Tag: DD new wave

Dec 11 2010

Power to Represent

Photobucket

In his speech yesterday, Bernie Sanders spoke of (and I am paraphrasing here) he spoke of needing his fellow citizens to back him up so that he could represent us.

Representing your constituents is a power in and of itself.

We have certainly seen and felt the power of those who represent the rich and powerful in this country.  Their constituents pay a great deal of attention to their representatives.

Our guys?  Not so much.  And often for very good reason.  The dynamic, for one thing, is very different.  The rich constituents are used to succeeding, they truly do buy governmental power.

We may convince some reps of our POV, but we usually don’t have the means or sometimes even the skills, to transfer our power as citizens to our representatives in a way they can use to counter the power of the other constituency.

I am speaking literally here.  Power is not an abstract thought, it is a real force in this universe, and we all have it whether we abuse it, use it, hide it or throw it away, don’t matter.

Anyway, I give Bernie credit for knowing where his power comes from.  He knows it viscerally.  There are probably some others in Congress, and in state and local government now who know that the same way.

I am heartened that me and my fellow citizens are now aware, in whatever capacity we have, that this kind of power may take longer to amass, but once people are brought together, the represented supporting and informing the representative, and the representative allowing that power to come forth, to truly represent the former, there is no power that can withstand it.

Dec 08 2010

Ding Dong, The Left is Dead! (Warning, very depressing!)

(Okay Kidz! I am in better shape and sat down to write again, yay! This is what happens when my brain is halfway between politics and spirituality, lol, and I just let it flow!)

The political Left that is. Us Dirty Fucking Hippies are still alive…and are or soon will be heading back into insurgent mode. Sniping from the hills, taking what prisoners we can, if we are lucky we may even be able to shoot down a chopper or two.

But from jbou, (haha) to kos and Keith, to Nancy Pelosi and Hollow Reid, and everyone in between, everyone on the political left has just been dismissed from the conversation.

The Macro Worst Godammed Thing about this pivotal moment in political history….is that Obama did not even talk to Pelosi and Reid before making a deal with the Devil Republicans.

He bypassed, and gave nary a thought to not doing it, the entire Left Wing of American Politics in his froth mouthed screaming headlong rush into the arms of the Daddy Party.

It was not just YOU who he emphatically and (breaking The Angry Black Man Rule) angrily called a Sanctimonious Purist, it was, by not even consulting the Establishment Dems, everyone even marginally on The Left. We do not matter. Our positions and policies do not matter. Our opinions, the opinions of the only group of people who have been proven to be continually correct about fucking everything, do not matter.  

Dec 05 2010

Wild Yoginis

Photobucket

Wild Yoginis

Wild awareness,

up and up and up we go,

We’re willin’

As they say in the West

You were called

Red Haired Dakini

by someone who

knew what that meant

In New Orleans

you led the puja, we chanted,

Avolokitesvara, Chenrezig,

and then we walked down

Bourbon Street together.

You bought one of those giant

neon colored iced alcoholic slurpees.

We practiced every day

and opened up to the Universe

like crazy yoginis.

Dec 04 2010

Wherein I Glorify my Prudishness

Photobucket

Lately I’ve noticed in my blogosphere wanderings the big controversy over President Obama’s balls.

I can’t even believe I wrote that!  Bleeeccchhhh!  Ewww.

I am really not interested, outside of my love life, in anyone’s organs of any kind.

I lament the loss of real privacy, which is an essential part of intimacy, one of the more pleasurable experiences in this crazy life.

Dec 02 2010

Today is Mine

Photobucket

Today’s my birthday, and was a strangely rainy day in the Big Apple.  I felt like going to work, which was bizarre in and of itself.

I like birthdays, the ego gets a holiday and can run free!  Free at last!  Hee.

In this moderen age, we can self-publish.  So that’s easy right there.  Boom!  Instant connection to cyberworld.

Anyhoo …

Dec 01 2010

Experiencing Reality

Photobucket

Most every spiritual system, be it institutionalized religion or various strains of spiritual practice that have survived the millennium in one form or another, all of them say something about the nature of reality itself.

The assumption being that we turn towards religion or spirituality because we have just finally said, “jesus, I just don’t know what’s going on any more and I’m not going to lie about it to myself any longer.”  Yes, pun intended.

Anyhoo, as my ma used to say.

Sep 11 2010

Washington Dysfunction Has Deep Roots

Across the board frustration at Washington, DC, will characterize this November’s elections.  The question on the minds of many is why, despite the promises to the contrary, nothing gets done and the situation gets worse and worse with every passing year.  To answer this question, one first needs to examine Washington culture in detail.  To begin, it is insular, frequently secretive, and suspicious of outsiders.  Capitol Hill dictates a more or less common mindset among everyone who lives here.  And, in all fairness, one really needs to get involved on the inside to totally understand its riddles.  I firmly believe that reform is possible, but, on the difficult matter of a solution, the analogy I always use is that of the Gordian Knot of Greek mythology.  This was an impossibly entwined knot that was eventually undone by a bold stroke of the sword, rather than through a probably hopeless desire to devote hour upon hour in the hopes of eventually untying it.    

Sep 07 2010

Personal Inner Strength and Collective Action

I wrote a little diary on Friday urging people on the left towards what is often called self-realization or living in the now. I do that because, ironically, it is the basis of the warrior spirit. To be focused and centered and at one with the yourself with no-thought is an important component of the samurai code. To be effective politically this spirit needs to inhabit the culture of the left.

Without a solid basis for action both in the personal sense and in the philosophical sense nothing can get done and progressives are doomed to gnash their teeth at having no say in the politics of this country. So far, in this decade, the left has, other than a source of funds for Center-right politicians, disappeared from power. There’s a game being played but the left isn’t in that game. Why? Because few understand what power and politics really is. I’m not sure how it happened maybe its that so many on the left buy into the American Exceptionalism cult maybe it’s just the decline of courage that is a general trend in this society.  

Sep 04 2010

Revolution Through Good Vibrations?

This feels like a crazy time. Almost nothing political in this country seems to make sense. I feel a little crazy too. Maybe this whole diary is nuts but it comes from my heart.

I think there are reasons for this crazy time here are a few of them:  

  1. There is little correlation between what is reported in the mainstream media and anything we might agree to call “reality”. This fact is true because there has been a deliberate attempt to mislead the public through mind-control techniques which are partly engineered and has partly emerged from the logic of public relations and advertising.
  2. We have,right now, a population that is, for the most part, addicted to “entertainment” and amusements almost as if they were the essence of life. This creates a need for meaning as a matter of fantasy. If it feels cool then it is true or desirable. We take positions on public policy, for example, based on messages from our lower brain. While this is normal for human beings the fact that the stakes are so high right now makes this a catastrophe. We are headed for a world described by the movie Idiocracy
  3. Those people who ought to know better and who have had a liberal education and are reasonably cultured have lost, as Yeats said, “lost all conviction.” In other words the educated are dealing with the influence of modernism and the scientific view of the world where you cannot, by definition, be convinced of anything. You must hold all judgement until you have all the facts and it is hard to know when that point arrives. So the point gets pushed somewhere far away and that becomes a habit. Ultimately this form of modernism is value-neutral. It is hard for a modernist or post-modernist to say “here I stand” even when the question is to abolish the modernist project. This can be seen by the astonishing quiet on the part of the American intelligentsia (other than derision and wry asides, with some notable exceptions) in the face of several decades of active and unrelenting work on the part of the right to institute a return to religious fundamentalism, American Exceptionalism and feudalism with all its comforting certainties.

Jul 13 2010

Let it Be

I’m moving away from thinking. Not that thinking isn’t useful but, rather, that it tends to take up too much space in my brain and limits my ability to perceive. The problem with out of balance thinking is that it feeds “stories” and makes the ego stronger (I’m right and you’re wrong, or they’re wrong). We need a balance and I find balance by focusing on this moment right now–and that’s the only time I feel truly happy and sane.  

Jul 03 2010

A Bold Notion

I read in the New York Times today about one of the strange twists of drama Tibetan Buddhism is going through since coming out of its millennial seclusion.

The way it goes is that you have a teacher who is a highly realized master, enlightened, and so forth, and because they have these attributes, they have the power to choose to come back for another lifetime, or many lifetimes, in order to help sentient beings.

That is not a notion confined to Tibetan Buddhism or any other flower of Buddhism.  Since The Matrix came out, popular culture in the West has dug the reality trip, as well, yah oh yah.

But the way the Tibetans would find out where the realized teacher had been reborn was pretty unique and powerful in its own way.

Miraculously, these adepts would usually have the time to write a letter, to be opened at their death, and the letter would have clues as to where he could be found, reborn in an auspicious coincidence where these clues could provide a good result.

It was a spiritual treasure hunt.  The search itself was a lesson with its own traditions of adventure and illumination, and was a very interesting test to be given from a revered teacher who had just left this world physically, or at least that is the phenomenon presented, the appearance.

If done right, this trip to find the teacher, using the teacher’s last written test, is a real teaching no different than the ones which led to the students now having to find their teacher again.

Jun 27 2010

Rain falls in Imladris

The year 1998 was the year of eternal autumn for me.  Now, it feels like those days are here again.

It’s raining here.  Water world, Caladan … Global warming run amuck.  Is here the last bastion of humanfolk?  The last bastion of the free people of middle earth?

Our climate is changing.  I have lived here all my life, and I can feel it.  As the economy dredges, one hundred years to a halt, here, the Rocky Mountain High, is becoming a temperate rain forest.

And I think .. Rivendell.  The autumn leaves swirl.  From my childhood, I can smell the smoke of burning leaves.  Burning pine needles as our forests turn brown with the ravages of the pine beetle.  Burning leaves.  It’s a smell from my youth, from innocuous and unknowing people and causes, plying the results of their uncaring into the atmosphere.  But I remember it fondly, alongside the acrid diesel of the airport.  The end of days, the burning leaves, the hubris of human technological triumph.  Twinned in complex carbon compounds.

Last refuge in the dying light.  Perhaps.  Perhaps elsewhere.

Seven billion people.  And callousness.  The earth has 7 times 70 billion ants .. but they work together, in colonies, and the bones of their evaporation feeds the earth.

Rain fall.  Light grows dim.  The comfortable grab the remaining tidbits in the dregs of the hot afternoon, while clouds build and those inclined yell at them.

How will we survive the dying of the light?  Will we make greenhouses, to feed the last few?  Will we establish a bastion against the darkness?  Will we stand?

Load more