There was a gardener I knew
who understood what she was doing
and gave her seeds to plant
in the dead of night

There was a carpenter I knew
who built a home out of trees
that still, to this day, grow green

There was a painter I knew
who wrote it all down
and gave back for all the world to see

And the world took the painter
and hung her up high
for a little while,
just for the novelty

But there are always wall-builders,
stone smiths and witch-burners,
afraid of what they would see

So the world took the paintings
for cannon-fodder
burned the letters right in the street

And the world took the carpenter
and strung him up good
because you can’t live in something so green

But the mystic I knew
still gathers dying flowers

And the gardener I knew
still tends them for hours

And the carpenter I knew
built more living towers

And the painter I knew–

she’s in the garden
growing flowers
from her belly.

Check out today’s song of the day: The Road. I wrote it almost exactly a year ago, after reading Cormack McCarthy’s book by the same name. Hope you enjoy. That book made me cry like a small child.

In one experiment, he took random subjects and had them role-play in a fictional government, so that some would have positions of power (aka prime minister) while others would be peons, like in the previous experiment. But other groups would, for instance, be asked to vividly describe a time when they held a position of power, in an effort to get them into the same mood they experienced when they were in that role. No one involved knew what the experiment was trying to uncover.

Later the subjects were given a questionnaire with gray-area moral questions (such as, is it OK to exceed the speed limit if you’re late for an appointment). After just that brief period of feeling powerful, the role-playing prime ministers were more ready than the peons to say they would bend the rules if they needed to. But when asked other hypothetical questions that tested whether they thought it was OK for other people to skirt the rules, the prime ministers were harder on the rule-benders than the peons.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18777_5-scientific-reasons-powerful-people-will-always-suck.html#ixzz11jSRMpPI

How about that, now? Think you’d be able to stand it if you were given an inordinate amount of power? Would anyone?

How do we, then, create a society wherein all beings are equally powerful? How do we also, then, given this great responsibility of power, controlour tendencies to abuse power once it is attained?

I’ve often thought about this if, in the slight chance, that anyone would like my songs/poems/art/music enough for me to attain some level of fame. If it was a Lady Gaga/Brittany Spears level of fame, fuck, I’d shave my head too, and then run screaming into the Himalayas and never be seen or heard from again.

I honestly have no idea how I would behave if I were given all the power in the world. I pray that it would be just, but something nags me, saying don’t you know, don’t you understand, if it were you, you’d orchestrate wars, cause famine and genocide, and be corrupt to the bone, just like all the glorified mobsters in international banking, arms sales, and global geopolitics.

It is also interesting to note, that in the last part of the article, it mentions that people who were denied power or placed in powerless situations tended to add to their own powerlessness.

So what is the answer? Empower yourself with knowledge? Seek the truth, but don’t follow leaders? Be your own leader and always make sure you have someone checking your power so that you don’t turn into Hitler?

She awoke in the deep black silence of the old house knowing how to activate the beacon. The dream still lingered; attach the copper wire here, replace the wires in this section, and more than anything, the strange syllables she now knew would charge the entire apparatus. If she could remember them. They sounded older than Enochian, different from the recordings Crowley had left of how to call out the sacred names. There was something more ethereal, more alien, about the way they were pronounced in the dream. She knew it would work.
It had been two weeks since she’d found the house of her dreams; the house that had followed her at night, house of changing stairways, rooms that appeared and disappeared at will, house of its own mind. The house that had grown more clear and prescient since she’d been moving, since she’d been traveling, since everything in society had collapsed and people had been forced into living from day to day, scooping up canned goods, looting, trying to survive. Since time had changed. Since dream-like houses and strange voices in people’s heads had become the norm, not the anomaly, although they were still only discussed in hushed voices, far away from the light of barrel fires and tent cities. It was the only thing she dreamed about, and it was time. It surprised her that the house was uninhabited already, although few things truly surprised her since the Shift. She’d been squatting in its first story, exploring the changing rooms during the day and staying quite away from them at night. But now she knew the passage had to be opened. She rolled out of her makeshift bed of blankets and coats. There was half a candle by her side. She lit it, and walked down the hall to the second story staircase.
As she ascended, the dream came back in more vivid detail. The tall ones, the grey-white shadows, she called them, chanted the innumerable names of potential energy into her skull. They grew louder with each step. The symphony of bells, bells that sounded simultaneously like the vibrato of strings and the pulse of singing bowls, thousands of them, filled the house and her mind. She turned the corner of the staircase and ascended then to the third story, music and voices rising as her feet paced out the rhythm, slow and plodding, reminiscent of a great wheel turning, grinding gigantic galaxies into singularity.
The top story of the house consisted of one octagonal room, twelve feet in diameter, with windows on all sides and a sun roof at the top. There was a ladder from the second story (or was it third, now? The house was dreaming), and she began to climb. The music, the singing white shadows, all that she had feared as a child and all that she had loved, pulled her upward. She knew now where to find the lever to open the sun roof, which would allow the beacon to radiate up into the sky. She stepped up on the solid redwood floor and smiled in relief; the crystal in the center of the room pulsed with sound. It wasn’t just in her head, it was coming from the giant rock, thing of the earth, a crystal amplifier better than any speaker system in the world.
Activate the beacon. Her hands went to work as though they had done their duty a thousand times before. She was no machinist; even in the days before time had changed, she had always left the mysteries of electricity and machines to her husband, who was gifted at understanding invisible forces. What she conceived of in her work as an artist, he could build; what he dreamed of as a machinist, she could visualize and create on paper. Thinking of his hands, how tenderly they would have caressed the ancient wires of the device around the crystal, she began to cry. Long, hard sobs wracked her lungs as she thought of the last time he’d held her, the last time she’d wanted to be held by any man. He had been so different from everyone else, so giving when people had come looking for food, giving shelter and laughter and healing to them. He was a survivor in the world before the Shift, but few had survived when the plague came. She’d been pregnant; one day she’d awoken bleeding, and it had been shortly thereafter when the effects of the virus appeared in her beloved.
“I’m sorry, please forgive me,” he’d said, coughing, the pestilence which had swept across the land devouring his immune system.
“I don’t care, just promise that we’ll find each other again.”
“You know we will. There is no time left, only dreams. I love you, and I’ll be with you, even in dreams, until we can be together again.”
She tried hard not to allow the tears to fall into the wiring, and to keep her calm. When it had first happened, she’d thought about just going off a cliff, or using the knife, or walking into a firefight when the United troops arrived to bus off one clan or another into the camps. Quarantine, they said. For their own good. She actually tried that once, but was pushed out of the way by a sympathetic soldier and told to take cover in a forest that the troops were too afraid to investigate. You don’t want to go to the camps. She’d spent a month out there in madness, talking to ghosts, screaming at demons, and grieving. She’d eaten nothing but worms and some fermented berries, vomiting ever few days, but somehow remained alive. Creekbeds would turn from rushing fresh streams into ditches bogged down with human waste and bodies. Spinal cords still leaking hung from trees where she thought she saw vines. This was life after the Shift; ghosts and dreams seemed to have more substance in the waking world than they had before. When her eyes were open, she could see all the horrors of the world reflected in an impaled animal on a twisting branch or an abandoned traincar loaded with rotting corpses; she could scry its miseries in the carcasses of wild game. But after a couple of weeks, the dreams of the lighthouse snuck back into her nightmares and gilded them with a painful beauty. And though she screamed at the unknown God who saw all of this and did nothing, screamed at him to return her beloved to her, her husband only came to her once during that time. It was the first dream where she’d seen the outside of the lighthouse. It was decrepit and strange. She stood outside of it, afraid to go in.
“You know, you cannot leave this world until you do what you have to do.” Her ghost-dream-husband said.
She erupted with rage. “Why? Why can I not just go easily, now, and not suffer in this horrible place? I’ve suffered enough, I want only to be with you and not be in this world any more.”
“We are not the music itself, only the instruments.”
She emerged from the woods a crone. There had been little joy left in her heart, but that joy was the only precious thing she had; that there was a way to get back, that she did have something to do, and that her dreams would carry her through the motions until she was once again free.
Her tears stopped. She aligned the last wire, tweaked the last bolt, and looked at the thing of beauty under the open roof.
She spoke to nothing. “I know you hear me. I know you know that I have heard you. Please, if there is anything that makes any sense anymore, let it be this. I love you.”
Then she folded her feet under her thighs and sat upright, allowing a voice that was not hers to arise out of her belly. She echoed the chant which rang in her mind, which radiated from the crystal, which had sat dormant in her belly for her entire life, untraceable, unspeakable, until spoken.
The crystal began to glow. It pulsed with every breath she drew, and she drew out her heart in each chant. Then the light from the crystal formed into a single pillar, reaching up to the sky, growing into a miles-long beacon. The sound was deafening, and singular. She saw, felt, and heard the white shadows singing in unison.
I know the magick of the Arc, she thought, the secret of the pyramids, the aleph and the Philosopher’s Stone. It is a brazen disregard for the definition between dream and reality. It’s finally broken through. And I am not alone in it, I am not the only one, I am not the only one who will hear this, who has been dreaming of it…I am not alone, and neither are the dead, or the dreamed of, or any other…I am one instrument in a symphony, and I am the symphony…
Her body was found weeks later by those who had heard the song and knew it was time to gather to it; she was preserved by the blast of energy, sitting still with her feet tucked under her thighs, eyes frosted with tears, arms open in eternal embrace.

The Demigods will be playing many shows this year, hopefully building up to a tour next year. You can see our current listings at our Myspace page. Please support us by purchasing our music DIRECTLY from us at our DIY-record label website: http://www.theglobalreality.com/fml-recordings. We’re working on a demo for the Demigods and hope to be able to record a full-length album by next spring. Your support is vital to our ability to produce more music, so please donate or buy directly from us. Thanks.

Delphi’s Solo Project: The Threshhold Sea

I’ll be working on a solo album project, tentatively called The Threshhold Sea. This will be my fourth solo release, and I’m really excited about releasing these songs. There will be songs on this album that have never been released and will not be played (very often, at least) live at the Demigods shows. I want this project to be something intimate, delicate, accoustic, and very different from the sounds we’ve created with The Demigods.

I’ll be working with photographer Dee Hill, who did the following portraits of me in her house and garden, to tell the stories of these songs. The Threshhold Sea is a line from one of my songs, “The Road,” which was my reaction to the novel of the same name by Cormack McCarthy. Most of my other songs are from my own first-person political perspective, like “School Without Walls,” or “33rd Degree.” By now, you’re all pretty used to my political leanings, exposing the esoteric priest class movements underlying world events. This next album, I want to do something different. I’ve started pulling songs up from someplace else, it seems–from the voices of women watching the Western world be pulled up from under their feet, the earth around them dying in the days of a healing and splintered, newly-industrial United States. Carnival girls too, also make an appearance, as do intergalactic pirate ships and skeleton circuses.

Here’s a small taste of what is to come:

(untitled new song)

I hear the locusts on the wind
great Blue Norther comin’ in
Rockefeller stole our land
and the railroad took my sons
I hear the horses on the grass
hooves beating like breaking glass
they know these old machines will
one day never run

What have we done?
What have we done?

I passed a Cherokee Girl today
with a look of torture on her face
the blood of conquest for the cities of the sun
And the slaves are free, so they say
still endentured to the ways
of a backwards master who enslaves
with debt and guns

What have we done?
What have we done?

And my gypsy great-grandmother
I brought over with my sixteen year old sister
is still in New York on the assembly line.
And my Irish fatehr died
a year before she arrived
the coal mines did their time
and the mountains claim their blood

And all my lovers left
to conquer the uncharted West
like a whore in vain
trying desperately to find some love

What have we done?
What have we done?

Ancient Samarkand, where Kharitidi travels to learn the techniques of healing through the exploration of the dreamstate, is located near Usbekistan, and has been one of the ancient centers for dream workers throughout the centuries.

This book will curl into your consciousness and make you face your fears; death, abuse, trauma, guilt, and suicide are all addressed in this text; not with clinical tediousness, but with lasting and powerful storytelling.

A unique aspect that Kharitidi delves into, or continues to find herself emersed in, are the true mysteries: Shambala, underground kingdoms, the shamanic connection to Sirius as described in mythologies throughout the world; all key roadstops along the journey of liberation of our soul’s imprisonment in our awareness. I highly recommend her other book, Entering the Circle, which was her first autobiographical description of her experience with Siberian shamanism.

One of the things I appreciate the most about Kharitidi’s work is that nothing seems forced, faked, or sensationalized. She is not giving you an end-all solution to your problems. She makes it clear that psychiatric, and especially shamanic, healing is an extremely difficult, painful, and involved process. There are no simple answers presented and the work described in her books requires that the initiate or healing patient go through very challenging mental, and sometimes physical, change. She is not selling snake oil here, but revealing what she has been blessed to learn from a very small group of working shamans.

Take the ride, enter the circle, and walk with the master of lucid dreams. You will not regret it.
Kharitidi’s Website: Cliff House Publications

Journey: Four Stars (out of Five)
High Weirdness: Four Bats (out of Five)
Truth: Five Stars