2016 into 2017: Water Reflects Fire

In the Dagara tradition from West Africa, 2016 is/was a Water year. The 6 is a feminine, receptive, internal marker numerologically.

2016 is not your problem as all to many people have suggested it was. 2016 has been your blessing. 2016 has been a time where we had opportunity to gain insight from deep-seated, deeply submerged, deep water issues that plague us. We got a chance to see, to resolve, to feel...deeply.

We were deeply blessed by the resistance of Africans and others to state violence against African people,the presence and emergence of African women creatively, courageously within that and related struggles, the resistance of women and indigenous people to patriarchal and colonial violence. We witnessed a sharp rising to the surface of xenophobia, racism, heterosexism, misogyny, great lack of political clarity and vision, retrograde narratives of discompassionate exploitation and disregard for humanity and Mother Earth Herself. It's as if our shit just rose from the bottom of our socio-political sewer and we could deny the stench no more.

We were...and ARE...blessed by the sacred work at and of Standing Rock. If you don't realize the fundamental history-resolving nature of that dynamic, then 2016 actually alluded you.  You missed 2016. We have been blessed by 2016.  

And we should not miss the fact that, celebrities aside, many many many people (and species) have crossed over to the Other Side, from Brazil to Nepal to Aleppo to Chicago and beyond.  Just take a moment to go inside, feel the ocean-heavy weight of what that means. Sit in the depth of that aquatic emotional tsunami waiting to happen. 2016 reveals itself to be sacred womb pregnant with gifts of spiritual Ancestral insight.

And if we have the utter bravery to do it, we will actually weep for 2016. We will weep its passing.  We will grieve what we found out about the diamond bright treasure of humanity at the same time we had deep water reflection into the distortions of inhumanity to peoples, water and sacred earth, to the feminine divinity that birthed and constantly rebirths us all. We will grieve the pain and the often latent joy of 2016, still flowing through us as we live....and breathe....alive to see the end, the death of it, the transformative cocoon-break of it, the dissolution of it, the absorption of it, the larger spiritual river flow of it.

And the Dead do not leave us...though they do change their address.  They are available to us. Corporeally. Communicatively. Actually.  Vibrantly. And we are called...if we say we love and miss Those that have passed over, this or any year....to consider how we will carry the blessing, the gift of Their transformed, transmuted lives in our minds, our bodies, our words, our works. If Those lives meant anything, how do we integrate the best of Them into the fabric of our social becoming so They then know beyond a shadow of a doubt that They have not been forgotten?

And 2017 is a fire year. And the Dagara have observed fire as the portal to the Ancestors. They reveal Themselves, Their wisdom through this powerful element that brings light, vision and incites our passions, illuminates our dreams. 2017 is an opportunity to explore the blessings that we have been given...on purpose...by our Ancestral legacies. And while fire allows us to reduce and burn away all that we do not need, it also lights the way toward seeing our path, sparking the impulse of life into a world turned upside down by exploitation, injustice and oppression, fear and self-loathing.

The 7 marks a feminine energetic.  And we know we must support and acknowledge the divinity and primacy of that creative force, that creation story. What lies in the pregnancy of human, spiritual existence waiting to be born? Who are we yet to grow into, gifted powerfully now by the newly Ancestored energies of our icons, loved ones and faithful and flawed relations?  Our Dead are in US. Their gifts waiting to be reborn...in and from us.  We are the composite treasure of their transmuted recent and ancient lives. We are Their sacred immortality. WE are.  We. Never broken, but reconstituted by the mortar of their now timeless existence, the constantly rebuilding dynamic foundation of Their every aspiration for our transcendent greatness.

And here we stand at a precious nexus like every nexus, every crossroad presents us with space and motivation for enlightened contemplation and powerful healing choice, pondering the meaning of a myriad deaths, of painful loss and continuing mortal struggle to keep the rest of us here in love, safety, validation and compassion to finish our sacred duties upon this blessed earth, this embattled earth buttressed by the bones of our Ancients, their blood now fused with the dust of time.  

Breathe that in.

The Dead have left precisely to carry us through to our next shining moment, here at the sparkling mountain spring of this new baktun, clean cold river rushing down to bring life to All, flowing like fluid gems of sacred healing clarity...incessant...unrelenting....

Find your feet.  Keep them on the ground. Ask Them how to continue your good walk on your path of life.  Ask those who have done it before you.  And as we stand here at the juncture of 2016 into 2017, here at the anniversary of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee at the hands and Hotchkiss guns of the USAmerican colonial cavalry, remembering still that a woman gave birth to a child at Standing Rock, the greatest unification of indigenous nations in modern memory, as Africans born of brutally displaced indigenous African Mothers and Fathers struggle for meaning and liberation and peace and ujamaa in Kwanzaa, at the present moment of the continuing destruction of lives in Aleppo, in Palestine, in Congo, we are reminded that we have much to do...and much that we have been given....and that there is a wealth of wisdom in the Ancestral genius of those that have come and fought and lived and loved long before us.  

2016 was not in and of itself a problem. It was our greatest gift as we stand here in the midst of our problematic challenges, pathologies, crippling privileges and passions. Even on the largest and largely unseen level...we all got here...together...troubled...fighting...bent and broken....healing...resisting...triumphant and transcendent.  Together. Our Ancestors birthed us all into this moment.  Now.  Here.  Present...holding the blessings of the sacred water of 2016 as we see in it the growing sparkling inner reflections of the fire of 2017.

Asante, Wakale.

We walk forward.

Modernity is High on Itself: Visions from an Airplane

Now above the earth, hurtling through the sky, all too fast for my own ancient soul's ability to keep up, I look down at my Mother and see more clearly how we have insidiously imposed ourselves upon her sacred Body. As Boston gets pulled beneath me like a tablecloth leaving only dirty plates and silverware, I see the glut of houses and building, the endless scab of highway and avenue, the cutting wounds of an adolescent and unwell society carved painfully into her deity.  I see the networks of electrical firestorm that so recently turned the indigenous spirit night of peace into a constant blaring din of constantly hungered day. 

From this lost and lofty place, I can see the, I can feel the, I can smell the shitstorm of body refuse, industrial disease and anti-cultural soulid waste coursing its way through toxic veins back to the oceanic heart of the world about to arrest us off the face of Her.  It, this modern endeavor, looks so inert, but feels so overdone, so wrongly complex (like a bad website!), so powerfully arrogated. Why does everything a thoroughly modern human makes look so very much like it doesn't belong in the world of sacred life?  What happened here? And why am I so high in the air, going so fast?  Really, why?  Since when was how fast you moved through space and time the trump card to how well you moved through space and time?

Clouds smoothly step in to obscure my view of the scene of the crime, carrying the peace of Kuon, the purification of Sapla, spirits of water humbly teaching me, reminding, again, reflecting, again, the proximity of the energetic cure.  Water is the baptism from the addiction to fire...still constantly burning globe, cultural sovereignty, land,  forest, tree, grasses green, the easy possibility of hope.

Modernity is high on itself.

We have harmed Home, our home, our mother, The Mother...

....but her beauty will remain, will reflower, even after we walk silently off the precipice of industrio-digital ascendancy. Modernity seems to like high places. It's where it perceives its uber-mind to be, its G-O-Ds, its wrongly conceived as untouchable patriarchal and racial privilege.  It's how we know modernity is sophomorically upside down as those two embedded philosophical pathologies are exactly what, in part, will bury it soon far under the ground...unluckily for the Great Mother to have to accept the invasion of that last toxic gasp of man's worst faux-glittering, faux-shimmering, faux-sane, faux-sure anti-social escapade, now then far from yon dizzying heights of, flights of fancy.

Never leave Home...not when Home is Earth...and you are human.

I didn't say don't fly.  Just don't leave Earth.

(written November 2013)

Culture is Our Relationship to the Earth

Culture, in the modern context, often gets reduced to "arts" and literature and exoticized material production like clothing and spiritual items. This is limiting and dangerous as it allows those in the throes of modernity to sidestep equitable considerations of nature, land and people, allowing corporate control of lives and livelihoods, of land and commodified resources, making profane the sacred.

Culture is a dynamic of wholistic and integrated relationship between all things, between humans and their immediate environment, the land, nature and each other.  Modern industrial colonial society is anti-cultural and exploits and destroys the "naturo-spiritual (human) dynamic" that has defined human presence on Earth for over 3 million years. This is dangerous to all life as colonial capitalist control destroys earth and its ecosystems and organic human cultural relations.

Culture, to be progressive and positively transformative again, must be organic and based in right relationship to land, nature, peoples' basic and expanded human needs and All That Is.  Spirit is part of culture.  Animals and plants are part of culture. The Earth Her/Himself is part of culture. Any reduction, disintegration or dissolution of these interrrelationships is anti-culture, destructive and ultimately a negative expression of human potentiality.

Racism Is Not Prejudice + Hate

I was just pondering on the use of the word 'hate' with regard to racism. It always strikes me as incomplete as it refers to someone's feelings, not their ability to directly and negatively influence my life. Whether a person hates me is not the immediate issue.  Whether they can and do exert negative and destructive force and influence in my life, community and environment IS. 

Racism includes feelings in its vile mix, on the side of the oppressed and the oppressor, the marginalized and the privileged, the target(s) and the agent(s) of racism, but how we feel is not the primary element that affects the lives of people daily harmed by the effects and outcomes of  racism. 

Sitting in your house hating me is one thing. Sitting in your house while a group of police officers in militarized cars that you helped pay for out of the ongoing profit you extract from stolen land and resources looks for people who look like me (an African person) to harrass, detain and incarcerate is a whole other thing.

Racism IS a power dynamic, a control mechanism, a function of material and energetic exploitation that is de-energized when physical (police, military, technology) means of exerting power are pulled out of the mix, the complex of systems and structures that define this pathological and cancerous anti-social surreality...when European/white and male and other privileges and abuse are dismantled and consciously and exuberantly given up.

Racism IS prejudice plus power, not prejudice plus how someone feels about someone else.  Racism and sexism are structural, systemic, dependent on troubled and imbalanced people to actively (consciously or unconsciously) apply their life force to diminish the life force of others.

It may be ultimately appropriate to advocate for and promote the expansion of love in the world (also a work of systemic transformation, not just interpersonal romanticism ), but it is not directly helpful to continue to assert that we are in a battle with hate. We are in a struggle to observe, see, assess and transform interrelationships of power and control, of groups of people's ability and seemingly comfortable willingness to continue to exert destructive anti-cultural, inhuman "wetiko" (Jack Forbes) power and influence over other groups of peoples.

I was pondering that today.