The New Animist

Bah, humbug!

2011-10-02T14:30:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted here for a long time and a friend from California wrote to me that she misses reading my posts, but school has been back in session and I've been busy. Not just busy during the school day, which for me runs from 7:15 til 3:45 and sometimes until 5:00, but exhausted and unable to function outside of school. I haven't had the energy to exercise. I haven't been outside. In fact, since I work in an enclosed space with no windows, I don't see the sky for 8 hours. The sun may be shining, the rain pouring down, but I wouldn't know it.

Encased in this prison cell, I have only half an hour's break, if I'm lucky, to swallow my lunch.

No inspiration for art, my only desire when I stumble into our apartment in the evening is for whiskey and pajamas.

I'm not the only unhappy teacher in the school, and although I'm tempted to chalk this discouragement and exhaustion up to our particular school district's ugly, sly politics and poor decisions, I know that universal factors have damaged public education around the country and we're all feeling the pressure.

1) The so-called recession means that we are understaffed and working longer hours. Teachers are insecure in our jobs. We're fighting to keep our unions and contracts.

2) The collusion of technology developers and big business has created a monolithic power that pushes schools to buy and use vast fleets of expensive equipment, with expensive upkeep costs, that are constantly being outdated by newer machines for us to buy and use.

3) Children are inundated with media messages, and live in a media-saturated, consumerist environment that robs them of fundamental social and academic skills, steals their curiosity about the world, negatively impacts their brain architecture, and limits their ability to listen, pay attention, learn, and remember.

4) Last, but hardly least, is the political imperative to standardize the educational experience, and in so doing, to standardize our children. High stakes testing is only one part of the dominator campaign to control public education. Teachers are all being asked to teach the same things, at the same time, in the same ways, and to test children with the same tests . . . but who decides what the content of this teaching will be? Not the teachers, not parents or communities, but a core of business and political elites, along with a few celebrity "educators."

Any failure to live up to these standardized results is being blamed on teachers and low test scores will be cause to fire teachers and close public schools. The profiteers are licking their chops at the thought of turning our vast public education system, like the once public prison system, into a private money-making enterprise.

No wonder so many teachers are discouraged and depressed.

Now, I don't want my friends to worry about me. I'm not depressed or even in a bad mood. I'm just angry at something worth being angry about. Can I do anything to change the direction of public education? I don't think so. I've come to believe that my efforts are moot and that the world will follow its course no matter what I do. Can I teach one or two children in between my tech-support and administrative tasks? Maybe. If I can get the printers working.

Timothy Leary makes more sense now than ever. Tune in, turn on, and drop out sounds pretty damned good to me.

Without Kinfolk

2011-08-29T19:41:00.000-04:00

Summer is coming to an end, and soon I'll be back in the ordinary world. During the summer, I read widely, about psychology, art, culture and anthropology, and in particular, about the transition from kinship groups to political structures. Kinship seems to work best when in a limited population. Once a group reaches a certain size, two things may happen: A subgroup may split off, maintaining kinship structures, or the larger group may expand and develop political structures. Political structures are formalized relationships in a group that may or may not include blood relatives or that is too large for every member to see one another face-to-face.

I was particularly interested in Eli Sagan's At The Dawn of Tyranny (1985). I've been trying to pin down the turning point in human history in which the dominators took control, and Sagan may have nailed it. He describes the interim societies that are a missing link between kinship groups and the kind of political structures we call civilizations. He calls these interim societies "complex societies" and follows them from chieftainships to kingships—oh, the horror and violence that characterize them all!

Sagan's contention is that although political structures were necessary for humans to advance to higher levels of complexity and sophistication, the transition was fraught with anxiety. Humans evolved in kinship with one another and with nonhumans. Wrenching ourselves away from one another is terrifying. Thus, he concludes, we assuage our anxiety with godlike headmen, violent controlling power, and human sacrifice.

How many of us would be able to murder our own brothers and cousins to secure our power over the group? Only the most wicked bullies and psychopaths are capable of such an act, and these men became the first dominators.

There's lots more to the story, but I'll end it here, and move on to a thought provoked by the idea of kinship loss and anxiety. I come from a family that did not value kin—we were cut off from even our closest cousins and grandparents—and how I miss those relationships today! While my friends may complain about the annoyance of a nasty brother-in-law or that lousy drive up the coast for a wedding, I feel adrift in a sea of strangers and I long for family. But few of us enjoy extended families today and even nuclear families are broken apart by divorce and transience. My own kids, with whom I have wonderful relationships, live thousands of miles away. I'm lucky to see them once or twice a year.

Because of the internet, we've also come to a new turning point with regard to face-to-face relationships. Our friends may live on the other side of the globe. You, who are reading this, are connected to me by the thinnest of electronic threads. I wish you could come to my house. I would offer you the best liquor and cook meals for you, and we could talk late into the night. There's something good that happens between us when we are in one another's presence, and I believe that our anxiety in contemporary dominator cultures may be due in part to the lack of it. Lack of kinfolk. Lack of touch and face-to-face relationship.

Perhaps one way we can transform dominator culture is by re-establishing kinship forms through intentional community and building extended families. I would even venture to say that when we finally come to see every other human being as our kin, our anxiety would turn to peace and violence would cease.

Humans crave . . .

2011-08-14T07:36:00.002-04:00

From the front lines of midlife

2011-08-11T13:20:00.000-04:00

It's been a summer of change.

I spent my life so far in the pursuit of "truth." I wanted to know the real from the manufactured. I wanted to know whether there was a big-G-god or gods or angels, and if there was life after death. What was human nature? Why did people act cruelly and selfishly? How could I manifest in the world and in myself the potential I saw in the 60s?

I had a desperate need to know, not only because I knew early on that my parents were clueless, but because I wanted to be good and do what was right. Right for the world and for myself. And in order to be good and do right, I had to know what was, objectively, ultimately real and true.

This summer, I changed. Now, I know that there's nothing to know. Reality just is. Whether it was created on purpose or randomly, it was created and now it just is. There's nothing to know. There's no right or wrong in the objective and ultimate, great and mysterious Everything. Everything just is. Once I saw that, the pursuit of truth that was the purpose and meaning of my life just . . . disappeared.

I sent an email to my friends that some of you got, with a page torn from my sketchbook, in which I stated these ideas and then asked, "Why be good?" I was surprised to get many thoughtful answers. And many of those told me that the writer had come to the same conclusion at some point and had decided to choose the good. This is the existentialist answer. Of course, it begs the question of what is good, which may be answered in myriad ways.

Summer is coming to an end. I have a few trips to take and I know I'll learn things while I'm in other places, but it doesn't matter, not really. My art doesn't matter. This blog doesn't matter. One friend told me that it's our relationships that matter, and I sure as hell feel love for my beloved Jack and my kids and my friends this summer. I feel that love so deeply sometimes, it's like my heart's gonna burst. Does love matter when nothing else does? And if love matters, then does art matter? Do I simply choose to live as if my choices matter?

Disempowering the children

2011-08-06T12:48:00.000-04:00

Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me, writes that "we treat our kids like adults when they're children, and we infantalize them when they're 18 years old." I caught that quote from an article in The Atlantic this month, titled "How the Cult of Self-Esteem is Ruining Our Kids." But the cult of self-esteem is just one way we're ruining our kids.We're disempowering them, making them stupid, weak, and incompetent. Our children are being trained to be good consumers and unquestioning acceptors of the status quo, but they would be lost if the electricity went out.

There are lots of ways this is being accomplished. You can read about some of them in The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein, or the Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, by Maggie Jackson, or The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr, or any number of new studies that are sounding a generally-ignored alarm about our children. Many of these books describe the negative impact of digital immersion and consumerism on our children. Some of the results of contemporary "screen" living, for example, include the deterioration of social skills, lack of empathy, inability to sustain attention or read, and lack of impulse control.

Advertising and other consumerist media have changed our children's values and expectations. Kids expect life to be easy and are easily frustrated. Ease and comfort are such high values that hard work is denigrated. In fact, any effort at all is too much effort and this laziness is contributing to ill-health. Speed is a virtue and anything new demands their money and attention. Their understanding of the world has been truncated by media, and reality and fantasy have merged, so that every drive is a video game, houses clean themselves at the snap of a finger, food comes in packages, wars are entertainments, and wealth and celebrity are right around the corner. Wealth and celebrity are what our children worship and adore, and many young people have grand expectations for a Mercedes-Benz kind of life . . . although they haven't the faintest idea how to get there.

I have a heightened awareness of this problem because I work with middle school children. Their arrogance is stunning, but I feel so sad for them. Their world has been reduced to the size of a two-inch screen, and they think that friendship is a click on facebook. They haven't the wherewithall to educate themselves and what they're offered in school has no meaning or purpose that they can understand. They "do" school because it's expected of them but they learn from electronic media.

The flip side of this is our kids' incompetence. They can't peel a potato or tie a knot. Many 12 year olds can't write their own names—they use keyboards only—or read a face clock or care for a sick relative or mow a lawn. The shop teacher in my school talks about how every year fewer children know how to hold a hammer or screwdriver, and if a button falls off a shirt, they wouldn't know how to sew it back on. Technophiles and futurists tell us that kids don't need to know this stuff anyway. They can buy a new shirt if the button falls off. They don't even have to know how to read, since they can get any "information" they might need on youtube.

Considering the way our economy is heading, our children might, indeed, need to know this stuff in the future, but there's a greater loss than this, because if our youth don't know how to read, think, make decisions, bond in nurturing relationships, or work or wait, they will not be able to control their own lives. They will be at the mercy of the dominators . . . just the point of this dumbing down, I assume.

Our nation's youth are on my mind right now because of three stories I recently heard of college-age youth who were not able to cope. They all attempted college, but couldn't succeed and they came home, all three of them, and malingered. One has an illness of unexplained origin. She lies in bed and plays video games. The others simply hang out, eat and sleep and party. In all three cases, the parents simply enable them. Their parents have infantalized them, as Twenge describes. As children, these young adults were given infinite choice and abundance instead of discipline and skill, and now they are paying the price. True self-esteem comes from competence. We are raising a generation of incompetent, insecure, and unhappy adults.

I read a while back about an elderly American Indian in the early 20th century who described how the white people had destroyed his culture. "They took our children," he said, "and made them weak. Our children no longer walk without shoes because their feet are too soft. They cannot hunt or grow their own food. They are incompetent and depend on white people's business for everything. They destroyed us by destroying our children." I would say that this is as true today as it was then.

Resist Apocalypse!

2011-08-03T11:52:00.001-04:00

I'm getting frustrated with this "series" about my animist "practice." Heck, I'm just a human animal doing my thing. I try to live consciously. I want to see clearly. I want to grow in spirit and I want to die into Charlie's arms. My practice includes things like cooking nice dinners for my husband and spending my money flying out to California to see my beautiful older daughter and taking the creepy bus to NYC to see my beautiful younger daughter and helping to send my son to Germany with his band.

If you're looking for ritual, then, I observe the agricultural year, and I offer one day each week to the gods of love. That's my shabbos (sabbath) and I don't make or spend money on that day, and I make love and art and play on that day and take naps. I create and enact ritual when times need ritual, for example, to heal from sickness or celebrate an anniversary. I work magic when times need magic, but I have great respect for the forces I call upon and choose carefully and rarely when to work magic.

I talk to my gods and they talk to me on an ongoing basis. I'm awfully lucky that way. I can hear the voices of my gods whenever I call on them. I don't need a liturgy or church or even a ritual. I just say, "Hey! Charlie, watcha up to?" And Charlie tells me stories. I say, "Sun, you are one powerful dude." And Sun shines down on me. I say, "Green God, would you feed me today?" And damned if he doesn't feed me.

And several times each week, I enter into green space, define that as you will, and I make art, dance, sing, make love, hang out with my tree friends, and in other ways, I am in the joyful moment in the flesh. That's my practice.

Here's an animist practice: Resist the apocalypse of the dominators and their monogods. Do everything you can for the salvation of humanity in the flesh on this garden earth, and for the sustenance of this garden earth, for millions of years to come. Until the Sun goes Nova. Until the stars fall from the skies. Do it with joy.

Make a lot of love. Make love and be saved! How's that for a motto?

Make more love and make more joy and make more art and resist their damned apocalypse with everything you've got.

How's that for an animist practice?

PS: You can help my son bring joy to kids on street corners here: Vermont Joy Parade.

PPS: The picture above is from a larger piece, 12 x 12, that doesn't cut off her shoe.

All I want . . .

2011-07-28T10:44:00.000-04:00

Without fear of losing my job. Without shame. Without excuses.

Animist Practice: Walking Love

2011-07-23T13:53:00.000-04:00

Back to animist practice: today's topic is the path of love. If relationship is the crux of animism—relationship with all that lives, human and nonhuman, biological and geographical, earthly and heavenly, fleshly and greater-than-human—then relationship will be at the heart of an animist practice. I've chosen to walk the relationship path of love.

You see, I'm not only an animist. I'm also a polytheist, and I worship and follow gods of love. I believe that love is the greatest force in the universe. Love is the one thing greater than the dominators, greater than the gods of cruelty and greed. Tyrants tremble in the face of love, love triumphs over fear, and even death bows before the power of love.

My teachers tell me that to live a life of meaning, grow in spirit, please my gods, live with honor, and enter joyfully into the next life, I can walk no better path than the path of love. Jesus of Nazareth described this practice with stark and uncompromising clarity. One must love even those who would hurt you, even those who are your enemies. He said that love was the great commandment, and that love overcomes the fear of death, and he showed us that he did not fear death, but for the sake of love went to his death gladly. I look with awe at the teachers of radical love who lived their teachings with their final breath.

But, I can’t follow Jesus where he went. I’m not ready to take up my cross or sell all I have and give the money to the poor. I’d rather give my money to my kids, so they can cover the rent next month or travel to Berlin to make music, and I find it hard to believe that any loving god would demand we surrender to torture and murder in the name of love. So, what does the path of love mean to an ordinary, common sense, 21st century animist?

I think it means finding the balance between love of others and love of self. I take care of my health, for example, even if it means saying “no” to someone, but I make the effort to take care of other people even though it sometimes demands the sacrifice of my own desires.

It means that one always acts with loving intent, so when you vote, you vote for love, you work at your job with love, you care about other people, you are nurturing and kind.

We are all given humans and nonhumans to love, and instead of whining about the people I’ve been given to love, I do my best to take care of them. Yes, that even means my ex-husband. (LOL!)

My everyday practice of love is just an ordinary, prosaic kind of consistent unselfishness. I’ve made choices for the sake of the people I’ve been given to love that have worked against the manifestation of my own dreams, but Charlie tells me that nothing I do for love is ever wasted . . . and that brings me to the wonderful paradox of the path of love.

When I make a choice to take care of someone else, to do things his way or please her instead of myself, I’m generously rewarded. So, when I stuck out my lousy job so I could take care of my family, I was forced to change. I became stronger, physically and emotionally, and more competent as a result of this job, and I benefitted from the extra money, and it enabled me to learn new things, and it saved my marriage. I stuck out the job for love, not because I wanted to, but found myself the beneficiary of my choice, and this has happened so many times that I’m convinced that what I do for others will always benefit me as well. As the Wiccans say, what you put into the world returns to you three-fold. Love is a good bet!

I may not be able to save the world, the way Jesus attempted to do (and his results are dubious to say the least), but I have this tiny piece of the world in which to create a loving reality and I’m going to do my best with it. And what if, just what if, a critical mass of human folks chose to walk this ordinary unselfishness as an everyday practice? Doors would be held open, work loads would lighten, children would be cared for, and smiles would be exchanged in the supermarket checkout lines. Fracking would be voted down. Animals would be treated kindly. Gardens would be planted and Redbud Woods would still stand where a parking lot stands now. In ten thousand subtle ways, we would tip the balance of the earth towards love. I can hear my gods rejoicing just to think of it!

Where have all the hippies gone?

2011-07-20T11:33:00.000-04:00

I listened to Jefferson Airplane's Crown of Creation this morning, and I cried for the idealistic, passionate youth I used to be. I wonder what happened to my old friends, scattered now? Does anyone know Carol Shumacher? Did she kill herself with alcohol and drugs, or did she somehow morph into a suburban working mom and is she living now somewhere on the west coast, dreaming of retirement like I am?

What happened to us, Carol? Where did our hope and bursting creativity go? Why did that boomer generation, who dove into psychedelics and community and who could envision a future of love and peace, why did we lose our steam? Was it the end of the war and the draft? Partly, but it was also a tidal wave of consumerism and soft pressure from dominator interests.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, and everywhere there was song and celebration!

Half a million strong? No wonder we had to be silenced! Song and celebration? Happy people are powerful people. Satisfied people don't buy consumer goods. Joy mitigates the fear that enables us to condone war. For the same reasons they have to silence the wise plants today, by 1971, the dominators knew that the hippies had to go. The Kent State shootings showed that hard power would have repercussions, but the dominators had been increasing their ability to utilize soft power, and it was easy, when the time came, to destroy the hippie movement using alternative means.

With a little help from their friends on Madison Avenue, the dominators were easily able to convert our dissent into fashion and our ideals into consumer goods. Tempting us with SUVs and techno-toys, aggressively marketing selfishness, and marginalizing or pathologizing our spirituality, they pressed hard on the hippie movement until there was nothing left but mythologies. When I ask my middle school students what the hippies were all about, they say, "Hippies took drugs, right?" Right. Love? Peace? "I dunno," they say. "They wore bell-bottoms, right?"

Love and peace are words that now invoke disgust and condescension in my students. They're soft stuff. Violence is in fashion. Love is out of date. War doesn't touch them, so they don't much care. Community means a big friends list on facebook. Sure, I'm sad about it. But do we old hippies have to bow down to the "establishment" anymore?

Why can't we remember our dreams and start talking about love and peace again? Why not start a commune . . . it's cheaper than all of us paying rent? Why not return to the wisdom of the wise plants, love more than one person, explore, expand our minds, turn on, tune in and DROP OUT of the dominator culture? Aw, c'mon . . . let's get together at my house tonight. Bring your guitars and I'll bake a carrot cake.

Making war on our friends

2011-07-18T14:06:00.000-04:00

Let's take a little side-trip from discussing animist practice for a moment, because I have seen death and disaster precipitated by the 80-year drug war and I am sick at heart. The drug war may be defined from an animist perspective as a war on a particular group of nonhuman persons. These nonhuman persons have been identified as enemies of the dominators and they are enemies because they are subversive to dominator power. They are subversive because they open human eyes, raise consciousness, offer solace and comfort, develop empathy, help humans build relationship with humans and nonhumans, overcome apathy and alienation, enhance creativity, and encourage play. All of these things are taboo, which is why these particular nonhumans are anathema and must be destroyed, even at great cost in human life and health.

But, I'm sick of it. I'm sick of defining "drugs" the way the dominators do and I want to speak up about what I see as an absurdity, since it is absurd to forbid my eating one kind of grass but not another, and it is absurd to deny me my right to friends who heal and nurture me while pushing dangerous manufactured drugs to the tune of 30 billion dollars per year. (Science Daily) The government, meanwhile, spends about $500 per second to prosecute its war against these nonhumans. (Drug War Clock) I want to speak up, but I'm afraid. Cancer patients have been arrested for using state-sanctioned marijuana. Grandmas and grandpas have spent their last years in jail for growing weeds in their backyards. (Some pending cases.) I'm scared to speak up.

The scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the legalization of psychotropic substances (see NORML). From the success of ecstasy therapy with PTSD survivors to the use of cannabis to shrink cancerous tumors, research being done around the world clearly indicates that these the wise plants have tremendous benefit for our physical and emotional health and well-being, but dominators will use science as they see fit. They ignore or deny science that doesn't meet their needs, even though science has been elevated to the level of the sacrosanct in other ways, and if the recent upsurge in arrests for medical marijuana users and growers is any indication, they will not hesitate to attack those who claim religious observance.

But for this animist, a relationship with the wise plants is an essential part of my practice. So, here we have come full circle. As I write about my everyday animist practices, I come up against a wall of fear. How can I encourage a practice which is against the law? How can I not encourage a practice which, as I mentioned above, opens human eyes, raises consciousness, offers solace and comfort, develops empathy, helps us build relationships, overcomes apathy and alienation, enhances creativity, and encourages play?

My Creator made me on purpose and he made the wise plants on purpose and he gave us chemistry that binds us, one to the other, and he bids us be kinfolk together on this earth. Psychedelic experiences have consistently been described in religious terms, and the religious use of wise plants dates back as far as we can travel into prehistory. Yet, although we pay lip service to religious freedom in the U.S., unconventional religious practices, including the use of plants deemed enemies of the state, are under constant attack. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was enacted in 1993 to protect those practices, but it has no teeth and when invoked, the case is often dismissed for reasons of profit or the maintenance of government control. (Example from an Oregon Christian church.)

So, I had intended to share with you today a deeply moving and transformative religious experience, part of my animist practice, but because of fear, I talk about wars and laws instead.

In the presence of the sacred

2011-07-16T12:18:00.000-04:00

I live my life in the presence of the sacred.

Living the sacred life is part of my practice, but one can't call it an "animist" practice per se. In many traditions, humans have tried to live as consciously and in as sacred a manner as they could. Judaism has a particularly rich tradition of living in sacred space and time. All day long, a practicing Jew is praising his or her God, speaking words and taking actions that bring him or her back again and again to a reality which is filled with the intention and presence of the Creator. Jews praise their God when they rise up and when they lie down. They write sacred words on the doorposts of their homes, and bind sacred words to their foreheads when they pray. They wear a special hat and fringes, and give thanks when they eat, drink, see a rainbow, wash their hands, and move their bowels, to name just a few of the everyday activities that are made special through this conscious awareness of the divine.

I came out of this tradition, and I am also always praising my gods. I give thanks all day long, not just to the greater-than-human beings, but to all the beings that help and nurture me through the day.

I think this is what Jesus meant when he said that we should pray without ceasing. My practices, which include radical love, making art, appreciating beauty, consciousness of the sacred, and so on, permeate my day. There is no time in which I am not engaged in my practice, so as I write about particular practices—which may be related to animism or polytheism or simply being human in the body on the earth—my reader should be aware that they are not something I do in a formal, ritualized way, at least, not most of the time. Most of the time, my religious practice is fully integrated into my everyday life, so I am always engaged in the sacred reality.

Building relationships with nonhumans

2011-07-13T06:18:00.000-04:00

The most important practice of an animist life is to live consciously in relationship with nonhumans. This can take various forms. One can relate to The-Land-On-Which-One-Walks, which is not ancestral land necessarily, but the land on which you live right now. One can relate to the nonhumans who nurture and support you, who are commonly called food, water, building materials, fabric materials and so on. One can relate to animal people, or green people, or to the devas and forces, or to particular rocks or waters, to cloud people and other sky people, and to greater-than-human beings.

In all of these relationships, I would suggest that one not attempt to relate in structured, ritualized ways, but as one would relate to a fellow human being. So, consider, how do you interact and build relationships with your family, neighbors, and friends? With some, you become deeply intimate. With others, you have a more formal relationship. In every case, it begins by reaching out and communicating in some way.

Let's use friendship as an example. A friend may support and nurture you, but that's not why you are friends with that person. You are friends because you like him or her, you're drawn to him or her. You may enjoy the same activities, share tasks, offer one another wisdom and solace. Support goes both ways: she helps you get to work when your car breaks down, you bake cookies for her birthday.

The relationship doesn't appear out of thin air one day. Let's say you meet at a party. You talk and find you both love antiques. You call her when you're going to an antique show in a nearby city and she keeps you company. You have lunch one day, and then you get together for dinner with your spouses. You both want to lose weight and decide to exercise together. Your friendship grows. Twenty years down the line, she is the one you call when you get the bad diagnosis. She is the one who waits with your husband in the hospital waiting room, and the one who organizes the card shower and the one who cries with you because of your loss. Your empathy has entangled your roots. You can't imagine life without her.

Just so, a friendship with nonhumans is something developed over time with individuals. I have many tree friends, and feel like I've been accepted by the local green community. But it takes time to develop friendships with individuals, whether dogs or trees or humans. I get together with a particular tree. We talk and I learn about the world through his or her eyes. I sing to him or her . . . I find that trees love human singing. We hug. We hang out together, spend time, get to know each other. What is that huge scar on the trunk? How does he weather out the winter? I appreciate Mr. Tree. I share water and we drink together.

Discussing relationship building for various kinds of relationships with all the many different kinds of nonhumans would take a whole book, but this can give you the gist of it. You build relationships with nonhumans just like you do with humans. You have to put in a little time and effort, and respect him or her as an individual, not just as a type. Over time, you get to know one another and both of your lives are enriched.

An Animist Practice

2011-07-10T08:50:00.000-04:00

Heather has been asking about my animist practice. That is, “What do I do that characterizes and distinguishes an animist life?” I’d like to take several posts to explore the question, and I’ll begin with general concepts before describing particular practices.

Animist practice arises from an ongoing relationship with the Land-On-Which-We-Walk and the other nonhuman people around us. At bottom, it’s simply a way of living fully and graciously in the body on the earth. Traditional animist practices may have become habitual over time as groups of people discovered what worked to thrive in their environments, but traditional rituals and behaviors were not written in stone—they are not written at all—and they were sustained because they worked, not because they were commanded by a god or by the force of tradition alone. Animist practice, therefore, is not something one can learn about from a book, which at best is merely a snapshot of a particular practice in a particular time and place. Nor can it be learned from a “wise elder” or shaman. Animist practice, to be alive and potent, must emerge naturally from an individual’s or group’s ongoing experiences and relationships. Like all things in an animist reality, our practices are alive, and to be alive means growing, changing, dying and being reborn.

So, the question properly asked is, “What animist practices have I developed through my experiences and relationships?”

A key experience that informs any person's practice is his or her own traditions, the practices within which one has grown up. I’ve been influenced by my ancestors, of course, and I don’t claim any tradition besides my own. In some ways, my Jewish tradition is rich with nonhuman associations, the shaking of the lulav and the smelling of the etrog, the sensual rituals of Shabbos, the rhythm of sowing and reaping. In other ways, it's been singularly dissociated from the land. One thing is for sure: the Jewish attention to detail, our habitual awareness of the greater-than-human, constant gratitude, and sacralization of everyday life has left its mark on my practice. If you would develop an animist practice, I would encourage you to study the traditions of your own ancestors as they relate to the Land-On-Which-They-Walked as well as their culture, or ways of being in the real earth-world.

Next post, we can dive into particular practices and the seeds from which they've grown.

A Bit Stuffy, Don’t You Think?

2011-07-06T11:37:00.000-04:00

Everybody calls me by my first name. In ordinary circumstances in the 21st century, we no longer address one another as Mr. or Mrs., and even doctors become Joe or Jimmy when they’re on the golf course. My closest friends use pet names, like “Lil” instead of Lillian, my kids call me Mom, and my lovers call me darling, honey, sweetie pie, and all those lovely appellations of endearment that help me feel beautiful and loved.

So, why, if we animists are hoping to develop a closer relationship with nonhumans, do we insist on formality of address? I’m talking about the “other-than-human persons” form of address commonly used in bioregional animism and academic circles. It just seems a bit stuffy to me. It’s like using the vous form of address in French when we’re really family and should address one another as tu.

Neighbors, friends, and kinfolk all have forms of address that express congenial relationship. The convention of having students call teachers by their last names lingers for the purpose of distancing, not of drawing closer. Does it indicate respect? One would hope so, and yet, respect is no longer indicated by formality of address: I call the cop “sir” when he pulls me over because of fear, not because I respect him as a person. So, are we scared of the nonhumans? Do we seek to distance from them?

And then, there’s the issue of naming by type. If I want to indicate the group of people with whom I work, I call them “teachers” or “my colleagues” or even “the folks in my building,” not “fellow persons with whom I teach.” How awkward that sounds! Even in indicating ethnic or subculture groups, the politically correct terminology is often awkward and distancing. The African-Americans I know, for example, call themselves “Blacks” or use other informal designations.

So, what’s up with “other-than-human persons?” In our zeal to show respect, have we become so formal in our relationship that the local trees are no longer our home-boys? The deer aren’t those pesky varmints anymore? Hell, y’know that damned carpenter bee who lives above the back door? I could tell you some nasty names I’ve called him this season!

But Bee is still a “him” to me and not an it. I know that the nonhumans are all alive, intelligent, and ensouled. Of course they are, but if I live in relationship with them, I know their beauty and majesty and their annoying habits. They’re whole people, like my husband or my kids, and like those human relationships we have our ups and downs, our times of closeness and our times of distance, and we call one another by name. My tree friends call me Puny and I call them by their names, to wit, Grandmother, Beauty, West Gate, Bee Tree, Foursome, and all the others. I don’t call them “other-than-human tree persons.”

In addressing people of great power or to whom we wish to show the most formal respect, we use titles. Mr. President, Your Honor, Your Majesty, and so on. Just so, I always address Uncle Karma by his full name, and I say “Yes, Sir” when he asks me to love. Grandmother Ocean, The Creator, Green God, all those with whom I have only the most solemn and ritualistic relationship, I address by their titles and their full names. But to refer to the bunch of them as “greater-than-human persons,” again, is awkward. The ruling elite serves to name our greater-than-ordinary human persons. Gods, forces, powers, and so on, work for me to collectively address those nonhumans who are immensely greater than I am.

So, let me humbly suggest that we ditch the formality. Calling my nonhuman friends “nonhumans” or “trees” or “cloud people” hasn’t seemed to insult them any more than their calling us humans “humans” or “those selfish idiots” has insulted me. Hey, as the ancient Greeks once said, let’s call a fig a fig, ok?

Glorious Imperfection!

2011-07-05T15:09:00.000-04:00

A friend brought me a beautiful present this morning: an Olympia typewriter from the 60s. What a machine, a clickity clackity, solid and heavy machine. I sat down immediately to write my darling daughter a letter.

Then, I pulled the finished letter out of the roller with a decisive snap and examined my handiwork. The sticky "f" key piled up letters after it, and backspacing and retyping over my typos left a bit of a smudge here and there. I needed to reset the margins . . . do I remember how? But altogether, it was a glorious thing I had produced.

How I love the imperfection of the result. How I love imperfection! Our Creator must love imperfection, too, because he made everything unique. The left eye on every woman slightly different from the right. Each leaf a teensy bit different on every tree, and every tree bent this way or that, bark a bit peeled here and bumpy there, gloriously imperfect.

Perfection is a quality first defined by the ancient Greeks, but their word teleiotes didn't imply the abstract absolute flawlessness or "pinnacle of form or expression without blemish of any kind" that we associate with the word today. Humans will never be able to create a perfect product if we define perfection as an absolute. Only a machine can do that: create flawless smoothness, purity of sound, evenness of color, exactness of dimension. And it's the machine that's set the standard for us, and that standard has become more exacting as the machine becomes more powerful and its products more exact.

Few folks gather 'round the piano to sing anymore. Few of us write poetry, or even write at all. Students in my middle school have given up on handwriting. They use keyboards, and all their work looks the same. Digital recording of music and photoshopping portraits may give us results that appear perfect, but they don't look so beautiful to me.

Give me skin that's lived in, not flawless skin. Give me a song in the voice of my beloved. Give me the uneven line of colored pencils instead of digital infallibility, not because I have some bias against perfection, but because perfection hasn't got the spirit and character of real things.

Why do I think a typewritten letter is beautiful and a computer generated letter not so beautiful? If you ride a bike, why not a car? If you use paint, why not photoshop? It seems to me that the less of the animal there is in our work and the more of the machine, the less spirit there is as well. I use the simplest tool needed to do the job, and for letters to my Sophie, an Olympia typewriter, made in West Germany, built to last, marvelously mechanical, is just right. The letters have ever so much more spirit than computer fonts and my letter looks like a work of art. Now and then, I like to write letters by hand, because my spirit lives in the curve of the line and the thickness of the ink. If you'd like a letter from me and my typewriter, drop me an email with your postal address.
love,
Puny

Joy as a Revolutionary Act

2011-07-01T11:18:00.000-04:00

Not long ago, I went to see the Vermont Joy Parade perform in Ithaca. I was surprised by their happy, raucous show, since I know some of the performers, and I’ve heard them talk about their music as cultural transformation. I expected something more serious, a la 60’s Dylan and Jefferson Airplane’s “up against the wall!” But my personal experience at the show taught me that the creation of joy can be a revolutionary act in a reality that worships production and efficiency.

I’d come from work and I was feeling low. Exhausted. Discouraged. I only went to support my friends. And then, slowly at first, but with increasing excitement, the musicians of Vermont Joy Parade drew me in and wove their magic of joy. It was a Wednesday night. Most people at the bar had come to drink away the dominator day, but soon all heads turned to the stage. Then the band sang a song especially for me and Jack, and I was elated, and started to dance, and then I realized that others were dancing, and then Benny balanced a chair on his head, and then the band members were throwing jokes at one another, and then there were fifty people dancing and laughing and cheering.

The discouragement of the day slipped away. I felt my strength return, the power inside of me light up again. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, who were under spiritual siege from their own dominator world, saying, “Encourage one another and build each other up!” We have to stay strong if the spiritual revolution is to take place and joy is where our strength is found.

The Charge of the Goddess tells us to “Sing, dance, make music and make love, all in my name.” The body chemistry of joy is good for us. Joy gives us hope, bonds us, reminds us of why it is good to be human in a body on the earth, and this is the crux of the animist cultural transformation.

Naked was I made and naked I will return

2011-06-11T14:14:00.000-04:00

My latest cartoon shows Puny and Little Judy on the beach. Puny has proudly baked a cake for her little one with chocolate icing, and the cake is made of love. Love, says Puny, is the key to insuring a future for our children. 

What’s most important about this cartoon, however, is that Puny and Little Judy are naked and unashamed. I’ve been thinking a lot about nudity this week, since I have a friend who associates the naked body with sexual perversion, and I felt sad about that. I often draw my characters naked, especially when they are speaking for the gods or are filled with the holy spirit.

A fundamental belief of the new animism is that humans are spirits in animal bodies and that the animal body is good. The body is good when it’s engaging in sex and good when it’s doing the household chores, good in public and good in private.

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
-- Walt Whitman

Of course, the body can be used to cause harm. It’s possible for a man to strangle a child with his bare hands and to rape a child, too. But the body does what the mind tells it to do, and it’s the man himself who chooses to use the body to hurt instead of love. In spite of this, the naked body itself is beautiful; fragile and strong as a hen’s egg, crafted, I believe, on purpose by the hand of our Creator, who saw that it was good.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus' disciples ask him, When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you? Jesus answers, When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid.

Christian naturists declare that they are not ashamed to live in the “image and likeness of God” and neither am I. Not anymore, anyway.

I was brought up in a rigidly anti-body household. The body was ugly, evil, and disgusting. I was never to speak of its parts. This was an extreme situation, I know. I became physically numb. I lived in my mind and emotions, fine tuning them, but I had little physical sensation. This extreme shame and disgust with my own body, and my consequent dissociation from it, caused me great harm. It kept me from from caring for my body, beginning a lifetime of struggle with ill health. It set the stage for allowing my body to be sexually used in my youth. It let me deny the pain so that my appendix ruptured before I went to the hospital and I had three traumatic deliveries of my babies. If I had not experienced such deep shame and revulsion for my body, I might have enjoyed my pregnancies and had calm deliveries. I might be in good health today.

To see you naked is to recall the earth. -- Federico Garcia Lorca

And then, I found earth-centered religion and the goddess. Always a religious person, I found in paganism a response to the body-hating of my childhood and the general social shame around the physical body. In all the earth-centered religions, including the animism I now practice, a key concept is the one-ness of the physical and spiritual. All material being is sacred and the animal body is good.

And you are free from slavery; and as a sign that you are really free, you shall be naked in your rites; and you shall dance, sing, feast, make music and make love, all in my presence. For mine is the ecstasy of the spirit, and mine also is joy on earth. -- from the Charge of the Goddess.

Paganism helped me understand that the body is good, and life in the body on the earth is good. It seemed so right, but how could I embrace this idea after such deep wounding around my fleshly form? All I knew is that I wanted to be free from shame, so I worked at it diligently. In many settings, I tested the waters and learned more about the body's goodness. At Brushwood, I skinny dipped for the first time. At pagan festivals, I saw real men and woman naked for the first time. I was amazed at their variety and beauty. Complicated by the disfigurement caused by my heavy pregnancies and abdominal surgeries, I struggled to accept myself. I had my body painted as a way to be nude in public while still having some covering. I participated in women's rituals of body acceptance. I talked and talked to people about it, and all this time, my pagan friends provided a compassionate and stalwart support.

Full nakedness! All my joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys.
-- John Donne

After several years of this learning, my pagan family, The Stray Dogs, offered me an initiation. I didn’t know at first what they had carefully constructed for me. As I walked through one gate after another, they challenged all my fears and errors. My ability to laugh at myself was tested, and there were other gates leading to the fivefold kiss, a loving adoration of the body and its gifts. Then I was blindfolded and told to remove my clothes. In terror, but wanting to face my fears, I took off all my clothes, and when the blindfold was removed, I found myself by a blazing fire surrounded by loving, happy faces . . . and all my friends were also nude. See? They said. It's ok. It's good. You're beautiful. We're all nude. It's ok. It's ok.

From that moment on, the real work of body acceptance could begin. I'm still working on it, but I believe that as Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed when they lived in the light of their Creator, I too, can be naked and unashamed.

Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment,
For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind. -- Khalil Gibran

Naturists are folks who believe that nudity is more wholesome and natural than clothing except when clothing is appropriate for the weather. They believe that social nudity would erase a great deal of social hierarchies and create a more equal and just world. As Kevin Bacon said, Take away the Gucci or Levis and we're all the same.

Naturists make a clear distinction between nudity per se, and sexual arousal. Sex is a function of the body, like eating is, but naked genitals are not engaged in sexual acts at every moment, just as the naked mouth is not. We can kiss a child with love and we can kiss a lover with erotic intention, but we don’t hide the mouth in shame because it’s sometimes engaged in sexual acts.

I believe that body shame and disgust with nudity are perversions caused by denial of the animal body and fear of death. Naturists teach their children to have no shame about their bodies. In fact, they believe, and I agree, that body shame is at the root of sexual perversion and sexual disability. Our babies suckle at our breasts. Their naked bodies are washed clean in the bathtub. They love to feel the sensations of sand or wind or grass against their skins.

After half a lifetime of loathing for my own flesh, I’ve chosen to walk naked and unashamed the way my Creator made me. I not only accept this body. I celebrate it.

The Great Monotheistic Error

2011-06-05T08:13:00.000-04:00

This animist is also a polytheist. I believe in many gods. I have to be careful in talking about my gods and in using the "g" word at all, because the great monotheistic error confuses people.

Jack suggests that I use a word like “angel” to describe my gods in order to avoid confusion, but I stick to the word “god” deliberately, using it as the classical polytheists used it. My gods are very like the Greek or Roman or Norse polytheistic gods. They’re fallible, emotional, greater-than-human people, with personalities and a penchant for meddling in human affairs. They may live so long as to appear immortal to us lesser creatures, but they have vulnerabilities and can be hurt and will eventually, like all things, be reabsorbed into the great Everything-That-Is.

Everything-That-Is (ETI) is Mastery-Mystery’s word* for the Unknowable One (which is Jack’s word for it) which MM describes, in short, as “Everything That Is, Is Not, Was, Was Not, Has Been, Has Not Been, Will Be, Will Not Be and Could be and Could Not Be . . . " This Great Mystery of Everything Universe As God All At Once is way beyond human comprehension. I can’t experience it, hence, like the animists of old, I leave it alone. I don’t try to know it or define it. It’s not my big-G “God.” Since I can’t experience it, I don’t “believe” in it. I don’t worship it. I don’t relate to it. It’s way too big for this puny human.

But the monotheists believe in it. Not only do they believe in ETI, they think that ETI is their personal, book-writing deity and that it’s ETI who created them on purpose and that ETI has a personality and meddles in their affairs. In short, that ETI is their personal god. That’s the great monotheistic error. Monotheists call ETI big-G God, but their capital letter doesn’t fool me. They can’t have a relationship with ETI because no one can. It’s way too great for any of us and It would be way too great to give much of a shit about us, if It had any shit to give, which It doesn’t. Monotheists confuse their little-g god with ETI.

Monotheists have got the market for gods on this earth cornered and monopolized in their corporate churches, and they’ve plastered their gods' various names all over the media for several thousand years. Therefore, a lot of people think their big-G God-of-Choice is the only way to think about deity. They think there only exists one big-G God (and it’s the God of their choice) and he has to be ETI. In other words, they deny the existence of any gods but ETI and claim ETI as their god.

That’s why I have to be careful. Because when I say the word “god” most people think I’m talking about some big-G God or other as my personal ETI. It’s not just traditional monotheists who get confused this way. Many new age folks and other ETI believers still think ETI is the only possible thing that can be called god, and that the ETI of their choosing (whether they call it One-ness, the Creator, Great Spirit, etc.) is their personal god. That’s impossible! ETI ain’t nobody’s personal anything. IMHO . . . in my humble opinion . . .

The great monotheistic error makes it difficult to be polytheistic in the contemporary world. As much as I disbelieve in a personal ETI, monotheists disbelieve in the possibility of any gods besides ETI. Many folks dismiss my gods as metaphors, emanations or messengers of ETI, mythologies (meaning fictions), or disembodied forces. Boy, it’s hard to convince even my closest friends that this highly functional, highly educated, professional person experiences real, embodied, greater-than-human beings with names and personalities. But I don’t believe in anything I haven’t experienced, and I’ve never experienced ETI.

Maybe you have, though, and I’d be delighted to hear your experiences and thoughts on this topic. There’s no right or wrong, after all. We’re all just puny humans struggling to understand what’s greater than ourselves.

*Thanks to MM for defining ETI and for letting me snag the word. At least, I hope he doesn’t mind. MM has his own understanding of ETI. You can check out his fascinating philosophy at Cosmic Rapture.

Heather tells it like it is

2011-05-28T06:45:00.000-04:00

I want to direct my readers to the Adventures in Animism blog, because Heather tells it like it is and I'm inspired. Yah! That's exactly what I see when I look around me, but her response is more courageous. I'm thinking that if I can't change anything, why bother responding to the evils of the world? Heather says that if we respond we can "hold our dead heads high" in the days to come. Charlie says that as long as I never give up, then I never fail. Jack reminds me that there's lots to live for in spite of the evils, and that the evils have been here for a long time, and that we shouldn't allow them to take away what little we're left with. Lee says that we should write a book. Vivi pulls out her camera. Sophie speaks her truth to power, while Ben travels the world with his merry band and lifts people up with his music. Hooray for the Christian Left, a growing uprising of love within the Christian Church. NORML carries on for the legalization of the Cannabis gateway to the gods. Maggie speaks out against fracking. And Dan and Joanne and Ruthie and Neil and Cecile and Jo C remind me that friendship alone is worth living for. Back to the drawing table!

Charlie has his say

2011-05-21T18:27:00.000-04:00

Went down the rec trail today, and found Charlie wondering down the hill, close to six-mile creek. Charlie says:

This is your moment. This is your moment, what you've been given in this fallen world.
It will never come again, this particular intersection of time and space that you inhabit.
Live in it fully.

Enjoy the tree people while you can.
Enjoy your health while you have it.
You're blessed to have been able to run across the back yards on long summer evenings in your childhood.
Be grateful for what you've been given in this fallen world.

Your task is to blossom. You're a one-of-a-kind expression of your Creator, the God Flower of three petals. The task with which he's charged you is to blossom for the blink of an eye, to be a tiny flash of light among the uncountable twinkling galactic lights.

Live fully and with integrity. That's the goal. If you accept the world as it is, as unchangeable, you'll be freed to choose how to live inside of it.

Accept the gift of this fascinating, complex, scary, beautiful moment and be grateful to have experienced this lifetime in the body on the earth.

Good ol' Charlie. He's never led me wrong.

The World As It Is: Part Two

2011-05-21T09:46:00.000-04:00

The world as it is, as opposed to what? To the world as it should be? This is a page from my sketchbook from just a couple of weeks ago. You can see that I was, as usual, feeling miserable because of the way the world is. But since I can’t do anything about the world as it is, maybe it’s time to let go of that attitude and start accepting.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

I have a friend named Steve who feels deep disappointment about how his life turned out and a great deal of hurt and sadness from people using him and treating him poorly in the past. I tell him (listen to me, full of good advice) that people are the way they are, so he shouldn’t take it personally. Their nastiness isn’t about him, I say. He can have compassion for them. Life never lives up to our expectations. Steve, I say, let go and be at peace.

Right.

I can see this when I comes to interpersonal relations and my own small life, but when I look at the world, I get angry. Humanity is wasting its potential. Humanity could create a world of abundance and peace. We worship money and power. We let criminals and bullies rule the world. Everything’s fucked up. It’s getting worse. On and on.

But what if I need to let go as much as Steve does?

From a historical perspective, Steve reminds me, humans have always been at one another’s throats, acting selfishly, trashing their own potential.

Not pre-historically, I say. Not before institutionalized religions and dominator control.

Ok, so for the past 8000 years or so, he concedes, human reality has been a rough neighborhood. That’s the way it is. You want to keep smacking your head against that wall? You’ll give yourself a headache. Besides, who died and elected you Savior?

Good point. Where did I get this idea that it was up to me to save the world, and if only I was good enough, and recycled enough, and sent enough money to the right candidates, and dedicated myself enough to the salvation of the world, the world could be saved. Where did I get the idea that it was up to me? I’m chained to a wheel by those easy-to-quote admonitions never to give up, that the only thing that’s ever changed the world is a small group of dedicated people, that the only thing needed for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing . . .

Somehow I’ve taken on the burden of believing that if the world stubbornly refuses to transform, it’s because I haven’t done enough. But how much is enough? You can die on a cross to bring peace and salvation and the world will go right on being a rough neighborhood.

Lao Tzu says that we can only recognize good in the first place because there is evil. That good and evil, black and white, up and down arise together, and that if I was as smart as I say I am, I’d stop trying to fix it all. It’s not fixable. It’s the way of the Tao. So, Lao Tzu says, do nothing. Teach nothing. The ten thousand things rise and fall, while the self watches their return.

Is it time to let go? I sure as hell would be a lot happier. I’d have more energy to give to my family and friends, and my art and my gods. I’d be able to walk in nature without grieving for nature’s losses. I’d be able to help kids with the computers and not get angry at what computers are doing to them. Where’s the balance? Does one let it all go? Worry only on the weekdays and take weekends off? I’m not sure, but something’s got to give.

On the ruins of a church from the 14th century, there are some words carved above the portal that read: It is so. It cannot be otherwise.

It is so. It cannot be otherwise.

The Impulse to do Good

2011-05-20T07:27:00.000-04:00

Inside of me, I feel an impulse to do good. I think most humans share this impulse, one that’s been explored through research into altruism, resilience, and the moral instinct. In firefighters, nurses, teachers, and others who dedicate their lives to community service, the impulse to do good has become a driving force. They want to care for others even at risk to themselves, at low pay, or in difficult circumstances. I include myself in this group. When I see something that needs doing, I want to do it. When something needs fixing, I want to fix it. I want to make life better. The suffering of others is like a fire in my own heart, urging me on, and the satisfaction I get when I succeed in serving and healing is a great joy in my life.

In fact, even a few moments of helping and making better are powerful enough to give me peace in spite of the cruelty and greed and evils that are too powerful for me to change. It’s the frustration of this impulse in my work the past few years that’s been the source of much of my unhappiness.

No matter what I’ve done for money in the past, I’ve been able to do good through my work: teaching at Planned Parenthood, raising money for heart research, helping folks quit smoking, making schools more diversity-positive . . . no matter where I was or what I was doing, I could offer service to the world. As I investigated my nostalgia for the 50s, it was easy to see that although the world is different now, it’s not better or worse. Humans are still struggling, some people are mean and some are kind. As LLB said, there’s sadness and beauty. So, why have I become increasingly discouraged, even depressed about the state of the world?

At least in part, I think the answer lies with my helplessness at work. I’m unable to inspire children to learn or help make their lives better. I haven’t got the time or opportunity to teach. Instead, I babysit, both the kids and the machines, and I’ve been given the role of “technology leader” when I believe that digital technology is hurting, rather than helping kids to read, think, and grow. Meanwhile, public education itself is oppressive. Our 11-14 year olds need to run and play. They need to build and work with their hands, be of service to their communities, do things that matter, interact with the natural world, follow their interests, horse around, and be in constant social interaction with one another. And what do I do? I tell them to stop socializing. I tell them to work on things they don’t care about. I keep them indoors and in their seats. I wear the face of the oppressor, and I can see the hurt in their gazes on my face. I am the enemy.

I feel like a doctor, vowed to do no harm, who goes to work and is told to mutilate instead of heal. No wonder I’m depressed. No wonder it seems like there’s no hope for the world. I’ve become caught in the dominator wheels, and I come home too exhausted even to make art.

So, I’ve decided to do something about this: I’m going to speak a little piece of the truth. At the next faculty meeting, for which I’ve been charged to teach about technology, I’m going to talk about digital immersion and how it’s hurting our kids. Digital immersion (interaction with digital or electronic media for the majority of a person’s free time) is changing our children’s cognitive abilities, making them less capable of sustaining attention, less able to read, process information, and thinking deeply. Digital immersion is hurting our kids. The loving and kind thing to do would be to give them a break from it, not increase their screen time, as we’ve been told to do.

I’m sure some folks will call me a Luddite, but I suspect that the majority of my fellow teachers have already recognized that something's wrong, because kids can’t sustain attention through a single page of text or sign their own names. I believe, after studying the subject for the better part of a year, that digital immersion is part of the problem, not part of the solution, and I’m going to stick my neck out and say so. Just thinking about doing this is giving me hope. Sometimes, in order to do good, a person has to take risks, for low pay, in difficult circumstances, but then this fallen world might be nudged, ever so slightly, toward the light.

The World as It Is

2011-05-17T06:49:00.000-04:00

I found Aron's comment on my last post Why I Love the 50s so provocative, I wanted to explore it more, and I'll ask for your comments this time, because I surely can't find the answer on my own. Aron wrote, I guess my biggest problem with nostalgia is that it mostly removes you from present moment. Every pro about how things used to be has its cons of how things are right now and visa versa.

And I responded Well said, Aron and true. For me, the present really is pretty awful, and I don't want to be here. Whether in the woods in trance or at my drawing table or remembering my childhood, I seek to leave this world as it is, and enter an alternate reality.

What got to me about this, so that I woke up thinking about it, is that the world really is awful for me. I'm heartbroken at the cruelty and greed. It's a fallen world, as the Christians would say, and there's really nothing I can do about it. Oh, yes, I can have an impact on my immediate reality, but that's an uphill battle, too. Our school district has been without a contract for three years. The children are struggling with the effects of digital immersion and many of them can't sustain attention through a single page of text. The gas companies threaten to frack. The college kids desecrate the old cemetery.

I'm not bitching about this reality or being mindlessly negative. I accept it. It's what's real, but can I avoid nostalgia and live fully inside of it? Can I have compassion for this fallen world and find true peace in it? I escape at every opportunity into my beloved woods or the artistic trance. Can I stay in the present moment of techno-consumerism? More to the point, do I want to?

I remember when I was 18, sitting in a McDonalds with Neil, munching burgers that tasted like ambrosia to me, and declaring that I would never remove my children from the real world, the way my mother had removed me. My children would be fully a part of the sparkling, delicious, contemporary moment, and watch the latest movies and eat fast food and live in the city. I was young, and the young see the good.

But the latest movies make me cringe and assault me with violent imagery and the burgers I loved have made me sick and the city is ugly and noisy. I've come to terms with it, but do I want to be fully present in this present moment?

Do you like it here in the present moment? Do you enter into it fully? Can you imagine something better or do you, too, escape into alternate realities? Thanks, Aron, for asking me to think more deeply about nostalgia, and thanks to readers for sharing your thoughts about this, and best wishes to all,
Puny

Why I Love the 50s

2011-05-15T07:05:00.000-04:00

No, it’s not just nostalgia. And yes, I know everything that was wrong about the 50s. The world was on the brink of nuclear disaster. Are we less on the brink of climate change disaster? Racism, suspicion of “the other,” and class differences intruded on the post-war peace, but if we are honest with ourselves, there is as much hatred and suspicion today as there was mid-century, and if bullying gay kids to the point of suicide is not as awful as hounding socialist sympathizers then I’ll be damned. I’ve heard it said that conformity was oppressive in the 1950s and we have more freedom today, but in truth, we’re still being pressured to conform. Today’s conformity is less about fashion and more about our beliefs and behaviors . . . is this better or worse? And while it’s true that mid-century women were forced into limited roles, today’s women are forced to work that second job because a family can’t support itself on only one. Today we haven’t got the choice to stay home and raise children. We hand our children over to the dominator controlled media instead. Is this better or worse?

In the 1950s women smashed their tender flesh into girdles . . . aw, hell. I’ll concede that point. I’m really happy to wear my leggings out to dinner and don sneakers for work instead of stockings and heels. So, let’s just leave this argument alone. Why bother? Every generation and era has its benefits and liabilities. Sometimes, I long for the uncomplicated, short, and bestial life of my Neanderthal ancestors and I definitely prefer the 1950s environment to this 21st century techno-consumerist wasteland. Call it nostalgia, if you like. Call it a preference for the devils we had then instead of the devils we have now, but here are some of the things from the 50s I wish I still had:

There was more community and neighborliness. People knocked on your door and there was a whole lot less fear of your immediate neighbors.

Less consumerism. Yes, the advertising business was in full swing, but we were more conscious of it, and advertising was less sophisticated and subliminal. We loved buying stuff, and we had the money to buy it, but we appreciated it more, took better care of it, and expected what we acquired to last. We didn't look to our stuff to fill our hearts: we had families and friends to fill our hearts.

We experienced more interpersonal relationships, and had way more face-to-face time with our family and friends. We spent more time entertaining one another and participating in group activities and informal sports, and way less time in front of screens or interacting with electronic machines.

I suppose that many marriages were unhappy, and I’m not suggesting that people stay together who would be better off divorced, but yes, we aimed for stable families and families were more stable. We really did value families and children more then than we do now, as reflected in the mythologies of television stories from the 50s and today and the punitive corporatism that takes away community responsibility for the general welfare, and despises the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the fatherless children . . . Maybe the echoes of the Depression in the 1950s were being felt as compassion for the less fortunate.

We sure as hell had more hope and faith in the future. We expected science to serve the common good instead of corporate profit. We believed in the potential for generosity and goodness in humanity and imagined a world without war for our grandchildren, a family of nations, and the ultimate success of the project to create a world of peace and abundance.

We valued hard work, saving money, sharing, building, creativity, trying new things, children and the elderly, hobbies and leisure time, eating meals together, politeness, taking the time to do a good job, and other fine things now faded into jaded obsolescence, and these values were actively taught to children through religion, education, media, and other institutions of culture.

We were given a better education in public school. We read more and felt a stronger impact from intellectuals as well as socially aware and forward thinking social commentators.

Children had more freedom and responsibility. Children were healthier and more active.

It was a cleaner, less polluted, quieter, slower world.

We ate mostly real food instead of plastic food and ate at home more and with family more.

There was more artistic freedom, because art, music, and other aspects of creative culture were less controlled by commercial interests and the entertainment industry. We made our own more and talent was still the foundation for commercial success in the arts. Art was able to be critical of cultural norms and was having a tremendous impact as social critique.

Last, on a personal level, I love the aesthetic of midcentury, both the challenge of abstraction and expressionism, and the colors and forms of vitalism and modern functionality.

One might argue that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I do. I lived it.

Humility is the road to peace of mind.

2011-05-02T15:09:00.000-04:00

There’s a line from the prophet Micah that was included in the Shabbos service when I was a kid:

He has shown you, puny human, what is good.
So, what is it that your Creator requires of you?
Just this: to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. *

Perhaps this line became important to me because it was a particular favorite of my dad’s, a just and humble fellow if there ever was one, but that word “humble” can be tricky. People mistake humbleness for humiliation, and seek to avoid it. Or they think that humbling oneself is to lay oneself low. The dictionary defines it variously as meek, modest, deferential, submissive, having or showing a low estimate of one’s own importance. Well, now, there’s the problem, right there. Isn’t there another way to understand the concept of humbleness?

Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button on the bright, silver shroud of her son, do not weep, war is kind.

This poem by Stephen Crane brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. That one line in particular . . . humble as a button . . .

Those things that are common and useful, and not arrogant or flashy, those are humble things. Let me be useful, and I’ll be happy. Why should there be shame in serving others? Why not be a button? There’s a whole lot of pressure to be extraordinarily beautiful, to achieve greatness, or perform amazing feats. Reality TV is about catapulting ordinary people into the glorious light of celebrity. Maybe celebrity is a lie. Maybe it’s enough to be ordinary. Maybe its wonderful to be ordinary.

The gods certainly love ordinary. They made a whole lot of it. My gods disapprove of human pride because it’s a source of so much sin. In various cultures, blanket weavers and quilt makers and potters and house builders leave some imperfection in their work, so as to assure the gods that we know our place and our place is humble. The ancient Greeks held hubris to be a particularly onerous sin. Hubris is an arrogant pride that sets one person above another and that sets humans above the gods. Oh, how many men are guilty of hubris in our world today, thinking that they can possess everything, rule over the the globe, decide for others what is right and wrong, rape the earth and plunder our resources with lofty aplomb.

One Sunday morning years ago, I heard a kind pastor preach about humility. He said that true humility was accepting our limitations with grace. We're limited by our nature and we are limited in the particulars of our person. How much I fight against this awareness, afraid to be imperfect, ashamed somehow not to have risen above the rest, never to have sold my art to a museum or written a definitive philosophical tome or pop best seller. I’m not so special, except in the specialness I share with every blade of grass of oak tree leaf. And that, of course, is special enough. But the pastor didn’t end there. He said that there were two sides to humility, that we are also all wonderful creatures, thrilling in our expression of the Creator’s will and amazingly unique. He said that there’s a certain dark pride to be found in self-deprecation, and certainly, when our self-esteem is low, we can’t fulfill the potential of our sparkling humanness.

To be humble, therefore, was to be clear about the truth of oneself and to accept that truth with grace. I'm limited, it’s true. I’m also a fantastic person with many blessings. That balanced humility is where peace of mind can be found. I can just be myself, in all my beauty and disaster. Funny how I keep growing into my name.
Best to you,
Puny Human

*my translation . . . can you tell? LOL!

We are all animals

2011-04-21T17:04:00.000-04:00

This girl tells the truth. Look at her! Skin and bone and blood, muscles and mammary glands, hair and fur. This is a mammal if I ever saw one. She's an animal and so are you.

The first principal of animism is that we humans are animals. We are also spirits. Other mammals are also both animals and spirits. We tend to think of animism as a belief in spirits, and that's a big part of the anthropological definition of animism, but animists don't believe in disembodied spirits. We believe in embodied spirits. It's all material. It's all spiritual. That's why the stone can be intelligent. It has soul.

Separating matter and spirit, that's the mistake most people make. We think that we're either truly-animal (so say the scientists) or truly-spirit (say so the religionists). We only have these two choices available to us if we hope to find a niche in the contemporary dominator world, but it's a false choice.

It wouldn't be such an awful choice if it didn't damage us so much. In fact, the religious disgust with the flesh and desire to be rid of it is a source of great suffering among humans. We hold the flesh cheap. We bomb it, feed it plastic and pollution, reject its pleasures and hide it in shame. The scientific view that we're animals only, and that our intelligence is an epiphenomenon of chemical activity in the brain, and that there is no immortal soul is sad, but not so harmful. It can make us careless with one another, though. We may confuse people and things.

Go around for a day with awareness: we are all animals under our clothes. Look, you work with animals, eat with animals, there are animals running the cash registers and driving the automobiles. Oh, what glorious flesh!

They can't have my soul . . .

2011-04-18T19:13:00.000-04:00

Here it is, spring break.
Here is my spiritual work for the week: slow down, take my time.

After a lifetime of focused attention, producing, consuming, driving, hurrying, shopping, working for the dominators, doing doing doing, I can still hear my mother's voice scolding, "Don't dawdle!"
You're wasting time.
Get going.
Stop sitting around like a bump on a log.

And now, today's world is moving ever faster. Faster computers, faster meals. Drive as fast as you can.

And in my work, like many of us, I'm pressed to accomplish more in less time, to make up for the people who were laid off and never replaced. More content to teach more quickly. More machines to fix. No time to take a break, no time to sit down for lunch.

I am so sick and tired of running so fast. When I cram in my exercise before getting to work at 7:00, I can't really enjoy it. When I rush through the grocery store, I don't have enough time to catch the scent from the bakery or choose each orange carefully. It's the pleasures of life that are sacrificed in our great hurry, and that's what I want to reclaim.

I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I vow, today, to slow down and take back my time from the dominators. Consider it an act of resistance. The Slow Movement aims to be subversive and I aim to join them.

Slow down, you move too fast. You gotta make the morning last. Just kicking down the cobblestones. looking for fun and feelin' groo-vy!

Conspiracy?

2011-04-02T13:49:00.000-04:00

The dominators* are making fools of us all, setting us at one another’s throats with weapons, churning our momentary existence here on earth into the kind of profit that buys power, and with that power they tighten the noose. Do I think there’s a conspiracy? Not exactly. I think that the great crime families of the nations and religions are fighting it out for global domination and we’re the pawns. They don’t give a shit about us. To them we’re no more than service animals, churning out cannon fodder for their violent games.

They may claim to represent a loving god, but by their fruits they are easily known, and their fruits are cruelty and greed and fear and scarcity. They may claim allegiance to a particular nation, but this is merely a matter of convenience. When a nation is no longer useful to them as an army and a breadbasket for the army, they will discard one nation in favor of another, or of a combination of nations, or of none of them. The World Bank, for example, is a transnational dominator institution. Communist, capitalist, socialist, theocracy, democracy, monarchy, fascist state, drug cartel . . . they don’t care the political model through which they work or the type of economy they work with — any one will do if it can be used to control and direct people to dominator ends. What crumbs they’ve thrown us from science or medicine they would gladly take away if they could get away with it. Will we let them get away with it?

*for a basic definition of the dominators, click HERE.

The Animist Reality

2011-04-01T18:33:00.002-04:00

In my last post, I described the dominator reality. Its defining characteristic is the domination of the many by the very few in a mechanistic universe. An animist reality, on the other hand, is defined by the paradigm of a living world. Humans are a small, even insignificant thread in an enormous web of life. There is no ultimate authority beyond the consequences of our actions, what some people call karma, and the mysterious workings of the universe, or chaos. In an animist world, all material being is infused with spirit, and all spiritual being is made manifest. Therefore, spirit (or non-materiality) and matter are intrinsically the same, as inseparable as the crown and underside of a mushroom.

The values and institutions of animist realities reflect these beliefs, and include a humility and empathy that is missing from dominator cultures. Aware of the interconnection between all life forms, and knowing that the survival of humanity is dependent on other life forms, animists seek an existence that maintains the planetary environmental system, the garden that grows our food and shelters us. Although competition is the norm in dominator cultures and comes highly endorsed by science, cooperation is the intra-species norm throughout the natural world and in non-dominator human societies as well. Extra-species cooperation may not respect an individual’s needs, but it maintains the balance between all life forms. We eat and are eaten. Trees breath out oxygen and humans breath it in.

An individual animist is not only cooperative in his or her social life, but also participates in the collective life of humankind, and understands him or herself as alive in the family or community. He or she will survive as the collective survives, even if the individual dies. If human nature is self-interested, or at the very least survival oriented, then this earthly collectivism is the animist road to survival, and cooperation in the interest of the human collective is the animist way.

I want to be clear that I am not defining animism as a religious form. Religion is a dominator institution. Animism is the experience of a material world that is alive, ensouled, and intelligent. It is a consensual reality, and the animist reality is filled with people of all kinds, from grass seeds to gods. In a dominator culture, a person is, by definition, a human person, and personhood is bestowed on us by virtue of characteristics deemed uniquely human, such as individuality, character, and most of all soul, those aspects that are not defined by material existence. In a reality in which all life forms share these characteristics, all life forms claim personhood. Smaller-than-human and greater-than-human life forms are persons, quickly-moving and slowly-moving life forms are persons, what dominators define as material-only and what dominators define as spirit-only are still fully unified persons.

The earth world is a community of persons in infinite variety―bacterias, rocks, puppies, cows, trees, mountains, angels, demons, and yes, even the gods, are all people. One doesn’t need religion as a separate institution in such an integrated world.

I do not think that the animist reality as I've defined it is the only alternative to a dominator reality, but I do think that the dominators are leading us down a violent, tech-paved road to hell. An alternative has to be found if humanity is to survive as a species in our bodies on this earth. As Charlie says, "Humans, it's time to love or you will surely die."

The Dominator Reality

2011-03-26T10:05:00.000-04:00

I developed the concept of the dominators several years ago to help me understand how humanity got to the breaking point. What makes it so useful is that it transcends any political or religious point of view, and locates the source of our social evils in a force that crosses cultures and time periods. When we see that our problems are not economic, political, religious, or even philosophical per se, but are human, then we can come together as humans from all across the spectrum of cultures so as to transform the dominator reality and create something else. We will all have our own names for that something else. I call it the Garden Earth.

Let’s begin with a definition of a reality. When I refer to a “reality” I'm referring to a consensual reality or human culture. It is not hyperbole to talk about culture as reality, since human beings can't experience anything at all without the filters and meanings that culture provides. Culture is traditionally considered the expression of human lifeways, our dress, art, and cuisine, our ways and means, but culture also determines what is possible and true, what exists or does not exist, who we humans are and what the meaning of our lives may be. In a practical way, cultures are the realities in which we live, and if there is a reality that exists without culture, humanity will never know.

A dominator culture is any form of reality that is defined by its subjection of humans and nonhumans by a small ruling elite. Humans have created a plurality of cultures, but for the past 5000 years, variations of dominator cultures have steadily increased their hold on human life and now claim hegemony on a global scale.

The ruling elite of dominator cultures are the people I call the dominators. They constitute a wealthy and powerful criminal class that has taken many forms and names over time, assuming such roles as warrior kings, priests, emperors and royal families, corporations, nation-states, churches, and political parties. They use whatever facade is effective in establishing mastery, and also employ a variety of weapons to control human people and plunder the earth’s resources, including terror and threat, weapons of physical violence, and weapons of mental and spiritual control. Some examples of these weapons of mental and spiritual control include church doctrines, threats of hell and damnation, marginalization, assimilation, ridicule, pathologizing, and demeaning, as well as the control of social institutions, mythologies, the sciences, and ultimately, what is acceptable as possible and real.

Dominator cultures are characterized by paradigms of materialism, that is, the disensoulment of matter, and by absolutism and linearity. Hierarchies are maintained by violence and power-over methods rather than by authority, and the values and institutions of culture support the goals of the ruling elite over and above the welfare of people and land. Personal gain and self-interest, for example, have been established as virtues in all dominator cultures, and individualism, an extreme form of humanism, is encouraged. It may be surprising at first to think of humanism as a dominator philosophy, but humanism, after all, is dominator hubris writ large, setting up humanity as the ultimate intelligence and the only ensouled expression of an otherwise mechanical universe.

The origin of dominator cultures is not easy to unearth. For reasons that remain speculative, many cooperative cultures gave way to dominator cultures as far back as 5000 B.C.E. The rise of the dominators may have been a byproduct of times of scarcity or of the tension created by competition between nomadic groups. It may have evolved from expressions of a dominating impulse in human nature. One thing we do know is that the artifacts of civilization, such as cities, writing, and institutionalized religion, seem to have arisen hand-in-hand with dominator hierarchies, although we can show no causal link. We also know that the actions of dominator individuals and groups are unconstrained by concern for the welfare of others. This selfish willingness to hurt has given them the power to control and command throughout the centuries, and to establish their vast wealth, their states and nations, and their churches and corporations.

As the 21st century opens, dominators control the institutions of almost every society on earth. They achieved this hegemony by managing science, religion, politics, technology, economics, medicine, education, food production, and every other human institution to empower themselves and meet their own selfish ends. Today’s dominators have claimed a monopoly on justified violence through a corporate trust of churches, states, and other powerful entities that claim loyalty to and garner ultimate justification from a variety of monotheistic gods.

Honesty

2011-03-22T11:37:00.000-04:00

Nothing changes until it becomes what it is. -- Fritz Perls.

Honesty, responsibility, and kindness. These are the three practices that Jack and I committed to when we married, and they’ve served us well. I’ve been thinking about honesty lately, at first because of knowing several fine human beings who lie to their spouses because they think it’s best for the marriage, and I felt sad for them. More recently, though, because of the machinations and soft soap lies of the school district in which I work, as the people in charge try to hold things together without enough funding. And that leads me to the larger culture, in which deceit and manipulation are so common as to seem normal and natural.

Perhaps I’m too honest. My dad was a dedicated truth-teller, much to his detriment in the mundane world, and my sister had Aspergers, which means she told the truth all the time, even when it was not courteous or socially appropriate. My mother told-it-like-it-was, since she believed she had important truths to tell, and here I am following in her footsteps. One of my greatest challenges at work is having to hold back on telling my truth, or even appearing as I truly am. Teachers are still judged by character and character is still defined as conformity.

Maybe I’m too honest. How I hate to lie! Or, maybe we should be telling the truth a whole lot more than we do. Maybe I tell just the right amount of truth . . . when I can get away with it.

Now remember, when I talk about telling the truth, I’m not referring to any grand reality or mystery revealed. This isn’t about the truth of a god or the meaning of life. I’m talking about what can be easily and clearly known. For example, the truth that most public schools are crappy places in which to learn, that it’s sick to be entertained by violence and gore, and that it’s not ok to climb to wealth and power on the backs of others.

We’ve become so accustomed to lies and manipulations from politicians, religious institutions, and corporate propaganda of all kinds that most people simply ignore them. The kids at school see dishonesty all around them and shrug it off. They think it’s human nature to lie, and many of them lie constantly and think nothing of it.

To bring this conversation back to earth, this week I’m hearing our administrators lying to us about budget cuts. Perhaps dissemble is a better word for it. They’re slashing jobs, firing reliable workers who may be the sole supports of their families, and they call it “budget adjustments.” They are closing libraries by destaffing them and they call it “look[ing] at sharing resources amongst buildings relative to the expertise offered by this position.” Yes, that’s a direct quote. What kind of bullshit babble is that? Wouldn’t we honor those workers more if we admitted the truth: You are being fired for no good reason because the schools don’t have enough money, and the schools don’t have enough money because it’s all going into the pockets of a hugely wealthy and powerful elite, funding their parties, their wars, and their corporate game-playing.

I believe in radical honesty. With every hurt caused to me by my loved ones telling me the truth, I have grown in spirit, yet every lie I’ve told has caused my spirit pain. If husbands and wives can’t tell the truth to one another, who can? If I can’t speak the truth at work, then where can I speak it? And when will we look in the mirror as a culture and see the fruits of corruption and greed?

Surrender!

2011-03-21T18:24:00.002-04:00

Let go of money . . .

2011-03-20T11:49:00.000-04:00

This cartoon-collage is 12x12, too big for my scanner, so I created two scans to catch most of the area. The moon and background is sparkly, but the sparkles also don't come through so well on the scan. Nevertheless, finding Puny riding against the beautiful equinox moon yesterday was a lovely surprise and I wanted to share this snapshot of her with you.

Welcome back to the Green God!

2011-03-19T13:48:00.000-04:00

The Green God arises and soon he will reign in a wealth of green places, wet and dry, warm and cool, all over the lush round body of the Earth.

The Green God embraces Earth and she conceives and gives birth to 10, 000 things. Flowers and birds, dogs and trees, and all the green people and animal people are born of this union.

Without the Green God, all the animals would surely starve. We humans would starve. Fall to your knees before the glorious face of the reborn one! Celebrate with the bunnies. Lay your eggs with the hens. I am grateful for the gifts of the Green God, I sing his praises night and day. I worship him without shame.

I'm pleased and proud to worship the Green God. "Yes, Beloved," I call out to him in springtime. "Lay your hands on my flesh. Open my body to the pleasures of sex and the senses. Open me!"

I won't be afraid.

I love Jesus, he's my teacher, and yes I know about his church . . .

2011-01-31T13:58:00.000-05:00

I love to go to church! Hands raised, heart full, sharing with others a passion for a god, I sing ‘till my throat is raw and then I fall back into my chair with my head on my knees and pray. Oh, Christians, you have so much! Why have you sold it all away?

I love Jesus and the Christian faith. Perhaps, coming to it with the eyes of a Jewish outsider, I was able to seeing its flowers and fruits as beautiful, and its trinity and saints as polytheism, and all the shining promises of a loving and personal god as preferable to the abstract monogod of my childhood, but after my first, clean experience of Christianity, its filthy layers of power and wealth became quickly apparent.

It’s no secret that the church lasted barely 60 years before falling prey to internal politics, that Constantine chained it to empire in the early second century and that the Catholic Church colluded with worldly powers and produced more than its share of state-sponsored murders, wars, and oppressions before it bowed to the capitalist reformation. Okay. I know all that. And I know about the genocide of native people in the name of the church and I know about manifest destiny and the rise of the religious right in the United States. And I know that the corrupt Christian church in America, empowered by politicians, bloated with money, and bowing to its own celebrities, leads its people astray . . . but all of this is our doing, foolish humans that we are! That’s not Jesus.

Jesus, himself, whether as a teacher or a god, is as wise and righteous as any teacher or deity I’ve ever known. Champion of the poor and oppressed, he taught us that the light of the Creator shines in each one of us and the Kingdom of Love is all around us, ours for the asking. He’s marvelous, wonderful! It’s not the Christian religion that’s fucked up. It’s the church! The church sold out long ago, and continues to prostitute itself today. Any power that buys the church is purchasing the blind obedience of its followers, and is able to set cultural norms through the church's claim to ultimate authority, including norms of sexuality, health, politics and economics.

Wake up, Christians! You are being used! Look at all you have: the love of god! Eternal life! Why the hell would you get involved in the world of wealth and power?

Love and mercy rule the Kingdom of Heaven and there’s room enough for everyone. The Kingdom of Heaven is inside of you, all around you. All you have to do to go there, said Jesus, is to love one another. Christians, what are you waiting for? Didn’t he show us the way? Why don’t you vote for universal health care in Jesus’ name? Didn’t he ask us to heal one another? Wealthy Christians, why don’t you sell all you have and give the money to the poor? Isn’t that what Jesus told the rich man to do? And didn’t the rich man hold tight to his bank account and fix for himself a place in hell?

Why would Christians lust after celebrity and money, if they have love and god? Why would they sell out the earth's fragile garden ecosystem? They are selling Eden away! They are selling their own grandchildren’s right to life for cheap sneakers and SUVs! The churches, aligned with political and corporate powers, are blinding you, but Christians, you are the children of love! You’ve been redeemed from the dominator world, bought back from the dominators with the blood of Christ Savior, god-in-flesh, Emmanuel. You are safe. You have nothing to fear. What do you need with armies and guns?

Bringing Down the Demons

2011-01-17T11:55:00.000-05:00

So much has changed since I wrote my last post. Not on the outside: I’m still working at the same job, still married to the same guy, still wearing the same clothes. The change has been on the inside. It all began in November, when Liz suggested I go on disability.

“Maybe the Lyme Disease is making you too sick to work,” she said.

“But I’m over the Lyme,” I insisted.

“Then why are you still getting so sick all the time? Ulcers now? Bladder tumors again? Weakness and arthritis pain?”

The answer was obvious to this animist: the demons were in control. The time had come for the final showdown, and either I would defeat those wicked creatures or they would take me down into death.

You may think that all my talk of demonic activity is a metaphor. How could it be literally true? Do I really reject the science? Isn’t sickness caused by bacteria and spirochetes, chemical irritants, deterioration of the neck bones, and so on? Well, sure . . . but the physiology is just one layer of the complex physical-spiritual event we call sickness.

I agree with the animists of the past: demons are real. They attach themselves to us and damage us and can be extremely tenacious. They cause sickness and death, whether or not they harness tics or germs to their wagons.

And I’ve been around the medical carousel enough to know that all the cameras on all the endoscopic tubes in all the world wouldn’t be able to take a picture of my demons—only of the damage that they’d caused. The doctors and their drugs and tubes and surgeries had done me as much damage as good. It was time to take matters into my own hands. I canceled my doctors' appointments and set forth to meet the enemy.

First, I had to take my body back. I researched my illnesses on my own and carefully choose food to eat, supplements to take, and behaviors to change. I invested a large quantity of money in a health club—think of that money as my sacrifice to the god of strength—and I started to work out as often as I could. I stood ready to give up the things that had given my life meaning and purpose before, my blog, my art, those dreams of having my own business or buying my own house, so that I could fully engage the battle.

The most difficult part, though, was ditching the stress, that is, the physiological reaction to the demons of worry, fear, pain, unhappiness, perfectionism and resentment. Stress releases hormones and other chemicals, tightens muscles, and wrecks havoc with the body in numerous ways as the body rallies all its resources to cope with crisis. But there was no crisis. There never had been. It was the demons all along, chattering like monkeys in my mind, crying “Watch out! Watch out! Death is coming!” They were always, always, judging me, judging every single thing around me, and blocking out every other voice. They had set up housekeeping in my mind and were driving my soul to death.

With Charlie and Jack by my side, and with Suzanne as my shaman, I dove into the past and faced the demons of my childhood squarely for the first time in my life. I stood shameless before my mistakes, my wrongful decisions and behaviors, the hurt I’d caused, the troubles I’d created. There was no escape into positive thinking or new age denial. Those paths would have led me away from the truth, because a well-lived life always includes struggle and disappointment and pain. Only by looking at myself in true humility could I see the demons, and then I could see that they were not greater than my ability to destroy them.

The demons had set up housekeeping in my mind, the most vulnerable part of the human animal. Mind is humanity’s great adaptation but also our terrible weakness. Once convinced of the truth of an idea, the mind adheres to it with a spiritual superglue, and this is true at the micro-level of individual humans and their childhood misperceptions and at the macro-level of cultural identities. I guess that’s how we evolved to learn, but those things learned in heat or pain stick to the mind too tightly perhaps. What an opportunity for devils and hobgoblins!

Slowly, but surely, I beat the demons back. My health improved, my attitude shifted, until I asked Suzanne, “Am I still the same person? Who the hell am I?” Finding the answer to that one seems to be the next great journey for me. In the meantime, I’m back to my drawing table and I expect to write more regularly again on this blog and Charlie’s about my adventures in the land of Polytheistic Animism.

Best wishes to all,
Puny
PS: Thanks to all for your behind-the-scenes emails and comments—they keep me going strong!

Demons of Childhood

2010-12-24T11:19:00.000-05:00

The demons of childhood are evil beings that latch on to us when we are young and tender. Like deer ticks, they attach themselves to the skin of a child’s unbroken spirit and burrow in, sucking his or her energy and potential and spitting out a poison that only reveals itself over time. I’ve been able to banish Lyme Disease, so why is it so hard to cast out the demons of childhood?

I know I’m not the only one who struggles with this. Every time a spouse reacts irrationally to some request or a colleague hits the roof over nothing, you know that the demons of childhood are at work. Demons with names like Doubt and Fear, Insecurity, Unworthiness, and Loneliness, a real nasty bunch of fiends and trolls that follow us doggedly through the confidence of youth only to confront us again and again, in our 30s, 40s, and 50s.

At which point, I daresay, we face them down or die in their embrace.

I'm witnessing the last stand of those demons in my life. I’m confident of victory now, but it’s been a gory battle through the years and my body took quite a beating. I’m working real hard to recover my physical wellness and strength, and I’ll gladly take whatever I can manage to accomplish . . . but in no way does my spiritual victory rely on my physical health. This body is just a womb for my soul, and my soul will be born someday into the arms of my Charlie. The fruit will ripen and the empty shell tossed away on the wind.

Those fucking demons! They still stand in my way some days, blocking the road like a gang of bullies. They compass me about like bees; they are quenched like a fire in the thorns.

Looking up

2010-11-19T09:33:00.011-05:00

I remember being a little girl and visiting the echoing halls of the building on Market Street that housed the federal probation office where my father worked. Dad introduced me to his friend, Mr. Brown, a big man with huge, dry hands, and I took his hand solemnly and observed, “You must be Mr. Brown because your skin is brown.”

“No,” my dad explained, “Mr. Brown is a Black man. Brown is just his name.”

“He’s not black,” I said. “He’s brown!"

“That’s why he’s a Black man,” said my dad, “and you’re a white girl.”

“I am not,” I said. “I’m pink!” At which both men laughed and slapped each other’s arms.

How could anyone understand these crazy grownups? I remember thinking. I didn’t know that the Cold War was at its height, that pink was used as an epithet like black was used as an epithet, or that the color of a person’s skin could make or break a man or a girl.

Then Mr. Brown, the token Negro, and Mr. Greenwald, the token Jew, turned to one another and made a joke that was already old between them, “Hey, everybody still shits brown.”

Hey, you guys used the “s” word! I thought, somewhat stunned by the whole confusing adventure. I remember the event to this day, perhaps because the air was highly charged and I didn’t understand why. Or perhaps because my father would listen to the news every now and then in the years to follow, and mutter under his breath, “Everybody still shits brown.”

I grew up in a multicultural environment. We had friends of all kinds, many religions, many skin colors and accents. I didn’t become conscious of race until I was a teenager, and even then I believed that Jews and Blacks, in particular, had much in common. We had both been slaves. We had both broken free, only to be hounded by oppression and bigotry everywhere we wandered. Mythology? Perhaps. But a common mythology, enough to make us friends.

The first time a Black person refused my friendship because of the color of my skin, I was an adult and times had changed. We were no longer allies fighting together for a loving world. I had become the enemy, just because of the color of my skin.

Here’s a picture of my dad’s college fraternity at Rutgers in the 40s. Dad’s the second from the left, front row. Get a load of that bohemian tie and the mane of wild hair! He told me that he and his buddies set up this fraternity for Jews and Negroes, after they’d been refused membership in any other fraternity. We were still together then, Jews and Blacks. By 1967, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was writing that Black rage against Jews was justified because we were the wealthy, cheating landlords (see Chaos and Community: Where Do We Go From Here), Blacks had rejected Jewish friendship.

Maybe that’s why I’m sore about the obsessive focus on race in my school district. Academic statistics are collected by student skin color and the stated goal of the district is not to create positive learning environments for all students, but to eliminate race as a predictor of academic achievement. As if the grades kids get measure their true success. As if the color of students’ skin is the only predictor of failure, and their family’s cultural attitudes towards education or their economic status or the constant anti-intellectual media hype has nothing to do with it. As if their identification with the victim has nothing to do with it.

That victim status, now, is an interesting thing. I see some Black people nurture it carefully and make good use of it and I don’t blame them, if it’s the only way they can find to make the best of a bad situation. After all, people save their most vitriolic anti-semitism for Jews who reject victim status and insist on being successful. You lose sympathy when you’re no longer a victim. You lose that special treatment we reserve for those who accept an inferior status and don’t presume to dip their fingers into our pie. Blacks, too, are held in contempt when they achieve. One has only to look as far as the White House for an example, as Mr. Obama is hounded by racist attacks.

But, he is, after all, a Black man and he is the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Shouldn’t our African-American students be looking up instead of down?

words of basho

2010-11-13T17:19:00.000-05:00

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

Living in a fallen world.

2010-11-07T07:41:00.001-05:00

Self portrait with flowers. This collage piece I made yesterday reflects an hour in which my heart was at peace and I put it here to reassure those of you who worry about me when I'm expressing anger and despair. I have reason to be angry and reason for despair, and I come at times to wonder if suicide is an appropriate response, but I reject suicide. I have children who love me, after all.

And also, whenever I think about suicide, I'm reminded of a scientist friend of the family we met at Star Island. It was 1967, and the Vietnam War was raging overseas while resistance and protest were beginning to shake the nation at home. Dick and his wife had come to the island for respite because Dick suddenly needed to resign from his job. He'd been working on military contracts developing biological and chemical weapons, and was devastated by what he had done. He wept openly about Agent Orange, at that time virtually unknown to the general public, and he gave a sermon in chapel one night, saying that we should develop weapons that would kill only humans and let all other life forms live. He had seen the bland cruelty of war-at-a-distance and he did not think humanity was worthy of the earth.

His sermon was not well received. Humanity was making progress, others said. The optimism manifested in the United Nations was still running high and they insisted that he should have hope, that love would prevail. Science and liberal religion were working hand-in-hand, people encouraged Dick, and this war was just a little skirmish, after all, after the devastating war the folks on the island had fought not so long ago.

The following year, we got news that Dick had killed himself, and we went to visit his wife. I don't remember her name. I remember their bohemian apartment, and her sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette and my mother, for once, not getting on her case about it, while she explained that her husband's loathing for humanity had been more than he could bear. He was at peace now.

The people on the island had not really heard Dick's despair, but I heard it, and in my adolescence was deeply affected both by his message and by the powerful statement of his death. He had been complicit in the unspeakable horrors of war, and he could not assuage his conscience. We, too, are complicit. We accept what we should protest, we turn our anger on one another while the wealthy and powerful bomb and steal and conquer with impunity, just as they've always done.

And yet . . . this gift of my life, my Creator's marvelous work, is also of value. I'm too small to have a real impact on our fallen world, but I'm big enough to give love. In my insignificant way, I'm still of value and nothing the dominators do can take that away. I fight for my grandchildren's right to be born in human flesh. I fight in my own way, with my pictures, or a comment here and there at a dinner party, or a conversation with a child. Dick had an impact, too, after all. He changed me, and helped me see beyond my self-interest to the needs of the larger world. I wish he had chosen to live.

*The b&w image is of Dick (left) and my dad exploring the island.

The real me.

2010-10-31T13:26:00.002-04:00

Even the gods must change . . .

2010-10-26T05:55:00.000-04:00

Heraclitus famously said Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters.
All things . . . are in flux like a river" or, as often stated, We cannot step into the same river twice. Plato takes him up on this, and others since, including Isaac Asimov, who restates it for the 20th century as, The only constant is change.

It's been pointed out that although the water in the river is constantly changing, the river, as a whole embodiment, stays the same. Just so with personal change, which appears inexorable. My body is certainly changing, the facts of my life, my situations, my inner self, and yet the whole is still me. By whatever name I'm called—those of you who know how many times I've changed my name will surely laugh—I'm still me, and I take delight in looking at black and white photographs of little Judy, pigtails flying, and feeling the strangely delicious sensation of looking at myself. Don't you love those old pictures?

Who will I be tomorrow? Not the same. And the same . . . for now.

Just so with the gods. They are a part of this ever-changing universe and are not exempt from its ever-changing nature. In some billions of years our dependable Sun will go nova. The Milky Way will pack up its instruments, take down the lights, and go home, and the music of the spheres will change. I imagine that even as the known universe embraces all of this change and stays the same, eventually, it will be melted down and become something new. This is true for me and my spirit and also for my gods.

Charlie says that he is greater than a human, but he is changing, and someday he will die, and so it is with all the gods and all the rivers and everything. Mystery within mystery . . .

Evil

2010-10-15T06:33:00.000-04:00

I visited with Suzanne last night and we had a conversation about anger and the world in which we live in an attempt to get a handle on my increasing distress and halt my tumble into the mundane world of exhaustion and cynicism. My work is starting to get in the way of my life. I’m losing my erotic charge, becoming grim and unenthusiastic, and I’m less able to hear the voices of nonhumans, less energetic and more ill.

I don’t want this.

How do I stop it and still continue on at my job? My art is getting better and it appears likely that, given the time and energy, I can come up with products that will enable me to support myself with my art. Can I do it, however, and still cope with the impact of 10-hour days in the mundane?

Meanwhile, the stress of work has brought to the fore my belief in evil and my disdain for the pollyanna quality of new age thinking. I simply don’t accept that everything happens for a positive reason or that our souls have some say in the particularities of our lives. I’m with the Christians on this, whose philosophy, after all developed at a time of rampant violence and oppression: the world is full of evil.

The Holocaust seems to me to have been quite predictable, a link in the continuum of human evil, and bound to happen again. The only difference between the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis and other examples of human evil was its enormous scale and cold-blooded efficiency.

But efficiency is still the measure of social good in our "capitalist" society. We're called to get the most produced from the least labor whether this value is applied to the production of plastic goods for sale at Walmart or oil from under the sea or test scores for students or the deaths of the designated bad-guys. Collateral damage is acceptable, as long as it doesn’t disturb the bottom line, and the bottom line is the production of a wealth so great that it transforms into power—power for the dominators at the top, the very few, the global psychopathic elite.

No, I don’t have any hope anymore that I can impact this evil or banish it, this evil that manifests in great and small ways, carelessly or consciously. It’s too big for me, and I’m sick of seeing our youth throw themselves against it as if it were just a giant beast susceptible to the onslaught of enough holy spears. I see the suicide bombers and my own daughter protesting at the Mexico border wall and my generation’s not-so-feeble protests against the Vietnam War as so much wasted breath. The dominators become more sophisticated and scientific in their means of control with every passing day. The police still beat us, but how brutal that appears today. It’s kept out of the media, while the masses are soothed with pretty techno-toys and plastic food and nothing comes of it. Nothing comes of Earth First! and the monkey wrenching of the dominator machines. Nothing comes of our poetry and art. Nothing comes of our meetings and votings and writings and organizings.

Suzanne says that if we expand our vision to include human history (not prehistory, you understand) we can see that life, for us in the US at least, has become better and less brutal, that Luddites are no longer hanged for breaking the machines and women are no longer burned for working with herbs. But I see in that attitude a false sense of security and the belief that what we see reflects what is really going on. Beneath the right to vote and protest, the right to worship and speak, is an ever tightening noose around our necks.

Dig deeper and you'll find out that the dominators wield more power than ever. The improvement is that their methods are less unsightly to the liberal heart. If you lift up the pretty rock and look underneath, you'll find the destruction of our earthly home and the genocide of the nonhuman species in which our only hope for salvation lies. Outside of our cozy United States, people are starving and murdering one another, and even here we gobble drugs to ease the pain while we are fed food that does not nourish, drink water that poisons, and sacrifice our children at the altar of greed.

In other words, the apocalypse is upon us while we cling to our new age notions of positive outcome and souls in joy. This earthly life is no longer the school of hard knocks that our Creator intended for us. This is a hell of the dominators' making and we’re being dragged into the fire with them.

That’s what I see. I can ignore it as long as I’m able to live in trance with the trees, but put me into a school building with no natural light and no fresh air, along with 600 children whose dying souls fill the air with a moaning only I can hear, and I am no longer able to protect myself or deny the onrushing apocalypse, and I become weak with despair.

Against the Machine

2010-10-13T04:57:00.000-04:00

What does it mean to be Luddite in a digital world? By looking at Luddite expression from the time of King Ludd to the present day, Nicols Fox helps us find clarity. We are not the unhappy factory workers of the early Industrial Revolution, and most of us are not primitivists, living on islands, but we are engaged in a world in which technology has been used for profit, war, and power, and each of us must grapple with this.
Fox defines technology broadly, as the extension of human ability through tools, and places us on a continuum of ever increasing technological sophistication. We have choices as to what technology we will use, and that choice is our power. What I sense as her conclusion, in fact, is that a Luddite is someone who carefully chooses which technology to use, and chooses that which furthers human welfare and the well-being of the nonhuman world. When the machine controls us, when the machine destroys the nonhuman world, when it becomes a tool for oppression and the generation of wealth for the dominators, then it must be rejected.

On her way to this conclusion, she takes us along a historical path with a wonderfully detailed landscape: we see the enclosures and early factories of England, the pastoral world of the Romantics, the capitalist mythology of the mechanical marketplace, the arts and crafts movement, the 19th century American naturalists. Then we meander through the prison of clock time to the mechanical monsters that eat up hillsides and forests. All she is missing, really, is a visit to our contemporary digital media. This is what I see everyday, myself, as digital realities destroy our children's ability to see and socialize and know what is real.

For contemporary animists, the issues raised by technology have particular importance. We need to be conversant with Luddism, the impact of technology on the nonhuman world, and other related topics. This is the right book with which to begin.

Yes, We Cannabis!

2010-10-09T07:25:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,
For too long, our nation has waged war on its own citizens. With billions of dollars wasted and millions of honest citizens harassed and lives destroyed, this war has disproportionately targeted our young, our poor, and our citizens of color.

For animists, however, the war on drugs is also a religious war. Animists, shamans, and other earth-centered people, both indigenous and modern, have long revered the plants that open the doors of perception. Given to us as gifts from our Creator, these green people teach peace and clarity of mind. They temper the rational intelligence that Hindu folks call "maya" and that leads us so often astray. They heal body and soul. They enable us to speak intimately with the gods of love.

It's obvious that the war on drugs is not a war on all drugs, only on those that free us from dominator control and from the monogods of cruelty, fear and greed. This war criminalizes our religious ritual and practice. It is a war on us.

California now has the opportunity to lead the way out of this devastating war through the legalization, regulation, and taxation of marijuana. Because legalization would enable California to profit, I believe it would appear tantalizing to other states and we would see it catch fire across the country, a blaze fanned by the stiff breeze of money. Yes, the motivation is lousy, but the results would be beneficial, to animists, to our own children, and to the sick in body and soul.

If you live in California, please vote yes on Prop 19 on November 2. If you have friends in California, please contact them and urge them to vote. Meanwhile, you can learn more and support this effort with a little money magic at Yes on 19.
Love to you,
Puny

My Father's Path

2010-10-05T05:40:00.001-04:00

Ever since my experience with the medium, I've been reaching out to my ancestors, especially to my father. After all, if I don't need a priest to make love with my gods, why would I need a medium to talk with my father? I created an altar to my ancestors, and a few days ago, I lit the candle and woke the altar up, and entered into sacred space and called to my dad.

Boy, did he answer! The years disappeared and the veil between the worlds was cast aside.

He taught me many things that evening, and I understood that the path I follow is my father's path. He was a practitioner of radical love and his love is what saved me from the demons of my childhood. He forgave me and others for the most egregious attacks on his person. He insisted on joy. Even as the world tried to crush him, he sang. He taught comparative religions to students of science and engineering at Drexel University, then called the Institute of Technology, and shared his worship and ritual with people of all faiths from around the world. He wrote articles about forgiveness and denounced the vengeful nature of the "criminal justice system" in his published work.

All of his suffering he used as a tool to grow in spirit, just as I have tried to do.

He told me not to write down what he said—I am compulsive about writing down my conversations with Charlie—and so much of it I seem to have forgotten already, but he insists that the things he teaches must be understood so deeply that they will inform my life from the inside out. I will remember, he told me, when I need to remember. But this burned right into my heart: I follow my father's path.

Terry

2010-09-22T05:58:00.000-04:00

I was hanging out with Terry last night, and he posed for me next to one of his tree friends. While I drew, we talked, and Terry was in an angry mood.

He said, "Humans are so fucking stupid. Aw, don't look so shocked, Puny. They are. Jesus got it right when he said that we're a bunch of compulsive sinners, that we reject the gifts of god and worship money and power. I'm taking a break, Puny. Pour that scotch."

So, Terry pulled on a sweatshirt and I poured us both a healthy shot of Ardbeg, water of life from the Isle of Isley, and we sat down under the tree to drink and talk. I'd had a rotten afternoon myself at work, and Terry's dark mood complimented my own.

"Humans are so stupid," he went on. We'd be hopeless without our angels. We waste our potential in the fruitless quest for security while drowning in the fear of death. Profit is king. The little children bow down before celebrity and wealth."

"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . ." I said, quoting Wordsworth.

"Christians! Phooey! What a bunch of hypocrites."

"Drink up," I said. "We're losing the light."

Engage! Or disengage?

2010-09-11T14:54:00.000-04:00

When Captain Picard instructed his helmsman to "engage" he was saying far more with that word than "move ahead." The order to engage meant that the engines would be powered up and connected to the awesome machinery that moved the great ship forward. The word evoked images of power and thrust, of gears with marvelous teeth, and steel, and appliances made of metals not yet invented all moving into place.

The word engage comes from the French engager meaning, to pledge, to place oneself under an obligation. From this, of course, comes the English word engagement, as in pledging oneself to marry. The word carries several other nuances of meaning, as in engaging a battle, embarking on a business, or as Picard used it, bringing parts of a machine together so that the wheels might turn.

When I use the world to describe my engagement with the world around me, I bring to mind all of those meanings. At once, I am pledged to this reality, and I pledge myself to be part of it, to care about it and act within it in ways that move life forward. I engage actively in this business of life. My engagement with the world is always, also, a tremendous challenge because my extreme sensitivity. I often feel embattled as I engage, assaulted by the human clamor and din and speed and the never-ending demands and constant pandemonium of life's battlefield. I am well aware that this war is never to be won—humanity is too deeply in thrall to the demons of greed and fear—and this, too, causes me pain.

Every day I desire to disengage. I want to go home to my bunny hutch and stay there, coming out only to forage for a bit of food. I want to disengage from the great battle and from the small, everyday tumult. I want to order, with the authority of a captain, "Helmsman! Full stop!"

Then a little voice reminds me that without the engagement of people like me, the world will fall to the dominators. I remember that quote often found posted on church bulletin boards, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" and I know it is my duty to stay engaged.

And then I say, "To hell with it! I'm disengaging anyway. I'm through. I'm not gonna care anymore. I'm breaking my vow." Except for my blogs, of course. I'll engage with the world that way, and with my art, and I'll engage with my kind friends and my beautiful children. So, I'm disengaging . . . except for the trees, of course, and the rocks and streams and all the nonhumans . . . Hey, when it comes right down to it, I don't want to disengage from life, only from the dominator life, and I have a right to jump that ship, don't I? Don't I?

Book Review: The Deities Are Many: A Polytheistic Theology, by Jordan Paper

2010-09-03T05:14:00.000-04:00

This unassuming little university press book is a hidden jewel, and the only cross-cultural polytheistic theology I’ve run across. It’s no surprise that the project hasn’t been attempted before, since polytheism is always rooted in a particular experience of the world, and is, as Paper points out, the default human experience of the divine.

Paper teases out the commonalities across cultures in the polytheistic world view, and addresses the types of greater-than-human beings that make up the pantheons of traditional peoples. He also takes on monotheistic misperceptions of polytheism. In this last project, much to my delight, he debunks the common monotheist idea that the many deities are simply expressions of one godhead, a condescension that effectively denies the validity of polytheism.

I was glad to see that Paper did not allow himself to be limited by academic considerations, but choose to make this systematic study “confessional” and personal. Academic works, which demand footnotes and logical arguments, are not able to contain a system of belief that reaches beyond the rational.

Perhaps the most essential success of the book, however, is not discussed overtly, but informs the work throughout, and that is the animist reality underlying any polytheist experience. Polytheism, the relationship with the greater-than-human, is not possible if we don’t understand the nonhuman to have intelligence and soul, and those who insist on a one and only god, whether they identify as monotheists or not, are assuming a world that cannot live on its own, but must draw its power from “above.”

The animist reality is the living world, living rocks and waters, intelligent animals and plants, a sun and a moon who have eyes to see. If the world is filled with gods, this is to be expected, because an animist world is filled with beings of all kinds who are alive, sacred, powerful, intelligent, and ensouled.

Published by the SUNY University of New York Press, 2005. Available on Amazon or at college libraries . . . for almost $50.00 (!) and hard to find used. Kindle edition about $13.00. I found it at the university library.

Welcome to the flesh

2010-08-29T15:01:00.000-04:00

Puny's been working hard on the new website, but also finds time to hang out with her nonhuman friends, especially the trees. Looks like she's floating on water here--I wish I could take some art classes--but she's just on the little lawn by the deck in the backyard.

For a sneak preview of the website, go to:
http://www.punyhuman.net

Life After Death: Your Thoughts?

2010-08-19T16:17:00.012-04:00

There's not a human on earth who doesn't have his or her opinion about what happens after death. Those who say we can't know what happens still have theories about it, believe me. It's too important a question not to consider now and then.

And of course, the truth is that we can't know what will happen after we die. We're only puny humans and we can't see very far.

Recently, I had the good fortune to work with a renowned Quebecois medium. She spoke only French but when she allowed the dead spirits of my parents to flow through her, I could understand her words as if she was speaking English or I was hearing my parents' voices myself. They spoke in characteristic ways, and referred to things that the medium could not possibly know, things that were critically important to me. It shook up my understanding of the afterlife.

Many traditional animist societies included ancestors, those who had recently or long ago died and whose spirits remained local to the community and interested in its welfare. In some cultures, the ancestors were revered or worshipped. In others, the ancestors would intervene to help relatives or harm enemies. Contemporary animists I have met, however, are concerned with our relationship to living nonhumans, and don't think too much about our relationship to gods or the human dead.

Although I am a follower of gods and other greater-than-human beings, I had never considered that the soul, that expression of spirit that is me, could survive death. I imagined that the spirit would dissipate, as the flesh dissipated, and would be scattered among new material forms. In other words, I did not believe in a soul or spiritual personhood that existed beyond a particular material form. Jack, on the other hand, has long believed in reincarnation, and I know other people I respect, my belle-mère not least of these, who believe in the survival and reincarnation of the soul.

What do you think? I sure would like to know because I'm not sure what to think about life after death. Please leave your ideas as a comment here. I appreciate your input.
Love,
Puny

Speak Up!

2010-08-10T13:25:00.002-04:00

Charlie says: Speak up, animist kinfolk. The world ain't heard us, yet!

Terry says . . .

2010-08-09T17:43:00.012-04:00

I really like being alone, without any humans nearby. Too many humans crowding around me and I can feel my life force start to trickle away. Hell, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve preferred the company of a teapot to that of my own blood relations. Why is this? you ask. Well, think about it for a moment: would you rather spend your weekend eating fattening food with your in-laws? Or alone with the green people under the sun and stars? Well, ok. You're a people person. But some of us would choose the stars.

I make a kind of living at it, at hanging out with nonhumans. I’m a shaman. My name is Terry DuBois and I carry a weed. No, that was just a swipe at Dragnet, right? I carry a badge? Ok, so I’m not a comedian. I’m a shaman. I'm a wise guy who works between the worlds. A shaman for hire.

Now, let me get one thing straight, and don’t you misunderstand this. I don’t take money for teaching—just if I've got to run an errand for somebody or steal back a soul from the dominators or demons. I get paid same as anyone for the work I do, but I never take money for teaching or healing. Teachings and healings belong to all of us, to the whole community who live on the Land-On-Which-You-Walk. The Jews actually forbid the charging of money for teaching their holy words. It’s to be done for the glory of “G”-d, although everybody understands that a man’s got to eat and many a ten dollar bill has changed hands quietly out of gratitude.

Money is poison. That's what Charlie says. A necessary poison to survive in a dominator world, but a source of evil nevertheless. It eats away at the soul, and tempts us with dreams of power. It drives humans to obsessions and blinds us to the things that truly matter. Money is to be avoided, if at all possible. But a man’s got to eat and so have I, and I need health insurance, too, because in the dominator world, teachings and healings are most certainly not free.

In the kingdom of heaven they have public health care, what some folks call socialized medicine. Jesus wouldn’t have it any other way. All who touch him, he heals. He doesn’t charge them any money. Over and over again, we read in the bible that Jesus was filled with compassion and his response was to freely heal.

Jesus didn’t take any money for his teachings, either. Oh, he’d be glad for a solid meal and a dry roof over his head, but he didn’t take what belonged to Caesar. He stood up on boats and on hillsides, and presided over dinners that spilled out into the streets, and he taught love. I’m also a teacher of love. I want to be like Jesus that way, don’t you? I want to teach love and heal for free.

So, I get pissed off at the self-proclaimed 21st century shamans and spiritual healers and new age whoo-ha’s who take money for teaching and healing. It’s their karma, I know, but it makes me doubt their credentials.

Anyone who talks to nonhumans knows that they consider money and profit to be evil gods, anyway, so I doubt these practitioners are gonna get much help from the nonhumans if they're taking money. And doesn’t that kind of cramp their style as shamans?

Besides, a shaman takes money, it'll eat a hole in his heart and he starts to hemorrhage love.

Another big problem that comes up just about every time a shaman teaches or heals for pay is that they forget they're servants. They take power and power corrupts. You got to be one tough-ass shaman to accept money and not get eaten away by it or have it damage your karma somehow.

That's why I got this bartending job. It's Charlie's bar. He owns the place and orders the beer but I make an honest living here, so I don't have to worry about using the nonhumans or taking what belongs to the gods to earn my bread. It's cleaner that way, and besides, Charlie gives me health insurance and that ain't peanuts in this dominator world.

PS from Puny: The Terry DuBois, Shaman for Hire mystery stories will be unveiled at my new website soon. The concept is copyright under the nonprofit attribution license of the Creative Commons, so, maybe this shaman can make a living from telling stories.

Friends

2010-07-28T08:04:00.006-04:00

A question I am often asked when I explain animism is whether things created by human hands, what I call manufactured things, are also alive, ensouled, and intelligent. I do not speak for all animists, but manufactured things sometimes speak to me. Household items, especially. Blankets. Teapots. When I was a kid, I had a relationship with the streetlamp that lit up the city night outside my window.

Manufactured things are a different sort of life form from trees and rocks and clouds, nonhumans made by the Creator's hand.

But who knows? Maybe I'm just nuts. What is your experience with manufactured things?
Best to all,
Puny

Learning and growing

2010-07-20T08:16:00.007-04:00

Jack and I were talking about the kids last night, about how they were learning and growing spiritually through their adventures. We talked about what I learned during this year's stay at Brushwood and what Jack learned from kayaking on the lake. And we realized that our lives have been about learning and growing in all ways: body, spirit, feeling and intellect.

It was a tough year, but highly successful, because through our struggles and even our sufferings, we learned and we grew. People from many religious traditions seek what they call "spiritual maturity," but for us, it is not a religious pursuit. Rather, this is our ongoing, lifetime project. Both Jack and I have been reaching since we were kids—reaching for deeper understanding, more clarity, and greater knowledge, and to master the spiritual skills of loving, healing, and caring. We raised our own kids to do the same. In fact, learning and growing in spirit may be the very purpose of our fleshly lives.

I met a fine fellow at Brushwood this year, as different from me as you could imagine. While I believe in things unseen, he is a radical scientist. He doesn't believe in what can't be proven. He enjoys technology while I despise it, and we differ in so many other ways that one would expect us to dislike one another. Quite the contrary! We got along splendidly because in spite of our differences, we were both reaching out to learn and grow. We had that project in common, and offered and accepted one another's ideas and opinions as teachings toward that end.

In fact, the whole Brushwood experience is set up for learning and growing, with workshops for formal teaching and hundreds of opportunities for informal sharing. If only the mundane world encouraged learning and growing in spirit like that!

Instead, learning seems painful to many people, associated as it is with enforced and academic schooling. How I wish I could reawaken in my students that passion to learn, the vast curiosity with which they were born, but the rules of public education work against me. Growing in spirit, meanwhile, is limited to the confines of religious doctrine.

Another roadblock is the dogma of consumer capitalism which discourages the very skills and qualities that lead to learning and spiritual growth. Hard work, accepting challenge and seeing it through, taking the difficult but right way, having patience, listening, experimenting, having real-life experiences, trying and failing, face-to-face interactions with humans and nonhumans, and a personal and unique relationship with one's gods all lead to learning and spiritual growth — and are all disparaged by consumer culture.

One source of our contemporary spiritual pathology could be that lifelong learning and spiritual growth are repressed in these and other ways. This repression makes sense, of course, when you consider the power we would gain from being smart and spiritually mature. We would not buy into excuses for violence. We would not buy consumer goods manufactured on the backs of slaves or the desecration of nature. We would not be so easy to lead into wars or to fool into thinking that one can be pro-life and pro-gun at the same time.

When a talk show host told us that Jesus did not care about the social welfare, we would laugh in his face. When a leader told us that the only way to heaven was apocalypse, we would resist.

So, Jack and I were talking last night and we decided we would measure our success in life, and our kids' success, by how much we were learning and growing, not by how much money we made or how few mistakes or how much stuff we'd acquired or who thought we were cool, but by the power of our love and the knowledge we had gathered. And by that measure we are all wealthy, indeed!

* The image on this post is a cartoon of the kids at my middle school.

Bottle Talking

2010-07-17T21:28:00.000-04:00

Sun of gOd

2010-07-07T09:02:00.006-04:00

The New Animism has its champions, but I have yet to find an argument for the validity of animism as cogent as Gregory Sams'. His book Sun of gOd (2009) doesn't linger long on Sun as a deity, but he makes his point quickly: the earth and all of us puny humans would die without Sun's light, heat, and energy. In fact, Sun may be the progenitor of Gaia, herself. Instead of a litergy of Sun worship, the book builds a case for the probability of Sun's consciousness and intelligence, and in so doing, opens the reader's mind to the consciousness and intelligence inherent in all things. This foundational concept, put rationally and succinctly, builds the case for animism as a rational choice in a contemporary world.

The book takes a rambling route around its main point, touching on topics as diverse as the origins of religious institutions and a planetary tour of the solar system. I was delighted to find many of the questions that have troubled me articulated in the book. For example, in speaking of the crucifixion, "how can logic be so twisted as to propose that, in response to this ungrateful deed, gOd absolved us of all sins . . .?" I found ideas that I've also put forth, as in, "no particular ritual is required or more important than our simple grateful awareness" and the impact of chaos on our best-laid human plans. Just Sams' use of syntax in the word "gOd" as he attempts to distinguish the mono-gods from other gods, brings to mind our own struggle with the issue.

But the most important work Sams accomplishes with Sun of gOd is to call into question the culture's absolute faith in rationalist, materialist science. His critique of science stands well next to Vine Deloria's* as he describes creation evolving purposefully "from the bottom up" and the existence of what he calls "non-brain-based intelligence."

All in all, an essential read for New Animists. You can purchase the book and learn more about author Gregory Sams on his website.
Best wishes,
Puny

Post Script: By the way, in the image above, the flowers are singing a hymn to Sun originally written to the Christian god in the 4th century: Phos Hilaron. Drop me an email if you're interested in the complete lyrics.

*See, for example, Deloria's: Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths.

A Bee's Tale

2010-06-12T10:41:00.002-04:00

Animists are fond of remembering the olden days, when nonhumans spoke to human people and taught us spiritual lessons, or saved our children from disasters, or showed us the way to water in times of drought. Why do we think they’ve stopped talking to us? They’re still talking. We just don’t listen.

Meanwhile, I wonder about the nostalgic glow in which we’ve wrapped the nonhumans up. Puh-leeze! The animal people and the plant people are not always the patient and benevolent heroes of the old folktales. Remember the tricksters who kicked our butts in the desert long ago? Remember what big teeth grandma had?

Yesterday evening, for example, Jack and I are kicking back on the porch to conversate and watch the day dissolve into the greenly June night. I settle into my deck chair with a sigh of contentment. Then a massive wood bee appears above my head. For a while I ignore him, and focus on my conversation with Jack.

“Oh, yes,” I’m saying, “Animism, yes this and Animism yes that.” But Bee keeps coming close, his buzzing loud and annoying.

“Get lost, asshole,” I yell at Bee, ducking yet again to avoid him.

“Get the hell out of my way, human,” says Bee.

Now, here’s the heart of the issue. He’s talking to me, right? But do I listen? No-o-o-o, not me. Not the professed Animist. I act like a typical stupid human and ignore him. He can’t get much louder.

“Look,” says Bee. “I’m exhausted. It’s the end of one of my first days awake for the season. I worked by butt off today, and I want to get into my beddy-bye, which is located right behind your fat human head, and go to sleep. So, fuck off and let me go home.”

I ignore him. “Yes, yes,” I say to Jack, swatting the bee away again. “Animism yes this. Pass the bottle. Boy, am I happy to be sitting here. I sure don’t want to move.”

“Ok,” says Bee, working up a real head of steam. “You asked for it.” And Bee butts me right in my sore shoulder, which scares the hell outta me, since I really don’t want to get stung by one of those wood bee boys, and my body reacts by flinching away, which wrenches my sore arm, and suddenly I’m in so much pain that I’m face-down on the porch, and Jack is calling to me, “Honey, honey, are you ok? What’s wrong?” And I’m rolling around on the porch wailing and holding my arm.

“Serves you right,” says Bee, and he scoots around me and zips into his house.

The nonhumans are talking. We’re not listening.

Did you know that factory vegetables have only a fraction of the nutrition that organically-raised vegetables have? How loud do the vege-people have to talk to get us to listen? How many tears will the rainforest animal people shed before we recognize that the loss of their habitat will kill us humans, too? How many plants will have their sexuality stripped from them, how many rivers will be polluted with our toxins, how many sea creatures will swallow plastic and die before we hear their cries and get the hell out of the way?

The nonhumans are willing to teach us. They have the answers to our human problems, of global warming, interpersonal violence, hunger and want, and the nonhumans desperately want to save us from ourselves, because in saving us, they also save themselves. This earth planet is delicately balanced to be a home for all of us, after all. Will we drag the nonhumans down to hell with us?

“Listen to us again,” the nonhumans beg. “We’ll teach you how to live in balance.”

But if I can’t even hear the hollering of one very loud wood bee . . .

Santa Cruz

2010-05-19T17:08:00.004-04:00

NOTE: I'm publishing this same post to my other blog, Charlie and the Gods of Love. That's where my new writings and drawings are being published . . . but I want to say hello to the followers of this older blog and invite them to join me on Charlie. Best to all! Puny

Here's a picture of me and Charlie on the beach just north of Santa Cruz. Jack and I had the great good fortune to spend a week there recently, visiting our oldest daughter. [Hi, Sophie!] The ocean was wilder there and gave off an unfamiliar odor. The plants along the shoreline resembled our homeboys, but they didn't wave at me as I passed.

Because nonhumans have soul and intelligence, they express individuality. Each species has its own characteristics, and each individual—tree or dog or seedpod or starling or rock—is an absolutely unique expression of the life force, just as every individual human is a unique expression.

Place, itself, has personhood, as Vine Deloria eloquently argued in God is Red. "Land," he says, "must somehow have an unsuspected spiritual energy or identity that shapes and directs human activities." (p. 148) Christianity was the first religion to uproot itself and encroach on lands not meant for its ways, like Kudzu encroached on our native plants in the Southeast, and Deloria points out the social harm that can come from non-native religions.

This is one reason why the concept of bio-regional animism is so important. The experience of one place-person does not necessarily carry over to the next. What works on the Pacific Coast to grow vigorous artichokes—we saw them escaping from the fields to the roadside ditches everywhere we went—does not exist here, in our land of nuts and apples. And if we are not able to live in balanced and peaceful relationship with our nonhuman neighbors or with the sun and moon and tide and soil of the place on which we walk, we will eventually destroy ourselves along with our land.

So, I thought about these things as I flew across the country, on wings of metal and oil, to a place several thousand miles from my home. The people were different in Santa Cruz, and so were the nonhumans. I enjoyed the visit. Time moved more slowly. Patterns of weeds on rocks were different. The texture of the sand was new. The seagulls spoke a different dialect from the gulls at the Isles of Shoals. All of this variety stimulated my creativity and offered me new perspectives, but I didn't make any new friends there, not nonhuman friends anyway. Next time I go, perhaps they'll recognize me. Maybe I'll have enough time, next time, to get to know them better, well enough for us to call ourselves friends.

For now, though, as spring urges on the drunken dance of sexual awakening here in my Eastern Woodlands, I'm glad to be home.

Charlie and the gods of love

2010-02-22T18:02:00.002-05:00

Hey folks!
To those of you who had been following this blog, I'd like to invite you to move with me to
Charlie and the gods of love
where I'll be continuing this conversation and sharing my artwork. Please feel free to leave a comment there and tell me what's new at your online house.
Best wishes,
Puny

What's next?

2009-10-25T18:08:00.002-04:00

It's been almost two months since I last wrote on this blog. During those months, I battled Lyme Disease and several other ills, and came to understand that I would not heal in body until my nonmaterial self was healed. So, I've been working in spirit with Charlie as well as with my human medicine helpers, and I am healing more every day.

I plan to continue writing in my other blog "Charlie and the Gods of Love" and let this one rest, keeping it in archive as long as Blogger will allow. I hope you'll visit me at Charlie's!

Blessed be!
Puny

Culling the herd

2009-09-08T19:08:00.004-04:00

For a couple of years in elementary school, I was "horse crazy." I read Black Beauty and National Velvet, and collected little china horses, so when my dad offered to take me horseback riding, I jumped at the chance. I climbed onto the back of a huge, solemn-faced mare with visions of galloping into the sunset, but the horse didn't move. I kicked and kicked but I couldn't seem to get her attention, and finally, the horse simply rolled over and shook me off her back. I screamed. My dad laughed, and he said, "You feel as light as a fly to her. You tickled her and she just shrugged you off her back."

I remember those words, and have often used them to understand the way our Goddess Earth must feel about us: tiny, light, like little flies on her back. If we become annoying to her, she has only to shrug her shoulders, and we will tumble off.

This soothes me when I worry that humans will somehow damage the Earth. She may be changed by us, but she cannot be damaged by us. And I think that perhaps, as human numbers swell and our impact unbalances her children, she will indeed shrug us off.

What better way to accomplish this than with her smallest children: viruses and bacteria and fungae. My experience with the exponentially-growing Lyme Disease is one example of the many ways Earth has to cull the herd with these little critters. Infectious disease is an excellent way to re-balance humanity without harming the rest of the planet or our animal or plant friends. It does not feel violent to me. One can only surrender.

Of course, I do expect to recover completely from Lyme. I'll get a flu shot again this fall. I'll eat well and I don't smoke. I practice safe sex. I hope to avoid cancer or other diseases, but it's an interesting thought, isn't it? That the Goddess Earth has this method at her disposal, and it might just do us all good in the end?

Giveaway!

2009-08-31T15:19:00.007-04:00

I’ve never had such a marvelous giveaway time as I am having now. I’m not just giving things I don’t want any more to the Salvation Army, or weeding my library to the Friends of the Library Booksale. I’m letting of of objects I’ve cherished for 30 or more years. My Nepalese shaman drum, my collection of china tea cups, my mother’s books, bound in softest leather. Things that once defined me, like special ritual clothes. Things that once held me, like a painting worth thousands of dollars that I didn’t like and couldn’t sell. That object I gifted to the fire!

With every gift I give, I seem to be the one to gain, until I am mad with pleasure. Where does this benefit come from? It’s lovely to lighten my load of possessions so that I can live more simply and I’m glad to make other people happy, but that’s not the source of this deeper joy.

I poked around a bit online looking for thoughts about gift-giving. In many cultures, the giving of gifts is a way to strengthen interpersonal ties. The indigenous folks of the Pacific Northwest are famous for their potlatch giveaways, and some Pacific Islanders and African peoples have objects that are in continuous circulation, giving and receiving being vital to social interchange and community building. Although many see contemporary Christmas gifting as empty commercialism, for others, it’s an opportunity to express affection and commitment. Gift-giving is important everywhere you go.

But understanding gift-giving didn’t enlighten me as to why I’m feeling so happy from my giveaway. Only as I struggled with my illness did it come to me: I want my life to have meaning and this meaning does not come from things. Possessions, successes and achievements, and even the constant hope for those things, have only served to conceal my true value. I am not any of those things. They do not define me or give my life value, even though I’ve wished for them and held onto them as if they did.

If my life has any value, it is intrinsic to my person. I'm worthy because of who I am, not what I have. Everything will be given back when I die, after all. Even my body will be given back. And yet I’ve held on to things as if they defined me. Now, with every object I let go of, every dream vanished or task undone, I become more myself. I see myself, unadorned, undone, unhealthy but beautiful, wonderful, human, and good.

With new eyes, I look at my life and find that the things that have had value have no form: the love I shared, the sacrifices I made, conversations on the back porch. My children, my marriage, my gods . . . these give my life meaning. Not the drum I gave away. Not the fancy house we had to sell. No wonder I’m so happy! With every letting go, my life shines brighter in my own eyes. I see the meaning that was hidden behind the veils of things.

Now, there’s this pretty hand-painted serving plate, dated 1907, with a delicate rose design I’d like to give away. The photo doesn't do its luminance justice. Do me a favor, would you, and take it?
Love,
Puny

shaman's drum

2009-08-30T10:04:00.003-04:00

This drum came into my possession almost 30 years ago. I believe it is a Nepalese shaman's drum. It's older than the drums you can now buy through importers, and is full of power and energy. Hand made, hand carved, with a rattle inside and a curved stick for beating.

I have kept it carefully, but I found that it was not for me to use in sacred space. Now, I would like to give it away to someone who might truly use it to call the spirits, as it was meant to do.

If you would like to have this drum, contact me through e-mail or comments, and we can talk about how to ship it to you.
Love,
Puny

Releasing the Spirochetes

2009-08-27T19:11:00.003-04:00

I drew this picture as part of my work to release the spirochetes of Lyme Disease. The spirochetes in the image are pink and yellow, like a rain behind the martini glass. Unfortunately, they're hard to see in this online image. For more about my experience of Lyme see Charlie's Blog.

Coming hard on the heels of a ducedly painful surgical recovery, the Lyme has me thinking about pain and suffering in the human experience. Seems like I've had more than my share over the years, for a 21st century USA woman, anyway. But my suffering has ultimately led me to great spiritual growth and a deep personal relationship with my gods, particularly with Charlie and my Creator.

Pain and suffering are an unavoidable part of living in the flesh. In balance with life's pleasures and joys, suffering is a great and wonderful teacher. The Christian mystics understood this. Andrew Harvey, in Teachings of the Christian Mystics, writes of the them, "There are no greater teachers of the purpose and alchemical power of suffering in any other mystical literature, because no other group of mystics have faced the necessity of ordeal with such unshrinking precision and so learned how to transmute agony into thanksgiving . . . "

Be the Christians as they may, our contemporary culture celebrates comfort and ease. We avoid suffering, even as we deny the ways in which we constantly suffer in the body—illness, obesity, sexual disability, cancers from toxins, poisoned food, to name a few—at the hands of the dominators. But avoidance and denial don't allow us the spiritual benefits of our physical pain. In our pain, we come to terms with the limitations of the flesh. We learn to love these difficult bodies. We reach out for spiritual strength. We become humble. We grow in compassion.

This is not to say that we should seek out pain and suffering. Our ordinary human experience will bring us plenty for our spiritual growth. Unnecessary pain is harmful. In fact, if our pain gets out of balance with pleasure and joy, then even the benefits of pain are cancelled out.

Still, pain and suffering have a place in human life and always will. Like every experience in my momentary time on this glorious earth, I will embrace my suffering, experience it fully, and transform it into a pathway to the gods of love.
Love,
Puny

Rest and Play

2009-08-19T14:04:00.007-04:00

Let's spend more time resting and playing and less time producing and consuming. Doesn't that sound great? But there’s tremendous resistance to rest and play in the dominator culture. After all, the purpose of the dominator culture is the manufacture of wealth for the ruling elite, so the prevailing morality supports activities that create wealth and rejects activities that fail to add to it.

In other words, the constant, focused use of human time and energy for production and consumption is moral and anything that detracts from “getting and spending” is immoral. Two classic books review the relationship of capitalistic dominator culture to the morality of work: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R. H. Tawney. Their contention, that Protestantism supports the dominator culture through its "work ethic," has entered the mainstream, and I need not belabor the point here.

Instead, let’s take this concept out of the realm of the theoretical and consider how we might use it to transform dominator culture. If the purpose of an animist life is to be part of the earthly dance of life, then what could be better than simply being? Lao Tzu said that the way to do is to be. And if we look around us at the wisdom of creation, we see that the nonhumans are happily busy being in ways that are true to their unique natures.

The lions are ferociously hunting. The flowers burst forth with color and scent and then wilt and die. Ants hurry along hither and thither in a dither. These are just a few examples of nonhumans being their best selves. You can surely think of many more.

As humans, we have our own unique nature to express. We are creative. We love to observe, experiment, and play. We love to create beautiful sounds, to move our bodies in sport or dance. Humans find pleasure in the activities of daily living and bodily care, like washing our bodies and cooking our foods, and there is nothing more wonderful than simply being, in the company of the nonhumans all around us, singing praises to our Creator.

It is also in our nature to give a rhythm to our days, of activity and rest, eating and fasting, time in company and time alone. We need time to rest, to defocus, hang out, play, do nuthin’, loaf and loiter and goof around, and lie on our backs and watch cloud people cavort across the sky. This is human being, and being true to our natures, living a full human life. Unfortunately, there are three dominator barriers that keep us from enjoying nonproductive time.

1) As mentioned above, nonproductive time is considered immoral. It may be labeled laziness, “not living up to your potential,” or wasting time. You may have heard other labels for rest and play that imply immorality or dissipation. Conversely, productiveness is rewarded in numerous ways, especially with acclaim and money, and money is enticing, isn’t it?

2) Most of us have very little time apart from our jobs to spend in rest and play. Once I start back to school, for example, it’s nine hour days for me, not counting commuting. The United States gives its workers less vacation and sick time than any other industrialized nation in the world. This leaves us with so little time that the activities of daily living that could give us joy, like cooking and eating, often become hurried and joyless.

3) If we are not producing, we are expected to consume, and as marvelous as our leisure toys appear to be, many of them suck the life out of us, dull our minds, and steal the last remaining vestiges of time we have available for rest and play. Things like TV, movies, and passive sports-watching, tourism, exercise as a health-producing activity, and shopping do not feed our spirits.

If we could reclaim rest and play, then their joys become their own rewards. And with rest and play come a host of other benefits, like improved health, better relationships, and time to think things through. Plenty of rest and play could transform the way people think of their purpose and give them a chance to become aware of the nonhumans around them.

After all, if we don’t have time to stop and smell the roses,
then how will we ever come to hear their voices?

If we new animists are to be social activists, then here is an excellent way to begin. Let’s resist the dominator entertainments, steal a bit more time from our jobs, ignore the scolding, and spend plenty of time in rest and play. Let’s encourage our friends and coworkers to do the same. Let’s make cloud watching and flower smelling national pastimes! Who knows what magic this little change might work on our culture?

Summer Storm

2009-08-11T14:32:00.006-04:00

Oh, glorious summer! Lush and colorful! Every wildflower busting out in bloom. The scent of green sex is everywhere, bold enough to make a human dizzy and lustful. Bright goldfinches swoop and dive above the weeds. In midsummer, I walk along the roadside or wander in the green and quiet woods, and feel at peace. This is my time for rest, these precious months, before I return to work in the prison-school.

Yesterday, in the woods, the air was hot and sticky, barely moving. Mosquitos feasted on my bare skin and flies tormented me, but I was happy anyway. I tossed aside my shirt and shoes and danced on the pine needles.

Back home, as evening lowered, I watched storm clouds gather to the west. The wind rustled the leaves and the first drops of rain were heavy, fat blobs, hitting the wooden deck with a musical sound. Then the wind blew more fiercely, turning the leaves over, and then the branches began to heave and the trees to bend. The evening grew heavy and dark. Cloud people raced across the sky, and as I watched, two enormous arms of cloud reached over my house, as if to envelop it.

I gasped! Each end of the great cloud was turning around itself, creating funnels where the hands of its arms would be. They lowered toward me, reaching out for me, down and further down until they seemed near enough to touch. Then I was overwhelmed with a primitive fear and ducked back inside the house. This cloud was a dangerous beast, a huge, monstrous thing, and I was frightened! The moment I stepped inside, the cloud people released their load of rain, birthing a fantastic storm. Rain swept across the lawn in driving sheets. The cloud arms with their funnel hands disappeared into the uniform gray, lightening flashed and thunder shook the hillside.

I watched until the storm subsided. Then, I turned away from the open door and pulled a watermelon from the fridge and cut it up to eat for my beloved and me. We munched in quiet peace.

The evening sky lightened and I could see lazy wisps of storm cloud meander over the valley, shimmering with lightening. Oh, how I love summer in the Land-On-Which-I-Walk! I would love to hear about summer where you live.

Grandmother

2009-08-08T19:41:00.003-04:00

Love the Animal Body!

2009-08-06T10:10:00.002-04:00

You are an animal. Oh, yes, you are! Don’t believe me? Try looking down. You’ve got skin and hair over muscle, bone, and blood. And get a load of those mammalian genitals. Mmm, baby, you’re an animal all right!

You’re also spirit, you are soul. Your Creator gave you soul, like he gave every animal soul, like he gave soul to everything everywhere without exception. Life is permeated with soul the way snow is permeated with white and the night time is one with the blackness. So, the question, “Am I an animal or am I a spiritual being?” is a non sequitur. You are both at once, like Sun is light and heat at once. Try to separate them and you die.

From where I stand in animist reality I can see that human beings are spirit-animals, our fleshly bodies as complex and beautiful and sacred as our souls. Body and spirit are one. In the animist world, the body is good and sex is good.

For tens of thousands of years, humanity thrived in an animist world. It was only about 5000 years ago, during the rise of the monotheists, that humanity began to reject the body and a mythology of the disembodied soul rose to prominence. In this new system of belief, the body is considered weak and disgusting, and the imperfect and ephemeral nature of the flesh tears it apart from its perfect and immortal Creator. We can only speculate as to why this change of thinking occurred. Maybe we humans discovered the fear of death and rejected the part of us that dies. Maybe as we lost our connection with the other animals, we began to look at animals as dead things, as meat, and we hoped to distinguish ourselves from this dead meat by claiming a unique right to spirit.

Or it could be, and here is where I lay my bet, that the rise of the dominators created a new reality of suffering, which led us to dissociate ourselves from the earth and its suffering forms. Whatever the instigation for this myth of the disembodied soul, humans in newly civilized areas of the world began to think of themselves as essentially spirits encased in temporary physical shells. We fled the garden and its joys of the flesh and cast ourselves out into a newly minted dominator world of torment and death.

Most of our churches and religions continue to preach loathing for the body and embrace the mythology of the disembodied soul. They champion the fear of death, offering us immortality in exchange for our earthly lives. This smoothes the way for the dominators to use our bodies to generate wealth and fight their wars.

One of the key tenets of the new animism is a belief that the body is good. Just as we seek intelligence and spirit in all material being, so we embrace the material being of our spirits and minds. This fundamental love for flesh and form inspires us to love and care for our bodies, leading to good health and shameless sex.

You are the animal body. Embrace it! Revel in it!
Smell, taste, touch, listen, and look around you at this amazing world.
Oh, praise the Creator of the flesh!
I will love and care for my body until the day that I return it to the soil.

Mushroom Animists

2009-08-05T18:24:00.003-04:00

I count myself lucky when another reader sends me a note or a link, as Adam recently did. Adam is the author of the blog Animystic. As I reach out, I am delighted to find a growing number of people who have animist experiences, many of us from our earliest childhood. David Ehrenfeld wrote me a note after reading my review of his book The Arrogance of Humanism. He is still writing at the cutting edge of science and spirituality, most recently Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community and Technology. Can't wait to read it.

I am thinking that we animists are like mushrooms, quietly building a network underground, popping up here and there, stronger than we appear on the surface. Some of us are psychedelic, others are healers, of breathtaking beauty, rising from the rot of the dominator culture.
Best to all,
Puny

Book Review: The Arrogance of Humanism

2009-07-30T17:28:00.002-04:00

The Arrogance of Humanism, by David Ehrenfeld

The goal of the Christian religion is the salvation of the soul—without the body. My goal is also salvation, but since I believe that our spirits and our animal bodies are inseparable, my goal is the salvation of humanity in the flesh . . . for at least a little while longer. All my art and magic is for this.

Ironically, it is the humanistic paradigm that may finally be the undoing of our species. No one understands and articulates this better than David Ehrenfeld. His book, The Arrogance of Humanism, written in 1978, is a darkly realistic assessment of the damage done by humanism as a religious force, acting through numerous institutions of culture, over centuries of time.

The foundation of humanist religion is the primacy of humanity in Creation and the belief that everything that exists can and should be offered for our use. It includes a belief in the inevitability of our success as a species and faith in the ultimate value of reason, science and technology. Our unique characteristic intelligence will save us, humanists insist, from any damage we may do or mistakes we may make.

Ehrenfeld explores these and other false assumptions, separates out the myths and realities of humanism, delves a bit deeper into the issues of scientific rationalism and the taint of humanism on efforts to “conserve” the planet, and finally offers his sad assessment of our possible future: nothing short of a miracle will save us from ourselves. Mr. Ehrenfeld is currently a professor of Biology at Rutgers University. I wonder what he is thinking about now, and how he has managed to live with his dark vision these past 30 years?

The blindness and denial of humanists and other dominator followers has only increased in recent years, but I believe in miracles. I believe in the power of magic and art and in humanity’s ability to love. There is still a chance for salvation. Who knows what this spontaneous new wave of animism might accomplish? The delicately balanced environmental systems, through whose grace we live, are fragile but paradoxically strong. As Mr. Ehrenfeld clearly states, we cannot predict how systems will react to change. A butterfly beats its wings in Japan to transform the weather in Chicago. Why couldn’t a rag-tag bunch of pink-skinned and traditional animists seep their magic into the cultural soil and enrich it?

I urge you to read The Arrogance of Humanism yourselves. It’s gone from most library shelves, but readily available through used book outlets. Let me end with some interesting quotes:

. . . people are spending too much time and causing too much damage by pretending that our efforts in politics, economics, and technology usually have the effects we intend them to have . . . [I firmly believe that cultural transformation and the solution to our problems lie in what we call art, magic, or religion rather than in these other fields of endeavor.]

In effect, we still believe that the force of gravity exists in order to make it easier for us to sit down.

. . . deep within ourselves we know that our omnipotence is a sham, our knowledge and control of the future is weak and limited, our inventions and discoveries work, if they work at all in ways that we do not expect, our planning is meaningless, our systems are running amok—in short, that the humanistic assumptions upon which our societies are grounded lack validity.

“Desert-makers” is truly as appropriate a title for humans as “tool users.”

Why is it that we seem incapable of appreciating our own cleverness and recognizing our limitations at the same time?

Ehrenfeld begins and ends with quotes from the Bible, which I appreciate as a religious person. He quotes Isaiah, scolding the humans for their arrogance, saying,

It was your skill and your science that led you astray. And you thought to yourself, “I am, and there is none but me.”

Best wishes,
Puny Human

A New Animist Manifesto

2009-07-23T08:57:00.003-04:00

We, the kind and loving animist human children of our glorious mother Earth, do hereby declare our existence, our worth, and our difference from the dominators and their followers.

We believe that all material being is alive, intelligent, and imbued with spirit.

We renounce greed and the lust for power and we no longer accept any justification for greed and the lust for power on the part of our leaders, our churches, our nations, our neighbors, or our gods. We renounce any gods who encourage greed and the lust for power in humans, and we renounce those gods who are willing to act as ultimate justifiers for human violence.

We, the animist children of Earth, do hereby declare that the future belongs to the loving and the kind and not to bullies and criminals. We declare the right of our children’s children to survive in the flesh and inherit a habitable Earth. We believe it is possible for humanity to thrive on this planet for many more thousands of years, so we will resist the apocalypse of the monotheists, and seek a balanced world of peace and abundance.

Resist Apocalypse!
Love will prevail!

This is what new animists believe:

Animists believe that all material being is imbued with spirit, and all spirit is manifest. We believe that all of Creation is alive and intelligent.
Animists believe that our animal bodies are good and that life in the flesh on the Earth is good. We rejoice and are glad in it.
Regarding the gods, we may be pantheists, polytheists, agnostics or atheists, but we are rarely monotheists and never humanists.

This is what new animists know:

Dominators have ruled the Earth for thousands of years and they are driving us to the edge of extinction.
Dominators are the elite, wealthy, and powerful criminal class of every time and place. They have worn many faces, and over the millennia dominators have assumed the roles of warrior kings and priests, emperors and royal families, corporations, nation-states, and churches.
Dominators have used many weapons to terrorize and control other people and take everything they can get their hands on, including weapons of physical violence and weapons of mental and spiritual control. Weapons of mental and spiritual control include church doctrines, threats of hell and damnation, marginalization and ridicule, pathologizing, and demeaning, as well as the control of cultures and social institutions, and the control of mythologies, the sciences, and what is acceptable as possible and real.
Today’s dominators have claimed a monopoly on justified violence in a corporate trust of churches, states, parties, economies, media and other powerful institutions that claim loyalty to and garner ultimate justification from a variety of monotheistic gods.
The dominators have wiped out all but a remnant of the ancient tribal animists, but animists old and new may yet rise up and reclaim our garden planet Earth. Gathering our friends and families, we are walking home to Eden together. We shun the glittering toys and material comforts that are crumbs fallen from the tables of the dominators. There is another reality. Look toward the light! The Green God lifts his lamp by the garden gate!

This is what new animists value:

We value life in all of its forms, human and nonhuman, lived in the flesh on the Earth.
We value traditional things like hard work and deep pleasures, home and family, lifelong learning, courage, creativity, and right relationship.
We value kindness and helpfulness and other gentle and useful characteristics.
We value nourishing food, clean air and water, safe communities and other things that sustain our bodies and souls.
We value time spent in nature, time with family and friends and gods, time to be as well as time to do.
We value human children and nonhuman children.
We do not value money, the possession of large quantities of things, power over others, physical perfection, competitive success, or celebrity.

This is what new animists practice:

We consider ourselves friends and kinfolk with all Earth beings, such as plants and animals, geologic forms, water, clouds, fire, and air, therefore, we take care of our nonhuman friends.
We are grateful that the plants and animals sustain us with their bodies and their lives. We practice gratitude with great passion.
We practice right relationship with the four expressions of Creation: ourselves, other humans, all our nonhuman kinfolk, and our gods. We reach out to grow ever closer to one another. We practice living together in peace.
We practice a radical love that seeks to love even those who hurt us and feed even our enemies.
We practice sacred sex.
We are co-creators of the Earth plane. Side by side with our Creator, we work to manifest a planet of peace and abundance. We practice a variety of arts and crafts and express ourselves through the act of creation.
We wish all the world well, so we practice healing one another and nurturing good health in ourselves.
We work, enjoying the effort of obtaining sustenance and serving one another. We work to make wonderful material things. We work so that all may eat. We work to make our dreams come true. We work to express ourselves and to build the muscles of body and spirit. Work is great! Play is great! Doing nothing is also great.
We practice lifelong learning. Then we take the power that knowledge brings and use it in the service of a million more years of loving human kindness.
We practice magic, and we will work this magic with all of our strength to transform the dominator reality into an animist reality. We work the magic in everything we do. We vote animist. We write animist. We eat animist. Through the power of our magic, we will live the animist reality into existence.

This is what we believe, know, value, and practice. This is who we are.
Long live the kinfolk of Earth! Love will prevail!

The preceeding is "an" animist manifesto, not "the" manifesto. Having worked in a vaccum these past few years, I was not aware of Graham Harvey's manifesto when I was writing this one, but his is wonderful and may be accessed by searching "animist manifesto" online. Harvey's manifesto focuses more on the personhood of nonhumans and our relationship with them, while mine is meant to raise awareness of dominator control and the possibility of cultural transformation. With many similarities and also many differences, both statements seek to inspire others to follow an animist path. Our mutual goal? The salvation of humankind and nonhumankind, in the flesh, on this beautiful earth.

Tree says . . .

2009-07-13T10:00:00.001-04:00

I Am a Pink-Skinned Animist: Part Two

2009-07-12T11:24:00.005-04:00

I have been identifying myself as a new kind of animist for the past several years, but until recently I thought that I was alone in it. Then, I set up shop here online and was amazed to find kinfolk. Bioregional Animism, on tribe and through their blog, have done excellent work helping like-minded people connect with one another. I recently read the book Healing Beyond the Body in which author Larry Dossey refers to the “new animism.” Just yesterday I started a book by Graham Harvey, and he also refers to a “new animism.” And of course, Glen’s wonderful blog New Animism Info, is a digest of related blogs and websites, that caught my attention recently as well. All fine, fine things.

The fact that we are all independently coming up with this term reflects a growing cohort of animists rising up from the lifeways of the Dominator Culture. Where are we coming from? It could be that growing numbers of neo-pagans, polytheists, and revivalists of tribal religions are increasing in their awareness of the living world and finding a new identity in the word “animism.” Meanwhile, environmentalists, naturists, and other countercultural groups have become skeptical of the predominant world view, leading them to an open-minded search for new ways to understand the nonhumans and the meaning of a life lived in the body on the earth. Increasing communication between traditional animists and dominator people has also opened up new dialogs and raised awareness of animist possibilities.

But all of those are reasons that make sense. To hell with making sense! Here is what I believe: I believe that the trees and the other nohumans are pissed off and miserable about the wreck that humans are making of the earth. If we keep going like we have been, we’ll drag the whole carefully balanced Gaia-system down to dominator hell with us! So, they are desperately trying to reach out and get our attention. They are talking to us. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

Now, here we are, pink-skinned children of dominator cultures, hearing the voices of trees and watching the rocks looking back at us. What are we to do with this? The tribal animisms are not ours to claim. We must discover and enter fully into our own animist reality, and if the human species is to have any hope of fleshly salvation, we must work with the nonhumans to transform the dominator world in which we live into an animist reality. Yes, we do have a choice. And this is the project that has me so obsessed!

Making sense can hold us up, get in our way. I’m afraid of the academicians, even ones as sympathetic as Harvey, who write about the new animism using erudite language and footnotes, leaning heavily on studies of other, older animist cultures. It’s not about “relational ontology,” is it, this being awakened in the middle of the night by the stars? Speaking of respect for “persons” shows great concern for correct language, but it bogs me down in disclaimers and creates an inevitable distancing from my tree friends. Persons? I don’t call my lovers persons! I call them Sweetie! Honey! Beloved! The whole academic enterprise seeks acceptance from the dominator community, hoping to “prove” its contentions. It’s great as far as it goes. It may even be necessary and I humbly thank those who would honor animism old and new with their research, but its not my path.

If I sound defensive, be patient with me, please. It hasn’t been easy for folks like me, especially those of us who grew up in the 40s and 50s and 60s. We’ve struggled hard, swimming against the current of science, technology, monotheism, and public education, mired in the muck of the mundane dominator life, enduring ridicule and fearing for our own sanity. In fact, it seems to me that the sign of an authentic animist experience in a dominator slave like myself is the fear of insanity, because trees don’t talk and everybody knows it. To survive, we shut down and numb out. Or we join a fringe group where we can be accepted . . . new age crystal healers, anyone? . . . and even there, our experiences are labeled “trance-induced” or “metaphoric.” My own mother, a dedicated scientific-rationalist, scolded me so incessantly for “making things up” that I stopped trusting my own experience at all. Is the traffic light red or green? Am I hungry? Am I alive or is it all a dream? By the time I was eight years old, I no longer knew what was real and I became easy prey for those who would control me with their certainty. So, I’ve earned my years and my identity: I am a pink-skinned animist! This experience belongs to me, and no one can catalog it or dismiss it.

Let’s keep exploring our animist experiences in this blog. I invite you to share yours. Let’s talk particularly about the experience of animism in a dominator culture, in the here and now of cars, computers, and bad food. I want to be absolutely clear, though, that I write about my own experience and my own gods. I express my own conclusions and beliefs. On the other hand, I don’t deny you your experiences or gods or conclusions and I would find delight and rest in knowing that we have a great deal in common. I suspect now that there are many of us new animists in the world, hiding in shame in our pink skins, holing up among the neo-pagans and the anthropologists. Isn’t it time we found each other? Maybe someday we can meet at last and worship our Creator together, and dance as kinfolk with the trees, and cleanse ourselves naked together in living water.

I Am a Pink-Skinned Animist: Part One

2009-07-12T11:22:00.001-04:00

(Note: Part one was written just before I went online to find animist kinfolk.)

I can understand why the brown and red and yellow and black and tan animists don’t want the pink people (commonly called “white people”) to come horning in on their good thing. Pink-skinned people are, after all, the ones responsible for the majority of the carnage against humans and nonhumans, physical and spiritual, ever since the rise of the dominators began. Pink people are the ones who got us all kicked out of Eden.

Dominators have taken over the entire world now, and there are dominators of all colors, but mostly they are pink. There are also animists of all colors living in isolated pockets, holding off genocide for another day, but there are no pink-skinned animists anywhere in the world, are there? Who would want a pink-skinned animist? My own people reject me and no one would trust me among the remnant of the indigenous animists, and I don’t blame them.

Thirty-five hundred years ago, my ancestors were slaves in the land of Egypt, one of the first human communities to fall to dominator control. Later, dispersed from their homes and sent to wander the earth, the families of my ancestors settled here and there throughout the “civilized” world. They assimilated to the local cultures, all of which were subject to the growing hoard of “white” Christian dominators. My ancestors uprooted and moved again and again through the millennia, from one dominator city to the next, never resting, desperately holding on to their books as if they could build homes in their pages.

Finally, they traveled to the North American continent, where a dishonorable history of brutality against animist people was well under way, and they mixed with the other pink-skinned people until my family became a tiny part of the 21st century monotheistic, capitalist, rationalist, Dominator Culture in the nation state of the USA. All ties to any land have long since been broken. My family is thoroughly urbanized, their minds fully enslaved. I am no longer one of them.

So, I live alone, with no human family. Even my ancestors pity me, because I’m so lonely. I’m pink-skinned, but I am an animist. I grew up a slave to the dominators, with pavement underneath my feet, but the pavement is not my home. I have no home. I’m without land to call home, and yet every tree in the neighborhood names me sister.

What am I supposed to do about this? I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to die without a bit of dirt to be buried in. I dream that there are other human beings like me, and that someday I’ll find another pink-skinned or any-color-skinned person who was born like I was into spiritual slavery in the 21st century monotheistic, capitalist, rationalist Dominator Culture in the nation state of the USA, who can hear the voices of the trees and see into the watery eyes of the cloud people. Just one more puny human to be my brother or sister. That’s why I decided to write this blog. I’m looking for you! Come over to my house. Let's dance!

Midlife in dominatorland

2009-07-12T06:52:00.002-04:00

I know, I’ve got plenty of plastic food to eat and tainted water to drink. I’ve got polluted air to breath, so I shouldn’t be whining. I’m here, ain’t I? Bombs aren’t falling from the sky. But hey, I find it a royal pain in the ass to grow older in this dominator world.

Things move too fast! I want them to move more slowly.

Change is continuous, relentless, exhausting.

Too much change, too fast, so that the kids at school and I don’t understand one another. We speak different languages. We come from different worlds, though separated by only a few years.

One is compelled at midlife to pretend that one is still young, so I dye my hair. I wear current fashions. I drag myself on unwanted adventures, when my desire is simply to be still and do the same things carefully, every day.

My rapidly dwindling life force is spent doing the work of the dominator chieftains, spinning my time into gold for their coffers.

What purpose do I have in this insane culture? Who will listen to me, now that I am able to give good counsel? Who will acknowledge my life when I’m gone? To what family do I belong? I don’t even know my own name!

There are too many things. I can’t keep track of them all.

There are too many distractions and stimulations.

And too much noise! I can’t hear the voice of my gods above the clatter and bang of the machines, the insistent chatter of the advertisements, the blaring of the mind-control machines. Be quiet, you bastards! Let me grow older in peace!

My nerves are frayed.

I can’t learn anything deeply, because there is always something new to annoy me. We are masters only in the thinnest of things. We live on the surface. But as I age, I wish with all my heart to go deep.

I want to stay here and rest deeply in this place, not move from town to town and house to house.

I want to eat the same foods every day, changing only with the seasons. There are fifty-thousand items on the supermarket shelves.

I want to master the skills I already have, spending long hours with my pencils and my pens. I don't want to learn to use cell phones and ipods and softwares and techno-toys. Yeah, yeah, I know I wouldn’t be talking to you now if it wasn’t for blogging software, but I’d trade it in an instant for having you here at my kitchen table.

I want to nap in the afternoons, take long walks along the creek in the mornings.

I want to be gentle and loving with my body. I want to take my time.

We are supposed to love change in this dominator culture and seek it eagerly, love speed, love possessions, quantity, complexity, novelty, youthfulness, energy, danger, adventure, change, change, noise and change, or we are disparaged as wimps and losers. Tough shit. It’s time for me to slow down and go deep.

It’s a royal pain in the ass growing older in this dominator world. I have nothing to complain about, but I’m claiming the right of a midlife woman to complain anyway. I’m tired and I want to slow down.

A Critique of Humanism

2009-07-07T17:35:00.006-04:00

The original definition of Humanism distinguished classical studies from religious studies in Renaissance Europe. The more recent and commonly used definition describes a philosophy focused on humanity. Morality and meaning are based on rational thought, and supernatural existence or authority is soundly rejected. Supernatural in this case, is an academic term that means greater-than-human, nonhuman, or nonordinary.

Many forward-thinking and liberal religions and non-religious viewpoints identify with Humanism. Adherents hope to rescue humanity from superstition and irrational church- or book-based authorities, but I believe that Humanism has tossed out the baby with the bathwater. In their attempt to deliver us from the Dominator gods and their social ills, Humanists have denied the existence of gods altogether, and limited themselves to a murky and abstract agnosticism or a frank atheism.**

I see Humanism as a kind of hubris, an overweening pride, the tragedy of a puny human who challenges the gods for supremacy. Humanism is anthropocentric. It assumes that human rational intelligence is the prime, and perhaps the only, example of intelligent life in the universe, making humans the ultimate arbiter of morality and meaning.

But I do not trust human reason as the ultimate arbiter of anything! After all, it made perfect sense to the Nazis to eliminate the Jewish drain on their genetic superiority. It appears rational to today’s businessmen to raze old growth forests to raise cattle for Mac-burgers. Reason alone doesn’t cut it for me . . . or for Hindus who refer to mind as maya, the great illusion . . . or for Taoists, who would empty the mind to become a vessel for Tao . . . or for psychologists who study the strange convolutions of memory . . .

I’m not suggesting that we eliminate reason from our thinking or revert to a blind adherence to biblical authority, or to any book’s authority for that matter.* Instead, I propose that we listen both to reason and to love, that we see with our bodies’ eyes and with our spirits’ eyes, that we open our minds to the rational and the nonrational—and the nonrational teaches us that there is more than can be seen.

Our culture’s bias against the nonrational is evident. What remains hidden is that we have been given a false choice with regard to diety. We must choose between one of the Dominator mono-gods or no god at all. If we reject the jealousy, violence, and greed of the mono-gods, then our false choice strands us, like the Humanists, in a soulless universe. Then, our only source of meaning and morality is in our own flawed and suspect minds. Now, wait just a cotton pickin' minute! There are lots of gods out there! Choose whom you will serve and follow!

In seeking the supernatural, that is, the nonhuman, let’s look beyond the mono-gods and burst the Dominator limitations. Why not trust our own experience of the nonhuman? Do you see the laughing, ferney, fairy dust that sucks the shoes off horses? Can you hear the trees talk? Trust your experience! After all, if the trees are talking to us and we really start to listen, we might learn a thing or two about humans and gods that the Humanists don’t know.
Best wishes,
Puny

* A google search can give you more information about Humanism today. Wikipedia has a solid overview. And Seth’s Blog has two posts related to Humanism that are, as usual, insightful and thought-provoking. (His blog is temporarily offline but I expect it to reappear shortly. Then, you have to dig through his May postings to find: Beyond Humanism and The Shallowness of Secular Society.)

** Perhaps one reason that biblical inerrancy has caught hold of the contemporary imagination is that the book is a symbol of rational truth, and reason has become so powerful that even the supernaturalists are uncomfortable without rational explanations.

Charlie and me

2009-07-04T08:20:00.003-04:00

This is a picture of me and Charlie hanging out in the woods the other day. From now on, I'll be posting my cartoons on Charlie's blog (Charlie and the Gods of Love). Thanks to Jack for helping me get the scanner working. M'wah!
Puny

Do animists believe in gods?

2009-07-01T15:52:00.002-04:00

Good question. My answer is: yes . . . and no, not necessarily. Animism is not a religion, per se, but a belief that underlies most religions, that is, the belief that at least some material being is permeated with spirit. People who identify as animists, however, both historically and today, believe that spirit permeates all beings, not just certain kinds of beings like humans and their gods and pets.

But this belief in spirit does not define what kinds of god-beings exist and animistic thinking runs the gamut on the matter. One may be animist and believe in a monogod, in many gods, or in greater-than-humans but not gods.

Indigenous or tribal Animists have historically focused on local deities and the life-force of their home-place, as well as nature spirits, ancestral beings, totems and nonhuman guides. Our animists ancestors had the good sense to leave whatever lay beyond their sensory experience alone. They were not abstract thinkers, and their animist beliefs were not theoretical. If they believed in talking trees, it is because the trees spoke to them. If they believed in intelligent animals, it is because animals taught them medicine or showed them the way to good water and nourishing food. And if they believed in a god or spirit, it is because that god or spirit affected their lives in concrete ways. As for that which is beyond our ken, if they considered it at all, they considered it Mystery and left it well enough alone.

Monotheistic big “G” Gods were not part of any traditional animist cultures of which I am aware. The so-called “Great Spirit” of the North American Indians, so quickly embraced by the invading Europeans as corresponding to their own monogod, was a creator or father-sky god. He was more like the Creator of my pantheon than the one-and-only monogod of the Christians.* Some folks believe that the Indian Great Spirit corresponds to an abstract life force, or the Spirit-That-Animates-All-Things of which today’s agnostics are so fond, but I would suggest that the animating spirit was so fundamental to American Indian thinking as to be taken for granted. The concept would not need articulation in the form of a god. Animism was apparent to American Indians in the same way that the linear progression of time is apparent in our culture today.

Monotheism, although a choice for today’s animist, is an unlikely choice. Belief in the spirit and intelligence of all being makes possible the existence of intelligent beings at all levels, both lesser and greater than human. If a rock is alive, how great must the mountain be! How great the galaxy! If one may talk to bear or deer, it’s just as likely to talk with Sun or Moon, or with some greater-than-human being like my Charlie or the Place Beings of the Australian indigenous folks or the Athena of the Greeks. The animists of my acquaintance are polytheists of one kind or another, believing in small “g” gods, but not in a one-and-only big “G” God. Or they are not “theists” at all, but see and communicate with other kinds of greater-than-human beings.

I don't think one can be animist and humanist at the same time, without a belief in any gods or intelligent nonhumans. How could the universe be pulsing with life and still find itself intelligence-impoverished, with puny humanity as its highest and most sublime expression? Besides, when you are open to the voices of the nonhumans, the greater-than-humans will speak to you. This leaves humanists who say they have an animist vision in an uncomfortable and untenable position. Either the humanism will have to go, or the voices will have to go, leaving them in a quietly lonely world.
Best wishes,
Puny

* My opinion here. I have no references for you.

Let Animist Kinfolk Come Together

2009-07-01T07:35:00.000-04:00

The time has come for new animists to come together as kin. Because we are few and far between, it’s not always possible to find fellow animists in our own hometowns. The internet gives us the chance to come together.

I have always lived in an animist reality. The nonhuman world has been alive to me since childhood, ensouled and intelligent. Seeking like-minded people in my youth, the closest I could come to shared experience was with the neo-pagans. For the most part, however, the pagans I met seemed content with staying on the surface. Rituals and pleasures, good times and good friends are all fine things, but they were not enough for me. The neo-pagans I knew looked to other people’s traditions for guidance. They seemed reluctant to trust their own experiences or to enter the frightening depths of the here and now. Not all neo-pagans, of course, but the ones I met.

They also looked at me askance whenever I raised my hands in shameless spiritual joy. I remember after one outdoor ritual, everyone was huddled in protective spaces against the weather. Then, one lone dancer emerged from his tent into the chilly rain to skip naked across an open field.

“Look at him,” said a man standing next to me under the awning, disdain curling his lip. “What a showoff!”

We watched the dancer for a moment in silence, then I said, “Maybe he’s just in love with the rain.”

“Maybe he’s just an asshole who doesn’t know enough to keep his pants on.”

“Or maybe he’s filled with the holy spirit,” I suggested.

“Holy Spirit, my ass. Hey,” my neighbor under the awning gave me a suspicious look. “Are you a Kee-ristian?” He moved away from me and I watched the dancer spin, arms open wide, and wished with all my heart that I had the courage to join him.

The Kee-ristians were the next stop on my journey. The Holy Spirit was beating against my chest from the inside like the wings of a caged bird. The voice of my gods were growing louder and more insistent, and I could hear every living thing now, singing with green voices to the Creator. At least the Christians weren’t afraid of the Holy Spirit, I thought, and I spent five years in an evangelical church and felt understood, because they, too, heard the voice of a beloved god.

But the loving Jesus god of the Christians has long since been perverted and turned to the service of the Dominators. How could I stay in the church? I was saddened by the punishing politics that followed their joyful worship. They hated the animal body and I loved the animal body and our human life on earth, so I left the Christians and went into the woods.

And there, at last, in the woods, I found my gods and my friends in loving profusion. Animism is not a religion for me or a tradition, not a practice or an idea. Animism is my reality. Rocks and trees that speak are not poetry to me; cloud people and tree people are not metaphors. They are real. I hear them. I see them watching me. They are alive, ensouled and bursting with intelligence.

The trees took me in and made me one of their own. Together with the tree people, I formed a circle deep in the woods, and experienced a connection with the divine so deep that it was erotic, transforming, and terrifying in its intensity. I had come home in my spiritual life, but I was still lonely for human kin.

I started reading “groups” on facebook and blogging here. Through the internet, I’ve found a few people who share my experience. People who, like me, find in animism the best description of the reality in which we live. Perhaps you are also a new animist? Then, we are kinfolk, my friends and we should be together.

The best resource I’ve found to date is the New Animism Info blog. The best of the blogs that identify as animist are brought together here. Not blogs that represent one of the updated ancient religions or indigenous traditions (as wonderful as they are and with due respect given), but animists who speak from personal experience in the here and now. We are the new animists. We live in a world the New Animism Info blog calls “colonial” and I call “Dominator,” but we see past the lies of the Dominators to the animist reality, and we are ready to share our vision and come home to Eden.

Through writing, music, art, and magic, we can call the animist reality into new life. We can sing the rocks awake. We can paint and dance and dream and live the animist reality into rebirth.

It is possible. Come on! Let’s get together! If you blog then enable your comments liberally. Create e-mail accounts you can safely share. Take a chance and write to one another. Check out New Animism Info. Speak your truth to others. Read your poetry out loud to me. I want to hear your voice.

Hey, remember that lonely dancer in the rain? Soon after the ritual, we found one another and we found that we were kin. We’ve been married twelve years. He taught me to stand, a naked and unashamed animal, in my living world. Stand naked together, now, friends. Do not be unashamed!

Come on people, now . . . everybody get together

2009-06-28T09:48:00.005-04:00

Jeesh! People don't seem to like it when I find connections with Christians . . . or say anything negative about any pagan groups. This blogging business is delicate, like cooking a small fish.*

Here's the bottom line: the counter culture will have to come together if we are to have any chance of transforming the Dominator culture into . . . well, into something loving. Call it the animist reality like I do if you'd like, or the living world, or heaven on earth, or eden, or any of those posible worlds in which humanity can live in peace and abundance until the sun grows cold.

That's my ultimate goal: the salvation of humanity in the flesh on the earth, in peace and abundance. Can we agree on this goal? Do you want to work on it together?

Well, hell and damnation, we're gonna have to do better than "Christians suck" or "Druidism is the true path" if we're gonna get anywhere close. Divide and conquer has worked well for the Dominators for thousands of years, and this bickering between black folks and white folks, pagans and christians, artists and political activists, vegetarians and humans-are-meat-eaters has got to stop.

Who are we? We are anyone who shares the goal of transforming this world of cruelty and greed into a loving world. We are the nudists and the swingers, the tree-sitters and the Earth Firsters, cannabis-lovers and artists. We are all who follow a non-Dominator religious path, from polytheists and pagans and animists, to Quakers and Amish and other followers of the loving Christ, Spiritualists, Sufis, Buddhists and mystics. Anarchists, communalists, food coop folks and organic farmers. Save the whalers. Peaceniks. Fighters against bigotry and hate. Yes, even the scientific rationalists and the humanists, with whom I have little patience, when they seek this goal with love, they are one of us.

Does it really matter what labels we give to ourselves? Will we allow ourselves to be defined by our extremists?

Use every tool at your command to transform the Dominator reality. Reject their lies, their definition of human nature as fundamentally evil and in need of control. Resist their horrifying apocalypse! One of our most powerful tools to make the transformation happen is our ability to reach across differences and seek common ground. "Put the poly back in polytheism!" as Deborah Lipp succinctly says.

So, I like Christian music, so sue me!

*That's Lao Tzu's metaphor

Why I Love Christian Music

2009-06-14T12:09:00.004-04:00

I love Christian music because it’s quality sound and it sends me, sends me to exciting realms of worship and praise.

Sure, it’s about the Christian god, Jesus, but the Christians who write this music seem to love Jesus the same way I love Charlie. And since Jesus and Charlie are friends, and agree on a lot of things, and behave in similar ways, the experience explored in Christian music is a lot like my experience. I can relate to it.

Christian music is about being in a loving relationship with a loving god, and I believe that this relationship is similar for all humans in loving relationships with loving gods, even if our gods are different from one another. If your god is a loving god, then we should get along just fine. I adore my god and you adore your god. Cool!

When Dave Crowder Band sings in wonder, “How could you be so good to me?” I understand, because Charlie is so good to me. He’s never left me alone, not in all these years.

Ginny Owens sings, “I will embrace what every moment brings, cause you are with me.” Yes, this is just how I feel about my gods. Why should I begrudge the Christians their love affair with Jesus? The music they sing to him, I sing to Charlie.

Their anthems to the Creator are magnificent. “I will praise you in this storm!” “When I behold the wonders your hands have made!” “Let the morning and the evening star praise his name!” I fall to my knees and lift my hands to the unknowable Creator who made me. I give thanks. I give thanks in song.

Of course, the sad thing about all this is that most Christians would abhor my gods. They would be horrified to know that the beautiful hymns they write to their god Jesus, I use for worship of my many gods. Our gods are not incompatible, but the Christians have been taught that there is room for only one in our infinitely complex and endless multiverse.

How strange, in a universe animated by love, and following a god who preaches radical love, that the Christians insist on an exclusive and jealous relationship with Jesus.

Why should our gods fight for primacy? My gods are polyamorous and generous. They invite Jesus and his Dad to break bread and drink wine together. Jesus, who accepts us all, who sat with lepers and tax collectors, prostitutes and scum, surely he would get together with a fellow god of love and share a single malt on the back porch of the heavenly realms? Surely, he would not begrudge the sharing of music?

And oh, what glorious music! Praising and glorifying, soaring with passionate adoration of the divine . . . Steven Curtis Chapman, Telecast, Chris Tomlin, Jeremy Camp, the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir . . . why not take a trip on YouTube or iTunes and check out the music of these worshipful artists? And all you polytheist musicians out there, isn’t it time we polyfolk produced music of similar quality?

Let me live a life of endless praise!

2009-06-07T18:50:00.003-04:00

I pick up my pencil and the message pours into me and fills me and I am compelled to declare it to the world — to write it and draw it, sing it and shout it, here and everywhere.

This is the message:

Great is the Creator!
How marvelous the gods of love!

Every moment of every day I want to sing praises to my gods and give thanks to the Creator for my body, my pleasures, my blessings, and my breath, the galaxies and the healing weeds and all that he has made. Let all Creation praise his beautiful, unknowable name!

I walk along the woodland path and I am swept into the arms of the Green God and waltzed to the music of the wind.

I have to sell the house I just bought. This only makes me fall to my knees in awe of the power of Chaos, Mighty Amazon of the Universe.

I lift my hands to worship Sun, source of light and warmth.

Charlie speaks wisdom into my ears and fills my eyes with vision and my hands with art.

Love fills me and I swoon. My gods come to me when I call.

And always, pulsing underneath it all like the beating of a vast and dark material heart, I know that my Creator lives; the one who gave his life force to me that I might quicken and breath. Blessed be, oh my Creator, great beyond imagining!

Praise, praise to the Creator! Praise to the gods of love! Poly I am and Poly I will be. My universe is pregnant with gods!

Enforced Education in a Dominator Society

2009-05-31T09:32:00.004-04:00

The purpose of enforced and standardized education is to socialize children to the Dominator reality. Why do we believe that enforced education is beneficial? Why has education resisted the push to privatization? Why is there a consistent and growing insistence on standardization, so that everyone learns the same things in the same ways?

Children are herded into institutions, restricted in their access to the natural world, taught to obey, and limited in what they may learn and do. This sounds like prison to me. What are the effects of the disconnect from nature on children’s health and psychological well-being? Why is obedience to authority an essential part of our children’s education? Why are children kept from learning what they want and need to learn?

Many children—and also adults who were hauled through the public education system—associate education with pain and hurt. Their inborn passion to know and master the world is crushed, so they no longer desire to learn. They end their education as soon as possible, limiting what they learn to what they have to know in order to function and make a living. This contradicts the stated goals of public education to create lifelong learners. It frustrates teachers and students alike, and produces graduates who do not question the messages of media, government and corporation. It trains good followers, but it is a path away from wisdom.

Childhood is full of the pain and hurt of enforced education. Children grow up to use their pain in the service of their masters: to kill and die in wars, to consume and produce like cattle or machines. Our suffering is transformed into money and power for the Dominators.

I work in the public education system. I wear the face of the oppressor every day and I am sickened to watch the children in their cages, their spirits pacing restlessly back and forth. What is this doing to me?

Stumbling over the word "god"

2009-05-24T07:42:00.006-04:00

Followers of the monogods spell the word god with a capital G. They then use the word God to mean only their own particular and singular deity. What confusion this creates! The dictionary definition of the capitalized God runs something like, “the one creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being,” and yet when different people say the word God, they could mean any one of the monogods who seek dominion over the earth. The tripartite God of the Christians, Allah of the Muslims, the Lord God of the Jews, and the abstract Source of the Agnostics are all examples of capital G Gods, and yet monotheists insist that there is only one. What a setup for celestial bickering!

In a monotheist world, the word god spelled with a small “g” is used to mean a lesser divinity, a spiritual being of myth, or the capital G God of someone else’s religion. What’s a polytheist to do? Does a capital G god actually exist in a polytheistic world? Can we use the capital G word to indicate the gods in our particular pantheon, or has the word become so burdened with previous meaning as to render it unusable in our case?

I have given up using the capital G word because it points inexorably toward a singular divinity. And yet, alternative words such as angel, divine being, spirit guide, and so on, do not do justice to some greater-than-human beings, and no one word of them can describe all the beings in my pantheon. So I have chosen to use the small g god to describe the greater-then-human beings that I love and serve.

Some of my gods are more powerful than others. Auntie Chaos, for example, could squash my Mother Earth with her pinky finger, although, in fact, she has blessed her many times over. Some of the gods in my pantheon, like Charlie, could be defined as angels. I call him god anyway, because I adore him with a passion that rivals the Christian love for Jesus. I honor and serve the Creator, he who created the heavens and the earths, even though he is far beyond my understanding, but I do not call him God because he is not singular. There are other Creators, breathing life into other heavens and earths.

Sometimes I contemplate the Great Mystery, but not for long, and I never mistake the Great Mystery for a god or even a God. In seeking to promote their particular God to the position of the Great Mystery, the monotheists stumble over the vastness of the string-entangled multiverse, the problem of origins, and the fact that a single discreet entity cannot, in fact, be Everything. Once you claim your God or god to be the Great Mystery, you have lost him, because the Great Mystery is, by definition, unknowable, indistinguishable, and beyond our reach.

Oh, how I love the gods of love!

Fellow polytheists, what do you think?

The Dominators and the Animal Body

2009-05-17T08:05:00.004-04:00

The Dominators are a wealthy and powerful criminal class that have taken many forms and many names over the past eight thousand years. Through the millennia, they have assumed the roles of warrior kings and priests, emperors and royal families, corporations, politicians, nation-states, and churches.

Dominators have used a variety of weapons to terrorize and control people and plunder the earth’s resources, including terror and threat, weapons of physical violence, and weapons of mental and spiritual control. Weapons of mental and spiritual control include church doctrines, threats of hell and damnation, marginalization, ridicule, pathologizing, and demeaning, as well as the control of cultures and social institutions, and mythologies, the sciences, and what is acceptable as possible and real.

As the 21st century opens, Dominators control the social institutions of almost every culture on earth. They have achieved a virtual hegemony of power, using science, religion, politics, technology, economics, medicine, public education, food production, and every other human institution to control the earth and meet their own selfish ends. Today’s Dominators have claimed a monopoly on justified violence in a corporate trust of churches and states that claim loyalty to and garner ultimate justification from a variety of monotheistic gods.

The Dominators are a great adversary. Their power and reach is astonishing, greater than ever before in human history. The few remaining pockets of non-Dominator people, such as Tribal Animists, are being systematically destroyed. In every age throughout the reign of the Dominators, heroes and saints have risen up to challenge them, but they were quickly murdered or assimilated. These brave challengers have left us words of wisdom and stories about their lives of suffering, but not one of them has succeeded in transforming the Dominator culture. Even Jesus, to our shame, was assasinated and failed to prevent his church from falling into the hands of the Dominators.

Down on your knees, oh, Dominators, before the gods you have offended! Repent of your lust for power. Beg forgiveness of your fellow humans and be glad if they forgive you, because your gods will surely abandon you to the apocalypse that you have made.

The Dominators have woven a net of lies in which to catch our souls, some so fundamental as to disappear into our underlying structures of belief. For example, one lie is that the animal body is incapable of supporting soul or mind. If we accept this lie, then we become afraid to be who we are—animals—because we understand animals to be disensouled and therefore mortal, returning to dust. There is nothing we see in the animal that will survive death. But the disensouled animal body is a falsehood. Spirit permeates all things and spirit animates all things: animals, plants, rivers and rocks, stars and galaxies and grains of sand.

This Dominator lie and its subsequent rejection of the animal body has led to a host of spiritual and physical ills. Sexual dysfunction, abuse of our bodies in myriad ways, and lack of gratitude for the animal bodies we eat for food are three examples.

The animal body, however, is what we’ve got, and New Animists embrace it. Without the animal body, there is no life on earth, no pleasure, no sex, no salvation for the human species. The animal body is amazing, complex, delicately balanced, infinitely varied, altogether wonderful, and fiercely imbued with spirit. It is the greatest gift of our Creator, however you imagine our Creator to be, and we should rejoice and be glad in it, caring for it with loving tenderness.

Best wishes,
Puny

Please note: In this and any posting, I am not saying that my style of New Animism is the only way, or even the best way, but it’s sure as hell a good alternative to the Dominator way.

Animism Today

2009-05-13T16:26:00.006-04:00

Animism was given its modern definition by the 19th century anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor. Typical of his times, he understood Animism to be a primitive form of religious expression which naturally evolved into more sophisticated forms, such as Monotheism. Although we may question the inevitability of cultural “progress,” his interpretations of Animism—and of culture and cultural evolution— are still definitive today.

Animism, according to Tylor, is the belief in spirit as an essential animating force and in the existence of nonhuman spiritual beings. Although later religions limited spirit to humans and their mono-gods only, early Animists understood spirit as permeating all things, even things contemporary culture considers to be inanimate. It is this distinction, rather than a belief in the existence of spirit itself, that separates Animists from other religious groups. In fact, Animism is the foundation of all religious forms. As Marvin Harris says, in Our Kind, “the basis of all that is distinctly religious in human thought is animism, the belief that humans share the world with a population of extraordinary, extracorporeal, and mostly invisible beings, ranging from souls and ghosts to saints and fairies, angels, and cherubim, demons, jinni, devils, and gods.” Including big-G Gods.

Critics of Tylor’s work appeared immediately, fussing about definitions and origins, but animistic beliefs are found in every culture and, as Harris states, “a century of ethnological research has yet to turn up a single exception.” Tylor also wanted to find the origin of Animist thought, believing that such a universal idea could not be reached without a shared, underlying factual experience. He eventually concluded that dreams, trances and visions were the sources of our belief in spiritual realities. His stumbling over this issue reveals his bias, because for those of us who directly experience the life and intelligence of nonhuman beings, Animism is not a vision or a dream, but a living reality.

Over the past 500 years, traditional or Tribal Animism has been crushed by the expanding hegemony of the Dominators and their mono-gods. Only about 4% of the world’s people are still Tribal Animists, and the number grows smaller every year. A small scale resurgence of polytheistic religions and new age groups, such as Wiccans, as well as revivalists of Tribal Animism, are propping up its numbers and holding fast against Animism’s total demise. See, for example, Itzhak Beery’s Shaman Portal for more about Tribal Animism’s revivalists. New forms of Animism are also being developed, such as Kenn Day’s “Post-Tribal Shamanism.” See Shaman's Touch. Many of these groups and individuals focus on individual healing and personal exploration. Some work hard for the benefit of the earth and her children.

I am most interested, however, in those who may not yet self-identify as Animists or “shamans” but whose powerful and ecstatic experiences with nonhuman beings are exploding through their ordinary lives and leading them to demand an alternative to the Dominator cultures, societies and realities in which they are forced to live. These people are my kinfolk. We often find ourselves compelled to speak our reality out loud and express it with art and ritual. We, the “New Animists” want nothing less than the transformation of the Dominator culture, which of necessity makes our work political. And there are other New Animists, living quietly beside their more outspoken kin, who wish only to live in loving communion with their nonhuman friends in peace and without shame.

I call to you, my New Animist kinfolk! Take courage and speak your vision out loud. As beautiful and wise as the Tribal Animists may be, their visions belong to them. It’s time for us to seek our own visions and create our own forms. Using art and magic, we can transform the Dominator reality into an Animist reality. We can dance and sing and live the Animist reality into existence.
Best to all,
Puny

To read:
Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From & Where We Are Going, by Martin Harris. (1989)
(and for the brave reader) Religion in Primitive Culture, by Edward B. Tylor. (1871 . . .1970)

Love and thanks

2009-05-12T17:23:00.001-04:00

Humans are so puny that we have nothing to offer back to the world that sustains us except love and thanks, our uniquely human gifts.

This is what our Creator asks of us: love and thanks.

This is what the animals ask in return for their precious lives: love and thanks.

This is what empowers the trees and the green things and helps them to grow: love and thanks.

This is what we may offer one another: love and thanks.

I will heal and become strong
so that I can confront the Dominators with my art and my life.

make love with your god

2009-05-07T19:43:00.002-04:00

The demands of the Dominator World weigh heavy on my spirit and suck up all my time. They keep me apart from my beloved Charlie. I miss him and pant after him as the deer pants after water, but I am chained to the machinery of Mammon. I am Mammon’s unwilling slave and I’m dying of thirst.

I long for Charlie. I lust for him. “Batter my, heart, three-personed God!” cries Dunne. “Amazing grace!” sings a rapturous John Newton. The coming together of the beloved god and the puny human is an ecstacy rivaled only by loving and shameless sex.

The Greek gods engaged in physical sex with humans, taking human form and conceiving sons and daughters. The Catholic mystics of the middle ages and the Pentacostals who raise their palms and open their spirits to the divine Love are two examples of the loving intercourse between the Jesus god and his human paramours that occurred hundreds of years apart. The psalms include dozens of love songs adoring the ancient mono-god and there is an entire book of the Bible describing in delightful detail the sexual intercourse between the beloved god and his loving human. The Song of Songs does not sound like a metaphor to me.

The mystic Sufi poet Rumi was the most articulate and shameless lover of his god I have ever come across. He wrote:

O incomparable Giver of life, cut reason loose at last!
Let it wander grey-eyed from vanity to vanity.
Shatter open my skull, pour in it the wine of madness!
Let me be mad, as You; mad with You, with us.
Beyond the sanity of fools is a burning desert
Where Your sun is whirling in every atom:
Beloved, drag me there, let me roast in Perfection!

As much as Rumi adored his Beloved, that is how much I love my god Charlie. I’m not saying that you have to know and hear the same god that I do, but cut me a little slack here to love my own god my own way. Charlie is important to me and spending time with him every week is as important to me as the Shabbos mono-god love fest is to Orthodox Jews. Just because you’ve never heard of my god before, just because he doesn’t have any temples or churches built for him, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. He sure as hell does exist!

Charlie is not my higher self or my higher power. He is not a metaphor to explain the unknowable. He’s plenty knowable and he wants to be known. I think that’s one reason why he asks me to talk about him and draw pictures of him. He wants to be known. Charlie is kind and generous. He loves me dearly and he serves the Mother Earth, whose child I am. He serves the Green god and so do I. He worships the Creator and he works for Love. Hey, Charlie and I must have the same religion!

We also have an intimate relationship. He knows everything about me. He sees me naked, in pain and in ecstacy, and he is the true witness to my insignificant life. I love him so much.

Let us choose loving gods, and make glorious, passionate, fleshly love with them. Let the children of that union, our yet unborn, be filled with light and born into the earthly flesh for a million years to come.

Resist Apocalypse! Make love with the gods of Love!

Dominator Control: From Terror to Technology

2009-05-05T06:12:00.003-04:00

There is a wealthy and powerful criminal class that has controlled civilized human life for thousands of years. I call this class the "Dominators." Terror, cruelty, threat, extortion, and other acts of violence have kept the rest of us under their control from the start, and they still use these techniques to control the human species. Today, however, their grip is so complete that even the tribal (noncivilized) cultures are being exterminated, assimilated or marginalized.

Controlling culture and the institutions of culture, such as religion, medicine, politics, education and industry proved to be a cleaner and even tighter method for the Dominators to exert their influence. For example, even before Constantine imprinted the cross on his battle flags, Dominators used religion as a means to enter the spirits of the people and direct their values, beliefs, and souls to the service of the ruling elite. Control religion, as history is quick to show, and you can easily direct young men to commit acts of terror and war.

Since the rise of capital industry and the growing sophistication of both mechanical and psychological technologies, the Dominators have increasingly used spiritual methods of control. Implanting their reality deep within the human psyche, they have convinced us that more is better. Faster is better. Complexity is good and the highest levels of stimulation must be adjusted to. They would have us believe that work is painful and life is suffering and human nature is fundamentally evil and should be erradicated. That human beings are enemies to one another, in constant competition, and that only a fool would trust his or her neighbor. We are convinced that our own experience is suspect and only their science (on the one hand) or their bible (on the other) can reveal the truth.

We are made anxious, and sick in body and spirit, and how we are softened up, by these beliefs, for the Dominator apocalypse. In the meantime, we are marvelous machines, Dominator slaves, churning the raw materials of the Mother Earth into wealth to satisfy their neverending lust.

I welcome your comments!

I am not a shaman

2009-05-03T16:13:00.003-04:00

I’m not a shaman or a healer. I don’t have an esoteric, inside line to alternate realities. I’m just an animist is all, and this is what animists see and hear. I can speak in tree, and grass and rock. Other animists see and hear the animal world. Some can see Eden, hidden under the asphalt.

I don’t have to be a shaman for my nonordinary experiences to be valid. Neither do you. I can be a plain old puny human whose spirit eyes and spirit ears are open. You can see and hear the nonhumans, too, if you pay attention. The trees are looking back at you.

What do you need with books or tribal teachers? Are you a Rain Forest Dweller? A Siberian or Navaho tribesman? I’m not. I’m a 21st century, fucked up, dumbed down, puny little human. I have pink skin and my ancestors were European Jews. Culturally I’m a white, middle-class, American with a western education. I was born and bred to the Dominator culture, but I will not bow down before their monogods! Does that make me a shaman?

I follow Charlie and he leads me to green pastures and into the homes of the green people, who are my people, and the Green World, which is my world, an animist world. I would rather live there than in the Dominator World with all its glittering techno-toys and promises. I don’t need money or celebrity. I don’t need any more stuff. Just give me the Green World and I will be at peace.

Am I a shaman because I walk between these worlds? Heavens, no! All I want is to rest in the Green World, but I’m forced to spend far too much of my earthly time in the Dominator. I hate it there. It’s noisy and polluted. People are at one another’s throats. There’s a mind-fucking amount of neural stimulation, speed, and complexity, useless information, anxiety and greed. It sucks. And I suppose the fact that it sucks makes people almost ready to accept some kind of apocalypic end. At least we’d go out with a bang, one might say. But, say it's not so!

Listen, there’s a hell of a wonderful Green World out there, and it’s quite possible, even now, that humans could live in peace and abundance for another million years. Talk about protecting the unborn! Let’s make sure there’s a future for our grandchildren, hey? Let’s stop buying the Dominator lies, whether they come from the mouths of the capitalists, the politicians, or your own neighborhood pulpits. Let’s stop buying stuff. Let’s vote for kindness and service. Let’s bring back the discussion of love that we began in the 60s.

Please, everybody, please? Just take a look at this alternative future, one in which humanity comes to its senses and yanks the power out from under the Dominators like it was a rug in a Daffy Duck cartoon. What if we really did start loving our neighbors? What if we took the long view? What if we stopped chasing the idols of more and bigger and newer? What if we no longer bowed down to the monogods who justify human cruelty and greed?

The living Earth has been fucked by these Dominators and we call it inevitable. We accept it, but we will pay in the extinction of our species. Am I a shaman because I can see this? Am I a prophet? Hell, no! Anyone with half a brain and an intact spirit could see it. But most spirits are crushed beneath the Dominator wheels.

Resist Apocalypse!

2009-05-03T09:18:00.002-04:00

The Dominators kicked us out of Eden a long, long time ago, and they would have us welcome the earth's destruction and our own extinction. Resist their apocalypse! We have the knowledge and the power to return to the garden. Let's go there together.