for life and self-determination. We help each other grow our fields of consciousness, so that we can all make better choices. Alena brought my attention to Robert Moss who recently published a blog on soul loss and recovery. Much of what I have written above can also be understood as soul loss. This is a beautiful analogy to what happens to us when we face situations and circumstances that overwhelm and crush us. He says: “Understanding soul loss and how our Active Dreaming approach facilitates soul recovery and helps us become shamans of our own souls.”

So, activate your imagination…make time to dream…find ways to re-engage your inner world, and most of all love deeply. When you find yourself in grief, which is a natural consequence of deep love, do not fear it… embrace it. Let it help you shatter your previous frames of reality because they were probably too small for your soul, which needs a bigger body and mind to do what it came here to do, so grow! All the while, love yourself and help others in whatever way they need. We will not survive any other way unless we put aside our differences and unite as a force of healing love for life.

Drawing by Bébé from video blog: It Came From Inside and Tribute to Cider

WATER AND BONES

Based on a Dream on October 22, 2019

BECOMING THE HORSE by Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Archipelago appeared

Two thin islands stretched on the North tip 

of a sacred remote lake

The land was sky blue upon Prussian blue 

Savory sorrel, nettles and wild sage all grew on this inlet that was once harvested

Now forgotten. 

SHE WAS NOT SURE AT WHAT HOUR OF THE NIGHT SHE BECAME THE BIRD by Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Lady of the Lake 

whom lived in the water said;

“Something far more sacred lived upon these sandbars…”

This lovely one seemed to resemble my mother as I recalled her from many years ago.

She was composed of water, blood and bones. 

I witnessed her in a timeless slumber,  The Sacred Witness.

A pumice gray ribcage 

formed around her, spiraling, like a  wrapped chrysalis.

I was told the Lady sleeps in a dreamlike perpetual state 

like Shiva reviewing all the stories of the past, present and a future so far away it seems

unfathomable. 

She is assisting us to Remember.

Water and Bones by Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Deep in the waterways 

Everywhere we walk 

Forming us

Our Ancestors Bones

Our Ancestors Stories 

wanting us to

Reconnect 

Remember. 

The Lady said;

“Go to the sacred places, walk upon the land. 

Touch the waters. 

See what dreamtime brings you. 

Gather what is rightfully yours.”

Hushed silence reverberated in the air

Water colliding 

Falling into unconsciousness

Melodic waves 

She said no more. 

I was left with the 

Water and the Bones.

WOMAN BY THE FIRE WITH STARS IN HER HAIR by Donna Alena Hrabcakova
WHEN I STOOD BEFORE MY ANCESTORS LAND by Donna Alena Hrabcakova
ENDANGERED SPECIES: NARWHALS by Donna Alena Hrabcakova

Jewels of Indra’s Net

I wrote the following as a reflection from a series of conversations people from around the world had to discuss the climate crisis. As I looked through the wondrous materials considered and assembled by the Conference Weaving Now What? Deep Dives, I was dazzled by the jewels in the Now What?! Consciousness Deep Dive Conversation Harvest. Immediately, I thought of Indra’s Net. Before telling you why, it is important to understand what this net is. And, to find out more about Now What, visit the beautiful new site: Now What?! The art of being fully human in a time of crisis

According to Wikipedia: Indra’s net is a metaphor used to illustrate three essential concepts:

Indra’s Jewel — Art by Bébé
  • Śūnyatā (emptiness) – This is a Buddhist concept that has multiple meanings depending on its doctrinal context. It is either an ontological feature of reality, a meditative state, or a phenomenological analysis of experience. [I believe for something new to emerge there must be space for it, thus this feature of reality both outer and inner is essential to all who seek to bring into the world a kinder, gentler, restorative reality.]
Indra’s Jewel — Art by Bébé
  • Pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination) – This concept “is commonly translated as dependent origination, or dependent arising, is a key principle in Buddhist teachings,[note 1] which states that all dharmas (“phenomena”) arise in dependence upon other dharmas: “if this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist”.  [I cannot think of a more essential concept to consider as we engage together in these sessions and others along with the weaving done afterwards. I always need to be reminded what dharma means. There is no single English translation for this word. Essentially it is the behaviors that make life in the universe possible. I think fits beautifully with us joining together in conversations that seek to understand and uplift behaviors that sustain life on our planet. If we don’t understand each other, we are indeed stuck.]
Indra’s Jewel — Art by Bébé
  • Interpenetration (coalescence) – This concept developed from the Huayan school. It  holds all phenomena (dharmas) are deeply interconnected, mutually arising, and every phenomenon contains all other phenomena. Various metaphors and images are used to illustrate this idea. The first is known as Indra’s net. The net is set with jewels which have the extraordinary property that they reflect all of the other jewels, while the reflections also contain every other reflection, ad infinitum. The second image is that of the world text. This image portrays the world as consisting of an enormous text which is as large as the universe itself. The words of the text are composed of the phenomena that make up the world. However, every atom of the world contains the whole text within it. It is the work of a Buddha to let out the text so that beings can be liberated from suffering. [So, there you go. Perhaps this is why Indra’s Net popped into my mind as I read through the jewels, which is only a tiny piece of the harvest and this is even a tiny part of what is happening when we connect with each other and seek mutual understanding. We are indeed reflected in each other. We are the jewels in the Indra Net enveloping Earth.]

I imagine two wonderous Indra’s Net. One net holds our universe. It is woven by time and space that create the matrix holding everything we see in our universe. The second Indra’s Net is like the first, but this one wraps around our beautiful Earth. All life on Earth create the threads that are woven together to create this web. Humans have taken on an exaggerated importance in this web because of the level of consciousness we have attained. I am not going to delve into my thinking on this now…perhaps later… but suffice it to say we have changed the matrix from which we were born, and now we have a Herculean Task upon our shoulders to repair what has been damaged by us so life may continue to exist on this precious jewel in the larger Indra Net—Earth.

I think when we come together and listen to each other, we repair Earth’s net. Each of us has a special place and unique abilities that are needed to sustain Earth’s Indra’s Net. Each human being is informed by individual passions, interests, experiences, and failures. Some of us are really good at speaking, others are really good at organizing, still others are healers, and others bring visions. Each human being weaves part of this wondrous web enveloping Earth. To heal and repair our net, Earthneeds all our insights, energies, passions, and gifts.

So, this is the idea that struck me as I read the harvest material from the conferences, deep dives, and other conversations. It seems to me every human being is a jewel in Earth’s Indra’s Net. Through us the energy needed to repair, strengthen, and heal this netis made visible. We are essentially portalsof transformation, and it is going to take as many ofus pulling in the same direction as possible to change our collectivefate.

I have not had much time to read everything, nor did I have participate in the Deep Dives, but what I have seen is beautiful pieces of wisdom being pulled up from depths inside ourselves. Wisdom that has become submerged and lost due to current ways of thinking and living in our world. Let me stress the weaving being done through our collective action is utterly essential for the moment we are in now.  

Given limits on my time at this moment, I am only able highlight a few of the jewels that caught my attention as I looked through the excellent excel chart being created to preserve some of the harvest from this collective work. There are also notes and videos of Deep Dives and from parts of the conferences taking place around the world. My selection of a few of the jewels in no way diminishes any of the other jewels.I am a simple and small portal of consciousness informed by my individual experiences, passions, dreams, and failures. All this naturally limits what I can see and how I see it. But, then thisis the beauty of Indra’s Net. Each jewel is unique and reflects every other jewel in the net. I suspect there are as many jewels in Earth’s Indra’s Net as there human beings alive on the planet, and the energy coursing through the webbing of this net is the wonderous life alive on Earth right now.

Indra’s Jewel — Art by Bébé
  • The first jewel I want to highlight is one that I saw reflected in several discussions. This is the jewel of sacred ceremony. We need to remember our thoughts are powerful. They are able to collapse the infinite sea of possibilities in which we all swim into a single thread of reality. We do this by thinking, choosing, and acting (or not acting). Moment by moment we contribute our strand of reality to all the other strands being created by every living being on the planet. As the strands interweave, this becomes our shared reality. Humans have become particularly powerful in sculpting our shared reality by using our minds gifted with consciousness (or cursed – as many world myths account this moment as man’s great fall). I write about this in other places, so I will not delve into my meaning here, but only say humans emerged from a more primordial state of consciousness into the state we understand it as today. This singular accomplishment allowed humans to not only perceive the world, but to apperceive it. I will talk more about this ability to apperceive our world later, but for now, I will simply provide you with a definition of it: 

From Wiki: Meaning in psychology – In psychology, apperception is “the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole.”[2] In short, it is to perceive new experience in relation to past experience. The term is found in the early psychologies of Herbert Spencer, Hermann Lotze, and Wilhelm Wundt. It originally means passing the threshold into consciousness, i.e., to perceive. But the percept is changed when reaching consciousness due to the contextual presence of the other stuff already there, thus it is not perceived but apperceived.

Apperception is thus a general term for all mental processes in which a presentation is brought into connection with an already existent and systematized mental conception, and thereby is classified, explained or, in a word, understood; e.g. a new scientific phenomenon is explained in the light of phenomena already analyzedand classified. The whole intelligent life of man is, consciously or unconsciously, a process of apperception, in as much as every act of attention involves the appercipient process.[1]

Indra’s Jewel — Art by Bébé
  • The next jewel is the significant of language in constructing our realities. Here again our ability of apperception is powerful for we have civilized and cultivated most of the world simply by seeing possibilities different from what nature originally provided for life to exist. And, so here we stand at the edge of every moment with this power to apperceive infinite possibilities, and language is the tool we use to share our visions of what is possible. So, yes, it is a commanding tool in constructing our shared realities because it allows us to cooperate in collective action. 

It also comes with peril, as this group of jewels point out, for we can misunderstand each other if we do not take care in truly understanding how words are being used and what is truly being said. Our ability for language is an ability that we have perhaps grown too accustom to wielding. I really like the idea of reconnecting with other cultures and languages. This is a beautiful way to understand how utterly diverse our ability to communicate with each other is… and through communication, our ability to co-create. Human cultures and civilizations have unfolded in so many incredible and diverse ways across space and through time. So, getting stuck in our head with words that have become too small for our current reality is a trap, and it is good to learn how to get out of our self-created thought traps. Gaining perspective of different languages, different cultures, and even different ways of communication (e.g., dance, visual art, dreamtime, empathy), helps us re-appreciate our ability to communicate with each other in so many different ways. This I believe helps us to perceive nuances better for every word is really a universe. Here is one of my favorite shorts by  Dr. Maya Angelou – Power Of Words

Indra’s Jewel — Art by Bébé
  • The next jewel is learning to let go of the story. Here the question was asked: What are the actions I might take now that allow me to fully offer my gifts in service to what is needed in response to the possibility that everything is going to work our just fine or it is not going to work out? I think this is wonderful because it helps one to understand they can take an active role in telling the story unfolding right now about Earth and her fate (or a passive role). I think most of us began to believe (for me it was around the 6thgrade) that our voice does not matter, that our thinking will never be good enough, and that our internal knowledge is wrong and has no place in the world of educated men (I do use men here purposively). 

To survive in our modern civilization, we learn how to bend ourselves and squeeze into the tiny boxes of perception and apperception that are allowed by the systems dictated to us by our modern, civilized world. Most of these systems come out of Western Civilization for this civilization has had a huge propensity to colonize the world with its particular brand of thinking and mindset. For humans living in modern Western systems, there are patterns for how to make money, where to live, how much free time to spend with friends, family, or anything else that is important, even how to think and use our minds. Since so many human beings are born into this system, we do not even realize how much control of our shared narrative we have given up by making ourselves fit into this story being told mostly by powerful ones inside of Western Civilization. 

Most of us do not realize how shallow the conscious waters have become inside of this great narrative. But, we have been told we must swim only in these designated waters—conscious waters that are too shallow to sustain us much longer. I think other cultures and civilizations have not taught this out of their people. This is why we need our indigenous brothers and sisters, but we do not need to misuse their precious knowledge (as another Jewel cautions), rather this knowledge is inside every person trapped inside Western thinking, we need to marshal our courage and venture back into the deep end of our conscious capacities. This is where our indigenous brothers and sisters can be guides, but we must do the work.  And, help each other to take a more active role in telling our personal story that becomes part of the collective story…this is so important. Active storytelling is a precious jewel—indeed, it is a super ability.

Another really critical element in this list of jewels is letting go of the ending of the story. When we let go of what we hope or want the ending to be, we put ourselves squarely in the present moment. This is where our power is. It is not in the past (we’ve already been there). It is not in the future (we are not there yetand thusour choicesare only future possibilities). It is NOW—this is where we choose our thread of shared reality. This is where our voice can help guide the flow of the collective story being told about Earth and its inhabitants. By letting go of our attachmentto what the ending needs to be or should be, suddenly all possibilities open up again. 

In this moment of infinite possibilities, we can get about doing what we are so good at doing. In fact, we have evolved as human beings to not only perceive the beautiful world around us, but to appercept it. I am using apperception in the psychological meaning of this word, as defined earlier: “the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole.” With this ability, we become transformers. It is what we do better than any other species on the planet, and that is to take our individualized toolbox (the mind) equipped with individualized knowledge, experience, and hopefully wisdom and create something new. Even when we don’t employ our wisdom, when we choose from the infinite number of possibilities swirling around us every momentof every dayand act on one, we collapse the infinite stream of possibilities into one possibility. This becomes our thread of reality. 

Indra’s Jewels — Art by Bébé

So you see, we are more powerful than we think… and yet, just like the Buddhist concept of Pratītyasamutpāda, we are completely dependent on each other making the best choices possible to survive within our shared reality—the web we weave together. What a dilemma!  

The world cannot be saved by one human being, not even by the most powerful and rich 1 percent of human beings. I don’t know how many it is going to take to save Earthfrom the looming climate crisiswe have woven into the story, but it is probably going to take asmany of us as possible who are awakening to our new role as narrators in this collective story. So, releasing the ending you want is essential because to be a powerful narrator, it is essential to see the present moment for what it is and tell this story as accurately as you can… how you avoided the rocks or boulders in the stream, how you saw and out smarted the poisonous snake laying wait in the rocks, how you navigate the stream of possibilities.  

These are power stories. They have always been power stories from timeimmemorial.  Now we must learn how to tell these powerful stories about ourselves again against the backdrop of our modern age with all its distractions, pain, and fear thatcreates chaos meant to keep us docile and frozen in non-action. Or at least trap us in polarized action. Such action simply gets cancelled out by its equal and opposite action by others trapped on the other side of a false divide. It is a trick of the powerful narrators of our time who currently control most of our collective narrative. Too many of ushave fallenintotheir trap, makingus desperately grasp at things beyond our reach. This especially happens whenwe lose the firm ground of our inner reality; then, we are especially at the mercy of nefarious forces trying to control the collective story through fearmongering  and other dramatic techniques. 

We must grow stronger consciously. This is how we strengthen Indra’s Net because each one of us is a jewel in this beautiful net. We can help each other by giving freely our time and attention to lift each other when we falter or fall.  We don’t have to leave anyone behind. When we stand on the plain of our present moment and really see what is in front of us, we are powerful beings. This is a link to some of my early writing and visual storytelling about these ideas. This began to emerge inside of me more than two years ago: Consciousness Waves.

https://www.sapience2112.com/2019/01/10/consciousness-waves/
Indra’s Jewel — Art by Bébé
  • Another jewel is pain. Here another critical question is asked: How do we create a space for pain? So much of Western Civilization is focused on avoiding pain at all costs. I don’t know about you, but I grew up feeling it was not OK to admit to feeling pain. Physical pain was fine to admit. Everyone can clearly see if you have a scraped knee or broken arm. But, emotional or spiritual pain…this was scary. Often it is assumed you did not follow the prescribed rules you were taught, and thus you are the cause of your own pain and deserve to suffer. No one deserves to suffer. Hardly any of us has such control over all the things that impact us, it is ridiculous to blame a person in pain for their pain. But, so often this is what we do. I have been going through a year of pretty intense pain, I can tell you one thing: Pain focuses ones attention and time like no other stimuli. Pain tells us something is wrong, and it prods us to seek solutions. When we are in pain, trivial matters, mindless distractions, the things that use to fill our time fade away and the mind focuses on finding solutions. [I captured this idea in a fantastical little story about my trials in The Divine Dodo – Hanga Dyra Mingja.]
The Divine Dodo — Hanga Dýra MingjaArt by Bébé

So, yes, make space for pain. Do not be afraid of the power pain offers. Perhaps this is what victim blamers are really afraid of… the person experiencing pain finding their power making them no longer so easy to control. Finding solutions to things causing pain is absolutely critical. 

In this collection of jewels, there is also discussion about the power of music. I write about the power of music in another story I am writing, so I will not wax on about it here. I will simply say our ancestors understood the power of music and how it can inspire action in the minds of individuals and groups. We have forgotten the power that music and dance give us. We have let them become co-opted into the realm of entertainment and money-making. It is so much more than this. It is part of our internal guidance system. Find your song. Find your dance. This is how the universe moves and expresses itself through us. Our magical powers to transform reality rises from inside of us and through us… and it is through our collective action that what rises from inside our minds is made visible through our collective action in the world—this is our shared reality. 

Indra’s Jewel — Art by Bébé
  • Another jewel closely connected to pain is grief. Indeed, grief as this group discusses, breaks open the heart. The group also shares a beautiful poem expressing grief exquisitely. Grief connects us to our empathy. Our empathic powers are needed now more than any other time in human history. To me empathy is not just understanding that someone else is in pain or is grieving, but it is the capacity to stand beside the person who is suffering, to bear witness to their pain knowing we cannot take their pain from them, but perhaps we can help them hold it for a time… maybe help the person endure it, however long it takes. 

I think really powerful empaths can absorb into their own bodies other people’s pain, anger, grief, and the unbearable emotions. I think our ancestors and indigenous people understand how this works and know how to help transmute these powerful emotional states. But, this takes time and skill to understand and most of us in Western Civilization have lost this ability. However, Medicine men and women around the world still possess it, and known how not helping people navigate these difficult parts of the journey can impact the health not only of the individual suffering but of the entire group. In most modern cultures, we have lost the rituals of transformation that can transmute and balance these negative and destructive energies with their equal and opposite energies. It is here where we have our power as individuals and as groups in helping each other find and maintain balance so that wisdom can rise and shine brightly. 

This is all I have time to reflect on right now. I wish I could do more, and I am sure my thinking and efforts to communicate are inadequate for the rich reservoir of ideas, thinking, collaborative efforts transpiring through this collective work (collective action of transformation) unfolding right here and right now.  I can only encourage each person who has participated in the dialogues or who is just discovering these resources to use your own unique toolbox of thought, perception, experience, ideas to continue strengthening this net we are repairing together. We do this by providing our time and attention in whatever capacity we feel called to do and with whatever time we have available to do so. Time and attention are the most valuable resources in the universe. It really is all we need to be powerful narrators of our personal stories, which of course become a part of the collective story of Earth.

The Thing That Feeds on Fear and Sadness — Art by Bébé

Postscript

After writing this, I came upon readings and conversations about the importance of emptiness. I quite frankly did not understand how absolutely essential emptiness is when I wrote the above. I intend to write more about it when I have time, but for now I must devote most of my attention to finishing editing the story I began 7 years ago (almost to this day for I remember first finding the thread to the story I have been writing ever since late one September afternoon–this story is Sapience). And so I leave you only with a quote from Carl Jung whom I was reading and finally understood the power and importance of emptiness. He said:

“The archetype corresponding to the situation is activated, and as a result this explosive and dangerous forces hidden in the archetype come into action, frequently with unpredictable consequences. There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall a prey too. “

“If 30 years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onward millions of warriors ready for death–why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool. And today? Surprising as it may seem, all this absurdity is a horrible reality. Private life, private aetiologies, and private neuroses have become almost a fiction in the world of today. The man of the past who lived in a world of archaic ‘representations collectives’ had risen again into very visible and painfully real life, and this not only in a few unbalanced individuals but in many millions of people”

“There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will, or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis.”

— The Portable Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, p. 66-67

PAUSING. REMEMBERING.

Painted by Donna Alena Hrabcakova

PAUSING. REMEMBERING

September reminds me of the days where one had the leisure

to jump into a pile of leaves 

carefree no worries about the existential crises of NOW.

Wind brings in the random dance of the falling ones 

turning into a kaleidoscope of magical hues.

My favorite being brilliant red and burnt sienna

Taking my breath away. 

PAUSING. REMEMBERING.

The cycle of Autumn presents herself in Her own timing.

I feel the rhythm within myself changing. 

What I see before me. 

Remembering why I am here. 

What my purpose is.

Are you re-remembering yours?

Painted by Donna Alena Hrabcakova

PAUSING. REMEMBERING.

Those whom passed in the summer and knowing it is a new season without them. 

I like to think an Ancestor will fly into my crabapple trees and visit. 

It happened for awhile this summer a beautiful red tail hawk hovered in my tree,

which seemed like minutes or hours all colliding. 

Our eyes truly connected.

I knew it was someone whom loved me once so much. 

I knew it was true. 

PAUSING. REMEMBERING. 

This Labor Day I reflect on the meaning of why I create. 

What purpose it serves and maybe it doesn’t move but only a few.

I am not needing to be famous.

I only want to be heard.

Connecting to the trees the leaves the intercommunication of the living planet

telling me it is time to release what no longer serves me. 

I feel the quietness moving inside me. 

The need for more psychic silence for the soul.

I don’t question it because it happens with every turn of the seasons. 

I must make the time to create and set boundaries that will not be interrupted.

These are the Sacred Hours of the Day.

PAUSING. REMEMBERING. 

I carry on one foot in front of the other and know each step holds the imprint

of my mother and father 

my grandmothers and grandfathers 

my great grandparents 

the beautiful lands they left in Eastern Slovakia. 

Each step 

Each word 

Each brushstroke is telling 

me this. 

Lest I forget. 

I do not want to forget. 

Autumn embrace me with all your narratives.

Let me be one vessel that carries it all back into the dirt and soil 

full of purpose 

communicating to all whom will listen.

Stories buried and released in the awakening that lies ahead. 

In Lovingkindness, Donna Alena 

THOUGHT FOR YOUR ART: What is your mission statement in your art?

Let’s think about why we create and what are we hoping to communicate in the forms of art we manifest or are given to us from Sources unknown.

What is your part in the collective unconscious of stories, storytelling, novellas, films, music and how you live and express yourself?

I am listening. 
Tell me your statement and I will begin my also. 

PAUSE and REMEMBER. 

These are my words today. 

OUR ART IS THE CEREMONY to heal ourselves and so many.