Children of the Wasteland

Back-dated, time-traveled, and arrived at your windowledge.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Can’t shake the dawn
Dawn, curling its toes around humanity
the disengenuous, the tenative
humanity
who shrinks from difficulty like a snail from salt
the solid rock bite too strong,
raises her voice,
She says, look what time it is
here in the unfleshed houses
You bathe your bodies in scent and status
to remind yourself to forget
how hard it is
when you live by the land
how lovely it is
to have no posessions
how strange it is
to be a new kind of shaman
with all your trappings of success.

You see, my children suffered.
The Dawn’s children took their meals when I administered them
and took their water from my consent.
You tap the earth, and rightly so
but you’ve forgotten what it is to know the sweet taste
of spring
after a winter of suffering
and what it is to know the morning
after the longest night of the forest.

Dawn looked sharply at the river running through her,
the silver snake twining, spinning new stories
snake of knowledge biting, snake of mercurial ink,
messenger, winged serpent on the stone.
Snake River, she said, rise up in me
Rise up in my children and remind them
that the Matrix may have them, that Paradise might be Lost,
but that you can’t take the dawn’s warmth
from the winter frost
and you can’t shake the snow
without my light
rising
rising
rising up right.

riday, December 12, 2008

Another world
I dreamed of these ruins of a carnival and an old house in the desert, like recent ruins, but they’d been dried with sand and time.

Which really isn’t much different from the way things are here. When a building project goes under or a mall isn’t making enough money, it’s just left to rot, there is no infrastructure to tear it down, leaving this weirdly apocalyptic world next to pristine marble mansions and gardens that rival Nebuchadnezzar’s.

I went to the Red Sea yesterday and thankfully, a world does exist beneath the desert. You get quite a sense of just how much of an ocean floor the desert really is when you’re over here…miles and miles of flat sand with sparse vulcan hills flicking off the sky in defiance. The ocean is amazing, once you swim out past where all the coral has died and see the last living thing before the big drop. It looked just like Finding Nemo, all the fish were intensely colorful and the rocks swam with the current…like hair moving on a giant stone head.

This is incredible until you realize that every single ecosystem in the ocean is dying, and it is a direct result of our influence. When you swim out there, you forget about things going on on the land. The madness of religion, the political pandering, the shallow view of humanity that’s expressed in our insane desire for the material. You forget that all of this could be over in a second, that no politician ever follows through with the promises they make, and that the world is in a state of extreme unbalance.

You forget, and you remember, too.

You remember that it wasn’t that long ago that we had to swim out to sea to catch our food, that we made the most of each day because life was much shorter, that we lived through our myths and that a rite of passage was essential to each person living in the culture. You remember that a fish is just a person is just a planet is just a star system in a galaxy floating along the reef of a vast, vast universe…you remebmer that the stars are plankton, a whale is a nebula, and that the deepest Mariana Trench, to a tiny fish, is no where near as massive as the supermassive black holes that spin all of creation around its dark unknown.

For these memories, I am grateful. But like Odysseus, who was tempted by the beautiful Calypso of the Sea, who would have chosen him among all men as her lover forever, and whom he turned away because his heart was back in Ithaca, the Sea can’t make me forget everything. This is the second Full Moon here for me, second since that one in October that changed everything, that keeps my heart in Ithaca even when I’m out in the land of the Lotus Eaters gathering knowledge from the old world.

Love you all, miss you. Six more moons to go.