Empires crumble to the sea by my command

Write these words as I tell them to you, my Son

This world is dying for the sake of the new

For The Man shall not forever stand

No longer shall you hide

From the enslaver that binds

Your words shall flow without inhibition

Dancing freely, in Nature's good time

Empty words

Void of sound, site or texture

Saturated in non existent life,

They hide behind their Mother's shroud

Screaming horrid sounds of desire

To form and take definition

Remaining unborn whilst

Sloshing about in chaotic motion

They form in accordance to their own accord

While all the else's
are left scrambling in the dust

My Christmas Card to You
by Merry Hall

...BUT...

Love contains the seed of life.  Like the proverbial grass that cracks the concrete walk in its search for daylight, Love persists.  Death is as real as winter...and just as much a part of the cycle of Life.  Therein lies our hope. Yes, our Culture-of-Consumption is dying, taking us down to the grave inexorably.  It MUST die, for its ethic of perpetual profit at the expense of all is choking our life-force.  Nonetheless, Sophia (Wisdom) goes on spinning her web each night.  Like Penelope in The Odyssey, she must destroy it every day lest it proliferates and becomes her shroud.  Still she persists again and again (forever and ever, Amen).  She knows that time is but one generation in Eternity.  She is spinning you; she is spinning me.  Right here; right now. 

Christ really IS born today, December 25^th, 2009.  Merry Christmas!

Burl speaking:  Meister Eckhart says, "If the virgin birth does not pertain to me, then what avails it."  Can you give forth that birth from the depths of your Soul?

Sailing upon windless wind

She moves everything without movement

And without sound or thought

She shouts us all,

Past, present and future,

As one

Her tongue,

Wet with seminal desire...

Our Father, who art in Heaven,

Forms and defines,

Through good measure,

Worlds nested within worlds

Yet, these illusive, shallow senses

Hear only a surface sound

Disclaiming what they see underneath

A belly laugh emerges

As these words form

A recognition of spaceless, timeless infinity

Dancing the numberless all.

Space and time, meanwhile,

Lie in embryonic wait

Eternally asleep, prior to the big bang

Her primordial shout...

Screams forth

Forever we are conceived

From the inconceivable.

Hence the head of this poem crowns

From the same womb as the universe

At the same eternal moment

On November 19 of this year, I saw the 45^th anniversary of my father's death.  Because he died of liver cancer at the age of 43, I have often wondered how much his service in the Navy during WWII may have served in the cultivation of the disease.  This has been an aspect to my desire to build an ecovillage that is founded on principles of cooperation with others and with Nature.  It is also one of the deeper factors in my wanting to develop a "Trauma and Deep Ecology" Workshop.  Most importantly, I wonder, what would the world have looked like had my father been raised in an ecovillage type environment?  I also began wondering how much our ancestry is going to be a major part of our community.

We all carry the spirits of our ancestors within us, as the tribal cultures knew.  Due to verbal, physical and sexual abuse that is so much a part of our dominant culture, many of our ancestors have been wounded and that wound has carried down to us.  So, as much as our ancestors have given us their gold, we also carry their pain.  I find this area of our lives extremely important, for much of the influence of the ancestors is unconscious for us.  Perhaps healing ourselves will heal them?  It's interesting that I recall my mother stating that my father believed that his eternal life was through me.  Was this part of his tribal English and Scottish heritage that did attend to the ancestors (just as most tribal societies do)?  Is my "rebellion" towards the dominant culture and its effects some of my father's anger and love?

What about you?  What are some of your reflections on your ancestry?  Who else lives inside you? Where is your ground?

Terrorized by Love's quest for Truth

He cries alone at night,

Nursed only by

the scar ridden words of External Sayers.

"To life," he cries

Sipping his chemical compound

of battling photons

Quiet and alone, lost in a cloud

He chokes for breath in the vomit of his silence,

blinded to the brilliant bright darkness within

Saturated in fear ridden silence,

His journeys go without,

into the world of chemical illusion.

His in-dwelling Muse cries alone

Her needs untended by his external thrust

All he sees are lies

Manufactured by the corporate Machine,

The Nazis of modern day

Need no ovens and gaseous showers

To keep him at bay

He doesn't have to work,

Through thinking for himself

So he decides to take the easy road,

And remains a slave

Thus, his cries are silenced

In the Liar's domain

Truth having been defined for him

Through what the News Anchors say.

Recovering from Trauma:

A Deep Ecology Approach to Real Change

       There is much ado in the mental health field these days regarding trauma informed services.  As it was back in the 70's and 80's regarding Transactional Analysis, it is now the fad, alongside "evidenced based practices" and the use of pharmaceuticals to cure everything from depression to bad boy and girl behavior. 

      
This is the day of budget cuts and quick fixes, folks.  An 8 week therapy cures you.  Cures you of what?  This is the question I ask, and you should ask also.  In our modern day disease model of behavioral issues, we isolate the individual from the context of the culture he or she lives in, and do not look at the bigger issues.

Now, of course, many system's models theorists say, "why sure, we use the systems models of behavior to induce change.  It's the way to go, it gets you funding from the insurance companies because it is ‘evidenced based.'  Everything is evidenced based in this day and age, but who is doing the evidencing?

     
"What?" You may quirk.  "Are you saying that we should not have therapies that are based on evidence?"  Well, aside from the research showing evidence that there is no objective observer separate from the results of the experiment.  A particle is only a particle when it is observed, otherwise it is a wave.  So, there is no "objective" article out there distinct from the "subjective" eye reading this page and turning a light wave into a page.  Subject and object are ultimately one, at least according to the physicist Heiseberg (Talbot, 1991).  Take some hallucinogenic mushrooms one day and watch how these words come alive and begin to dance.

What makes that view "wrong" and your normal concrete view "right?"  Nothing more than your opinion.  And, opinions are nothing more than thoughts.  They arise, they play their magic, and then they sink into the deep well of Mind to rest until they are called back into their industrious play.  So, your view is actually your opinion in line with what the mainstream says you should see.  It is that dictate that determines what is right and what is illusion.  Talk to a Pygmy and she'll tell you about a completely different universe.

      
Evidence is not separate from the condition of the evidencor and the evidencor is not separate from the culture of which he is a part.  In other words, how you see this article and the way ways that Mother Culture taught you to see this article determine how you see this article.  If you are a good scientific type, you're probably hearing a little old lady's voice in your ear, "sweetheart, don't pay attention to this crazy man.  He's taking you down the wrong road.  Would I, your Mother, tell you a falsehood?  Mm?"

Now, if you are a left brain analytical scientist that believes in an objective world in accordance to the dominant ethos of evidence based methods of inquiry, you're going to tell me this article is "bullshit."  And, for you, that's correct. That's ok.  Your perception of my article being "bullshit" is based upon your conditioning regarding what is truth and what is illusion by the dominant culture.  It is not objective fact.  Indeed, I would tell you that the more inclusive Mother Nature could teach you something different, as She taught Heisenberg, Bohm, Pribram and some other scientists (Talbot, 1991).

Now, here, I must speak a warning.  In saying this, I'm not advising that you begin thinking that your thoughts are central to the universe, as the New Agers state.  "We create our reality," your ego might say.  No!  Your ego's thoughts are like waves upon an infinite Ocean containing other waves.  Your thoughts influence the waves around you, and the waves around you influence your waves.  But YOU, that is, your ego, does not command the universe.  The idea that it does is nothing more than more self-centered arrogance.

You are more like a cell in an infinite Being than you are the entire Being.  Yet, each cell of your being contains the knowledge for making a "whole new you."  This is the idea behind cloning.  You are a holographic reflection of all Being, for in you the All is mirrored in its totality (see Hall, 1999).  In other words, my warning is that you not see your ego as being IT.  Saying your ego is "IT" is akin to saying that you clothed is your truth.  No, you naked is your truth, your clothing speaks a lie.

In similar fashion, it is in your deepest nudity that speaks to Meister Eckhart's statement, "When God gazes into the creature, He sees Himself and no one else."  But, again, to think that God sees Himself mirrored in one of your ego's thoughts is to be delusional.  God only sees Himself mirrored in Infinity, which by definition cannot exist side-by-side with its self.  Hence, Infinity is in you.

This is why the Hindus the concrete world we see Maya, or Illusion.  The illusion of our modern day is that we exist separate from the world "out there" with us safely nestled "in here."  We and the world are one.

As such, trauma is an aspect of the universe.  Ask any antelope being chased by a lioness.  Hence, we are products of a "Big Bang" in which all things explode out of a singularity.  The process mirrors birth.  As a baby is separated from his mother's body at birth, we, along with all creatures, are separated out from the primordial "soup" existing prior to the beginning of time.  But, this beginning of time resides eternally inside ourselves hence, in our infinity, we continue to exist in the state we were in prior to the Big Bang.  We are eternal in the depths of our being.  Or, as Christ says, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.  Heaven is on Earth.  You no longer have to wait for it.

So you are at once living in a traumatic world and exist in peace.  Regarding trauma, the holographic nature of this issue is spelt out beautifully in Glendennings (1994) Hello: My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization.  Trauma is written into the nature of modern day human interactions with Nature and with each other.  The same dynamic that creates global warming and the devastation of ecosystems creates warfare, spouse and child abuse, and school systems that are based upon funding requirements more so than caring about the well-being of children.

Ok, when do we start saying "no" to trauma and what do we do to reduce it?  First, you have to begin seeing the patterns in all facets of our modern world.  Second, you have to identify the controlling cognitions and belief systems behind those patterns.  Primarily, those thought and belief systems have to do with our need for control and domination in order to survive and to prosper.  So, the agency has to control its staff in order for profits to occur and the school has to control its children in order for funding to keep the schools open.  If that doesn't happen, people loose jobs and could starve to death.

So?  What would happen if people began making their own food, getting themselves independent of oil, and began being truly family oriented, meaning family spends time with family and family members have to begin relying on each other to make a decent living?  What if we began saying "no" to work hours above 35, or running around like a chicken with her head cut off to get the kids from this or that sports match. 
                

What if we truly began spending time with our kids?  What if we looked our wife or husband in the eye and have a heart-to-heart talk?  What if we really bit the fig leaf off that Adam and Eve put on?  What if we start seeing each other for who we are....and meeting that "who we are" with love more so than shame or indignation? 

Can we do it?  Do we have the guts?  In some ways, I think we find it easier to do battle than surrender our vulnerability to love.  But, can we do it?  Hey, we might choke up the first couple of times we truly looked into the eyes of another....but we can do it....and perhaps we are at a crisis point where we must.

References

Glendinning, Chellis, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization.  (Boston, MA: Shambhala

Hall, Burl B., Sophia's Web: Understanding the Unity and Diversity of Religion, Science and Ourselves, available through http://authorhouse.com/.  

Talbot, Michael, The Holographic Universe, (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991).

Dingy metallic green

Shouts the barren coloration of modern man

The stagnation of grey saturates

The hospital room

Where monitor, alone,

Registers life left in the patient.

Zoe screams Her plea

For Her daughter to reawaken

Murdered by the apple of Corporate Vanity

Her poisoned lips await

Her lover's kiss.