its a perfect spring morning today here in Pipestone. It is sunny and crisp like a honey crisp apple. there are clouds in the sky that are gathering for a pow-wow. Their drums are tuning up for the afternoon dance.
I've been having quite the time here in the transition of the year I miss being able to hop on my motorcycle and go out and greet the spring transition from that perspective. I taught myself to make iced coffee in what is called the Japanese style of icing it immediately as it comes out of the filter so that the taste is protected by cold. It is like flash-freezing sort of, only not that cold. It is really good and instead of coffee going to waste, taste wise, because it cooled off before I drank it, or it cooking to death on a heater, I just stick the container in the fridge until I am ready to have some more, later.
Living here has been a process of learning what is essential, what is worth spending resources on, what is wasteful and or more satisfying. My life like that of many others has changed so much from a few years ago. Now when I see ads for target, or shopko, or walgreens or best buy I wonder how much stuff they think we can keep purchasing, storing, buying and discarding before we are satiated by the refuse of want.
Pipestone is late to the harvest. It is an isolated town where the mortgage crash is just now happening, where the less than idle rich are finding that their power and the power that they promised their children maybe isn't so respected or feared after all. Their world is just beginning to wobble and crumble as the people here are turning over like an old garden that will eventually compost itself through neglect and lack of sustainability in its planting. the pockets that they have picked for so long are now so empty and so turned out that the implosion of the lack of economy will consume them if we simply stand by and let the inevitability of what they created come to full term.
I am heartened by the sure propensity of greed and gluttony to over graze its own pastures until faced with the exhausting nothingness of repetitive spending, consuming, and discarding the captive human being will some day raise their head from the feast of famine that our society is now chained to and realize that something vital is missing from their diet.
I trust the children, the young adults, the middle aged warriors, the mature philosophers, the elder peace keepers to stand together on the shore of humanity and open the gates of our future with the love and vision that they have held despite the drag of the under tow of humanity in its rush for the black fridays, and the Mac Mansions, the power, and the drug dangled fantasy of a perpetual personal high spent as the chains of debt and poverty bury them deeper and deeper beneath the wave of the past. I am sure that the market will kill itself with redundancy. That the consumer will outgrow the desire for that which is on the end of a stick because they will have seen, held, tasted, and worn it all. There is one thing that comforts me about the children of today and that is that they are bored. I believe they will continue to be bored until they either die of it, or kill each other off, or get up and go out and seek that which sustains a different kind of life. a life that is an original opportunity not because it is the most costly or the most exclusive, but because it is not reproducible.
every day I have a choice to cut away the past from my day to stand or sit in the fear and judgement of inability or to pick up stand up and do even a small amount with the ability that I have. the tide of despair laps at my heels as I drag myself from the ocean of the past and all of its judgments, losses, broken perspectives, and eminent willingness to drown me in its fantasy of helplessness rather than support the spark of my life.
that is what tells me Relatives, that wherever whomever whatever that or those are that tug at me are not of me, nor do they have my wellbeing as part of their interest. They have no care, when they consume me or I consume myself for their wellbeing, that my life is forfeit.
why feed that which has no care for your own life?
why stand for one minute under the yoke of that which will grind you up for grist to feed its perpetuance rather than lose its own existence?
do not give of yourself to that which in your day feeds or supports fear, judgement, death of self, or takes the life of either you or your neighbor.
this is not about being selfish in our choices but in being together as one. we are not the same but we are together in the necessity of our freedom from blindness about our circumstance. Our circumstance has changed here in our country. we have changed. we have been pushed under the wave of commercial and credit and the profiteers of war machinery's oppression until we are almost drowned from the futures that were traded on the backs of our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, children and even those who are not yet born.
we have become the refugees that our country once offered respite from as they stepped on her shores less than three hundred years ago.
― Emma Lazarus tags: quote-on-the-statue-of-liberty, statue-of-liberty
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
where are we to go?
do we stand by and let the garden fail? do we stand up for ourselves and that which can be done? it is and always has been tough to be both a philosopher and an activist as well as a peacekeeper. the conflict that must be shed like a too worn garment that rather than comfort chafes as it slides once more over the skin of my limbs.
will we be the golden door? will we have the stamina to lift the lamp? not of false promise, or of power mongering securities , or of religious right, or of war waged against those whose resources our great consumerism wants to suck dry.
change comes through small efforts applied over and over
do not buy what is pushed at us through a sale flyer coupons that drive your food consumption especially those that are tied to gas savings are ways that the great money mongers are driving you to your death, to your lack of freedom and choice.
if you sell your freedom for a 5 cent or 50cent coupon then you are linking your nutrition to oil consumption
rather how about support a garden? how about support a local food source, how about choosing what you would really like to eat rather than what is "available" or made available by the grocers who pick and choose for you long before you ever arrive at the store.
have you ever wondered why with all the global ability our groceries are so narrowly focused? why is it that we either buy products mass produced by the big four or mass produced as generic substitutes? why is it that fresh, small, free market is less than it ever has been?
it is because of the coupon, the gas percentage, the willingness of ourselves to be led to slaughter by the acceptance of the presentation of profit at the stores in which we shop. stores used to be markets that presented the local harvest then it became regional and finally national but as it grew it became tailored for profit and tailored to train us the consumer to accept the trade, the narrowness
do you realize that we spend more for coke and for bottled water per gallon than on gasoline? do you realize that if as a city, as a county, as a state, or a nation we stopped driving for a week, if we did not buy gas for a week, or even two weeks, if we trained ourselves to really conserve gas consumption to walk we would have the ability to control gas prices, oil focused transportation and all that it sustains like war
do you realize that we can change the cost of cell phone and internet and cable by not using it for only a few hours by declining to re-up to the programs that empty our pockets even as we work and work to earn money that we cannot ever hope to hold in our hands for long enough to even make a joyful choice as to its fruition in our daily lives and the lives of those we love?
we have the ability to become our own Lady Liberty
we have the ability to talk to ourselves, our partners, our children, our neighbors and to take action small and steady and grow it until it becomes the force of those who will not be held hostage any longer by the weekly ads, the gas percentage coupons, the buy ten for ten cheap nutrition less body and mind numbing empty calorie debris that is on sale this week at the local store.
there is no doubt in my mind that our country is going to collapse. what I raise my fist for, what I hold up as a light is that there are those who will choose not to seek the golden door as if it was the golden calf and sell out their children and their neighbors to grasp its temporary glory, but who will seek to hold that door, to open and sustain the structure that will and can stand tall, that will rise from the mud of this countries past failure, and become the land of freedom that we have a choice to create
or not
mb
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