PERINEAL POLITICS

Maureen Mullarkey

Perhaps is not so surprising to use this word in a time when science has introduced us — upclose and on video — to non-human meiosis, known in human terms as “sex.”  My favorite example of sexual predation is a bug that bores a hole in the female and injects his sperm.  Bugs don’t have perineums, which is called in slang about women, “the pink.”  Sometimes it’s called “the slash”, which gives it a bug-like violent vibe, or the “slot” which sort of suggests a coin-operated function.  Violence and monetization are two characteristics of human intercourse of all kinds.  We don’t manage them very well.  Men have names for their unruly little man: Peter or Dick.  Technically, the perineum is unisex.

Those of us who try to understand existence in ultimate terms as well as in the framework of “embodiment” have been challenged to the point of shifting the paradigm of theology from one big old gramps in the sky to an infinitely interrelated and constantly morphing fabric or symphony of electrochemical atomic interactions — the atom being, of course, a pattern of energy.  If being is actually, really, this and not the pattern of brain interaction assembly that goes on through our lives, casting a connectome over the universe that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, what are we to use as a guide for human interactions?  

Rule out drilling holes in each other, though the NRA will not agree with that.  Personally, I’m going to the tension in the relationship between the human individual and the human group, even the species taken as a group.  Even “hominins” taken as a group.  The point is life-going-on, which we call evolution or survival of the fittest, though we get all incoherent about fitness.  It’s not about the biggest, strongest, smartest, prettiest, etc.  It’s about what fits.

Most crucially, “fitness” is a shifting target because the planet shifts, the cultures shift, the mood shifts.  Fitness shifts. Therefore, a system (meiosis) succeeds if it constantly creates a variety of kinds, so that even if everything changes, some of the kinds will survive.  Some will not.  (Goodbye hominins.  Goodbye cave bears.)  In a world jammed with humans, individual survival is often pitched against group survival.  Results vary.

A group that has settled upon an understanding of the world that lets its members survive will attract more people and eventually form an institution with leaders, buildings, images, songs, and dogma — lots of stuff to support functioning.  What supports the institution is likely to be written down and enforced by the group.  Until it doesn’t work anymore.  Then, in a freely joined group, people will leave.

Margaret Sanger

American Christian churches of all kinds are shrinking.  It’s not that people are going from one group to another, but that they are simply going group-less.  The larger culture is not recreating religious sub-groups people want.  Or maybe they just aren’t recognizing them as religious.  This may be the case with a new consensus forming about creation.  Some call it “scientific mysticism” meaning that it accepts all the work of responsible science without wandering off into the woo-woo, but is keenly aware of the awful grandeur of ultimates, eternals, and unimaginables that science points to.  I’m hearing rumors about the formation of new congregations, something like the earliest Unitarians and Universalists reacting against Calvin’s paradigm.

Actually it was Luther who admired the pink ruffles of the perineum as a source of salvation.  He famously said, as recorded by his students, that when the devil threatened him, he put his hand between the legs of his wife and was consoled.  It’s a puzzle to me why the more stringent feminists won’t share the wealth of the original container of life.

Artemisia Gentileschi

There are many jokes about the UU heresies.  One is that if there were two gates to heaven, one labeled “salvation” and the other one labeled “discussion of salvation,” all the UU’s would turn off to the discussion access.  But I often think that the UUA is best not thought of as a denomination but as a ground for denominations.  (I’m trying to echo Tillich resolution between being versus non-being by suggesting a “ground of being.”)  Reading “The Silk Roads” is a bit of a revelation in that it traces how the Greek-Persian rivalry/collaboration, the Christian-Buddhist interactions, and all the other tribal institutions formed by ecologies of river and mountain — especially after erosion and exploitation narrowed the world — had to change to survive.

Nothing has changed more abruptly or more drastically than our understanding of sex in terms of fertility, entitlement, protection, identity, leadership and so on.  Now we might be prepared to accept the idea that a virgin can have a baby — but so what?  We might not think that crucifixion is the most horrible death — today’s Messiah might be more likely to die of HIV/AIDS because of being denied meds.  We’ve accepted leaders and heroes who have sex with people to whom they have no legal obligation.  I won’t bother to name them — it’s a good parlor game.

But we have NOT reformed our societal protection of children, who are still partly commodities and partly party prizes, rarely human beings deserving of protection for their development.  There is NO UUA scandal-monger pursuing ministers who neglect their children or have children they don’t want.  The conservatives will punish for abortion, defending it with sentimental appeal to babies, not realistic concern or help for a baby that will need public money and attention.

Virginia Woolf

Can we say that our present institutions and protocols are serving either individuals or groups very well?  So many of our schemes from the 19th century have turned demonic so that peace-keeping forces are rapists, humane societies are money-machines, and hospitals are bombed.  What are churches?  What is the putative role of specifically religious institutions in a world where nothing is sacred?

It’s clear that the journey of the individual has become even more intensely a search for the Sacred, that transcends even individual survival.  Thus, the abuse of the pink perineum as a way of waging war is an abomination.  The  use of someone’s perineum for enjoyment in the face of social disruption is ill-advised but human.  It speaks to a greater lack that the individual is not addressing, but there is always the tantalizing hint that sex is sometimes sacred.  Ceremonies, even those of being drummed out, are not enough.  We must look to the swirling fractals of understanding the Big Picture and I mean galactic, not “me and my neighbors.”

Place settings are from Judy Chicago's Supper Party.

This conversation is not merely an address in a venue on Boston’s Berry Street.  It is now on the Internet and global, googleable.  

THE U OF CHICAGO WANTED TO KNOW

Sorting through my books in order to discard as many as possible, it becomes clear that my seminary education is almost thirty years old.  I’m gob-smacked.  During the fourth year I was working as a transcriber for the U of Chicago Law School, an entirely different sort of people than the Div School crowd in two different ways.  The professors (among them Scalia, Zimring and Sunstein — Obama wasn’t there yet) were brilliant (just ask them) and part of the elite national establishment.  The support staff were female, middle-class, more dutiful than competitive.  Some were black.  At least one loved Sting.

Computers were barely coming into use.  (This was 1982.)  The professors were just learning by closing their office doors and playing “asteroids”.  The computers were actually work stations with a mainframe in the basement somewhere.  Among the many things computers and the Internet just then began to transform (you might not realize this) was the ability to work with ancient texts, since fragments could be pieced together onscreen, vocabularies in various languages could be kept at hand, and the fear of destroying something priceless, owned by people who wanted to prevent access, was much less.  This meant a leap in knowledge about recorded antiquity.

I’m reading “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” by Peter Frankopan, a documented account of how the Eurasian continent was transformed by trade and travel which brought together contrasting cultures, fed and shaped empires, and carried exotic luxuries everywhere as indexes of success and power.  This is a much earlier religious account than Karen Armstrong’s “Axial Age” when today’s major religious institutions were founded and began to struggle with nations.  “The Silk Roads” — at least as far as I’ve read — is about tribes who still locate the Sacred on the closest mountain and are just beginning to consolidate under major personalities, a pattern that is related to monotheism and intolerance.  The main hint of this that I got in seminary was the suggestion that the New Testament and the message of Jesus came about because he spent time in the East learning Buddhism.

Somewhere (maybe even on my shelves) are books that compare the cultural development of the Eurasian continent to that of the Americas.  There are always hints and mostly the discussion comes down to geology, the existence and placement of mountain ranges and major rivers, which are the result of plate tectonics and drive extreme weather.  There were no Silk Roads because of the Rockies.  There was no Mediterranean basin but instead the Mississippi Valley.  There were major civilizations, as early and elaborate as Egypt, but they were destroyed by drought — just as they were prevented in Australia by fire.  This is Jared Diamond’s kind of thinking and I find it revelatory, though some people get so angry that one person wrote an academic article entitled “Fuck Jared Diamond.”  Diamond does not address written culture, but rather the underlying ecology.

The people who resist plate tectonic theories of history want to believe in their elitism, the idea that Roman and Greek culture are the source of science, enlightenment, and progress and justify every privilege of being white, male, Euro-rooted and technologically dominant.  Unfortunately, many of the people who believe in this privilege and superiority are not good examples of it, being themselves less educated, less compassionate, less politically adept.  They brag of the wardrobe but stand in the marketplace naked, only accessing a tiny part of it on their handhelds.  They are totally unaware of what they don’t know and claim it doesn’t exist.

The upshot of addressing all this with my decades-old education is that the denominationally defined classes I took are obsolete, the U of Chicago Law School social classes have gone to the top but toppled over, and the U of Chicago Div School principles of inquiry are now central, though their confidence is shaken.  I just answered another one of those abominable questionnaires, half-market research and half-how-ya-doin’?  The bottom line for them is mostly “why aren’t you sending more money since you’re an alumn.  How are humanities to survive if all the money is going to science and commerce?”

Of course my answers didn’t come close to fitting the questions so I had to write a little essay.  Here it is:  how my Silk Roads always lead back to the grasslands and never to the cities, as was expected by the university.  Part of the answer is that now the biggest city of all is the Internet and it is world-wide.   (This is somewhat edited.)

U of C Law School

I came to seminary late in life through the Unitarian movement (First Unitarian of Portland).  I turned forty while I was at seminary so my classmates rang the bell at First Unitarian of Chicago forty times.  They were red-faced and puffing by the end.  We were technically Meadville/Lombard students, meant to satisfy a trust requirement at the Div School that a certain percentage be preparing for ministry.  My first ministry was in Montana, circuit-riding among four fellowships in Bozeman, Missoula, Great Falls and Helena for three years.  I lived in a Ford F150 van.  

Then I took an interim ministry across the lake from Seattle, and next went to Saskatoon for two years.  I made almost no money at any point.  Though Seattle loved my message they were prevented from hiring me because of interim protocol.  Saskatoon was not a good match and I left the ministry.

. . .

Now I barely have enough SSI and pension to survive, partly because of low-pay jobs, partly because my marriage in the Sixties meant not paying SS during that time, and then eight years total of being a student also meant no SS contribution.  The pension is from the City of Portland: $200 a month.

But because of the internet, the availability of low-cost second-hand books, and my U of Chicago Div School education which was about METHOD more than content, I’m as happy as Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch.

U of C Div School

. .

For the last decade or so, parallel to blogging, I was co-writing with Tim Barrus . . . His lifework has been special education and since the coming of AIDS, special pediatric care for boys who are HIV-positive, including those who have accompanying problems such as emotional trauma.  Some, like himself, struggle with avascular necrosis (bone death) and many have recurring lung infections.  Some were needle drug users and many did sexwork as pre-adolescents as a way of survival because of abandonment and abuse.

My input, unpaid, was exploring ways of understanding all this.  Christian ideas worried them.  They expected me to hate them though I’d never met them.  Some had been abused and infected by priests — this is an international group so some of the concerns overlap with the systemic problems in the Irish and British churches as well as American . . .

Unitarian Universalists are proud of their principles, but they are based on the Enlightenment.  Now we are in Post-Enlightenment times.  The “principles” are just too old-fashioned and peacefully academic for teens . . . in search of something solid.  Anyway, congregations and denominations are sociologically homogenous and UU’s are educated upper middle class.  Until recently, they assumed prosperity.

What do you say to a boy who was surviving behind a downtown dumpster by sucking cock at five bucks a pop?  What does God portrayed as a powerful old man mean to a boy who has been taken as a toy for political leaders onto yachts for parties that can end with tossing a boy overboard?  These are not things that preoccupy Div School professors.  Most people have no idea. . . .

Recently two dawning thought systems have influenced me.  One is our post-taxonomizing understanding of existence: how interwoven we are at the electrochemical molecular level and how much environment shapes life, which is close to the heart of evolution.  The other is the frankly evolving Deep Time (pre-literate, recorded in geology and biology) understanding of what it is to be human.  The neurological fMRI research is especially fascinating because the boys often have organic anomalies created by abuse and malnutrition.  But traditional psychotherapy is also effective if it is with someone who has “been there/done that” in contrast to the “nice lady” convention of social work.

These ideas merge into what I’m reading about as a kind of scientific mysticism — they say that congregations are actually forming in some places with the right population.  Deep space explorations provide images more powerful than any theism.  So I am pursuing a theory that is not about salvation as a perfected version of what “is,” but rather the idea of inclusion at every level.  Once you have happened, you are eternally in time as both an effect and a cause.  It’s the social level that’s tough.  No one wants bad boys, except tricks.

. . . I’m writing a theory of worship design that responds to my change in theological thinking. (It’s no longer theology since there’s no theos.)  It is actually an extension of the thesis I started at Meadville/Lombard.

The Div School was a terrific place, but I was a cat attending a picnic — mostly a watcher.  The work that I wanted and needed was sometimes just outside the curriculum:  Eliade, Lakoff and Johnson, Victor Turner, Gendlin, Csikszentmihalyi  — all that fabulous new thought was synthesizing right then about what I had learned earlier about Stanislavski’s method, Blackfeet concepts, and a kind of poetry of being (natural history).  I write all day every day and think constantly about all this, but there’s no money in it.  If I stop writing and try to promote or publish, I will short-circuit where I may be able to go with it in the future.  Born in 1939, I feel the pressure.

Blogging is what works.  From my keyboard to the eyes of the world.  I talk about the U of Chicago Div school all the time.  As far as I’m concerned, Meadville/Lombard is dead, merely a correspondence school for nice people.  I feel as though I took difficult jobs that repaid them for their very real monetary investment in my education.  I read Sightings and Criterion and the alumni mags, but there is no way for me to send money and my estate will be worthless.  But they tell me that anything that’s blogged to the internet is eternal.  Maybe.

HOW BEAUTIFUL UPON THE MOUNTAIN

A.B. Guthrie Jr's beloved Ear Mountain from the air.

Five of his genre novels were in sight of this formation.

There has always been a discussion of “regionalism” among writers: is it a limitation, a sort of provincialism, a failure to compete or be universal in global terms?  In the other direction, there are efforts to connect “specialness” and privilege to certain places: the Left Bank in Paris, SF in the Beat years, and Montana either as a 19^th century cowboy place or as a contemporary environmental paradise.  For a while Montana books were guaranteed to be popular, but now it is Portland books.

It struck me as an issue because several times now when I’ve told people that my “prairiemary” blog has readers all over the planet, maybe as many from China or Australia as in Montana, their reaction is “well, everyone romanticizes cowboys and is interested in the West.”  They give a "we're so special" smug grin.  But constant readers will know that though I privilege the high prairie -- the old Blackfeet territory -- I allot most space to stuff like sex or neurological research or something I have a hard time naming -- sorta like "the design of peak experience" (liturgical theory).  I spend time on small town dynamics and infrastructure, which seem to be universal in a way that transcends one continent or another.

In a way, thinking of something as “regional” like cowboys and scenery is to be confined by it and put down, but in another way it is a kind of pride, a confidence that the place is special, enviable.   (Last Best Place, God’s Country.) It invites visitors, but it’s an exclusion of anyone from “outside,” a xenophobia.  The newspaper makes a great fuss about local places to eat, local bumper stickers, weather jokes, creating an “in” space, a kind of club.

There is resentment of the more sophisticated and moneyed people who come in here and establish grand empires without having any ancestors who broke their backs and risked their lives to develop the prairie and establish the towns.  But then there’s pride that these big shots would WANT to come here and put up massive log entrance gates in the middle of 3-strand barbed wire fences.

There’s a certain kind of conservationist who brags about how deep into the wilderness they’ve gone, how many mountains they can name and how many trails they know from backpacking.  There are a lot fewer who are trying to understand aquifers and how to manage a sewage lagoon when the temps are thirty below zero.  Some are trying to get their cows up into the deep mountain grass for 19^th century government fees, and others are plotting to get as many wolves and bears as possible down as low as people will tolerate.  Some want the profit and some want the romance.

The great commonality is that everyone wants the money.  Money is ironically the great leveler and equilibrium among all the types who try to occupy this long section of horizon.  Somehow we fail to notice that an island off the East Coast called “Manhattan” has a grip on the money valves of Montana and has had since the earliest days of extractive mineral industry.  This is also true of literary efforts, though most of the people in Manhattan have a weak grasp on what Montana is like.  

When I was circuit-riding for the Montana UU Fellowships, occasional big shots would come from Boston for ceremonies.  Invariably, when they first stepped out of the airplane, they gasped.  Sheer size finally dawned on them.  Even more so after being driven around my circuit.  Each location (Missoula, Bozeman, Helena, and Great Falls) was unique and didn’t much understand the style and circumstances of the other three, nor did they feel any need to find out. So the provincialism (if you want to call it that) of the state was echoed in each town.  That was more true in the Eighties when I was traveling.

Television made some difference, but the Internet has transcended the state and the nation for those who know to reach out.  The farther the reach, the more shared the basis for sympathy and understanding.  In some ways, the UU denomination I served has been exceeded by the world-wide population of people who are in cahoots with each other, which means that local physical groups are only a small part of the movement, not necessarily aware of anything but their own friends.  They are content with what they know.  Scientific mysticism hasn't been institutionalized, so it isn't yet considered religion.

Be very careful about praising the scenery to me.  I become contemptuous of people who rave about how beautiful Glacier Park is.  It's not that I don't think the mountains are beautiful -- it's that they are so much more than that. They are NOT the dwellings of the Gods, although when I was circuit-riding, I called the statewide newsletter, “How Beautiful Upon the Mountain Are the Feet of the Messenger.”  

The line is from Isaiah 52.7 and in context goes like this:  "Therefore My people shall know My name; therefore in that day I am the one who is speaking, 'Here I am.'" How lovely on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, Who announces peace and brings good news of happiness, Who announces salvation, And says to Zion, "Your God reigns!"  Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices, They shout joyfully together; For they will see with their own eyes When the LORD restores Zion.…”  

A ranch family actually named Zion lived nearby.

I doubt many people looked it up.  It was meant to get them to think about what the purpose of this circuit-riding gig was: a chance to grow, to learn, to form new connections.  I think they mostly thought in terms of “hiring,” a status upgrade, and making it easier to run meetings.  At the time I just sort of skipped over that.  I was still idealistic and believed in the “spirituality” of the denomination.

Now I feel much differently about mountains, esp. the Rockies.  My chapter of John Vollertson’s book, “Landscape and Legacy: The Splendor of Nature, History and Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front,” emphasized the deep canyon refuges on the east slope where literary types and fiddler-playing Metis built quiet cabins.  Others identified the mountains with freedom and adventure.  Many fond memories. 

View south from the summit of Ear Mountain, photo by Ralph Thornton

Today I see that long sinuous cordillera as a living creature, pulsing over time with the forces of deep underground tectonic clash, breathing with hurricane-force storm and erosion, carrying snowpack, rains chuting down couloirs, the force of relentless sun heat opening cracks, the weight of glaciers shearing off cirques.  Metamorphized stone, sedimentation in a parfait of colors, avalanche to a skirt of scree, roots penetrating into every crevice and followed by the wedging ice, grizzlies levering boulders to get at the sweet-fleshed rodents hiding underneath.  Game trails of deer and elk weave in and out, making double and triple helixes that carry code for predators to read. Mountain goats climb ever higher on their sponge-bottomed hooves and ignore the peaks above them on the assumption that no predators will get that high.  Except humans.  Maybe eagles hoping for meat if they can knock a kid off a ledge.

The rosy alpenglow feels its way across the face of the ramparts in the early morning; all day the sun fingers along and around the knobs and chutes, the standing obelisks and fallen rubble; then at the end of the day sinks down into indigo cutouts of horizon.  A storm can bring shouts of thunder, speaking emphatically, then muting into rainbow whispers when the clouds move on through.  When a storm shelf of cloud stands behind the peaks, it’s an echo, a stanza of repeated chorus.  Often late in the day wind pulls back a wind arch to show the sun as a hymn to the day just past.

This way of talking is a little too twee, too fancy, too sentimental, too purple.  But that doesn’t make it untrue.  Such thick metaphor can mean nothing to people who only look at it as a kuppelhorizont panorama of scenery in a theatre best only visited with camera in hand, not lived in.  Check it off the tick list of things to see.  You could say it is a cathedral, so people will believe you are spiritual.

But it has nothing to do with formal religion or emotional spirituality or any historical legacy.  Nothing human.  It is the foundation of life, the substrate of the holy, before and after any human systems or uses.  It sustains us and destroys us without any meaning we can know.  Thus we are humbled and that is a valid use of the Rocky Mountains, but not one many people seek.

EMERGING FROM THE SOLSTICE

(Posted a bit early to coincide with the actual Solstice.)

It’s the Winter Solstice, one of those natural events that is the substrate for a multitude of human religious ceremonies and paradigms, one that escapes all dogmas, all priesthoods, all institutions, all nationalisms, to tilt through our lives once a year whether or not we pay attention.  On the prairie we never escape awareness of where the sun is or the effect on the Great Winds that rule our lives as much as if we were seafarers in the great winged ships of the past.  The jet stream is often overhead and sometimes in our yards.

One of my cousins is a California Prosperity Christian (claiming that he had to overcome his natural narcissism and hubris to achieve that state).  His adversary, he thinks, is secular humanism, so he was a bit disconcerted to be told that our paternal grandparents were quietly dedicated prairie humanists.  This was revealed when a grad student studying the movement in Canada found their names on an organizational roster and inquired through this blog what we descendants knew about them and their ideas.  As it turned out, not much.

Glenn W. Smith

http://www.dogcanyon.org/2010/02/07/prairie-humanism-the-just-now-emerging-progressive-movement/   This blog post is a good place to start.  Progressivism and neighborliness in response to very hard times, self-reliance combined with co-operative organizations, are certainly what I recognize.  But also, the fuzzy future envisioning, the weak ability to form a future, the craving to know more, are part of that strand of my Strachan family which started with immigration from Scotland in order to farm where the Brulé Sioux had just been cleared away.  In the end they didn’t do much better than the tribe.  South Dakota is a tough place to live.  Any prairie setting left by the great inland sea that once covered North America.

Glenn W. Smith has taught at Starr King, the UU California seminary I passed up in favor of Meadville, the Chicago version.  His “skew” is political and if you google him, you’ll find that he’s been fighting the good fight for a long time.  My own “skew” is cosmic.  I did a sideways step from Meadville to identification with the U of Chicago Div School, but even they are merely global.  I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern, sitting alongside the wife of David Schramm, the wildman astrophysics prof who was always seeking the missing “Dark Matter,” not as a metaphor but as what he hoped was a reality.  He died in a plane crash, the sole occupant and pilot.  I lost track of that writer wife.  The planet is full of dark matter.

David Schramm

I find that somehow, though I respect and will claim prairie humanism, my faith center is not there.  Many have suggested fanciful ideas about how to name another forming “faith” that many don’t even recognize as existing.  “Scientific Mysticism” will do.  Non-anthropocentric, often represented in science fiction (especially if one includes the work of people like Ursula LeGuin and the visions of pop film), welcoming to indigenous “spirituality” (whatever that is, so long as it’s land-based), the space program, and the persisting Aquarian thought represented by the Edge, some TEDtalks, the Bioneers, and other think tanks, including Smith's www.dogcanyon.org

Paul Tillich used to say that symbols can’t be imposed on people like advertising icons, but must be “found.”  That is, they are emergent from our lives.  This is certainly true of Scientific Mysticism which tries not to be anthropomorphic by including all life as neighbors.  On the other hand, the science part of the syndrome is emphatically NOT about magic and superstition, but rather about the interwovenness of all existence whether it is T-cells trying to resist HIV virus or the nursery of the stars where new fusion-based entities create energy.  We come to understand our bodies as aggregates of cooperating cells organized into -- well -- “organs” and our brains as an orchestra that plays the symphonies that are our consciousness.

Salvation is not found in virtue, but in participation.  Eternal life is not found in the persistence of one skin-enclosed entity but rather in the long-time influence and sharing through eternity.  Once defined, our impact may be small but it is forever.  No “faith” is necessary, just communication, action, connection.  One of the strong influences on the Strachan generations has been a baby named Archibald who lived only seventeen days.  He was the first child of my paternal grandmother, immediately preceding my father. 

The loss of that baby, which my grandmother believed came about because she was so desperate for the company of others that she went to town in the wagon, even knowing she was close to term in her pregnancy has meant a legacy of sadness.  The birth came on the isolated homestead.  Archibald was kept alive for a little more than a fortnight in the warming oven of the woodstove.  My generation didn’t know of the baby’s existence until I read through the boxes of journals my grandmother kept.  Neither did we know that her sister had died in childbirth and we still don’t know what happened to that baby.  Live babies and conceived but naturally aborted babies are lost every day, often undetected, often due to bad code.  But it has meant that my cousin wants safety, assurance, "faith."

Now we understand that all is code.  The first response, like that of the US government, is to hoard code, to try to get hold of all information in the effort to save everything, like a mechanic making sure to save all the pieces. But this is not the way.  It leads us to the problem of the centipede who was asked how he knew to walk with so many legs to manage.  He ended in the ditch with his legs in the air, a symbol that emerges again and again.  The way forward, as Smith recommends, is a function of desire and focus.  The goal may not be reached, but the minutia will be pulled into some kind of purpose.

Oh, yearning!  Oh, vulnerability!  I listen, I watch.  My kitchen has a big east-facing picture window where I often stand and look up the long alley that reaches to a close horizon, a bulge in the terrain.  From behind it rises the full moon, coloring the snow blue but draining the color from the feral calico cats I can’t resist feeding just under the window, their tails forming a mandala around the dishes of cat food.  It’s a good depiction of the mental and emotional life of a single old woman in a defensive small town, using a fancy education in a way it was never intended.  (One is supposed to become a success in one’s field, usually through affiliation with an institution, but when it comes to them I’m strictly a feral cat.)

Words don’t serve as well as music.  Consult Paul Winter.  The Winter Consort at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. http://solsticeconcert.com  

Of course, this is the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  We are all connected.  Survival drives evolution; evolution responds to the rhythms of the world.  We are emergent and something will in turn emerge from us.