The Ascent of Man - a prose poem

Silent streaming photons bathe the plant on all sides.  It lifts its head towards warmth and it breathes.  Tiny thrills of energy wave out along tender branching stalks and a sense of peace opens its internal pipes, throbbing with moistured nutrient earth particles.  It drinks carbon from the surrounding air, and extracts minuscule ionic trace minerals which knit the carbon into long flows of new form.  

The flower moves upward into air, day by day, and this day will be a good one.  Its body grows from thin air and sunlight upward into free space and outward, shading tiny ecosystems beneath its leaves where molds and insects live and farm their own domains, destinies intertwined.  It’s funny, but we humans don’t usually remember that organic growth is almost entirely from air and sun, free and clear of eco-nomic expert knowledge of proteins and fat. 

Our eco-sense is mostly some nonsense about fertilizers, after the fact, once removed through the flesh of others.  Yet, everything is given.  We did not invent the sun and the air, the grass that makes our beef, nor the bacteria that allow cows to digest that grass.  We grow independent of our thought, in spite of infantile wishes to remain small, dependent, fed, clothed, pampered by others.  

We gain stature and strength we did not ask for, but, once found, we revel and want more.  Our lofty minds, so fluid, automatically assume shapes from ancestral dreams we do not even know.  (By the time our minds discover ourselves, we have already lost them.)  And yet, we grow.  Our bodies drink air and the air that plants drank, water and the water that fell from that air eons ago.

We emerge upward, and climb and build and scale and challenge ourselves, each other.  This is how it happens, I guess: the games that hone skills become life work, of course, and the life work become games, deception with each other, ourselves.  So wrapped up in skills we forgot.  

We forgot how it is all given, a given that we did not create.  We grew out of thin air, after all, before we even knew it, and then we were there, playing with the pieces, stealing bananas from each other, at first perhaps for fun, but then in earnest.

Clouds form above the flowers, carrying virtual rain high across the heavens - it’s over our heads, that’s for sure - and then they vanish, all on their own, outside of our knowledge.  We can telephone for help, for fun, to annoy or to comfort, but we cannot telephone for rain.  Over our heads, clouds follow messages like virtual wires crossing the heavens, find special fields on which to pour their blessings with an inner eco-sensitivity foreign to us any more.  

We scratch our heads, looking up and down, how to manage this wild far field of moisture-bearing ether?  No?  Well then, we’ll dam the ground flows in concrete, taking and giving according to our own eco-sense of fair-play.  Damn it all, we have visions of power generated from these hijacked waters and we’ll sell it to the ground.  We have to mean something, don’t we?

The flowers have formed blossoms, attracted insect partners, and become full with pollen.  The bees have drunk and flown sluggishly back to their villages, full of treasure.  New seeds formed and petals blew away with the wind, in full maturity.  Tiny ecosystems bloomed below in molds and insects harvested for later need.  Man crouches where he was, pounding ground that is shifting beneath him.  He struggles to stand upright, suddenly discovering that schoolyard struts  are no longer adequate.  He must support his own full weight now.

March, 2012

March, 2012

Looking around Austin, I see business as usual, but there is no business as usual.  The earth has turned toward a different star.  Most people sense this but do not turn to look at what it means.  I see cars driving about and people dressed for success, having lunch and buying organic on the way home from work, but they seem as if the dead walking.  It is so sad, this Occupy time.  And so hopeful.  

Finally.  Finally humanity has a moment again to reflect, to reassess, to reassemble perhaps, like after the plague or the fall of Rome.  And so, my need.  I feel as if all I can do is to wait, as if I were already dead myself, waiting for some greater good to place me where I can be of help, as if I cannot help without commission from outside, as if everything I might do, however good in itself, will be another form of personal ego.

I would like to see Safe Smiles Zones, painted into the sidewalks.  Smiles Stores, where people leave and take  useable goods without money.  Sunshine Hats, which can be exchanged on the fly between strangers.    Sidewalk Studies, where people can stop to sit and talk.  

The next era will be one of connections, locality, smallness perhaps, networks.  The time of individual ego has been exhausted into its logical endpoint: 1% owning 99% to no observable purpose other than because they could.  Perhaps our species has become equally as useless, meaningless, as boring to the gods as the dinosaurs, living only to eat, create wastes, and die.  

I long for meaning.  It is time for magic and sacredness and joy, subtlety, the sublime.  Perhaps the need now is to reach inside for these things, to dig past my conditioning, past the childhood dregs and accustomed responses, to look and seek for those connections, that magic, sacredness and joy.  Time to go past fears.  

Nov. 2011

I am now posting stuff I wrote over the last two years, I hope vaguely in order, up to the present.  It documents the growing sense of unreality I sense throughout our modern life and times.  At times, I have felt great anger, sometimes over losing what feels like the lifeblood, the vital, primal, messy, daring, surging, stirring, sometimes scary, energy of the earth.  That energy seems far away, muted, tied down, as if we little Lilliputians have nailed the gods of the planet to the ground under miles of thin plastic filaments, staked out the gods to perish under a hot sun, and then went off to dance around a campfire over which the last living mammoth roasts in pieces.  Anyway, here's the first post (warning, it's a bit of a rant):


November, 2011

When I was laid off in 2008, I lost medical insurance.  During graduate school, I was on the student plan (at $165 or so a year).  Since being graduated, I applied and was turned down for private medical insurance, because I "had had cancer."  Since I am 63, I cannot yet use Medicaire.  Since I am 63 and had breast cancer 12 years ago, I am apparently uninsurable...though I have not actually used insurance and have had good checkups since then.

Today talked for three hours to an insurance company which offered to give me insurance at twice the normal premium.  They decided that I am hypertensive, use tobacco, and that I require medication for high cholesterol...all incorrect.  My blood pressure averages about 120/75, I do not use any tobacco, and, while my LDL is and has been about 215, the HDL/LDL ratio is terrific.  They, however, diagnose me over the phone, overruling my doctor, whom I saw last week.  Anything for a bigger premium.  am angry and frustrated, underneath the sense of health and well-being, eroding me somewhat.  

I did not ask to be laid off (the month that I turned 60).  I did not really love working in corporations but was willing and able, and expected to continue for 10 more years.  Now, it seems that insurance companies have decided that, since I did not die from breast cancer 12 years ago, they will helpfully create the situation where that could still happen.  Good times!  (The medical system declared me free and clear of cancer after 10 years of good health, but what do they know?).

I was laid off, in part, because the work I was doing (high performance microprocessor design)  went to India.  Remember voting about that?  Neither do I.  If you think that politicians are protecting “good jobs” (remember that slogan?), think again.

Hey, I never asked for a health system run by insurance companies with Wall Street values.  I bet you didn’t either.  I left medical school (years ago) because I could see that doctors were becoming irrelevant...  That is the case now, as my case demonstrates.  Feel warm and fuzzy now?

None of us has had a choice about either how the medical system works or who has access.  Same with the food industry.  We spend twice what other rich countries do on health care and yet are unique in leaving millions of citizens without access to it.  The nutrient density of our food had dropped significantly over the last 50 years, as processing and agribusiness has taken over the food supply.  None of us has had a direct say in any of this.  If you are not upset about these things, WHY NOT?

Enough kvetching.  Life is grand.  Too bad that our country isn’t, so much.

I am the 99%.

Well, I'm back.

Well, after four years I am back.  I have written a lot during this time, and will post some of it in succeeding posts.  From August, 2008, until May, 2011, I attended Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary in Richmond, Indiana, and received an M. Div. with an emphasis in writing.  The program was intensive, varied, and, for the most part, really interesting.  My goals at the start were (1) to study the greatest mystery we know about, (2) to learn writing within a non-competitive, non-gimmicky, say-what-you-mean-as-much-as-possible framework, and (3) to learn a lot more about liberal, unprogrammed Quakerism.  I would say that I achieved (2), made progress on (1), and, to put it bluntly, lost interest in (3).

During the fall of 2011, throughout 2012 and much of 2013, I rejoined my Quaker Meeting, serving on committees, going to Yearly Meeting, serving as Recording Clerk, and teaching classes on Quakerism and on the Bible.  I spent some time at Pendle Hill at an FGC consultation.  I read more Quaker books and I transcribed many (over two hundred) pages of early Quaker writing from Early English Books Online.  I came to the conclusion that, at least in my case, modern Quakerism has lost its convincement.

Between 2006 and 2011, I participated in a group that calls itself Sufi, learning Arabic prayers, going to dhikrs (chanting prayer sessions) and gatherings.  Due to misconduct at the leadership levels, I left that group and approached another, more grounded, less doctrinaire Sufi group.  (Yes, yes, these are my opinions...just settle down).

So now it is almost 2014.  I am sixty-five years old, retired with a smallish, but workable income, relatively healthy (so far), and free to divest, to jettison baggage, baloney, and bullshit dreams.  It feels pretty good.

postmodern desert

I am spending this summer at home from seminary, thinking about it all, reading, and hoping for clarity. My heart has indeed unlocked somewhat during this year, in spite of some painful family complications.

After seeing Serene Jones, Gary Dorrien (Union Theological School), and Jonathan West on Bill Moyers' last show, I went running to the UTS web site. Drs. Jones and Dorrien were talking about how their students differ from previous years, they demand what is 'real,' are breaking the old theologies and rituals, committed to social justice and love, matters of the heart. These professors seemed proud of this. I was excited - a lot of what they were expressing seemed to match my own inarticulate searching as a seminary student, and it is not clear if my own school is as enthusiastic about this emerging redefinition of religious activity.

What I do know is that there are people who are uncomfortable, dissatisfied, with the expression of spirituality that is possible within the current form of our Meetings and churches. Many new forms of 'worship' groups are appearing, experimental groups of people from all denominations across the U.S.

What I also know is that I am still a bit lost in terms of how I want to express my own spirituality. As soon as I start to put words to it, my mind starts complaining about lack of content while my heart shrinks back a bit. It is as if I am afraid to hope.

The World Of Being

Less than 2 weeks after the last post, I applied for and was accepted into seminary. Since I am a member of a Quaker Meeting that does not use Pastors or formal Ministers, this is perfect. I have been practical for far too long. I have completed one semester and am about half way through the second, with no major mishaps so far, as far as I know.

This is a different world from the large multinational corporations I was used to. Ten people in the incoming residential class with about 15 in the 'remote' classes. I am getting used to having a name and face again. And I am remembering what it means to live according to conscience and heart instead of corporate policy, though, of course, a school is a corporate body and there are rules and things. This is actually a hard adjustment to make. My heart has been locked up for so long that it is unwilling to emerge quite yet.

At the time I wrote that last post, I had no idea what I would do with myself. Now that I am in school, the question is temporarily answered. In the longer term, though, I still have no idea what I will do, but somehow it seems less important a question. All I have to do is be. And that is the point of this post. We all of us really need to 'be' ahead of 'do' if we want to make a world that we can stand to live in, it seems to me.

Wow

Well, I have been relieved of my job and career. In 11 years of odd jobs and 26 years of cpu (computer) design, I survived many rounds of layoffs. In the last 2 positions, however, I was laid off after less than 3 years each.

There are certain disadvantages to being someone like me in a competitive high-tech environment. The longer one works, the more one is expected to rise up into quasi-administrative, 'leadership' roles. These roles are, quite frankly, awful for one's health. I did not want to take them on. I do not dissemble very well, and so became less and less able to pass, as they say. My self presentation became pretty terrible as I lost respect for the current theory, to put it generously, of corporate structure and policy.

In short, my main objective for the past 10 or so years has been to remain employed while avoiding rising too high in the organization, and the game has finally played itself out. I am relieved, though grateful for the interesting technical work and good salary given to me during this ride. I worked hard to produce the technical results needed by the companies and enjoyed many of the people in them. The exchange has been fair throughout, and all benefited from it.

It has now taken me 3 months to figure out that (1) I don't have a job, and (2) I now have the opporutnity to make whatever I want out of the rest of my life. Wow.

I am still pretty much speechless about this.