Coyote and the Monster A long, long time ago, people did not yet inhabit the earth. A monster walked upon the land, eating all the animals–except Coyote. Coyote was angry that his friends were gone. He climbed the tallest mountain and attached himself to the top. Coyote called upon the monster, challenging it to try to eat him. The monster sucked in the air, hoping to pull in Coyote with its powerful breath, but the ropes were too strong. The monster tried many other ways to blow Coyote off the mountain, but it was no use.
Realizing that Coyote was sly and clever, the monster thought of a new plan. It would befriend Coyote and invite him to stay in its home. Before the visit began, Coyote said that he wanted to visit his friends and asked if he could enter the monster’s stomach to see them. The monster allowed this, and Coyote cut out its heart and set fire to its insides. His friends were freed.
Then Coyote decided to make a new animal. He flung pieces of the monster in the four directions; wherever the pieces landed, a new tribe of Indians emerged. He ran out of body parts before he could create a new human animal on the site where the monster had lain. He used the monster’s blood, which was still on his hands, to create the Nez Percé, who would be strong and good.
Both a creator of order out of chaos and a destroyer of order which represses creative energies, an animal being and a spiritual force, Coyote is contradictory and ambiguous, as can be seen in Barre Toelken’s description of the Navajo conception of Coyote: “There is no possible distinction between Ma’i, the animal we recognize as a coyote in the fields, and Ma’i, the personification of Coyote power in all coyotes, and Ma’i, the character (trickster, creator, and buffoon) in legends and tales, and Mai, the symbolic character of disorder in the myths. Ma’i is not a composite but a complex; a Navajo would see no reason to distinguish separate aspects” (quoted from “Ma’i Joldloshi: Legendary Styles and Navajo Myth” in American Folk Legend, 1971).
What will happen if the Republicans take back Congress?
Chaos.
What will happen if the Democrats hold on to Congress?
Chaos.
What will happen when “our” government and governments around the world finally wake up and buckle down to address the chaos?
Chaos.
What can we as individual citizens do to stop the coming chaos being ignored by the foolish humans in our government and media? What can we do to address the causes and effects of the coming chaos caused by Climate Change and the stunningly chaotic outcomes that the Pentagon forecasts as the result….
WASHINGTON – The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.
Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.
Not much.
Foolish Humans will scheme and plan and plan and scheme , busily attempting to control the future for their own selfish ends, each according to their own Very Important Ideologies. They will commission studies, frame strategies, discuss and select tactics, allocate resources, dispatch covert operatives, deploy manpower, use their technological prowess to kill from the skies and….
WASHINGTON – The floods in Pakistan have upended the Obama administration’s carefully honed strategy there, confronting the United States with a vast humanitarian crisis and militant groups determined to exploit the misery, in a country that was already one of its thorniest problems.While the administration has kept its public emphasis on the relief effort, senior officials are busy assessing the longer-term strategic impact. One official said the disaster would affect virtually every aspect of the relationship between the United States and Pakistan, and could have ripple effects on the war in Afghanistan and the broader American battle against Al Qaeda.
With Pakistan’s economy suffering a grievous blow, the administration could be forced to redirect parts of its $7.5 billion economic aid package for Pakistan to urgent needs like rebuilding bridges, rather than more ambitious goals like upgrading the rickety electricity grid.
Beyond that, the United States will be dealing with a crippled Pakistani government and a military that, for now, has switched its focus from rooting out insurgents to plucking people from the floodwaters. The Pakistani authorities, a senior American official said, have been “stretched to the breaking point” by the crisis.
ooops
What can we do to address the causes and effects of the coming chaos caused by Climate Change and foolishness of the humans who are “in charge?”
(H/T cumberland sibyl)
A Hopi Elder Speaks
“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered . . .
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.”Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time!”
“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.
“Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, Least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.
“The time for the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from you attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
— attributed to an unnamed Hopi elder
Hopi Nation
Oraibi, Arizona
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The Hopi elders words brought this to mind. I asked Deena for permission to use this stanza in a poem of my own. She gave that permission even though her poem had not yet been published. So I don’t have a reference for it; I can only make the acknowledgement.
Yet the sentiment fits the message here.
Maybe I’ll write an essay. The shortest version: I’m going to be 64. By every definition, I should be assuming the role of an Elder. If I were in India, and my kids were grown (as they are), it would soon be time to renounce being a householder and to embark on my Spiritual Journey. I’d give away my stuff, and hit the road. But look at us in the US. We don’t revere our Elders. We don’t consult with them. We don’t really take care of them by providing for them. We don’t ask them, let alone listen to them. And we certainly don’t have a ceremony or an acknowledgment for them, when we say, “Look at you, you’re now an Elder, you’ve been around for a while, and no doubt you’ve learned something that could be of benefit to all of us Please tell us.”
I don’t mind that the War Chiefs are young. And strong. And impulsive. My problem is that the Elders are not fulfilling their obligations.
understand that chaos rules, do you bother posting concerning party politics, as if that, in itself holds any hope of correcting the problems of the country.
On the one hand, Liberal pundits are telling us that government is overtaken by non-elected power and money interests and on the other hand they are promoting Democratic candidates, as if candidates coming out of a broken and dissolute political process can restore 18th Century reason.
Misty eyed myths are of no use to closed minds that deny the reality that electoral politics is a conservative construct. Parties are enemies in the same way that fighting dogs are enemies.
There is a non-partisan basis for unifying community action that deserves everyone’s time and money. Parties and individual candidates do not. That is where the grass roots action is, these ‘progressive’ drives are vote marketing for political dominance, the so called grass roots efforts are contrived with no basis for predicting outcomes.
I vote for Democrats because they offer the best of a bad choice. That is the most effort that deserves.
can share a cathartic, spiritual event. IMHO, it often happens in the chaos of man’s journey. But there must be an impact that is transformative, that redirects the road ahead. It is very, very difficult, because often tools for survival have been stored along the old road, albeit a dead end. Spiritual courage must outweigh the fear of giving up the investment in the old road.
This courage is not symbolic, linguistic or mathematical. We must face the ineffable reality underlying our descriptions of it. It means coming face to face with ourselves. Yes, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for, stripped naked of our fears and recognizing the cosmic gift of life that has been given to all people.
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sorry, cant explain…
As Jefferson stated so succinctly nearly two centuries ago:
This would suggest that for many in this country the following quote would now appply:
The recent poll informing us that 18% of U. S. citizens believe that Obama is a Muslim seemed to be missing at least two important pieces of additional data..
1) How many of those 18 per centers plan to vote in November?
2) How many of those 18 per centers also believe the stories leading up the election of 2008 that Obama was closely tied with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?
The first question might provide a sense of the degree to which this perception may influence upcoming elections.
Regarding the second question, please consider the following from the wikipedia article about Rev. Wright:
Are we to believe that Mr. Obama underwent a recent conversion to Islam, or that he has been a Christian Muslim or a Muslim Christian all along?
Although I haven’t been able to listen to progressive talk radio as much as I’d like lately, I have yet to hear a single talk show host raise these questions. Are they missing something, or is it me?
Perhaps even more disappointing, another 43 per cent aren’t sure what religion Mr. Obama belongs to (i.e., Christian, Muslim, Wiccan, atheist, etc.). This would suggest that the Rev. Wright story didn’t convince very many people or that memory loss is running rampant in this country.
Anyone else think the Amaerican Psychiatric Association should consider adding another diagnostic category to the DSM-V when it is published — mainstream news media- induced amnesia?
She went out to pee and in under a minute he grabbed her up and took her away to feed his babies.
It’s the way of the world now, coyotes in cities.
We carry on even though it hurts like hell, the coyote and us.
I will live my life in a way that is good, and hope that I have passed that on to my children.
I’m not afraid, but I am resigned. There will be adaptation until there is no more adaptation to be made.
Just like the real life coyote that ate my cat.
without cracking some corporate salmonella eggs.
Activist Guy <–agent of anarchy. (It’s not chaos!)
I’ve lately been pondering the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics. No, not the creationists’ version in which your refrigerator wouldn’t work, but the real one that says that to create order in a region, large or small, of the Universe, the total amount of chaos in the surrounding regions must increase. Or, said another way, if you’re going to cool something down, you have move the heat somewhere else, it doesn’t just disappear, and the work itself that you do to move it also adds its own heat to the total.
On a scientific level, this sort of means that each of us consumes order and manufactures disorder in our environment merely by thinking a single coherent thought, or eating a potato. To live, we must shed the heat of our metabolism into our environs. Increasing non-local disorder or “chaos” in return for localized order is an undeniable property of the Universe in which we live and breathe and have our being.
It is hard to see how this law of hot and cold would, strictly scientifically speaking, make any real philosophical difference on the macro level of inter-human relations on the scale of our conscious reality, but it does seem to speak to a tendency that is favored in the Universe…maybe even at scales we don’t ‘grok’?
The monkey king, Anansi, Br’er Rabbit all kinds such creative spirits. Even when victimizing some hapless human, their defeat in any story involves their intended victims becoming even more clever than they.
We need more clever chaos, not a surrender to it.