The “fat lady” hasn’t sung. She’s not even on stage, yet.

I’m not denigrating the size, seriousness nor complexity of the issues we face locally, nationally nor globally, but among the current crop of books I’m reading, it’s obvious that humans and their societies have a long experience of making a mess of things and fumbling through. Will this time be different? We don’t know and won’t know unless and until enough [too many] of us give up. Furthermore, neither is this intended to be a “misery loves company” solution. Here’s the books I’m referring to:

• Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: chapter 1, Pelagius, makes repeated reference to “the religion of the [Roman] empire was about to formalize a teaching that was convenient for imperial power, enabling empire to relativize people’s worth rather than reverence their dignity.” 


• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity: chapter 1, Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood, asserts (all in UPPER case) among other things “How the conventional narrative of human history is not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull”


• On Immunity, an Innoculation (which I’m rereading) notes that “Throughout the nineteenth century, vaccination left a wound that would scar. “The mark of the beast,” some feared. In an Anglican archbishop’s 1882 sermon, vaccination was akin to an injection of sin, an “abominable mixture of corruption, the lees of human vice, and dregs of venial appetites, that in after life may foam upon the spirit, and develop helll within, and overwhelm the soul.”

not all serpents are snakes

Photo by J. Harrington

If you read the Bible’s Old Testament, you may have noticed that, although Adam and Eve had only one job, it didn’t take them long to screw it up. Then, some time later, the whole human race had to start over with Noah and the Ark. Does this mean that our species is hopeless? Probably not, but it seems to strongly suggest we are subject to evolutionary developments. If we continue to destroy earth’s climate and life support systems on which we depend for food, water and shelter, it might be unwise to expect divine intervention to bail our dumb asses, or us, out of our self-created diminution. What we seem to be facing is not a serpent in a tree but the excessive, egregious influence of non-human “persons” on our institutions, customs, and values. Frankly, the serpent was less pernicious.

A Map to the Next World

By Joy Harjo 

    for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the

map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-

ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the

destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.