The Temple
Inside this temple are mountains and rivers
there are forests of oak, mountain lions and moss
Seismic shifts and lightening bolts are inside
innervating every silent thought Read More
Reflections on Peru
Photo album at FB: Amazon to Andes
… descending over the Amazonas, vistas of jungle, thatched roof, thin pillars of smoke, winding muddy river through low cotton cloud…
we land,
dismounting steel, into a welcome wave of humid heat, across hot tarmac, through tin pot airport, 3 wheel moto-taxi driver hustle and away, tearing like madness itself through the chaos of another 3rd world tropical city! Reminds me of Bankok 20 years ago. But this is Iquitos – different time, different place. Feels good. Unrestrained life at the pace of ungoverned humanity – dirty, chaotic, colourful, unconscious, living in the moment. Squinting against hot road dust, a thrilling roller-coaster ride through traffic governed only by the laws of nature – a fluid dirty dance, family of 5 on a moped cutting in as we cut through another narrow opening and close the gap, ebb and flow, seething into the largest city on earth with no outside road access. And it is a shit hole. There are some ragged remnants of the bygone colonial rubber boom era, Spanish tile, fading façades of faux grandeur, but tropical decay reclaims such structure fast. Read More
Doing “frog”
No, not the kind of frog you might lick for it’s secretion of DMT (should you be so inclined.)
That would be Bufo alvarius – the Colorado River toad. This is Phyllomedusa bicolor, an Amazonian rainforest treefrog,
And talk about right of passage – this little fucker took me down!
Sapo, or Kambo – frog “medicine” – or poison – is administered to boost ones mojo. Traditionally taken to hone hunting skills, keen the senses, boost immune and reset nervous system, or in other parlance – to realign the chakras, emphasis on the third – personal power, deep cleanse the body through purging for health and vitality, strength, passion and prosperity (success in hunt or business)…
OK, thought I, lets give it a try… Read More
Somewhere in the Amazon rain forest
Banisteropsis caapii
After swallowing a shot glass full of the somewhat wretched medicinal brew, with ceremonial reverence and a personal intention of what to work on for this ceremony, we sit upright in meditative postures, on mattress pads, in the darkness of the Maloka – a large circular palm thatched structure, open to the surrounding jungle sounds. 20 plus Pasajeros in the broad circle, and 6 Maestros at the center, we wait in the stillness of the night, mid the haunting and lyrical sounds of vibrant tropical forest.
Holding down the nausea, the medicinally purgative Banisteropsis vine and synergistic DMT laden Psychotria leaves start working their mojo after about an hour, as the maestros pipe up, chanting their ikaros. I came to think of these as song-lines navigating other dimensional space-time. Traditional Shipibo shamanic healing and blessing chants that, when the maestros are all singing together, can be divinely beautiful, and when dissonant as they individuate, breaking off in turn to sit in front of each one us, shuffling about in the dark, off their kites, puffing away on mappacho – hardcore sacred black tobacco considered the male propitiate to mother Ayahuasca – they can sound like a gang of wailing cats on heat stuck in an air duct.
And so it begins… Read More
Keeping quiet
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second, Read More
A fistful of short stories
8 out of 10 (New Yorker) short stories leave me cold as a fish in space. So whilst like film, there is a degree of subjectivity, here’s five, captivating in their dark humor and edginess and for my money, rewarding in their poignancy, punch and pure celebration of life, love and madness:
- What you Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie. A story of great humility and humor in Native American spirit and good men: Go ahead and read this story below or download PDF
- Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower. A superb, vivid and haunting, anachronistic excursion into Vikingdom. Read below [P2] or download PDF
- Until Gwen, by Dennis Lehane. Evocative and raw, written in 2nd person perspective: “Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat.” download PDF
- Bullet in the Brain, by Tobias Wolff. Acerbic, cynical critic reviews life in bullet time. Sharply written. download PDF
- Depth Charge, by Craig Bernardini. Radical right of passage story, plumbing the depths of a soul searching alcoholic 21 year old becoming a “man” (from Narrative Design by Madison Bell. download PDF (1.2MB)
Shapeshifters
Download PDF (221 KB)
Shapeshifters (v3.0) – a short story
Something catches your eye starting out of the forest below. A lone figure, it appears, coming towards you now, up the winding path towards the brow of the hill where you are standing, wolf hounds at your side. Judging by the weathered gait, it appears to be a rather tall old man, leaning into his path resolutely, as though into the wind for a hundred years. There’s something curious about his demeanor, and before your eyes the distance between you is covered in a space of time that is somehow unsettling. The old man stands in front of you suddenly and lifts his head from the ground for the first time, fixing you with a beguiling gaze. Read More
radioactive haiku 1,2,3 …
#3
dusk in Fukushima
wild plutonium horses
ride jet-stream home Read More
mid east revolutions and err, democracy?
Gene Sharp, Author of the influential Nonviolent Revolution Rulebook (more here) suggests that as people develop techniques for withholding consent peacefully, regimes will crumble. This must be true whether dictatorship or western “democratic” oligarchies. So don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards – arguably a privileged notion but democracy is a failed system as there is only one party in reality, the money party, with 2 lame factions in the case of USA, 3 in the UK last time I looked. Read More
quote of the moment
“It’s OK to be seen without your make up on, America. People will still want to fuck you, you’re rich.”
Film for the Discerning
Yes, indeedy, one of the most subjective media by definition, but here in my humble view are some of the best of our generation, meeting the minimal criteria of being any or all of the following:
- fucking brilliant
- independent / non-formulaic / non-hollywood-puerile-shite
- sublime acting
- superb cinematography / lighting / sets
- numinous story / theme
- gorgeous score
- honest irreverent fun
Film is the medium of the mythos of our time – often deep and sublime but like all art, sometimes shallow, manipulative and pretentious. Nevertheless, it seems when synchronicity happens in the making of a film, like alchemy, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the individual talents that make up a production. And without further ado, here’s a few worthy of mention
OUR PEOPLE: culture, perspective, future
On his way back to Earth, having just walked on the moon, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced a radical transformation in perspective and thus consciousness. As he approached our planet from beyond it’s sphere of influence, “he was filled with an inner conviction as certain as any mathematical equation he’d ever solved. He knew that the beautiful blue world to which he was returning is part of a living system, harmonious and whole—and that we all participate, as he expressed it later, ‘in a universe of consciousness.’”
Namit Arora suggests that: Perceptions of culture, history, and identity are necessarily subjective and selective. There’s no impartial and omniscient chronicler of events, no ‘scientific’ history. Facts are one thing, their interpretation another.[1]
Accepting this idea, really screws things up however, as it implies everything learned in school and early adulthood, about oneself and the world, might have been through the skewed collective lens of a society that could not possibly see beyond it’s own ideological identity. Hence imperialism and the notion it is right to educate ourselves, and the people of lands we “influence” to fit our model (particularly if those lands happen to be rich in spice, oil, tantalum or any other resource that “feeds” us.) We know what’s best for them and we reign by virtue of superior technology. Thus only the technology and commensurate resource has changed since the earliest times. We continue to globally garner what we believe we have a right and a need for, not to mention the moral authority to impose over (human resources, land, mineral and water rights, along with incumbent environmental and human rights degradation – you know the story by now.)
You might ask who is this “we” you are talking about? Read More
meetings with remarkable men
So he rolls up our long ragged redwood road and
is doing a 7 point turn at the top of our driveway in a shiny
PG&E survey truck. They’d trimmed a schwag load of branches
around the power lines and left them in our turnaround several
weeks ago, so I walk straight out to the guy in my slippers and 4
day stubble, all lazer eyed ready to burn and he just looks up at
me from his fat truck seat and says with a jovial expression “You
really like your privacy don’t you” and wins me at once with his
quizzical disposition –
Read More
In a dark time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood –
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks – is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady stream of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is –
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, freeing in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
mean free path
by Ben Lerner
For the distances collapsed.
For the figure
failed to humanize
the scale. For the work,
the work did nothing but invite us
to relate it to
the wall.
For I was a shopper in a dark
aisle.
burn baby burn
Earth’s dynamic fluid systems – not to be underestimated
Deepwater
The Earth and all life functions as a continuously evolving, fluid, dynamic system that we barely begin to understand in it’s complexly interwoven entirety. Sucking out the oil and burning it off in a fashion marginally more evolved than the discovery of fire itself – e.g. the archaic combustion engine, proliferating to this day by the obtuse laws of corporate swaggery – is still just burning stuff based on nature’s de-structuring forces for near-sighted profit. This as distinct from the con-structive spiralic forces of natural growth systems and the plethora of quelled yet more visionary and progressive, life affirming technologies.
At what actual cost?
Shapeshifters – a short story
This is v2.0 – gender specific!
Something catches your eye starting out of the forest below. A lone figure it appears, coming towards you now, up the winding path towards the brow of the hill where you are standing, wolf hounds at your side. Judging by the weathered gait, it appears to be a rather tall old man, leaning into his path resolutely, as though into the wind for a hundred years. There’s something curious about his demeanor and before your eyes, the distance between you is covered in a space of time that is somehow unsettling. The old man stands in front of you suddenly and lifts his head from the ground for the first time, fixing you with a beguiling gaze. Read More
Sold – the soul of Google, and you
Google Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin disparaging the commercialization of search engines said. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They had a vision of allowing unfettered access to the sum of all human knowledge on line.
However Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently explained in an interview with Charlie Rose, “now we are an advertising company!” Today 99% of Google’s revenue comes from the ads it strews on websites across the internet. Google has become the internet’s largest and most determined info-polluter – effectively killing the dream of a commercial-free internet.
This should cause us to consider the long-term cultural consequences of relying on an advertising company to organize the world’s information. For the first time in human history, a single company both controls our access and corrupts that same information through advertising. Read More
The Dreamer and the Dream
Listen up!
Non resistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. Through it, consciousness (spirit) is freed from its imprisonment in form. Inner nonresistance to form – whatever is or happens – is a denial of the absolute reality of form. Resistance makes the world and the things of the world appear more real, more solid, and more lasting than they are, including your own form identity, the ego. It endows the world and the ego with a heaviness and an absolute importance that makes you take yourself and the world very seriously. The play of form is then misperceived as a struggle for survival, and when that is your perception, it becomes your reality. Read More
the temple
Inside this temple are mountains and rivers
there are forests of oak, mountain lions and moss
Seismic shifts and lightening bolts are inside
innervating every silent thought
All the dancing impulses of nature are here
laughter, grief, hunger swirling
in the winds and time
There is ecstatic music, echoing through these chambers
and starlight – all the infinite stars
Ruminations of the cosmos are within
the poet
says
inside this temple, is the one I love
haiku #1
bird song
in the city
false dawn
Oh
Oh great goddess,
mother of creation,
this earth
What silent hunger
causes big breasted women
to wander in my dreams.
Oh happy happy death – this fool
asphyxiated in the heaving depths
of the cleavage of the beloved.
damaged goods
“The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.” – George Santayana
Lewis drives us to a deserted beach just outside of town
There’s a tranquil, silky ocean. It’s silent but for a rushing
over the distant reef, and Lewis talking shit
A lone seagull stands on one leg feigning interest.
I’m just not in the mood – it’s cloudy
He strips of his shirt and performs yoga
There’s a significant paunch, a few old tattoos and
we sit there in the white sand, ignoring him politely but
he returns from the shore and talks
myopically and with too much enthusiasm.
Mirra is hungry for company – my sister is lonely too. It is a soulless city.
So we all end up on this desolate beach with a fool in thick glasses.
But, how did I get here really? Did I miss a turn?
I remember, as a kid, stabbing at my heart with painful thoughts,
probing for feeling. But at some point it had all become too much
and I cut myself off. Now here I am fumbling down a blind alley,
in the broad daylight of my life
while the one I’m trying to love
is far away.
I know in the deepest place of me, there is a love
and the truth of my feet rooted in the earth
that is so great, I’m afraid to let it rip through
and I hold on as tight as I can
to the little prison of my self
afraid if I let love in it’ll break me,
like it did in the beginning.
If I can forgive myself and all these innocent people
I might just find my way home.
music
by some curious twist of unsanity, music – the very thing that 1st moved in my otherwise numbed teenage sensate body, hours spent lying on the floor, head phones on, deep in sound space, moved to tears – melancholy and joy (Bruch/Beethoven) in a way not possible among other mortals – or moved by the formative yearnings of raw rhythm, blues,
the later more sexual soul years
and the initiation into electronica (early 90’s, Tokyo, underground Trance scene) lilting spheres of unrestrained architectonic sound
yet how did this become the most neglected of pursuits today, taking second place as background whilst multitasking. I mean – when did you last immerse yourself for hours uninterrupted, in music, eyes closed, carried… Read More
Reviving Low Tech High Tech Architecture
“People assume that in the 21st century buildings should be made of titanium, because we have a narrow definition of progress. Maybe a 21st-century building is made out of dirt used in an intelligent and beautiful way.”
Symphony of Science
An inspired remix: ‘We Are All Connected’
(ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)
[youtube width=”600″ height=”420″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk[/youtube]
more at symphonyofscience.com
melodysheep apparently uses Reason 4.0 (instrumentals), Adobe Audition (audio editing), and Melodyne (auto-tuning), but the musicality, art and inspiration is all his own. Good stuff.
God Bless (America)
Love the melodramatic ending at the end of this piece (“addicted to nonsense”) – The tragi-comic drama of reality!! It’s interesting to me that, whilst the picture is bleaker than we might care to acknowledge in our waking lives, the end isn’t necessarily nigh! On the contrary. Radical change is nigh – and the saviour is YOU, baby! [Yes, yes – like, Neo – WAKE UP – You are the One] – Hello…
… What really matters in our lives—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism…
No One Is Going To Save You Fools
And, in case nobody told you yet…
… And each and every one of you is being taken for fools. You work for an election or two to put chosen leaders in place, and expect those leaders to work their “leadership” magic to ram reforms down the throats of the corporate sector, failing to understand just how fully the corporate sector holds the cards. It’s not the campaign contributions: it’s the persuasion money.
You’re looking for a savior. And like that Savior of biblical fame, s/he isn’t coming, as long as there are people like me out there. I personally won’t work for a company or organization that goes against my personal convictions. But 99% of us certainly will…
Go on! Read the rest of this perspective piece here.
Solstice – Solar New Year
as above, so below
(underlying cultural influence on the theme of Christmas and New Year)
winter solstice is considered the strongest of the four main power points of the year.
The light returns…
masculine sun gains strength from this day till summer solstice (when sun begins to wane again.)
Now…
is when we might ritually let go in our bodies, minds, hearts and spirit of what we don’t want to carry into the new cycle of increase.
Celebrate, release, renew!
a thousand suns
An elegant and eloquent short. I like it because it offers (to me) a clear and honest juxtaposition of two worlds (without newagism or sensationalism) and where my values and heart truly lie – with the soil under my feet, a feeling community, and a simplification from distractions by knowing where my deepest pleasures in life really lie…