Cracking Open Reality

“Enlightened people become non-functional,” said Tina Rasmussen to our group as her husband Stephen Snyder nodded in agreement toward the end of a Samatha Buddhist Meditation Retreat. “They inhabit the crack in consensual reality.”

Let’s go burst open these cracks! Together we can bust open reality! What happens to how we perceive and experience reality when our mutual consensus for it breaks down and dissolves?

“It’s really amazing,” Tina continued. “When you live in such a world long enough, you’re no longer functional. These enlightened people, it’s wild, and they’re just not functional. It’s almost like if, well, if you live that kind of lifestyle long enough, you see it all over India and Southeast Asia, it’s pretty common there, but when you live like and immerse yourself for such a long time in these practices, when you truly become aware of what the world really is, what the world really looks like, there is a big, big crack in the consensual reality.”

“And sometimes when you get there,” broke in Stephen, “you can’t leave. There’s no going back.”

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Calling Down Mars, God of War: Questioning the Nature of Reality

Once upon a time on a hot, late summer night we gathered in a cutover cornfield and called down Mars, the God of War. I remember clearly seeing the Red God as he made his appearance. What disturbs me most, however, is not that we accomplished such a feat, but I can’t recall what we did it for and why. My ego has great pride in my memory of events, especially as I have an almost-photographic memory. I say almost, as I seem unable to remember numbers, mathematical formulas, musical notes, the names of people as I’m more of a face guy, and the titles of songs, poems, and books, especially who wrote what when. What I do know is one night in a Virginia cornfield in the vicinity of old Civil War battlefields the God of War came down in a blaze of sparkling, red haze.

We were Witches back then, American Neo-Pagan Wiccans of blended eclectic traditions to be exact. Neo-Celtic-Germanic, often shortened to “Celtic,” was the predominant cluster of traditions we wove into a tapestry of magick, ritual, and celebrations. As the term “Witch,” unfortunately, carried such a negative charge around the world since the Christian Inquisitions and the Muslim Conquests, many of us publicly used the term “Wiccan” as we also worked to rehabilitated Witchcraft and Witches.

We also used the term “magick” to distinguish “real” magick from the tricks and illusions performed by showmen proclaimed “magicians.” These stage magicians were astounding at what they did, of course, and skeptics rooted in material science used such stage tricks as “proof” there can be no such thing as true magick. Real sorcerers scoffed as such foolishness as card tricks and derided illusionists who pretend to make things disappear. After all, real sorcerers know magick demands disciplined practice and focus. As such they can conjure up gods, goddesses, angels, and demons from the Spirit realms. As we Witches did with the God Mars. Well, we got part of him to show up.

It’s an argument as old as philosophy – did matter come first or did mind? Did mind arise from matter? Or did mind come first and matter arose out of mind?

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The Grinch is Gone!

Somebody stole The Grinch from Candy Cane Lane! What a vile and horrid thing to do. Whoever stole The Grinch and thus robbed us all and not just the Whos of Whoville must have a heart so teeny tiny as to be even tinier than the Grinch’s. Hey Dude, yeah, you, you and your giggling, drunken, lamebrain buddies with cigarettes dipped in stale Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, hey, do y’all need suspenders to hold up your hearts or what?

Candy Cane Lane is Heaven in Seattle for Christmas lovers. It’s a small crescent shaped block of classic brick and wood homes from bygone “Grandma and Grandpa Days” carved out of a hillside in the woodsy Ravenna neighborhood of North Seattle. And a huge, big cutout of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas was stolen a couple of days ago. Cindy Lou Who and Max the One-Horned Doggiedeer Reindeer were left stranded and sad.

What will happened to Christmas without The Grinch? What will Santa do? And all those poor Whos way off in Whoville? What about all the good people of Candy Cane Lane right here in Seattle?

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The Gaza Mess: Is Global Intervention Needed?

Today is Monday 29 December 2008. Already Jewish Israelis have killed more people in their airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Arabs in Gaza than Muslim terrorists based in Pakistan killed in Mumbai, India a month ago. While tensions between India on one hand and Pakistan and Bangladesh on the other seems to have subsided, at least for now, they have exploded between Israel and not just Hamas but the Arab and Persian streets.

It is time for the international community to unite, invoke global sovereignty, and launch a massive planetary police intervention to stop this local and regional cycle of hatred, revenge, madness, and stupidity once and for all. This situation is so serious it warrants acceleration of human cultural evolution toward democratic planetary union.

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Mumbai: Opportunities Lost

A Postscript Foreword:

The following essay was written soon after the Mumbai attacks and massacres on Wednesday to Saturday of 26-29 November 2008. At first blame was placed upon India’s own restive Muslim population. Sporadic Hindu-Muslim-Sikh communal riots still tend to break out now and then, and Kashmiris fighting for independence from India sometimes strike India.

Subsequent investigations uncovered the terrorists were not Indian at all but Pakistani Jihadists from Lashkar-e-Taiba, based in Pakistan. The same group was responsible for the December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. Both likely involved the Pakistani ISI. In both 2001 and after the Mumbai attack India and Pakistan came close to war. Their last major war was the Kargil War of 1999. Minor yet deadly on-going wars include the Kashmiri War and the Siachen Glacier War.

Both India and Pakistan, nominal allies in the larger Global War on Terror, are on opposite sides of the battle when it comes to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, and their own frontier including tribal-autonomy issues over Punjab and Sindh. In fact, soon after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistan, while denying anything to do with the attacks at first, massed troops along the border even while fighting Taliban and al-Qaeda forces along the AfPak border.

Mumbai presented humanity with a novel opportunity. It especially presented India and Pakistan such an opportunity to rise up over their ridiculously infantile yet murderous differences. Even China, Russia, and the United States and perhaps Afghanistan missed a significant opportunity with far-reaching implications to help facilitate peace between these nuclear-armed nation-states.

What follows is an in-depth view into the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, what the world came close to without much general awareness in the mainstream mass media or the populace at large, and unfolding scenarios. All-out destruction is still possible even as Mumbai recedes into the past, the situation in Kashmir remains highly inflamed, and tensions are high between India and China along their borders. The situation inside Pakistan has deteriorated so greatly many consider the nation a failed state. Perhaps more disconcerting, the relationship between the United States and Pakistan worsen with sporadic violence and open distrust breaking out between the two. Continue reading

Remember the Pygmy Holocaust

A holocaust has been going on under the radar of the world’s media and the canopies of the African rainforests. “Never again!” has become an empty cry as one genocidal massacre after another continues to pinball through our post-World War II history.

Little known is the on-going extermination, enslavement, and even cannibalism of the Pygmy people. Yes, you read that right. Cannibalism. While Pygmies have not risen in armed revolt against any government nor engage in combat against any armed faction in the Great African War, they are nevertheless hunted down like wild game animals, killed, and eaten. By other people. Continue reading

Congo: Nkunda’s Terror in the Great African “World War”

Foreword 2011:

Within this narrative we’ll study the rise and fall of Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general in the Congo Wars against the backdrop of Central African history. These Congolese conflicts are in turn part of the Great Central African War or the so-called African World War, a series of parallel, overlapping, and interlocking local and regional wars. Nkunda exploited the resulting chaos to set himself up as a warlord. He carved out his own little empire among the Virunga Mountains, the African Great Lakes, and other border areas of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.

At the height of his power, Nkunda came close to bringing down President Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo, humiliated larger United Nations military forces in the region, and was wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Some thought it possible he could unify Tutsi tribes across international borders, take over the DRC, and attempt to conquer an empire. His pride proved to be his own undoing. In a classic story evocative of Shakespeare’s plays reflecting the foibles of human nature everywhere, Laurent Nkunda was responsible for his own undoing. Continue reading

Two Days After Veteran’s Day 2008

Veterans’ Day 2008 in the United States has come and gone now. It originated as Armistice Day to celebrate the armistice that ended combat on the Western Front in Europe in the First World War. It evolved into Veterans’ Day within the U.S.A. to honor veterans of all America’s wars. In other countries involved in the First World War it is still remembered as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. Major hostilities officially ceased with the German surrender in 1918 at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Called the Great War, the War to End all Wars, it was neither the first nor the last world war, although it was the most terrible up to that time. Nor did it end with the signing of the Armistice. The actual peace treaty officially ending the war wasn’t signed until 1919 and fighting continued on other fronts as the international slaughter morphed into a vast, interconnected network of revolutions and civil wars across several continents and included great violence in Russia, Germany, China, the Middle East, Mexico, and elsewhere.

The so-called Spanish influenza pandemic swept around the planet in the wake of the First World War and killed more people than the war itself. The wars spawned by World War I eventually converged into the Second World War such that some historians include the violence of 1914-1945 with the Great Depression in between all one monstrous war. Some go further and include the Cold War of 1945-1991 as the last phase of a truly Great War.

My grandfather, Carroll M. Bass of Richmond, Virginia, served in the U.S. Navy in the Great War. All I can remember from family stories of that time is that he was out in the Atlantic Ocean hunting German U-boats as part of an anti-submarine unit. There was always present the fear of being torpedoed, blown up and sunk in unimaginably deep, cold water. A medal lies on my desk, an old tarnished coin-like medal. Face-up is an image of what I fancy is woman in a long dress waving good-bye or hello with a smaller, encircled image of the Goddess of Justice. On the back is inscribed, “Presented by the citizens of Richmond, VA to C.M.B. (illegible) in grateful recognition of patriotic service in the World War, 1917-1918.” Continue reading

Obama: Our First World President?

Postscript as Belated Prologue: Voting for Barack Obama for U.S. President proved to be one of the biggest and most embarrassing mistakes of my life. As I write this almost five years after I voted for this brilliant, captivating, but mediocre man who waffled as much as he smiled, I’ve come to loathe Obama as much as I despised Bush I & II. I’ve since disowned the Democrats as well as the Republicans and wish them both a speedy death into the garbage cans of history.

In the wake of the still-ongoing Great Global Recession with its corresponding economic, financial, environmental, and social turmoil, I’ve also disavowed and spurned Capitalism. All attempts to reform Capitalism with the most generous and heartfelt of intentions failed. Finance Capitalism still wins out. FC is also known as Predatory, Disaster, and Crony Capitalism for a reason. Capitalism conquers Democracy and leads to Fascism and Imperialism New, reformed kinds of cooperative Socialism and Neo-Communism is far more desirable. In 2012, I voted against President Obama and for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Obama won, and I became further engaged in the Green Party of Seattle. The Greens stand the best chance during these uncertain times to build pragmatic bridges between the Far Left and the Mainstream Middle where I live in the United States of America. I would say the same thing in regards to the Libertarians as building bridges between the traditional, conserve-Conservatives and Libertarians of the Far Right and the Mainstream Middle. What follows serves as the power of illusion, desperation, manipulated rebellion, and, yes, the deliberate deception and continual betrayal of the American people as well as the rest of Earth. ~ the Author, 19 July 2013.

 * * *

Barack Hussein Obama is now President of the United States of America. He was inaugurated today this Tuesday of 20 January 2009. To the relief of many, George W. Bush handed over the reigns of power without declaring martial law. After all, “W” wanted to get back to his ranch outside Crawford, Texas. Obama’s elevation to the Presidency is historic for a number of reasons, many of them obvious and oft commented on. What is not so obvious is that unofficially and energetically he is, at least for now, the de facto President of Planet Earth.

This became clear during his Berlin speech in the Spring of 2008. There he addressed throngs of people as a citizen of the world to point out nations of the world must work together to resolve the numerous challenges facing all humanity. We ARE one people. Today in his Inauguration speech he again alluded to the need for our community of nations to work together. Obama is energetically the unofficial President of the World. Take note. This is a historic first. And it is to be celebrated.

National sovereignty is as obsolete as the divine right of kings. An integration of personal and global sovereignty may well evolve to replace this outmoded and violent concept. We today have a planet of co-dependent nation-states and dependent stateless-nations. Yet nations still exist and their institutions can be leveraged in mass collaboration. We all must learn to work together to resolve a convergence of severe global crises unique in human history. Continue reading

“How did Republicans become Communists?”

“Obama is a Socialist!” We heard such slogans shouted and banded about by U.S. Republicans in the waning days of the American Election of 2008. Arizona Senator John McCain and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the respective Republican candidates for President and Vice-President, used the S-word in an attempt to fire up conservatives and scare the hell out of mainstream moderates. Few bit, however.

First, most Americans realize and accept they have some form of mixed economy where free market capitalism operates inside a container of government regulation and control and that was what saved us from the Great Depression and the Second World War. Yes, many Americans also realize their economy has a tint of socialism in it, but unlike Communist regimes the U.S. does not spout Marxist rhetoric or squash liberties and freedoms or slaughter millions of it own people like the Communist states of Soviet Russia, Red China, the Khmer Rouge, or North Korea. So McCain and Palin’s claims of “Socialism!” fell flat. Many people yawned, and many Republicans felt embarrassed.

It’s hard to yell “Socialist!” when you identify yourself as a Red Stater. Hey, hasn’t anyone else noticed that the U.S. Republican Party identifies itself with the term “Red State?” Has anyone else noticed that ultra-conservative Republicans identify as “Reds?” It must drive a conspiracy theorist wacko to think hey, the Communists actually won the Cold War after all by infiltrating and silently taking over its archenemy those U.S. Republicans. Continue reading

Obama Stands Tall…and the World Wakes Up…in 2008

Postscript as Belated Prologue: Voting for Barack Obama for U.S. President proved to be one of the biggest and most embarrassing mistakes of my life. As I write this almost 5 years after I wrote the original essay, I’ve come to loathe Obama as much as I despised Bush I & II. I’ve since disowned the Democrats as well as the Republicans and wish them both a speedy death into the garbage cans of history. In the wake of the still-ongoing Great Global Recession with its corresponding economic, financial, environmental, and social turmoil, I’ve also disavowed and spurned Capitalism.

All attempts to reform Capitalism with the most generous and heartfelt of intentions failed. Finance Capitalism still wins out. FC is also known as Predatory, Disaster, and Crony Capitalism for a reason. Capitalism conquers Democracy and leads to Fascism and Imperialism New, reformed kinds of cooperative Socialism and Neo-Communism is far more desirable. In 2012, I voted against President Obama and for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Obama won, and I became further engaged in the Green Party of Seattle.

The Greens stand the best chance these days to build pragmatic bridges between the Far Left and the Mainstream Middle where I live in the United States of America. I would say the same thing in regards to the Libertarians as building bridges between the traditional, conserve-Conservatives and Libertarians of the Far Right and the Mainstream Middle. What follows serves as the power of illusion, desperation, manipulated rebellion, and, yes, the deliberate deception and continual betrayal of the American people as well as the rest of Earth. ~ the Author, July 19, 2013.

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“Obama rocks!” my daughter Kate shouts, pumping her fist high in triumph. She’s three and a half weeks away from her 10th birthday, and she is excited about politics for the first time in her life.

I realized for the first time just how ashamed I felt to be an American under the Bush-Cheney Regime. I have both supported and opposed various policies of different administrations over the years, demanding the light of truth be shined on any and all things. Despite terrible things done by Americans over the course of U.S. history I was proud of what we achieved. I was proud of what we stood for even in the midst of our imperfections. Continue reading

A Retrospective: Political Parties and an Endorsement for the American Presidency 2008

Postscript as Belated Prologue: Voting for Barack Obama for U.S. President proved to be one of the biggest and most embarrassing mistakes of my life. As I write this almost 5 years after I once endorsed this man, I’ve come to loathe Obama as much as I despised Bush I & II. I’ve since disowned the Democrats as well as the Republicans and wish them both a speedy death into the garbage cans of history. In the wake of the still-ongoing Great Global Recession with its corresponding economic, financial, environmental, and social turmoil, I’ve also disavowed and spurned Capitalism.

All attempts to reform Capitalism with the most generous and heartfelt of intentions failed. Finance Capitalism still wins out. FC is also known as Predatory, Disaster, and Crony Capitalism for a reason. Capitalism conquers Democracy and leads to Fascism and Imperialism New, reformed kinds of cooperative Socialism and Neo-Communism is far more desirable. In 2012, I voted against President Obama and for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Obama won, and I became further engaged in the Green Party of Seattle.

I feel the Greens stand the best chance these days to build pragmatic bridges between the Far Left and the Mainstream Middle where I live in the United States of America. I would say the same thing in regards to the Libertarians as building bridges between the traditional, conserve-Conservatives and Libertarians of the Far Right and the Mainstream Middle. What follows serves as the power of illusion, desperation, manipulated rebellion, and, yes, the deliberate deception and continual betrayal of the American people as well as the rest of Earth. ~ the Author, 19 July 2013.

December of 2011 is half over now, and the Election of 2012 is already in overdrive. As a group, the Republicans have seen many of their candidates make fools of themselves. The Democrats demonstrate an astounding lack of spine and decisiveness. Together they antagonize the general American Public. Nor have the Green Party, the Libertarians, or even an Independent party emerged with viable candidates.

Certainly there isn’t anyone who ignites people with passion and vision. The other minor parties field extremists who may in all fairness have a few good ideas but also many terrible and certain impractical ones. New groups have emerged fielding alternative ways to choosing our leaders, such as the Americans Elect and the Win Win Revolution (see their URLs below).

The Tea Party revolt was hijacked by the ultraconservative superrich and after a great noise faded from prominence. The Occupy Wall Street movement exploded worldwide and made an even greater ruckus, initially appealed to a broad majority of American citizens. Support for OWS may be fading.

Police intimidation combined with a growing perception among the 99% the general assemblies of those groups camping in public spaces may be internally hijacking OWS with their own radical agendas. Efforts to unite both “TP & OWS” by Venn diagram-wielding visionaries have yet to bear results. It’s still too early to tell what will arise come Spring from the Winter of both groups. Continue reading

Over Meditated

After four days away in the woods of Cloud Mountain, a Buddhist meditation retreat center down near Mt. St. Helens, Washington, I’m back in the Emerald City of Seattle surfing traffic in my four-wheeled kayak. With fiercely serene contemplation my breath guides me to all the sweet spots between grinding dump trucks and vrooming sports cars and teeth-gnashing morons, oops, excuse me, peoplyps, wow, post-meditation Freudian malapropism there smashing together people and polyps! Oops, back to the breath. Breathing in, breathing out. Good thing we worked with our nasal orifices and not any others. Indeed.

During the retreat, we focused on Samatha or Concentration and Tranquility Meditation with Jhana practices. Samatha is “the other twin” to Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, and is little known in North America. It’s beginning to take root, however, as it is rediscovered by many practitioners. My two teachers, Tina Rasmussen, a former nun, and Stephen Snyder, had immersed themselves deeply in these Samatha practices. They mentored under a rare master, the Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw of Myanmar/Burma.

After studying and practicing Vipassana in Seattle for two years it proved to be the missing link. For the two middle days I spent at least nine to ten hours in sitting meditation, or attempting to, and the rest of my time awake meditating while walking, eating, and during tasks such as brushing my teeth or working as one of two “soup yogis.”

As part of trading work for money to get myself into the course, I set up and maneuvered giant soup contraptions for the cook. It wasn’t hard, especially as a tiny woman with a head-spinning mane of hair who once spent five years as a bald nun on a silent Zen meditation retreat handled those big soup gamdoodles even faster than I did.

Continue reading

Stages of Collapse

“Collapse” here refers to the process and stages a civilization descends through as it falls, crumbles, and collapses into extinction. Or manages to turn itself around at pivotal points on the way down before its too late. The term originated from the title of Dr. Jared M. Diamond’s pivotal 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

What human-made forces and institutions kill most people? History provides the answers. Political and religious institutions kill the most as they shape our beliefs, perceptions, and cultural reactions to reality. Civilizations arise within these structures. As nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down and began to congregate and work together in increasing levels of complexity, their populations expanded. Cities develop as local villages, markets, and fortifications merge and consolidate. Continue reading

Little Red Boots

I loved my little red boots. Little itty-bitty cheap plastic boots with plastic rubbery pull-up handles. They were so RED! And I loved red. I felt so PROUD! Cuz I wore them, or rather lost them, in receiving (remember, medals of honor are not awarded to winners but recipients!) my very first concussion, which was also the first time I fell out of a tree, and the very first time I broke through the ice over frozen water. Now, one can imagine little red boots venturing foolishly out onto the ice, but what in tarnation where they doing up in a TREE?

Oh, by the way, this was back when I was a little boy. I was a bad, bad elementary school lad trying to tag along with those badder than worse pre-teen boys my Momma hated me playing with. Of course, we didn’t use “pre-teen” back in those halcyon red rock-throwing1960s. Back then we li’l kids call ‘em “the Big Kids.” I grew up, see, in rural Virginia, on my parents’ dairy farm outside the town of Farmville, yes, the real Farmville, halfway between Richmond and Lynchburg.

One day a long, long time ago, decades now, I ventured out after a long and terrible storm. In my little red boots, of course. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. And all the plants and everything else outside was slick and glistening wet. It must’ve been Spring or Fall because I do remember wearing a coat and a hat.

I climbed up into a tree. I loved to climb. That’s why I was up in a tree. I began playing in it the previous summer. It was a scrubby, bushy, shrubby tree growing wild around the corner of the yard. My parents just mowed the grass around it. It was a tangle of shoots with myriad branches forking forth in all directions. At one point I slipped and grabbed, stopped myself, and ended up with a mouthful of leaves. Apparently I used my mouth as an extra hand. No wonder I have jaw problems these days! Continue reading

Yellow Jackets Swarming Ants

A cloud of yellow jackets gathered over the yard as a dark storm of malevolent invasion. The black and yellow wasps were at once beefy and lean from a summer of feasting and hunting. They circled together in the air; then dropped to attack. God, they were FAST! I stumbled backwards in panic. Dozens of yellow jackets swiftly assaulted, killed, and ate hundreds of ants. The massacre was over in minutes. Life and death right there in my front yard. The ebb and flow of nature I unwittingly contributed to in a reminder we humans live within nature. Continue reading

Interview Impromptu with a Murderer

People have no idea what a person goes thru in life. As a young man working on the family dairy farm I had the occasion to work with at least three murderers. All three were men. One was White. He boasted of what he did and would do. He later did it, too. Cut his own Momma’s head off. Two others were Black. One of those was matter of fact about the psychology of killing and was all business about it. The other hid out in plain sight. There may have been more killers working alongside me, too, but I only knew about these three during this time period of 1981 – 1984. This was back when I lived in Prince Edward County, tucked away in the Piedmont hills and low valleys of south-central Virginia. As I worked side by side together with them on the farm, we got to know each other well.

All three stirred powerful emotions in me. Once I almost killed one guy, a drunken horror named Paul Jenkins. It was my day off work, but I had to come in as Paul never showed up to milk the cows. He was home drunk off more cans of the cheap beer he called “liquid steak” then one could count. He jumped my back and drunkenly tried to choke me as we prepared to milk the cows, I lost it. Enraged and scared, I broke loose, ran into the cow barn, snatched a pitchfork from where it stood buried in a bale of hay, and charged him to drive those prongs in deep. At the last minute I stopped myself. I felt too much empathy. Reminded myself some of us carry a heavier cross than others at different times in life.

My drunk coworker then begged me to kill him, or he would commit suicide. He threatened to hang himself off the side of our 75-ft high grain silo. Another fed-up coworker, an older man semi-retired, would have no more of this interruption of work that must be done, and shouted at him to “Go ahead and hang your own damn fool ass off that silo! I’ve had it with all your shit!” After a few deep breaths I backed off as he flopped crying in the grass and almost knocked over a big, smelly pan of cow milk set down for the kitties. Yeah, we had a lot of cats and kittens around back then. The other man calmed down. Together we got the cows milked, but Paul staggered on off down the road, found a way to Charlottesville where his MaMa lived, slipped into her home in the middle of the night, and cut her head off. She whipped out a pistol from under her pillow, the same one she’d shot her abusive husband, Paul’s daddy, dead with, but she wasn’t quick enough. Not this time. Her son severed her head right there in her own bed.

The scariest one was a young man whose name I’ve forgotten. Although I can see his face clearly in my mind as I write this piece. So I’m gonna call him Mike. Though it might as well ’ve been Dick. Wait, I remember now. It’s Thomas! And one day during a slow time “cleaning up the barn,” our job description for gathering up and removing leftover hay, cow manure, bovine urine, trash, and anything else, I interviewed him. What follows is not a formal interview of direct quotes, but a close approximation as I paraphrase his stark use of language. In some ways it felt as if I interviewed him only yesterday. He, however, acted as if he was somehow my mentor, as if he was going to train me in one of the darkest arts, murder. I shiver even now in remembrance.

Continue reading

Homeless along the Freeway

She stood surprisingly tall and alert but worn out and desperate. Unwashed blonde hair hung over gray-white skin. Her clothes were ragged, drab, and yet rich with color all at once. Bands of red, purple, and green zigzagged through the fibers of a dirty Sherpa hat pulled down tight. A turquoise scarf was wrapped around her neck and flung over her shoulders. Her eyes flickered between the waning control of high intelligence and the growing impulses for beastly survival. She looked real. She was real.

Upon the edge of an exit ramp off the freeway along which traffic thunders through Seattle, she stood there in mismatch boots holding up a ragged cardboard sign. It stated:

COLD

HUNGRY

I NEED MONEY

PLEASE!

Continue reading

All Eyes Are

When I am certain
No one is watching,
Not a single soul,
When I am certain
No one can see me,
I stop.

I sit
and meditate.
I sit on a cushion and feel
my own breath alive in me
and outside of me.

Complete but never done,
I rise to sing,
and dance,
and rock my pelvis
at nothing in particular,
just to loosen up my hips.

Naked I stand.
Naked I twirl.
Feeling foolish,
Feeling good,
A hirsute man in my early 50s.
Why, I am not even old yet.
I could live another 50 years,
or drop dead before I finish this sentence.

As I sit so alone and so naked
and half-aroused,
dreaming of mounting vibrant, exciting women
who dare look me deep in the eyes
to see if they trust my soul,
I realize
God is watching me.
That He watches from above and from within
as Goddess watches from below and all around.
She slithers up inside to me to embrace God.
I feel a quiet explosion of Love and Power
expanding from that unity of Spirit and communion of all Souls.

All eyes are upon me naked,
even if many are closed.
Everyone sees me,
and in looking out together
I see myself.
Everyone sees me
as we see you.

 

William Dudley Bass
2 December 2011
Seattle, Washington

NOTE: Originally published on one of my earlier blogs, Cultivate and Harvest, on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at <http://www.cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com/2011/04/all-eyes-are-when-i-am-certain-no-one.html>. Revised and republished here on my new blog On Earth at the Brink on December 2, 2011 at <https://williamdudleybass.com>. Thank you.

Copyright © 2011, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

*

I ain’t no man

I ain’t no man. That’s just a word. Somebody else’s word.
I’m not my name. I’m not my history. I’m not my past.
I ain’t the future; ain’t happened yet.
I’m not my stories – they all made up.
I ain’t dead – but will be eventually.

I’m not my personality or my character. I’m not my identity.
I’m made up in my own mind, and I’m not my self as there is no self.
I ain’t no ego or no id. I’m not my consciousness or my subconsciousness.
I’m not my shadow or my inner child or adolescent or whatever.
I ain’t no woman tho I came outa one and like all humans who ain’t cloned or genetically engineered with sheep & cows & chimpanzees cuz
I’m a mix of Y & X but ain’t no frakkin’ mutant Z, Z & Z.

I have all those things, but I’m not those things. I’m not my body.
Yeah, I have one. I have a body. My frakkin’ body. Love it, too. But I’m not it.
I ain’t nothin’. Rip off all my clothes.
Ain’t got no shame. Ain’t got no pride. Ain’t got nothin’.
Feelings & emotions rise up roiling hot scorching magma…
but I let them go & cool off. I ain’t nothing.
There’s no AM in my I.

Standing in wet emptiness a hot flash of darkness renders naked all creation. Moving into light I start up again cuz I’m the DNA engine…move people move!
Move into possibility…move into my power…into love…cuz I’m done Seeking.
Tears find me. Carve gullies down my chest and belly.
Tears burn open holes in my flesh and fill my heart as wine.
The more I cry the clearer I see.
I cry so hard my head breaks open round my tears.
Salty wine pours down my insides and out.
My legs rust apart like iron and break upon my feet like clay.
All dissolve into the sea.

I topple into sand beyond the furthest stranglehold of my own hands.Ozymandias dead and unremembered even after the winds long blow away the sands. There is nothing but this present moment, nothing beyond death but words. Nothing explodes into everything becoming anything.
Power flows and love churns reborn.
Flowers crack open concrete as massive stars destroy whole galaxies.

In the Bang of Big of Everything
every tiny quantum particle wave bursts into a genesis of evolution
from which arises after 14 Billion years the capacity to forgive and feel compassion, to feel empathy and love, to embrace paradox with and not or,
to transcend the horror we visit upon one another, to open up and cry, and to love, and to love with power, and be love in the power.

Love…it is our gift to gift as a species, our art we put out into the multiverse of billion billions of planets with billions likely teeming with life…when we finally face the mysterious beings afar will be our greatest challenge to love…and sometimes in 14 Billion years things move fast and “they” may not wait for us Humans to get our act together & stop slaughtering each other & wake up into our own power to understand to wake up to get LOVE powers the Universe.

 

William Dudley Bass
Spring & Summer 2011
Seattle, Washington
U.S.A.
Cascadia

NOTES:

  1. Inspired post to Prezz Pressley’s Facebook Group, “MEN who r NOT AFRAID 2 CRY” on May 25, 2011 and later revised on May 27, 2011 as A Prose Poem Written With Pounding Heart.
  2. Reposted to one of my earlier blogs, Cultivate and Harvest, on July 8, 2011, at <http://www.cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-aint-no-man-i-aint-no-man.html>.
  3. Revised, restructured, rewritten, and republished here on my blog On Earth at the Brink at <https://williamdudleybass.com>.

 

Copyright © 2011, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

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I am not my Name

My name is William,
William Dudley Bass,
And I am not my name.
I am my Word.
Nurture, nurture myself:
I love, honor, and respect myself.
I love, honor, and respect myself.
I love, honor, and respect myself.
AHO!
I am alive.
I am here, right here now.
I have a history.
I am not my history.
Nor my stories or identities.
I am not my legacy, or my reputation, or anyone’s opinion.
I am not my own beliefs, views, or interpretations.
I have my beliefs, views, or interpretations I give meaning to,
Of course,
But I am not any of those…things.
I am here, right here now,
And I am alive.
What happened is what happened, just what happened.
Truth.
Meanings, interpretations, perceptions, views, myths, filters, beliefs
Are all made up,
All stories,
And stories are lies.
Unless it is, of course, called “a true story.”
Would that be a false lie?
We all have views,
And only God has View.
If such exists, either View…or God.
Views are not truths,
just events filtered, deleted, and interpreted by mind.
I am not my body or my feelings and emotions or even my thoughts.
I do have a body, and with feelings, emotions, and thoughts, of course,
But am not any of those…things.
Even a construct of mind is made up by the mind to be a construct of mind.
In the beginning and yet again there was nothing leaving nothing but The Word.
I am my Word.

 

(Influenced by works as diverse as Landmark Education, Peak Potentials Trainings, Scott Brooks’ mythopoetic men’s work, Vipassana Buddhist Meditation with Seattle Insight Meditation Society, and Jeff Shushan’s psychotherapy and counseling.)

 

William Dudley Bass
20 April 2011
Seattle, Washington

NOTE: Originally published on another one of my blogs, Cultivate and Harvest, at <http://cultivateandharvest.blogspot.com/2011_04_01_archive.html>, then republished here on December 2, 2011. Thank you.

 

Copyright © 2011, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

*

The Three F’s

My wife
She & I fight
I hate it
She does, too
I saw a pattern
Called it “F & F”
For “Fight or Fuck, Fuck or Fight”
Ken Wilber once wrote the
primal male drive toward everything
Is to “Fuck it or kill it.”
My wife liked to quote Ken Wilber a lot
when I was horny and she didn’t care
if she made love for over a month or two
or even a year or ever again
I, however, was horny a lot
K added the third F
“F, F, & F”
Shit, I hate all this F & F & F
Keeps us apart
Tears open our hearts
As mad dogs rip up a coon
Caught alongside the river
Deep down below a full moon
My point of view was
“Fuck or Fight & Fail”
Her point of view was
“Fight or Fuck & Fail”
Still the same 3 F’s
Shit, I hate all these here F’s
A long time ago
In a circle of men gathered around a big drum
On a sawdusty stone floor before a fire
A shaven-headed skinny dude with a beard
Pointed his long index finger to the North Star
“We all have a fuckin’ point of view,” he said.
“That’s why we have so many wars.”
He jabbed the shadow air again with bony finger.
“Remember this, I say it now, remember what I say, OK.
You and me, we all have a different point of view,
Yes, we do,
But only God has View.”
Around and round the wife & I rumble
Struggling to beat together as One Heart One
In sweat-drenched sheets shoved aside
I surrendered to her
And she was all mine
As we ground out electric Tantra sparks
Amid blazing pillows and melted wax
God saw through our eyes all at once
Our points of view became only View
I was in her and she in me
I was Goddess and she God
With a cry of submission
To the Divine Within
The One God Beyond All saw everything
And so could we
For a time, for a time.

 

William Dudley Bass
From a desperate & broken prose poem from 30 May 2009
Turned into another bad poem on 20 September 2011
Published here at On Earth at the Brink at just after midnight on Friday 2December 2011
Seattle, Washington

 

Copyright © 2011, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.

*

Blogging the Deborama

“Tuesdays with Deborah” is a circle of bloggers and writers I gather with to listen and to share about and for blogging. Author and editor Deborah Drake facilitates, and she pours her soul into our meetings. She’s passionate and generous for the art of crafting language…and how we can all market it. Deborah recently guided us through our blogger version of November’s National Novel Writing Month.

Good thing I didn’t keep what I originally put down as my title, “Decembering the Deborahma.”

Better yet I’m glad I paid attention to my intuition, something I’ve been known to neglect with interesting consequences. My intuition said, “I betta lookit uppa!”

“Decembering” stems from Olde English per the on-line Urban Dictionary & as December’s the first true month of Winter means, “to give a cold shoulder.” To dismiss, “to blow off,” even, uh, um…“hate.” See for yourself at:  http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Decembering. Worse, my spellcheck suggested I respell it “dismembering.”  I’ve been playing a bit too cheeky with words, I see. Continue reading