And the Sermon Today Is...

I spent an hour in church today.

Oh, don't worry; not THAT kind of church.

My church.

The Church of Eternal Change.

It's down a path that's hidden so well even I can't find it on the first pass. The boys have offered to trim it up some, but I told 'em, "Don't you dare!"

To get to the church proper takes navigating a steep leaf-covered slope, but there's a tree covered in poison ivy on one side and a holly tree covered in spiny leaves on the other side to hang on to, and if you still slip on the leaves, the needle-sharp nuts of the sweet gum tree overhead will slow you down some. Texas. Gotta love it.

And I do.

I love the soft even clearing betwixt the slope and the creek. Most of the creek lines are stark and abrupt; steep slope and then creek with no gentleness in between, the creeks cut directly down about 20 feet from the rest of the property and weave a path seemingly mapped out by drunken lightning.

But this one spot is different.

It's different from the rest of the creek lines and it's different from any other place I've ever been.

It's mine.

Let me rephrase that. I'm its. I belong to the place- the place belongs to no one.

I felt it the first time I set eyes on this place- from the road and peering beyond the locked gate. I knew it was back here.

My church.

The clearing is grasses and leaves and poison ivy but also ferns and mosses and stands of inland sea oats. The clearing is never mowed but never tall and overgrown.

There are pines and sweet gums and dogwoods and hollies. Oaks and cedars and elms. Mimosas and honeysuckles and Virginia creepers. Prickly pear cactus peer over the top of the bank, shy of the water.

The creek itself is shallow and narrow, but spring fed and ice cold all year round, no matter how tiny drought may render it. During violent storms it rises to about 2 ft deep and widens to about 6 ft across, whirling and twirling whitecaps and detritus in a brief episode of channeling the Mighty Colorado that lasts all of about 24 hours before it magically returns to normal.

It's not really a creek at all. It's a 'branch'.

When we bought the place, I was telling the man at the feed store about it and he knew right where our new place was. Said that there used to be a natural swimming hole (where my clearing is now?) back years ago that all the area kids knew about since it stayed freezing cold even in a Texas August when everything including giant Lake Palestine is peed-in bathwater warm.

I asked what the name of the creek was.

He told me it was Deadman's Branch.

I thought 6 year old Alec was going to faint straight away.

All the way home, he wanted to know why. "Why is it named 'DEADman's Branch??? Is there a hanging tree there? Who died there? Will there be ghosts? I don't want to move there. Give it back. I'm not moving there!"

I called Billy at the feed store and thanked him for scaring the bejeebus out of my son.

I asked him why the creek is called Deadman's Branch.

Billy laughed solid for seemingly an hour before he could catch his breath enough to explain, "It's not DEADman's Branch, it's Dedmon's Branch- it starts one road over in a spring on old Mr. Dedmon's place".

And there's a tree. It's a pine like hundreds of other pines on our place and millions of other pines in East Texas. Not the biggest pine or in any way distinctive. But it's where I sit. I sit on the ground with my bare toes rooted in the pine needles and leaves on the soil and my back straight up against my tree. When the wind blows I can feel her creaking and swaying behind me.

The church is ever changing. Depending on the season, the weather, the time of day, the recent rainfall, whatever life is ebbing or flowing, winging, hopping, climbing or swimming at that particular moment I'm never alone. The congregation is ever-present and ever-celebrating.

Always I can pull energy out of the air, up from the earth, through my ears and eyes and nose and always I can release all the pent-up shit that accumulates in an artificial society beating to a mechanical clock and I can see it waft into the air, float on down the creek, terminate in the ground like electricity.

I ask and I promise.

I ask for patience and strength and I promise to care for this planet and those people who cross my path.

It's a prayer but not a prayer.

I'm not visualizing 'anyone' to pray to because I don't have to.

I'm part of the cycle; the everlasting change. I'm here for but a moment and I'm no better than any other tiny speck on this earth.

Mother Nature is benevolently cruel, filled with disinterested drama and indifferent passion. All of us are born, live, die and are recycled over and over and over again (whether or not you believe in souls, our physical beings are only organic matter after all) and that's not depressing to me, it's a comfort.

There's nothing evil about it and nothing dismal. We may be insignificant but we're none of us pointless.

I can access the energy around me because we ARE energy- everything we do, every person we meet, every word we say has meaning and makes a difference.

I will make a difference because we all make a difference and the only question is will my tiny spark help others or hold them back?

The congregation today consisted of about half a dozen dragonflies darting over the water, dancing and landing and messaging each other with their wings. We were serenaded by frogs and birds and thunder in the distance.

I spend a fair amount of time in church letting go of worry, of fear. All the 'what ifs' normal American adults have plus our own family's personalized list that includes cancer and the many losses that come with that large and small, life-changing and trivial.

I hadn't been to church in a few weeks- we've been too often to Houston and the rest of the time I spent trying to catch up at home and at work and I had a huge shoulder-load of left-over fear and worry that I couldn't completely shake off even after breathing deeply and watching the dragonflies and listening to the water splashing over the rocks, the birds and frogs calling from the trees, feeling the soil under my feet and my tree strong and warm against my back.

Today's sermon was brought to me by a jumping spider who insisted on crawling on me. I'd shoo him off my left leg and he'd appear on my right leg. I gently knocked him off my right leg and he was there on my left arm. I set my right hand down on the rock next to my tree and he had beaten me to it, glaring at me with multiple eyes through bushy multiple eyebrows.

"Sure, you're huge next to me but I'm not afraid of you. The worst you can do is squish me. You'll have to do better than THAT to scare me".

Amen.

(Welcome to church- press "HD" and "full screen" for the best view of the dragonflies...)

Who Wants to be a Meteor, Anyway?

"I do not want to hand my children weapons and instruct them on how to watch out for themselves because it's dog eat dog out there.

I want to hand them a world that is on the mend, a society that is truly social, a civilization that is truly civil and those things do not come from burning people alive out of spite, or arming school teachers, or sending drones after citizens of ANY nation.

It comes from a people who are sick of being sick and tired of being scared and who have the courage to really change things instead of getting more entrenched in the same old shit that got us here to begin with.

Change is possible. But it means rethinking everything, everything."

That was how I ended my last post. And I feel I need to elaborate a little more on it because we're so divided, so polarized, that the reactions and responses and pat answers to the above are not what we need at all.

"I do not want to hand my children weapons and instruct them on how to watch out for themselves because it's dog eat dog out there."

Do I think if I teach my children that everyone is their friend and life always has a happy ending nothing bad will happen to them and they can just traipse along with their eyes closed? Of course not. The world CAN be a dangerous place. People CAN do horrible things to other people. But that's not what 99% of it is. The world IS a fantastically beautiful place and people DO behave in kind and self-sacrificing ways every single day and in places you'd least expect them to.

Humans have evolved to be social creatures- herd animals, if you will. We are safer in groups and can accomplish more in groups. We are hard-wired to NEED each other for security and livelihood and companionship. No matter how much we want to all think of ourselves as "rugged individualists" the hard fact is, most people who follow that course are
a) born with some sort of imbalance in their head and it's nature's way of getting them away from the rest of us for our own protection and
b) end up heading up into the hills or locked in an apartment somewhere and either eaten by bears (in the hills) or with a bullet in their head (self-inflicted).

Because it's NOT natural to be loners.

It's natural for us to be part of a community and work together for the common good. That's not communism or socialism, it's HUMANISM...because we're humans.

I will not WILL NOT teach my children to live in fear, and *I* will not live in fear. Have I ever been hurt? Oh, hell yes. To live in fear means that those who have hurt me and wanted to see the fear in my eyes have won. Fuck that shit.

I will love other humans and help other humans no matter if they can ever pay me back or do one thing 'for' me. Because that's what being human means.

I will look for the beauty that is always there- always everywhere and I will love Life.

"I want to hand them a world that is on the mend, a society that is truly social, a civilization that is truly civil and those things do not come from burning people alive out of spite, or arming school teachers, or sending drones after citizens of ANY nation."

How do we change that? Now that the drones are droning and people are armed to the teeth and the richest 1% have more money than the bottom 40%? How do we fix THAT?

Not overnight, unfortunately.

As trite as it sounds, we change it one day, one action, one person at a time.

We STOP rewarding violence and selfishness- stop looking up to people who amass great quantities of wealth merely for wealth's sake- we are so happy to judge the average person on their personal moral behavior but are called "commie" and "pinko" if we question the morality of someone who hides vast amounts of cash in overseas accounts to avoid paying taxes here in their own country. Call it what it is- criminal and selfish and then git after 'em. Don't allow it and STOP REWARDING IT.

Tell our politicians that it is NOT acceptable to wage wars without end, NOT acceptable to take food from children and old people and give tax breaks to the banks and corporations. Not. Acceptable. Vote- we have a system and it may be bent but it's not broken...yet.

Most importantly, we need to insist on liberty and justice for ALL Americans- not just Christian Americans or White Americans or Straight Americans or Gun Owning Americans or Conservative Americans- ALL AMERICANS. The more divided we are kept, the less likely it will be for us to ever become what we were supposed to be.

"It comes from a people who are sick of being sick and tired of being scared and who have the courage to really change things instead of getting more entrenched in the same old shit that got us here to begin with."

This is a hard one. Not the sick and scared part- we've got that down to a tee. And that's why it's hard. Because we've been told and taught that "those other" Americans are somehow...LESS American than we are. That if we want America to be in Her Glory we need to stifle anyone different from us...by force if necessary. Watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and all that shit.

And just like the fact that there is a part of life that can be dangerous and a small percentage of people who can do awful things, the propaganda river runs deep- hip wader deep- with references to Nazi Germany and the dangers of socialism and big government and we all know how THAT turned out, right? without taking one tiny glance at all the countries that DO have socialized health care and their workers ARE treated fairly and they are NOT up to their ears in privately-owned weapons and they are actively IN a society that runs on much more of a socialist level than we do and they are JUST FREAKING FINE- nay, better than fine- they are flourishing and healthier than we are and live longer and the only ones who are in a shitload of financial trouble are the ones who got too tangled up in the US way of finances and are resorting to "austerity measures" that are totally not working because every single economist says they won't but our 'fiscal conservatives' are pushing us over that self-same cliff and DAMN I need to end this sentence.

The difficult and delicate part here is that all those folks who are buying up guns to stave off a government tyrannical takeover really truly believe it is the right and patriotic thing to do and think that those of us who think differently are not only idiots but treasonous.

But they're wrong.

And if they'd stop and think about it for one minute, they'd realize that IF they ever decided to actually take up arms against the government that would give the government the absolute perfect excuse to unleash the military on the citizens and proclaim marshal law. Which is what they're claiming to be trying to avoid.

The government doesn't give a rat's ass how many AR's anyone has. They have bigger. The government LOVES the Armed Citizens- the more paranoid the better. Those are the staunch 'fundamental conservatives' who are voting for the status quo times a bazillion over and over again. Small government? Bullshit. Not when you're regulating vaginas and marriages between consenting adults and making damn sure this country is a theocracy.

Why weren't any of the armed and treasonous tea party rallies met with militarized police force like Occupy was?

Well, the Tea Party likes to say it's BECAUSE they were armed- they were respected because they were armed. It is to laugh.

"Change is possible. But it means rethinking everything, everything."

It's because the Tea Party is not looking to change a damn thing- they want BIGGER government and MORE money for the corporations. The gun-toters are not looking to change a damn thing (obviously, by their cries of "NO COMPROMISE").

They're not a threat. None at all. They are fervently and rabidly protecting the rich and those in power to the detriment of their own families, their own communities, and themselves.

Files from the CIA are now showing that people in Occupy were referred to as "possible terrorists". Students, women, old people, working people of all colors and classes were detained, arrested, pepper sprayed and rubber bulleted. Public peaceful assemblies (remember that one amendment that comes before the second one?) were violently cleared out.

Did they hurt anyone? Steal anything? Were they armed and dangerous?

No. They wanted real change.

They're not gone, by the way. The parks are empty but Occupy is alive and well.

People like me are alive and well. And we want change.

We do not believe in a violent change- we will not instigate violence.

We do not believe that guns in and of themselves are evil. We believe that our current strategy of "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" is bullshit of the highest order. Our current Gun Culture is crippling and delaying the change we need by creating and rewarding a mindset of violence.

There is such a thing as Peaceful Courage. Peaceful Strength. Willful and Carefully Guarded Peace. True Community. It ain't for sissies. That's what we need to reward and encourage. Non-violent resistance.

It's the only thing that ever changes anything for the good. Ever. Return violence with violence and even if the 'good' guys win you've merely exchanged one group of bloodthirsty victors for another.

The meteor that just hit Russia made a spectacular and sudden hole in their landscape in a violent manner, killing and destroying in an instant all that was in its way. Other than a few scientists' excitement, it's safe to say that love for said meteor is sorely lacking.

The Grand Canyon took millions of years but is much more spectacular. It killed nothing in its path, and came to be so slowly yet persistently that by the time it was 'here' we never knew of anything else. And we love it.

Humans are community-oriented, herd-oriented. They like and need some form of order. If their society values and rewards morality and kindness for its own sake- not coerced by fear of punishment, they will be a moral and civil society.

For several generations (really- that's all) we've rewarded selfishness and greed and are now reaping what that wrought.

We don't need more guns, more violence, more punishment of victims, more division. But in our current mindset that's the most natural and protective thing to do.

We don't need a vengeful jealous god to strike fear into our hearts and MAKE us be good.

We need the strength and courage to need each other without shame, and to help each other without strings.

We need to be a human community, and violently reject anything less.

Non-violently, of course.

I've Been Thinking...

Those are the three little words my family most fears.

The FOUR most feared words are "I've got an idea".

But right now I'm not in the Idea Mode, just the Thinking Mode.

And I've been thinking about our friend Juli.

Juli is an amazingly beautiful woman in about a thousand ways and on at least that many levels, but I was reading her blog this morning and once again was struck by just how serene this woman is- fundamentally absolutely and shining-like-starlight serene.

She's overcome more shit than a body and lifetime should ever be dealt yet remains loving and kind, optimistic and thankful.

I push my way through life like a banty rooster with rabies, stopping every so often to give something my FULL jumping up and down with spittle gathering at the corners of my mouth fury and then moving on to the next thing, the next foe, the next obstacle. Lemme tell ya. It's exhausting.

And I know I've made verbal and written commitments to be a kinder, gentler version of myself (recently, too- no need to remind me), but now I've got something I can mentally paste to the backs of my eyelids so I can see it during that brief moment when my eyes are closed in concentration and concentrating the madness before the explosion sends verbal shrapnel deep into the feelers of all those around me- WWJD

What Would Juli Do?

Oh, don't worry your pretty heads that I'm gonna get all soft and squishy- I'm gonna have to direct all that venom at SOMEONE and luckily there's plenty of targets around who deserve it.

But not the people I love- be they human or otherwise.

I'd be remiss if I didn't share with ya'll- Juli makes awesome teas and sundries and art that calms the mind and makes the soul smile.

Check her out-

http://wildmooncottage.blogspot.com/

If I Could Say One Thing Before the Party Gets Started...

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

And that, in a nutshell, is what I'm feeling about the death of Osama BinLaden.

I'm half Sicilian, so I believe that there are, in fact, some people who just need killing but I also believe that to REJOICE in their deaths- no matter how deserved- is more than misguided, it's evil.

I have a friend, a dear friend whose son was gunned down execution-style exactly 5 years ago today. Although they know who the killer is, he walks free until they have "enough rope to hang him with" because without hard and fast evidence there's a chance that he'd be acquitted in a jury trial.

Frustrating? Oh, yeah.

Maddening? Absolutely.

Even as 'merely' her friend it makes me crazy that this is taking so long to bring to an end, a closure, some goddamn justice.

But lets just say...

Lets just say they get the evidence. It goes to trial and he gets the death penalty (because here in Texas we still do that).

There are no appeals and no calls from the governor and my friend witnesses the death of her son's killer.

I've known her nigh on 20 years and can say with some assurance that there would not be a smile on her face, no joy, no satisfaction.

I can say with some assurance that she'd be weeping. From the still-fresh wound of the loss of her son, at the brand new wound of the loss of someone else's son (no matter how badly he turned out, he's still someones' son).

Because even with Justice Served, her baby is still gone forever. The death of someone else's baby will not bring him back. Ever.

So, should Osama BinLaden not have been assassinated? No, he clearly needed to be dead.

But we do not honor OUR dead, OUR loved ones, by rejoicing in the death of another- no matter who he was.

We honor our dead by a moment of silence, a deep sigh of resignation, and by wasting not one minute- not one second- on bloodthirsty relish.

The people who lost their lives both in the attack on our soil and overseas in our armed services are lost forever, and the death of even the admitted author of the attack does not change that one iota.

We honor those we have loved and lost by striving every day to live lives of honor, and truth, and justice yes- but also of compassion and peace.

Ironically, it's those last two that sometimes take the most strength and resolve.

Take us home, Martin-

"Let no man pull you low enough to hate him."
— Martin Luther King Jr.