VI. Return to Paradise
I had a dream the other night that I was with my mom, my biological human mom, and we were watching this psychedelic cartoon of two light beings, a mother and a child. The mother was teaching the child how to communicate through their pineal gland, how to exercise their third eye chakra and develop an extra sensory perception. There was an exchange of colorful vibration between the two, as the child learned to connect in a way as natural as walking and talking.
My dreams are real. Heightened vibration communication is real. I am on a path of reconnecting as I purify my material self. I can feel the subtleties of my evolution happening in the moment. This dream was a transmission from my mom, the other one.
*******
I gave up meat today. Well, not real meat, just caged meat. Fenced meat. Farmed meat. I guess technically, I gave it up after I ate that road bacon, we’d already been eating vegetarian all week. So, sure, it’s easy enough to do when it’s not around, but how’s it gonna be when I’m back in colonization? It might take some getting used to, especially for those who know me as an extreme meat aficionado, but as I write and further develop my beliefs on living in a good way, I’ve really got no other choice.
I do not believe in keeping my food in captivity. It’s not healthy for them, and it’s not healthy for me. Animals are meant to be free, they are supposed to eat a diverse diet of the wilderness, not a limited supply of whatever happens to be growing in the fence. Obviously the fake-fed Corn cattle are not approved, but unless they’re free to roam like the Buffalo, grass-fed beef is still not gonna make the cut on this butcher’s block.
As I more clearly understand the relationships between Sun and Earth and plants and animals, I also realize the importance of consuming the purest vibrations possible. I’m less worried for my physical health, and more urgently concerned for my vibrational connection to the planet, though the two are connected in more ways than I could possibly imagine. Eating dumbed-down food that ate dumbed-down food, has only one logical conclusion as to its effect on my own capacities.
And aside from the physical, mental, and spiritual health aspects of it, and the fact that the meat market is the second highest contributor of greenhouse gasses, surpassing even the billions of personal vehicles clogging the highway, I simply do not morally believe in locking my family in a cage. I feel a deep connection to both the plant and animal nations, a literal feeling of kinship, one that many of my brothers have lost sight of as they’ve been forced to adapt to colonization. I understand that the Buffalo are gone, I understand that store-bought burgers are the closest facsimile and one of the more filling sources of protein and such, but I can no longer contribute to the demand for fences. I certainly cast no judgements on those who still eat it, I get it, I love meat too, and I am lucky enough to travel in circles that provide the opportunity for a diet of fair game.
Within the cage of colonization, it would certainly be tough to find an adequate alternative, the tempeh was really good, but it was no meat. And honestly, a lot of the meat alternatives are filled with other stuff that’s not good for us either, or her. But how’m I ever gonna get enough protein and stuff? Oh yeah, bugs. Except that even if you did cut back to only eating animals that you plucked from the scraps of nature left in your neighborhood, the colonized world is so full of pollution, that the purity of their bloodline is probably up for debate.
It would be tough for me to offer a colonized solution other than abstinence, which is why my solution is to escape colonization altogether. It is the only way I can retain whatever sanity I still have left, for many reasons, a big one most certainly being the food. Even if I completely gave up meat, it would be tough to feed myself without creating a trail of plastic packaging in my wake. I can no longer pretend not to notice the impact of my personal food consumption. I dream of a world where we can enjoy the abundance of diversity without the spoilage of excess, but we’re not there yet, and giving up while I resign myself to the system being the only option, is simply not an option.
The only part of this personal sacrifice that I haven’t figured out yet, is how I’m going to cook at camp. This is an individual choice that I’ve made, even if I may not feel much choice in the matter, so I have no intention on imposing it onto others. We are going to have colonized meat in the kitchen and I am going to be preparing it for my family. I don’t have any moral dilemma in the actual processing of it, I can still butcher it and fry it and all that good stuff, I haven’t gone soft or anything, but how in the world am I going to make it taste good without tasting it? Burgers, steaks, and chicken, no problem, I don’t season-to-taste those anyway, but I’m not talented enough to wing it without a little last minute spicing things up.
We’ll see I guess, either I’ll figure it out, or my quality control will decline, or I’ll have to make an exception to my ethical code in order to retain my kitchen standards of mediocrity, but that seems like a slippery slope of bacon tasting to me. I’m not worried about it, my heart will guide me in the right direction, especially once I’ve intensified its connection as I cut loose a little more of the fat holding it back.
*******
We were only a couple of days away from Ben’s, where I bet I can shake up my protein portions with a Woodchuck or something, but for now, some fresh made fireside tortillas would have to wrap up the rest of this trip. I navigated us to the most epic national forest campground, way out on a peninsula, it was so cool that they even wanted to charge us rent, can you believe that? The fee got you a concrete parking spot and a metal ringed fire pit, neither an amenity I prefer over the open Earth, so we backtracked and found an access road with a better view anyway.
Got up and went on a hike by the lake, was pretty sure I’d identified some Lamb’s Quarter that woulda been great on last night’s tacos, but then our attention was diverted like a cattle crossed creek bed. There was trash everywhere. Bunch of styrofoam too. It’s certainly a tough one to escape, there are enough polystyrene cups on the planet to circle it 500 times, and it floats in water and wind as it pours methane into the air, unless some animal just chokes on it instead. It’s toxic to us too, the styrene leaches into our hot coffee, and without the timeline for a proven track record of devastation, it was originally determined to be “reasonably anticipated” to cause cancer. And now we know that it does.
So at least california should be able to ban it, and occasionally they do, and even new york managed it once, until the cahoots of recycling firms and plastic manufacturers put their footprint down. Progressive places have been prohibiting plastic shopping bags and plastic straws, both are super bad for the environment as they’ve been found in the stomachs of the deepest sea, and other toxicities of the cities are slowly breaking down our ideas of planetary takeout. But it’s not happening fast enough.
My most recent visit to colonization found a friend touting the convenience of single-serving plastic packs of olives, and then they opened four. Or the ethical cage-free eggs, available in single-serve two packs. Or a giant bag of individually wrapped oreos, so that they’ll be nice and crisp when you mush them up in your Cow’s baby formula. Food is a primary component of community, but yet they’ve got us all wrapped up in individual serving sizes.
But I’m a single guy, living alone in an efficiency apartment, I work all day, and commute across town, I don’t have time to cook, or to buy in bulk, so I’ll just grab a bite to eat on the way home, it’s cheaper anyway. We live in a single-serve society, as we each fill our cabinets with the commodities of convenience, because it’s all they’ve left us time for. Gotta work real hard for the system, that way you can grow up and buy your very own house, and car, and credit card debt, and we’ll be happy to extend your sentence as we lock you away in the cubicles of the colony.
The entire scheme of colonization is founded on the strategy of divide and conquer, and from its very inception, they have been dividing the people across borders, across party lines, across racial tensions, across the class system, across fences, and they’ve so successfully conquered the planet that they’ve convinced billions of us that we’re all alone.
Humans are communal animals, we’re meant to live in community, as did every single indigenous culture on the globe. We’re not the strongest, or the fastest, and I’m not all that convinced that we’re the smartest, but we are highly evolved at hanging out. We are social creatures, society is natural, it’s civilization that isn’t. We didn’t divide the labor so that we could extract the most equity, we followed the pulls of our hearts and came together to make magic moments of manifestation. A community-based community lives in a world of abundance, even on the poverty-stricken rez, they may not have much of your made-up dollars, but there’s an undeniable web of cosmic coincidence enriching all who simply believe.
The community of abundance is built on the fundamental concept of sharing, there’s plenty to go around, what do I need extra for, here, have another. Food is plentiful, though it does take many hands to process a Buffalo, or to gather Buffalo Berries, so good thing we happen to have a whole tribe at the ready. We all have our own unique skillsets, and as we work together to improve the entire family’s quality of life, our interpersonal relationships strengthen the web of human consciousness. Folks are far more capable of far more tasks than the average commuter, though that doesn’t mean that there is more work to do, it only means that each individual’s work actually benefits those that they love the most. And as every-one brings their own perspective and expertise, the evolution of experience reaches a new level of common-unity.
This is how it is supposed to be done, this is how we are supposed to grow, it is how we are supposed to live. And it is how we best learn. We learn by experience, by being immersed in a living environment of planetarians, and a lifetime of life lessons prepares you for anything that life can throw at you. And mom and dad might not know all that stuff, but that’s ok, because you are not locked in your bedroom until they come home from work, too tired to play. You are the child of a tribe, of uncles and aunties with the energy to do stunts and crafts, grandparents to share recipes and fishing stories, and with the strength of the community, the community becomes strengthened.
But out in that other world, we sentence the formative years to a strict regimen of boxes and books and the indoctrinations of how to succeed in a left-brained society. Forget the fluorescents and cubical corners, and the outright lies in american history class, the entire foundation of colonial education is designed to homogenize individuality and inflate the importance of an individual income. Competition not cooperation, and you better be better than the rest, that way you can rise above and get approved for a student loan. All kids learn in different ways, so instead of letting the natural flow of life figure it all out, we’ll just pick a way that doesn’t work for any of them, and force them all to follow our strict guidelines. Only those whose brains we are able to wash, will move on, the rest will be marginalized and looked down upon, as we bus them up the river to the phone factory, and our class system has now graduated to individualism 201.
Everything our left brain learned about the material world leads us to strive for accumulating material wealth. Your own personal material wealth. Your private property. A great big house, a fancy car, lots and more and stuff and things, and gotta get get get a bunch more junk to save for another sometime that we might need it. The latest greatest pocket-sized technology convinces us that it fosters further connection, though a single stroll for espresso will reveal that the entire world seems to be lost in a world of their own. And with everyone contained in the walls of separation, left to commune with the community through a mass-marketed hotspot, it seems that the now has a stranglehold on the inflation of retail consumerism. And they say to vote for what’s best for you, that’s all that matters out there, sure, the rest of the world is suffering, but don’t you want to save the most money on all the taxes we’re gonna charge you for that house and car?
Or they squeeze you into a loft in downtown colonialsburg, cram you onto an underground train where no one will even look you in the eye, and sweep you through the supermarket of convenient single-serve packages. Gotta stock each apartment cell with food, and heat, and water, and of course electricity, all of the fundamentals of life, and only in this backwards world of abstract language, could energy efficiency describe the insane wattage required to fuel our fractured state of separation. The world is a dark and scary place out there, no way for broken humans to survive, so just take a number, because that’s all you are to us.
*******
No, the Earth is an abundant cornucopia of life and love, it has been for millions of years, and it still is, right now. You share a tipi for a winter, and you begin to intimately understand energy efficiency, and the advantages of communing around the common fire. The projections of human consciousness are a powerful force, and the reality experienced by individual mindsets can vary greatly, especially when subjected to the traumatic conditioning of a conquered culture. The societal structure of scarcity is not rooted in the material Earth, it is a purely human construct that has been used to control the masses for thousands of years, and only because we are willing to believe it, does it manifest itself into our lives. If you harbor the fear of going without, then you’ll hoard more than your fair share to compensate, and you’ve personally fulfilled the prophecy of self-importance. And the more who hide away, the drier the desert gets, and the cornucopia spirals towards it’s infinite conclusion.
But Edenistic abundance is simply a state of mind, and of heart, and if you flow through the world as you give it away now, the miracles of manifestation will fuel your eternal expedition. This is not a joke, or an idealist proposal for an intended community, I have lived this lifeway for the past two years. I saw it bloom into the most magnificent spiral of connection in Standing Rock, and it inspired me to commit the rest of my days to spreading the doctrines of abundant love. I’ve lived it on the rez, in the heart of the deepest poverty around, and yet we never went without. The family was always there with everything they had, and worked together to honor the land as she provided all that they needed, and anyone who showed off with more than the rest, was looked down upon, not idolized. And I’ve been travelling freely all over the place, without a dime in my bag, never once have I gone hungry, and often I find myself in the face of extravagance. A lifeway not caught up on individual income, makes possible a myriad of ways to experience the abundance of living.
But that abundance begins to fade with each step into the confines of the cage. The deeper you get wrapped up into this worldwide web, the less perceptible you become to the wild, to the free spirit of the Earth, and the more you become dependent on the reading material of the machine. I absolutely feel it when I visit that other world, it takes all I’ve got as I pray and sing my way through it, and even in that concrete jungle I somehow manage to manifest an organic miracle or two.
The money’s the worst bit of it though. It is the material mechanism for the creation of the scarcity scare. It enables this ridiculous lifeway to make sense to the commoners, who are the most oppressed and imprisoned of them all. It only works because they’ve convinced us to believe that it works, even the notes themselves are littered with propaganda of the patriarch, and I personally believe that there is some sort of black magic at play. An entire civilization has been perpetuated in the pursuit of financial wealth, at the cost of life, and somehow I sound like the crazy one.
I can’t even stand to touch the stuff, and I feel a pulse of negativity when I do, though I’m still willing to believe that it’s just me. But what I feel when the energy of money enters my psyche, that is a very real thing. I am quite comfortable traveling across the country without a wallet, but the moment that five dollars is pushed into my pocket, I begin to feel the urge to hoard it. That may still mean spending it, but I start to feel like Gollum as I count my precious pennies. And most likely I’ll just spend it on food, something that should be free, healthy, and abundant anyway, but all I can afford is an individual slice of pepperoni, the pizza with the absolute least amount of personal love that I’ve eaten all solar cycle.
Our society may be hooked on the additives of convenience, but that is simply another side effect of an underlying condition, the fear of going without, not-enough-a-phobia, and the root of the problem is our undeniable addiction to the dollar. It creates class division and makes room for the ‘mine’ mentality, it dwells in domestication and corrupts community, and as it permeates my periphery, I start to feel the scarcity creep in as the abundance begins to fade. It rots the brain and corrodes the heart, and pushes even the straightest arrows to bend under the peer pressure of its intoxication. It is the trigger of a downward spiral, as is the bottle in my brother’s hand, or the single smoke that sends me walking to the store for another. Our society is strung out on the worst poison of them all, and only through the conditioning of an entire people, can a civilization of functioning addicts convince themselves that nothing is wrong. Hello, my name is DJ, and I’m a recovering capitalist.
I’m only a couple of years removed from the glitter of big city life, and was most recently considering relocating to LA, as I sold my soul to the commercialized world of colonial indoctrination. My sobriety is recent, and even through my shield of conviction, I can feel the wounds of my condition grabbing at the strings of material attachment. And I was already on the fringe of anything considered mainstream, so I must remind myself of the comforting walls of convenience that facilitate the denial of global domination.
And although I don’t allow the grip of greed to weigh down my navigation, I know that pockets still burn as they follow the hearts of adoring fans. People spend money on me. I try to stop it as much as I can, and plead to prevent the purchase of something brand new, but I can’t do much in the way of refusing a fill-up.
I recently shared a meal with some traveling companions, and somehow the conversation worked itself to the disgusting table talk of my gut feelings over money. I kept digging at the uselessness of the control mechanism, and its ability to destroy everything it attempts to turn into gold, and I offended a dear friend. They were feeding me because they support my path of privileged poverty, but they were doing so with hard earned money, and they had sacrificed their genuine lifeforce in exchange for what I consider a worthless wad of disposable paper plates.
I stand by my beliefs of surviving on belief alone, but I must practice the humility to understand that we all walk our own paths, I can’t know that Unci Maka isn’t working through the systems that we’ve locked her into. And I can’t be eternally grateful for this life of abundance, if I create rifts of negativity around those who are simply acting as conduits of manifestation.
So be prepared to defend your divestment from the money market, to receive ridicule from that other world, but do so with grace and compassion for those who have yet to break free of the cashier’s cage. And learn how to accept a gift, even if it’s not exactly what you were hoping for, it’s quite customary to not deny a single moment of personal presents. I still can’t stomach my acceptance of money, not sure if it’s something I should work on or not, but I’ll take a pouch of Tobacco whether I smoke or not, and I’ll eat a meal provided by the love of the universe, even if there’s a fence around the kitchen. But please don’t box it up in styrofoam.
*******
We couldn’t just leave the intoxicating litter in good conscience. We started to pick it up, but realized quickly that we’d never be able to carry it all. We made a few piles to pick up later, and then we hiked to the privately managed ranger station rental booth, to see if we could rent a trash bag or two, or six.
“You want to pick up trash? Just for fun? Well, ok, I guess.” You’d think they’d never had anyone camp here who actually cared about the forest. And maybe not, might have just been the motorsporting fisherdudes who probably threw half of this stuff out here to begin with, though, it seemed that most of this junk had been pushed ashore from a recent flood. “Yeah, it was a big one, water was up above the whole campground. Had a bad one last year too, got no idea why they seem to be getting worse and worse though.” I gotta pretty good guess.
The lake was manmade, and there was a whole town at the bottom, post office and all. Nice that at least it was a colonized town this time, though I suppose that’s just because they already burned the original villagers. But why’d they flood the town just to make this campground, didn’t they know that some good God-fearing white folk lived down there?
Oh, I’m sure they gave ‘em some notice of the eminent domain, and besides, it was all to save an even bigger community of tax paying americans. The dam had been built, to prevent the nearby riverside city from flooding. Yep, the natural water cycles of rise and fall just weren’t good for business, especially with the mysteriously increasing tendency towards rising up. So they built a dam, displaced a town along with the water, and now the white trash floods the shore with every big rainstorm.
What are they gonna do when the dam’s not enough? Or when it breaks under pressure and a tidal wave nullifies their property tax? Don’t they understand that the water is going to continue to rise, and that they’re not going to be left high and dry? I don’t think they do. I think they’re in denial. Their governor probably told them that global warming wasn’t happening in their state. Or their president. I think they’ll continue to go about business as usual, until the river engulfs them completely.
They’ll probably try to rebuild then too, but eventually we’ll reach a point of no return. Once it’s not just an isolated event that they can setup a fema camp at, once it starts to hit every major american city at once, at least those that are conveniently located near the water, it’s going to quickly become a national emergency that the nation won’t be able to do a thing about. And with NY, LA, DC, miami, boston, baltimore, seattle, houston, philly, and the bay area all under water, even if they could manage some government assistance, it ain’t gonna be coming to your neighborhood.
There’s a reason that there’s a vast disproportion of high-ranking military retirees that have taken up residence high atop the ozark mountains, they’ve seen the maps of the projected coastline of tomorrow, and half the country is under water. And they say it’ll happen quick. There’s a slow increase for now, but we’ll hit the tipping point of climate catastrophe and all hell will break loose, though I guess all that water might cool it down a bit. You can deny global warming all you want, I don’t care, it just seems idiotic when we can see it happening all around us. And if you look at the temperature trends since the beginning of the industrial revolution, it’s pretty obviously a real thing.
But you’re right, even I claim that the planet goes through natural cycles of hot and cold, for all I know this is all according to plan, whose plan I’m not sure, but this could all be perfectly natural. But that should be even scarier to those living in a city within a flood plain. If this is a natural cycle beyond our ability to alter, then there’s no way we can do a thing to stop it, and this global flood is going to be even worse than any manmade one could ever be. No amount of changing our ways will slow it down, and neither will pretending that it’s not real, so I sure hope your glass house floats.
Now there’s an idea, a floating city in a world of water, though one wave to the crowd and it’ll obviously capsize quicker than the movie did. But John’s idea was cool, he wants to build a boat out of plastic bottles and float down the mississippi, or what the Ojibwe called the Misi-ziibi, as he filters the water of the “great river.” I filled him up on the Lovewater truck and we had a plan, but I wonder if you could use plastic bottles to prepare a town for liftoff.
I think I’m done thinking about it, I believe that the cities are a lost cause, and we need to begin evacuating them as we figure out an alternative. We need to clean up our mess, and not make another one. And even without the impending doom of a promised flood, cities are the biggest centers of vibrational disconnection, by far. We’ve already been over my belief on that one, as well as my acknowledgement that there is much cultural awesomeness to be experienced as well, so we just have to figure out how to build the best of both worlds while we still have a world to do it on.
*******
I got an idea, and those are normally pretty fun, right? So, one of my bigger beefs with city life is the food supply, it’s simply not ok to pack in millions of people and then import food from millions of acres of outsourced agriculture. It’s not sustainable for the planet, and it’s just not healthy for you, either. Eating local is the only way, it gets you the purest solar vibrations, it burns less fuel to get it to you, it tastes better, and it’s fair to those who live in the ecosystems that you’d otherwise have to plow into cornfields. So once we have the greater metropolitan area on board with localizing our food supply, as well as relocating our arts district to higher ground, we just have to find a spot capable of growing food more centrally located in the country.
And now that we’ve stopped the need for ninety million acres of exported ears, there happens to be an abundance of unoccupied flatland, perfect for building the cities of the future. We could house our cities in the old cornfields. Sure, sounds ridiculous, what urban dweller wants to live in a nebraska cornfield, but are they gonna wanna live in the flooded sewer swamp of seattle? And it’s not going to be a cornfield anymore, it’s going to be a vibrant cultural hub, with all of the amenities worthy of keeping, and all of the city folk that also relocated. Guess what, that city you love so much, was just plants and stuff before it got paved over. Nebraska can be the next new york, it’s not the location, it’s the scene, and this scene will be above sea level.
Now, obviously I’m not talking about concrete and parking decks here. We’ll have to develop our city planning to work within the parameters of life on Earth. We’ll spread ourselves out a bit, but there will be way less of all that other nonsense just wasting space. Our dwellings won’t be as packed in, and not as permanent, but they don’t have to be tipis either. We can develop a way of life that gives us space to be free, a community to entertain us, and a checkerboard of uncaged food sprouting up throughout our grassy expanses. The most concerning bit of it all, is that the cornfields are toxic with chemicals right now, but I’m assuming that once monsanto’s profits are no longer pictured, that we’ll be able to clean up their mess in no time.
And the dirtbag builders could provide the construct for an Earth-based community. Earthen homes, built by packing soil into bags, stacked in an iglego fashion, coated with cob (clay, sand, straw), and enjoy. Temperature is regulated by the constant stream of our mother's vibration, and a circular structure is conducive of her flowing cycles. Multiple domes can be linked to provide the space for comfort, doors and windows and that kinda stuff can still be installed, and the unobtrusive design is virtually windproof, as the rising tides of sharknadoes tear across the plains.
This fabrication of the future has a long history of success, and a quick googling reveals many architectural wonders, and all within the guidelines of living a low impact way of life. The whole village can be con