love and words

One lone nut

2012-01-29T05:41:00.001-08:00

Derek Silvers said, during one of his presentations on TED, that it takes only “one follower to transform a lone nut into a leader.” He has a very valid point. He goes on to point out that the real leader is that first follower, the lone nut is the innovator.

I came across that clip while taking (yet another) course on Alison. If you don’t know Alison, you should meet (Alison.com). It is a multinational site designed to provide free and verifiable education to common standards. The one I was perusing was Bill Liao’s course on the Stone Soup Way, which is about building business and social enterprise. So far I am liking it and finding it very helpful. Perhaps what is most helpful is the concept of the “heated holistic present.”

Bill Liao basically says that most people fail at what they set out to do because they look to their past too much to learn. The past sets up a preconceived notion of the future. It is the person who can clearly imagine the future they want that will allow them to create their present. The past then becomes a record of where you have been, but not an indicator of where you will go. I find that the concept has a certain ring of truth about it. I have encountered a fair amount of people who not only define their own futures according to their pasts but also, will seek to define yours that way to know that it is not a commonly held concept.

I have talked about all the studies that have debunked the social myth that our pasts predict our behavior (from our past actions to past experiences – ie the once abused will abuse cycle) and how even though debunked, the majority of people cling to them as a means of predicting the future. But you can’t predict the future because it does not exist. To attempt to predict it is a waste of time and energy and most likely, you will be wrong. Unless, of course, there are reasons or catalysts (you, others) that ensure the prediction comes true. It is, of course, easier to fulfill an expectation or prediction because it absolves you of the responsibility for creation. A person who imagines their future is responsible for creating themselves in the present.

Another way to think of it harks back to Fromm’s concept that our society has become necrophiliac. We participate more with the dead (the past) then the living (the present) and the possible (the future). Back to Silvers, the innovator – the nut – is someone who can imagine the future but isn’t quite rooted in the living yet. That takes the first follower, the one who is living but can’t solidly imagine a different future – but will recognize a good one when they see it and risk supporting it. The next layer that comes, the other followers are people who need to see in the present that the venture is not rejected or ridiculed – it is then validated as being worthy of having a past, a point of origin and they jump on board.

The nut and the first follower are equals. The innovator and the leader cannot function without each other. One can imagine, but not create. The other can create but not imagine. Even when the role is fulfilled by one person, they will shift between those two roles (and get rather burnt, I imagine).

Yesterday, I played Go with someone much, much better than me who (after winning), walked me through several approaches of the game. I learned more in a ten minute conversation with him then in all the playing and reading I have done over the past few months. I immediately went online this morning to one of the Go problem sites and “got” the problems. Not that I could solve them yet, but I began to see the order and reason of the moves.

I had my writer’s group yesterday and I had a new poem submitted that they liked so much one of the women launched into a rewrite of it. To me, that is one of the highest compliments – to have someone so moved by a piece they want to write it in their own language.

Ok…back to the ocean, the small room, the draft but hopefully…not Tony Bennett.

the only thing

2012-01-26T15:39:00.001-08:00

this will be short, it has been a long day in a hard week and I am going to watch a movie.

I woke up early and realized I had to juggle three deadlines and a 6 hour in person thing with no internet access or break. I looked at my schedule and for the life of me, although I had written down 11 for the start of the personal thing, I seemed to recall a conversation about it starting much earlier. I decided to err to the side of caution and go early.

I was phenomenally early.

But on the bus down I saw one of the largest...peregrines...hawks...falcons...I have ever seen.

Then during the day I saw a single seagull strutting along the roof line of a house, silhouetted against the gathering clouds.

Followed by an enormous crow preening himself in a barren tree.

I listen to the same CD on repeat for 6 hours. Tony Bennett doing endless Cole Porter duets with everyone from Lady Gaga to Queen Latifa to Willie Nelson. This wasn't my choice, but for the comfort of someone else. By the end I was alternately feeling hyper-romantical or like I had just broken up with my entire high school class. It took a bit to walk myself out of that strange mood.

I got mugged by the two dogs in the house who have discovered that I do-so-too know where the treats are and if they bark, I give.

Walking back through the cold down a suburban street I came across the strange site of 12 wild turkeys gathered in a driveway. The biggest was able to look into the back window of the SUV parked there and was fascinated.

And the only thing,

the only thing that has run through my head all day is a Buddhist saying:

"That for those who do not know,

there is Buddha,

For those who do know,

there is no Buddha."

And I got it.

I am in the process of scheduling a series of meetups/workshops centering around meditation and I have looked at tons of spaces to rent. Some are beautiful. Gorgeous. Sacred in their lighting and wood and statues and incense. But I realized, what I want to teach is for people who want to know. And I think I may have found the perfect, barren space with tons of windows and you can hear everything on the street.

The People's Park

2012-01-25T18:23:00.001-08:00

I had written a few weeks ago about Occupy Providence and their offer that they would vacate Burnside Park if the city ponied up a day shelter for the homeless. I did have a touch of pride that they had pulled together a succinct demand. I was prouder still of the Mayor’s response which was to say that there were places for the homeless to go during the day and that yes, they needed more and better but that the city would not be blackmailed into rushing into something not planned well. Because blackmail it was. Not to mention, I suspect, an attempt at Occupy PVD to redeem their reputation after the repeated bad behavior of the group towards the homeless. None of this changes the other question about how, when the homeless had a tent city on unused, public land the state moved so fast with a court decision about the illegality of camping on public grounds and evicted them and that ruling seems to have been set aside for the tent city in the public park.

Today, I had to go downtown to the main bus depot to catch my ride. The depot is right next to where Occupy has set up. They have decorated the fence with a variety of signs with slogans etc. Today, I noticed a new one. A banner actually, set up near one of the park’s entrances, painted on a bed sheet and the message on the banner made me see red.

The banner read, “Welcome to the People’s Park! Love, Occupy PVD!”

My immediate reaction was, “It’s not the People’s Park, it’s Burnside Park and up until Occupy moved in, people used it freely and often and it was a long time gathering spot and safe place for the homeless. Now, people don’t use it because it is not theirs anymore, its trashed, you have cost the city $10,000 (and probably more in unseen budget costs) that will effect someone in need and the homeless have been driven out. “

People’s Park my ass. The arrogance. The entitlement. The absolute lack of empathy or consideration of any part of the community beyond themselves has just really gotten to me.

There is a part of me that is contemplating having a small sign making party with like minded friends and posting our signs right next to the Occupy one’s on that fence that say “Everybody is somebody’s 1%.” I wonder how long the signs would stay up before Occupier’s took them down from the fence surrounding the “people’s park.”

First, I was a man and now, I am Black

2012-01-24T14:23:00.001-08:00

First, I was a man, and now, I am black

Spam is a funny thing. It reveals quite a bit about how things really work on the Internet. For months I have been receiving lots of spam about Viagra and ummmmm…personal growth. Obviously, somehow I have landed on a “of-interest-to-men” spam list. Then, the other day, all of that was gone and instead I had message after message regarding “Meet Hot Black Singles!” and “Successful Black Women are looking for you,” plus quite a few tips on cosmetically covering my keloid scars.

Now, I had to sit and think about how I had switched identity on the spam lists and realized that just a few days prior I had a few exchanges on Google plus with two African-American writers (conservative writers, both are very good - Shirley Husar and JC Kendall) but haven’t been on much otherwise due to deadlines and presto! I am now an African-American Male.

Think about the kind of identity crisis this could cause. Think about what it says about how social media is actually used. It is important that you spend a little time contemplating how these services can be free. The ads we see are the least of the ways that revenue is generated. The issue is not just about how your information is used, but every click and stroke you make is analyzed for the purpose of selling you product.

Recently, I have begun to learn more about something called Big Mind. To quote Wikipedia (because I am feeling slightly lazy today)

“(Big Mind is )used particularly within the Zen tradition, the term Big Mind can have different meanings in different contexts, even within Buddhism. Japanese Soto Zen founder Dōgen Zenji uses the phrase in hisTenzo Kyōkun (Instructions to the Chief Cook);^[1] as does 20th c. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki in talks collected in the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. "Big Mind" indicates an awareness of reality that transcends the merely personal, or wholly subjective.

The "Big Mind Process" is a specific technique developed by Zen teacher Dennis Merzel that merges Western psychological techniques (specifically Voice Dialogue therapy) with Buddhist conceptions of self and mind.”

I am learning about it through personal application (read – I found a new therapist and this is their approach) and also in an outward application (read – the new therapist is also directing me to sources to learn how it is done). It is a fascinating process and one of the few that has the effect of immediately changing how you think and act. Some of the change is simply from an increased awareness, but with any type of shift in awareness – one begins to make different choices in their actions.

What I keep meaning to blog about (and started to a week ago) is the awareness I have of the shift in my writing. I have gone on and on for years that there are two kinds of poetry – the personal and the universal. The personal is more about a private emoting, the universal is about an identification of shared emotions/events. A lot of poetry contains elements of both. There is a third type, but I can’t stand it so am not even going to give it space.

Universal poetry comes from the poet writing in service to the community. In other words, they are an artisan and not an artist (assigning to artist the modern meaning of ‘outside the norm’). The artisan is the craftsmen (in any media) who translates or captures meaning within the community. They are the great masters who painted or sculpted for religion. The writers who wrote to educate or explore meaning within a larger context then their own lives. I think truly, the reason why some artists have remained in the public eye and contemporary context even though they may have been dead for hundreds of years is that when you are involved in serving meaning within the community, you are creating works that speak to large groups of strangers who all are connected by the human condition.

I have watched my writing begin to transition out of the personal, dabble into the universal and then…suddenly, begin to exist in a role in which it is a tool of something else. I have mentioned how I have been under the impression I haven’t been writing much poetry at all and then I noticed all I have been doing is writing poetry. Only instead of writing something that I put out in a book or on the web. These poems are being put into use – they are the prayers of Grace Independent, the hypnosis scripts I use with clients, the meditations that I am beginning to teach – and I don’t feel like I am writing poetry because suddenly, the words are not separate from the life. The work I have done before has been separate – separate in the sense that yes, people can relate to it and perhaps find themselves within it but only by suspending their lives for that moment. Just as the creation of the work was a suspension of mine. If that makes sense. Somehow all of this relates to Big Mind, I think it is in using awareness to see how things may adapt, heal and have purpose.

And I think that is one of the reasons I have had a sort of stumbling with the city of love. The city needs a purpose to be a part of to continue on. That realization makes me happy. Like I have to go find a job for the poem.

Now I have gotten totally distracted.

But I am off to go see The Artist again.

Lola

2012-01-19T15:00:00.000-08:00

I am sitting in a café (not ‘the café’) but my “I have someplace nearby to go and the other one is too far away” backup café. It has been a day of opportunity, cold weather, long walks, feeling highly competent, skilled and experienced and then immediately making a horse’s ass out of myself – so in other words…a good balanced day. One that is far from over.

So here I sit waiting until it is time for me to leave and go to my next appointment and I had the best of intentions for getting some work done but instead…I have eaten grilled cheese, sipped coffee and poked around on the Internet while listening to Gamma Binaural Beats and just…goofed around. I finally had to admit that was what I was doing (and not preparing for a heavy bout of concentration and work) because over the Gamma-Binaural-Brain-Food-to-Increase-Concentration-and-General-Awesomeness blasting in my ears, I could hear the distinct opening notes of the Kinks singing Lola. I turned off the brain food, checked the weather and ordered a double espresso. Somedays you need an extended period of just goofing off.

Today I learned that there are certain medical conditions that require a hospital bed to be alarmed so if the patient opts to radically shift their position (as in get out of bed) someone is alerted…alerted by what sounds exactly like the siren effect in discos. I learned this because the person in question was resting happily in a recliner and I was sitting nearby, once again attempting to get work done. I opened my laptop and put it on the bed (alerting the alarm to the presence of weight) and when it had finished booting up, I picked the laptop up off the bed and suddenly sirens were wailing and tweeting. I found the alarm and turned it off, puzzled as what it meant. The patient was now awake (no surprise there) but soon fell back asleep. I went to get something so I….put the laptop on the bed again, then returned and picked it up off the bed and triggered the sirens again. The poor patient was snapping at me “for Christ sake, squeeze the reset button.” I was panicking, not sure if it meant the batteries were going in the alarm or if it was somehow magically hooked up to the patient and something was going wrong that I didn’t know about. In a panic, I called the home office and as soon as the receptionist heard the alarm went off she panicked and patched me through to a nurse. The nurse was the essence of grace under pressure. She was in crisis mode until I stopped her and said, “But the patient isn’t in the bed, he is in the chair.” There was a long pause before she asked, “What did you do to the bed?” And I suddenly had one of those flashes of insight…revelation…ephiphany…and groaned, “Oh no, I put my laptop on it.” And the nurse burst out laughing.

It’s funny what happens when you let it be ok when things go wrong.

I remember when I started all of that aspect of my life I was so serious. So concerned that I was 100% on top of things and responsive. Now, I realize that no one can be that way 100% of the time. Sometimes all you can do is be there, whether you are doing it right or not.

OMG…ok…a) I downgraded my cell phone as far as I could go to break my txting obsession. It has worked but now people think I am really mentally challenged when it comes to replying to them because I can’t figure out where the punctuation marks and symbols are. 2) the café I am in was in the process of hanging paintings from a kid’s class that were done with acrylic on canvas board. The teacher hung them with tape. As the night gets colder and the heat gets higher, the tape is drying out and everyone in the café is getting bombed by dropping paintings.

And c) the funniest thing I have heard all day and the sign that I should just stop writing and post this is Obama did some skit or something last night where he challenged Betty White to produce her birth certificate.

Onward and upward.

Why I don't like crosswalks

2012-01-17T17:09:00.001-08:00

I run. I walk. I bike. If…while running, walking or biking…I fall down and go BOOM (more accurately BOOM-SKID-BOUNCE) it occurs in a crosswalk.

Why? Try walking across one when it is raining. The paint they use, at least in this state, that is raised and reflective is also slicker than owl sh*t. It is not too safe on a dry day either. Why oh why, in the name of pedestrian safety, they use paint like this is beyond me. There…that is my pet peeve for the day. I walk outside the crosswalk.

I have been engaged in a very strange and illuminating discussion of late about the concept of success, fulfillment, happiness and legacy. Usually, when I have these types of discussions it is very much a mental exercise – most of what is discussed is theoretical. Perhaps, we may know that doing what makes you feel fulfillment brings happiness and happiness is more important than success but living that is a different matter. Tied up is the separation of the idea of success from happiness and then further complicating the issue is how and where the concept of legacy comes in.

I am 43 years old. And I have been shifting steadily over the past three years in what I view as success and legacy for myself. I am not talking about defining it as a global concept, but sitting and examining the personal definition that we each have of what it means to us to be successful. Have you ever really thought about that? I mean, what does it look like to you? What comes with it? Does it provide anything? How is it reflected in the rest of your life – in your degree of happiness, your sense of fulfillment and purpose and – da da dum – how does it define the type of legacy you will leave?

The idea of legacy is difficult for many people to think about because in order to recognize the shift towards legacy in your psyche it means that you must also acknowledge your mortality. We sort of do a shimmy-shift and have defined legacy as the things we leave behind. This allows us to keep producing, acquiring and making until the moment we die – in effect, we get to distract ourselves from accepting, internalizing and reconciling our mortality because we continue to live in in a constant building and acquiring mode. Legacy, as Stephen Covey so eloquently defined, “fulfills our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence and contribution.” Erickson defines the psychosocial development stage of Legacy centers on the question, “Can I make my life count?” It is slightly embarrassing for me to be such a cliché, but the Legacy stage hits (not always but often) between the ages of 40 and 65, and here I am 43 and full in it.

If you combine Covey and Erickson, you get a very defined question that begins to illuminate what is popularly known as the “mid-life crisis.” The question becomes:

“Can I make my life count by understanding and committing to my sense of purpose, gaining understanding of my meaning, developing personal congruence and finding a way to contribute to life?”

The stereotypical mid-life crisis has people throwing away years of work and relationships and either going backwards to emulate youth (escaping Legacy) or launching themselves on a vague path of discovery that more often than not, leads them to become serial adopters of theories that promise to explain life and give them place and purpose. I wish I could say that there is one way above all others that reveals the answers to the questions posed when you consider your legacy, but there isn’t.

Legacy unfolds much the same way faith does. In the beginning, faith is wonderful and easy. There is structure, ritual, and answers – there is security in faith and faith is defined by how you experience it. As you grow spiritually, you begin to experience a deepening of faith and a rising questioning of the easy answers and structures of ritual, – this stage demands you give up the safety of symbols and rituals and stand within the unknowing without promise you will be moved to a place of wisdom and understanding. That phase often causes people to abandon their faiths – to reject the religions they once participated in so zealously as being hypocritical and false, to come to believe that even considering faith is an example of willful delusion. Should they make it through this “dark night of the soul,” they enter into a new phase – one in which they stand within faith, not as its center and definer, but as a part of its life. Your experience is accepted as limited and you become open to being a part of something larger, something you are not in control of, something that you do not define.

The concept of Legacy is exactly like that. Legacy is not something that you are in control of nor do you define it. Leaving a building with your name on it or thousands of dollars to someone is not a Legacy. A legacy is made from your contribution to something much larger than you could ever understand its purpose and meaning. But you have come to understand your own, your own small corner of time. Success redefines itself as fulfilling your purpose, understanding your meaning, becoming congruent (the process of having reconciled all of you into one), discovering the best way for you to contribute to what it is all of life shares, and that we can never define.

Ok…that is part one, I am still trying to get to what I wanted to write about a few days ago but this is getting to be a rather long one today and I have got to get back to work…so consider tomorrow’s post part II.

9 degrees

2012-01-16T05:33:00.001-08:00

Now it is 9 degrees and I have to leave the house soon. I have given up all pretense of looking businesslike, professional or fashionable and instead am going for the “I may look crazy but I am warm” style.

Yesterday, while traveling on the bus, we stopped to pick up a young (20) woman who had been waiting out in the cold for an hour. She had a nuclear meltdown as she got on the bus and discovered that the driver could not make change for a 5 except to give her a change card. She burst out hysterically crying and said that she had worked overnight and overtime which is why she had to wait an hour for the bus and only needed the one way ticket and couldn’t use the change card and had been out in the cold for so long her tears were frozen. A man on the bus was able to make change for her and she got on. She got on her iPhone and called her BFF and cried about being cold and the mean driver who wouldn’t just let her on and demanded exact change.

This young girl, mind you, went to work when it was 13 degrees out. Had no hat, gloves etc and so forth. Was dressed in the latest sleek 20 something wear and would not put her hood up even because of her hair. Sympathy was fast fleeing into the cold air. She went on and on about how no one in her family would give her a ride and she was saving for a car and just started working. An older man tried to comfort her and gave her addresses of places to go to get help with housing etc and pointed out that everyone on the bus was making it without a car and perhaps she should focus on building up the rest of her life first. Not going to happen. It was an interesting scene to watch unfold. And I noticed that we all (bundled like fools) started looking around and noticed that the majority of people 25 and younger were so not prepared for the weather. Which is kind of important when you consider busses can be a bit unreliable and chances are, you will wind up waiting.

It reminded me of passing the Occupy Providence encampment and noticing that there tents were so not prepared in the least for cold weather. Then again, I found out that the OP people tend to go back home in cold weather and just leave the tents there or stay on a rotating basis only. It would be easy to say “oh this new generation, so unprepared – so out of touch – so entitled.” But children learn how to prepare themselves and think ahead from the families they were raised in (usually but not always). Whether or not, when they are on their own, they still use what they are taught is another thing.

But, it brings up the issue with the Marines who urinated on the corpses. I have seen both sides of the argument – one in which people want them to be excused because they are young and dumb and overwhelmed; and the other where they are considered wholly responsible for upholding the Geneva Convention because that is what a Marine is about.

Is any side right?

Here was my two cents on g+ in response to a back and forth between two gentlemen, each holding the opposite opinion:

” Funny, I agree with both of you even though I can see where both of you don't agree, but I think that holds part of the issue. On the one hand, there is no excuse - no justification and nothing that can be said to diminish the criminality and responsibility of those soldiers. They are trained as to what is the responsibility and legality of their actions in combat. I am a vet, I had the same training and was in a combat area, as an MP we preceded the Marines, male and female. A part of maintaining your sanity in those situations is holding onto the rules that protect your human dignity and integrity. On the other hand, one of the real issues that is not addressed is the reason why soldiers are so young. It has nothing to do with being physically fit, it has to do with being morally undeveloped and malleable to accept that murder is viable if sanctioned and placing yourself in harm's way the most honorable and intelligent choice of all . Soldiers are trained that enemy combatants are subhuman even as they are trained to protect and provide for them as prisoners. If they are not prisoners though, they are in a different category altogether. A child who has never had the experience of independence from authority and from having a caretaker (a provider of food, shelter and purpose) is not morally mature enough to be able to reconcile actions that violate the innate drive to protect their life. After constantly choosing to put themselves in harm's way they will develop coping skills that can take a thousand different forms - some good and some not. We don't address this issue, instead relying on a wait and see approach to see who gets psychologically damaged and send them to the VA. Punish the soldiers? Yes, but don't forget to punish the others who were accomplices to the crime - and that is just about everyone.”

Funny, this was not at all the blog I thought I would be writing this morning.

4 degrees

2012-01-15T17:31:00.001-08:00

It is going to be 4 degrees tonight. Today, it barely got above a balmy 21. Of course, it will steadily rise back into the forties by the end of the week. I spent a large part of my day wandering around wearing: 2 pairs of socks, 3 layers of pants (2 long underwear and jeans), 4 shirts, a winter jacket, a knee length leather jacket over that, a hat, gloves and wrap around glasses. The bus, needless to say, could only get me within a mile and a half of where I was going. It was 11 degrees when I left the house.

For whatever reason, whenever it dips below 15 I suddenly have an appointment before 11am. Which means I get the full brunt of the cold. If it is above 15, I never have a reason to leave the house till noon or later when it has warmed up even more. I think the Angels are messing with me.

The mad kitten is in full happy hibernation. I have yet to figure out how she knows that when I enter the house with three identical plastic shopping bags, that one of them is filled with toys for her. She merrily attacked me last night and had removed all the feathers from all the toys I got on clearance at PetCo in about an hour. Then she snacked and passed out again until the morning.

Once again, I was struck at my skewed vision of what I am doing in my life right now. Once again, I was berating myself for not working on a poem that I need to write (on a deadline) and once again, I finally noticed that the thing I have been caught up with is actually a….poem. I am slowly learning to validate and recognize that I seem to have shifted in my life from someone who writes poetry often, to someone for whom poetry is in everything I do. In this case, I am creating a custom hypnosis script and when I got to the main part – it is a poem. When I write for Grace – it is a poem. When I write poetry for myself – it is a poem. When I do some of the other things that are becoming my “business” in life…they are all rooted in poetry that I have to write for them. It is interesting this transition. Interesting too how hard it is for me to recognize the poems.

I am having bird issues again. The other night I was walking back from downtown along one of the oldest streets in Providence, the sun was just going down so it was kind of that strange half-light where everything stands out sharply – but the detail is hard to see. I heard this sound, like a rushing and then the familiar caws. Looking up I saw hundreds of crows flying in a circular pattern over the Jencks House on Benefit Street. The Jencks house was built in 1774 and the Jencks in question are purported to be a part of the group of first patriots in the nation, the ones who burned the HSS Gaspee. The murder of crows filled the three largest trees around the house and they alternated landing and then taking off and flying in a circular pattern over the property and taking up roost again. I stopped and watched them for a bit. There is something about these massive murders of crows that fits Providence so well. After all, they are – cross-culturally, seen as the Divine Messengers of Providence. What I did not know is that they are considered to be solar animals and represent the creative principal. I have an interest in crows because if you remember, it was around the same time last year I saw the thousand crows streaming over the city. Things like that kind of stick in your mind.

Then walking downtown the next day, a flock of hundreds of pigeons came up behind me and flew over me thickly – I mean they were arranged in a block from a foot off the ground to about 12 feet above. They landed and refused to move when I was trying to walk through. So, I walked in the gutter while they did their thing.

There is something uniquely striking about a large amount of birds. Some of the most striking internal memories I have all stem from my encounters with mass amounts of birds. The thousands of starlings I saw lining the wires as I drove out of Providence so many years ago. The hundreds of swans I surprised in a lagoon once.

Something about them that moves me out of the present and into a kind of space between. The space where the stories live that become poems that have now become life. Funny, how the act of writing used to involve all these special preparations and was so separate from the rest of my life. If I was writing, it meant I was withdrawing from whatever was around me to find that silence, that sacred space. And now? I think my life is evolving to become that space and there is no withdrawing, no special ritual, no separation.

If you went looking for the Sunday Sermon for Grace Independent you probably witnessed it steadily shifting further and further into the day before finally coming to rest on Monday night at 9pm. That is temporary. I have a commitment on Sunday for the next few weeks that will keep me wandering around in the cold, wearing everything I own and encountering large amounts of birds. I am starting a new bi-weekly broadcast on the Grace Independent channel called “Healing Grace.” It will be a ½ hour – 40 minute show that simply examines all the different methods and means of healing – physically, spiritually, emotionally and mentally. I’ll cover alternative and mainstream therapies, clinical studies and anecdotal accounts. Given my own experiences and the work I am getting deeper into doing, I have learned the importance of becoming informed.

Now…off for coffee, to harass MK and maybe…get some work done. It will probably have meter and feet but I will call it work and bemoan my lack of writing poetry still.

: )

The Artist

2012-01-13T04:24:00.001-08:00

Last night, I went to see that new movie “The Artist” with a friend. If you don’t know what I am talking about you should watch the preview (http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi729455897/) it is basically a silent movie.

Now, a bit about my history with movies. With the exception of my blip trip at someone’s request (for their birthday) to go to Harry Potter at the Imax, I have not seen a movie trailer that inspired me enough to go pay full price to see it in a theater in almost 7 years. Actually no, it’s been 5 years. The last movie that inspired me to that extent was 300 (and boy, was that worth it). I watch a fair amount of movies of all different types but I tend to wait until they are free on youtube or available for a dollar somewhere. To put it politely, there are not very many good movies made – they all seem to be more about the personalities, the special effects, or the extent they can create shocking moments of one kind or another – the art of telling a captivating story is just lost.

So then, I started reading about the controversy over Uggie the Dog in the Artist. The dog in question has renewed the debate over whether or not animals should be awarded Oscars. So then I read a bit about the movie – a silent movie in this day and age? What are they, nuts? Or worse, it is going to be some obtuse arty endeavor that just gives you brain strain to watch. The trailer looked good, kind of cheesy – she-uses him to climb to fame – kind of story but the music was good and I decided to go.

OMG.

The trailer in no way represents what the story is about or how amazing this film is. I have not been to a film that absolutely grabbed you, pulled you in and took you on such a wild ride of emotions. The whole audience was on the same page. Which was amazing…it’s a silent movie – complete with the text cards – and half of the dialogue you never see the text for, but you get every nuance of every conversation. I don’t want to spoil it so suffice it to say – go see it, if you can – go with someone because you need someone to punch in the arm and go “I can’t believe he is going to be such an ass!” And the climatic scene towards the end? You need someone to hold on to.

My friend and I were talking about what current actors and actresses (of the Hollywood variety) we thought would be capable of doing what the heroine in this movie (played by Berenice Bejo) did. She had several scenes in which she walked across the screen and everyone got absolutely everything going on with the character. There was no question and no misinterpretation. We came up with one – Glenn Close (ignoring the new movie she is in, but you know it was one of those personal projects).

The capacity to express emotion and thought in silence and without gesture is a very, very rare thing –sort of, regular people do it all the time. The problem is, will anyone notice? Will they notice their own expressions?

I found this recently and am reposting it. It is from an excellent book, Emotional Genius: How Emotions Can Save Your Life by Karla McLaren. If I was an actor, I would read this list as a way of finding my motivation within a character. As a person, I read it and go “Oh…that makes sense.” And am reminding to remember these things as I move through life.

Anger (resentment, jealously, hatred, shame, guilt, boredom, apathy) tells us that proper boundaries should be maintained or rebuilt. The questions to ask are: “What must be protected?” or “What must be restored?”

Guilt and Shame restore integrity, self-respect and proper behaviors. The questions to ask are: “Who has been hurt?” “What must be made right?”

Fear (worry, anxiety, panic, terror) is our vigor, intuition and our focused awareness of the world around us. The question to ask is: “What action must I take?”

Confusion (masking fear). By unmasking confusion you can revive your intuition and your instincts and discover what is preventing you from moving forward. Ask yourself whenever you are confused or indecisive about any choice: “What is my intention?” then ask “What action must I take?”

* Sadness restores flow, relaxation and rejuvenation to us. Both questions must be asked: “What must be released?” and “What must be restored?” (the second question removes the blockage).

Grief tells us the loss has already occurred. The question to ask is: “What must be mourned?”

Depression tells us that what we’re doing and where we’re going doesn’t match up with our inner desires. It is ingenious stagnation. The questions to ask: “Where has my energy gone?” and “Why did I send it away?”

Contentment tells us we’re living up to our own expectations, we’ve accomplished a goal and we’re aligned with our morals. Statement: “Thank you for renewing my faith in myself.“ Acknowledge this feeling and like all others let it go.

Happiness is anticipating a bright future. Thank your happiness for this up and celebratory feeling. Trust happiness to arise naturally as you continue to acknowledge, move through and act on the guidance of your emotions.

Joy comes forth when we feel communion and inspiration. Again acknowledge this feeling which shows you that you are honoring yourself. Continue to follow the light on your path and more joy is yours.

Exhilaration arises when we try to cement self in happiness. It is comprised on ungrounded, skittish, distracted and addictive behaviors. It is the flip side of depression and those same questions can be asked. Also ask yourself: “How can I get back in my body?”

RESOURCE: Emotional Genius: How Emotions Can Save Your Life by Karla McLaren

puppy killing for fun and profit

2012-01-11T18:42:00.001-08:00

I think I am giving new meaning to the phrase “all over the place’ today. It has taken me a few days of a sinus headache, constantly blowing my nose, sneezing fits and being oddly exhausted to think that maybe…just maybe…I am fighting off the cold that is going around. But I have been randomly eating copious amounts of chicken soup lately so it has never blossomed into something that I recognize as a cold. But here I am, looking with lust at my Allergy & Cold Benadryl and unable to consummate our relationship until after I do the Essay broadcast tonight (10 pm EST http://t.co/GVdzxzKv).

I talk a lot about motivation and goals in this blog and I just came across something I have never heard of before that I thought I would share. There is a new kind of motivational web service out that is proving to be highly successful in helping people achieve their short-term goals and, shows signs of creating the motivation to stay on track up to a year after the challenge.

They are called anti-charity sites. You register on the service (for free) and define the goal you want to achieve – say, walk 2 miles a day for 30 consecutive days. Then you return to the site each day to log whether or not you walked that particular day. Some sites require that a third party register (like a friend) and that they are the ones reporting on your actions to keep you more honest. Other sites allow you to self report. Now, you may have used something like this on other sites like, sparkpeople the exercise and nutrition site. They track your progress and award you spark points the more you stick to your plan and send you motivational messages etc to keep you going. The success of that kind of site is ok but not stellar.

Along comes the anti-charity site. Before you begin your goal program, an anti-charity site requires that you deposit a set amount of money with them. Let’s say a dollar a day for the length of time that you want to work on your goal. In this case you would deposit $30 because you want to walk for 30 days. Then, and here is what is making this approach so unbelievably successful – they ask you to select a charity that represents something that absolutely appalls your sensibilities. Let us say that our walker selects the “Puppy Killing for Fun” lobbying group who seeks legislation to force shelters to give up unwanted puppies for sport killing. Everyday our walker does their walk (with their five dogs they treat like their children) and reports it, the site refunds one dollar to them – immediately. Every time the walker fails to take their daily walk the site donates one of their dollars to the Puppy Killers.

Studies are showing that using this kind of motivation is incredibly successful and also sustains a person’s motivation beyond the time frame of the set goal. It is interesting to sit and think about it. And I swear, if I keep procrastinating and rationalizing my way out of some of my goals, I may just try it.

The thing is, what I think makes this so successful, is that it is not about getting the money back, it is about feeling empowered that you can actual do something to prevent something you perceive as being awful from being supported. There are very few ways for people to feel they are being effective these days. While it may seem like it is a pseudo effectiveness, it is actually a very real one. Within the illusion of being effective lies the very real groundwork of change, achieving goals, growth and empowerment. As a person acquires these things they can become more effective in preventing things from happening that are abhorrent.

OMG…all I want is for that one sinus cavity to go on a cruise.

Projections

2012-01-10T20:10:00.001-08:00

This will be a short blog. I am exhausted. I have several projects that are requiring me to write on the fly for upwards of 10 hours a day and I am just burnt right now. I do have an ever growing list of topics I want to blog about, as soon as I pass the milestone tomorrow I can switch back to blogging in the morning.

I have been watching the primary feeds and it was just…frustrating to see the media releasing their projections before even a third of the districts had reported. Almost as disheartening as seeing the polling results and witnessing how many people were voting for candidates who had already bowed out of the race.

Back in the 80s there was a lot of noise made about how media projections, especially the ones made this early, have a direct impact on the outcome of the vote. There was talk about legislation being passed to block the media from reporting on the returns – mind you they could report the numbers but they were to be prohibited from editorializing on them. Needless to say that movement absolutely died out.

I wish that there was a movement to bring it back. My god, our electoral process is so screwed up.

And the people voting for candidates who have withdrawn or write-ins for people who don’t even exist, what on Earth do they think they are accomplishing? That is not a protest, that is the height of apathy. That is even more of an abdication of responsibility than not voting at all.

No small wonder that I picked Erich Fromm’s work on “The Illusion of Individuality” to read tomorrow on Essay. It is from his book “Escape from Freedom.” The central idea of the book is that “if humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism…If the rise of democracy set some people free, at the same time it gave birth to a society in which the individual feels alienated and dehumanized.”

Tomorrow, 10pm EST on http://blogtalkradio.com/grace-independent. If you can’t listen live, go to the link later and listen to the archived recording.

Ugh…alright…I need sleep.

After the Votes are Cast

2012-01-08T05:57:00.000-08:00

(The following is the text for the homily broadcast this Sunday, January 8^th 2012 at 10am EST on http://blogtalkradio.com/grace-independent. You can listen to the service in its entirety by visiting the link or finding the Grace Independent podcast on iTunes.)

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The Presidential election is underway and already we have seen the good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain strange in the Iowa Republican Caucus. Obama’s first term has provided the Democrats with an equal presentation of the same.

It does not matter what or who you support these days, there is no candidate that does not possess the core elements of hypocrisy, self-interest, a desire for power and who has made politics a career that has become the identifying qualities of politicians.. Whether the hypocrisy is intentional, it happens. There is a difference between what is said and promised in an election year and the reality of working within our political system. We get disappointed by the candidates we have placed so much hope in when they do not behave according to the letter of their promises. We act as if we have been betrayed and break off our relationship with them as soon as possible to shift our support to the next person who promises to believe exactly as we do.

We lose faith not just in our candidates, but also in the hopes we have for our lives and country that we placed in the basket that they carry. We lose our belief in change. We lose our trust in their representation.

This year we stand to lose even more. Religion and faith have become a tool for candidates to garner support. It could be because of their statement for a certain faith or against a certain faith. It could be because of their identifying themselves as representing a set of economic, social, foreign and domestic policies that are in keeping with the dominant religious beliefs in a small geographic area where they need votes. And the dominant religious beliefs may not be the majority beliefs of that area; they are the beliefs of the people who have a proven track record of turning out to vote.

Faith has become a tool of opportunity for politicians. Faith can be used to play to our emotions and cloud our desire to look at the totality of what a candidate represents by carefully evaluating their history. We have come to treat the electoral process not as a time when we evaluate the candidates as if we were hiring them for a job, but as a process in which we try to select a miracle worker based upon verbal promises.

After the votes are cast, we are left without our miracles and with an “employee” in place who has a specific agenda – to preserve their employment and advance in status by appealing to whatever is the current trend. We do not elect our presidents based upon their qualifications and abilities; we elect them based on their skill at making us believe that we can achieve our desires without effort.

The founding fathers of this country feared what would happen should one belief system become the dominant and enshrined governing rule of the country, just as they held a healthy fear of what would happen should the country become a Democracy. This is why the Constitution carefully lays out the construction of a Republic and strives to prevent, especially with religion, one set of beliefs from rising to control all else.

That is new thinking to people, that we are not a Democracy and were never intended to be one. At the same time, many people can give lip service to understanding that we are a Republic but few of them truly understand what is the difference between the two.

A Republic is based upon representation by elected legislators who have the power to create referendums that are presented to the public at large for a vote. A Democracy relies on initiatives originating from the public at large that are voted on and then passed to elected legislators to enact. The founding fathers had a healthy fear of what would happen should popularity, fashion and group think get a chance to determine the laws for all. They saw that this was the door to oppression and economic instability. There has been no pure Democracy in the history of mankind, the few governments who have attempted it have quickly devolved into Fascism, Anarchy or Dictatorship. A Republic, where the people are represented by legislators who try to balance the needs of their entire districts when creating referendums as well as negotiating with other districts/nations for a larger good, was seen as a more viable means of government that could preserve core freedoms.

We have come to believe that we are a Democracy and to try to push the concept of Democracy on other countries despite the fact that we have no experience in what it means to be a Democracy. Yet wearing the masque of Democracy feels good – it makes us feel like we are powerful, individual and in charge. Wearing the masque of a Republic does not feel so good because it involves recognition that we are not reliable enough to behave in a manner that will not oppress someone in order to preserve our own beliefs. Needless to say, because of this preferential masque of Democracy – now we do not have a country that is a Republic or a Democracy but a strange kind of…mess, part Fascist, part anarchy and wholly run by a dictatorship of corporate interest.

In today’s readings, we have a series of communications from God through the prophets, the disciples and Christ in which we are admonished that to become convinced that our own interpretations of the world are the only interpretations is to shut ourselves off from the entirety of life and escape our responsibilities. We will see a field of bones and not see that there is life still there to be welcomed; we will insulate ourselves and turn away from the world and not see that the world is necessary to our well-being; and we will think that there are people and situations that are hopeless and must be forgotten, missing that it is within responding to the most hopeless of situations that we find our hope again.

Consider your life.

How do you choose who to support in an election year? Do you choose them because they are the closest to representing the beliefs that you hold to be true? Or do you choose them because they hold beliefs that would best represent yours as they are in relation to the greater good of all?

Christ charged the world to love thy neighbor as thyself, and that is the only way to achieve peace, stability and security. We will not end hunger, we will not end poverty, we will not be free of oppression and violence until we choose to check ourselves, our beliefs and our choices against this commandment.

Will you place yourself before your neighbor or will you seek to find a way for both of you to move forward together? Will you vote for someone because they are your mirror? Or will you choose someone who stands for the greater good of all and has the history to prove it.

Invest your time wisely. I challenge you to take an hour a week and investigate the history of the candidates – not by going to their sites or reading news articles, but by visiting govtrack dot us. This site lists voting records and more without commentary or spin. I challenge you to take an hour a week to educate yourself on the reality of the candidates and what they truly represent. I challenge you to ignore the promises and commercials that are designed to appeal to your emotions and get your vote and to become an active citizen that chooses their representation based upon who is capable enough and consistent enough to consider all.

I challenge you to govern your choices according to the commandments of Christ.

I challenge you to make this the year that the United States returns to being a Republic,

One nation,

Indivisible,

With justice and freedom for all.

In the name of the Father,

Amen

tacking into the wind

2012-01-07T19:37:00.001-08:00

One would think that the fastest way to sail a boat would be to sail so the wind is directly behind the boat, filling the sails and speeding you on your course. Any sailor will tell you that with modern boats, the fastest and most efficient movement comes when you tack into the wind. Tacking is a manner of moving the boat in a kind of zigzag fashion so the direction of the wind is changing from side to side and you are moving both into the wind and across it.

Please do not worry. The above paragraph is not a foreshadowing that I am returning to the awful boat metaphors that were sprinkled madly across the blog just a few years ago. But old habits die hard. At least the metaphor is a bit more put together this time.

Change is like that. Transformation and awakening is like that. We think that the fastest and most sure way to achieve our growth is to get the wind behind us, the momentum behind us and to fly forward in a straight line. But our internal lives are very similar to water; it is why emotions are often described as being currents and waves in an ocean. We always have all emotions going on at once in our bodies; they are currents in our ocean. When they collide in certain orders, they rise into a wave. Usually, we don’t recognize what we are feeling until the wave has crested and begins to come crashing down. But for every emotion we recognize – there are 10 beneath it that have stacked up to create the feeling.

Sometimes it is better to tack into the wind as we sail on our own seas. It takes more effort than just pointing ourselves down wind, we must constantly pay attention to the winds, the currents, the fluttering of the canvas and be responsive enough to adjust our direction so we can catch the wind again in a new way and move across the wind and current, rather than just follow it in a single direction.

It was…61 degrees Fahrenheit here today. I had to pry the Mad Kitten out of her winter nest and boot her out into the yard. Then she didn’t want to come back in and just had a blast. I saw the skunk again and he is beautiful. All grown up and trucking down the driveway. He is almost 3/4s white. I have never seen anything like it. Actually, he is reversed. Instead of a white stripe down his back, he has a black one. He remains sweet and respectful. I just will never forget the look on his face when he came into the cave as a baby. It was warm enough for MK to take up her station on the top of the fence post and watch the chickens next door. The chickens have scared the bejesus out of her and she keeps a respectful distance. The chickens made me think I was losing my mind at first until I found out that yes, there were chickens next door.

Life is good. Not always in the way we want it to be or on the schedule we would like to keep, but overall, life is very good.

Testing the wind is the only way to know when to change course so that you can stay on course. Funny the logic of that, it goes against all of our assumptions about accomplishing goals but sometimes, the path to a goal is crooked. Then again, who was it that said something about broad and straight paths not being the best way to go?

I miss you like sin

2012-01-06T13:33:00.000-08:00

For a variety of reasons (that I didn’t realize were related until recently), I have been researching “home altars.” There are large varieties of home altars that are in use. Nearly every religion or belief system that requires a kind of daily practice (prayer, meditation, offerings and so on) encourages their believers to have an altar in their home. The idea is to bring the sacred close and make the practice of certain rituals a part of daily living and not reserved for special days or locations.

Many people have altars in their homes that they are not even aware that they have built. When we have a wall that we group our family photos on, or shelves were we keep our souvenirs – we have constructed altars to desire.

Now, I know that using the word “desire” is going to throw a few people but desire means much more than lust or sexual want. Desire is also used to describe the psychological state of wishing, longing and…missing. To miss someone is one of the most powerful desires a person can experience for it also embodies wishing and longing. While we may desire to gain spiritual awareness, contentment and peace and build our altars to hold our desire for these things – when our desire is based in missing someone we once had near – is can be as if the soul is weeping and we kneel before our altars and ask for whatever is out there to hear us, grant us our wish, answer our petition to return to us that which made our souls sing. The phrase “I miss you like sin,” is a way of acknowledging the strength of the passion involved. Sin, after all, tends to arise from passion. It is a …turn of a phrase. Some people prefer to say, “I miss you like air” to express how necessary the person is to the other’s existence. “Without you, I cannot breathe.”

Now, these types of phrases are powerful, evocative and quite true. They are not a version of co-dependency or anything like that. The absolute power of the desire of missing someone (a lover, a god, a friend) is something that has been acknowledged throughout history as a life changing experience. The power of the emotion can tear you apart or, rightly channeled, build you into a new being. Codependency just kind of sits there in a puddle. It has adopted many of the phrases of desire but it lacks the discipline of worship, practice and ritual. When I miss someone like air, I find myself seeking out small things that bring them closer to me – often they are not even related to the person except that when I am there – there is a feeling of closeness and connection.

For a few decades, more than a few, society has worked to dismiss the power and validity of passion, desire and love. We are taught it is a sick, sick thing to say, “You complete me.” But think about it…which is the healthier relationship? The one in which the presence of the other does not change much at all about the soul of the other? Or the one in which the presence acts like a key to release the soul into a new experience? Which would you rather have?

People are not interchangeable or replaceable unless you never really created a passionate existence between the two of you. If someone does not bring you a sense of a broader completion to your being than yes – anyone will do and when the going gets tough you will get going in a heartbeat. But when the other person’s presence is as necessary as air to this larger life, you will stay – you will suffer to grow to move past differences, you will love and worship and discover that everything you knew about those things was barely the kindergarten lesson.

Altars do not have to be complicated but often we go right ahead and dress them up as if they are off to a coronation ball. When I was imagining building an altar to help me focus with my meditation, I had an image in my head of a portable Vatican. It was all gilt and glamorous with candles, incense and all sorts of fabulous things. I even went to the store and found everything I would need to make my very own little Basilica.

But I didn’t buy any of it. I had it in my basket and it just felt wrong. So I put it back on the shelf and walked and walked around the store and just listened. I wound up picking up three bowls or various sizes and materials. The largest is brass, then I found a wooden bowl that nests perfectly in the brass bowl, and then I found a strange glass votive candle holder (in the shape of a bowl) that nests in the bottom of the wooden bowl. When they are placed together and the candle is lit, the glass comes alive; the wood is warm and brass bright and beautiful. Three circles nested inside each other with a flame at the heart. Three bowls that can hold anything. Three forms of life and consciousness. Three forms of existence.

Now if that doesn’t keep me busy while meditating for a while in the sheer contemplation of the Universe within this altar I have made, I don’t know what will.

I miss you like sin.
I miss you like air.
I miss you like a pulse.
I miss you and long to be there.

the altar

Perception

2012-01-05T20:55:00.001-08:00

So….I was giving myself a hard time recently because I haven’t been writing much poetry. This little rant was going on as I was working on putting together several broadcasts for Grace Independent. I was bitching and moaning and kvetching and generally making myself feel bad as I kept plugging away at the broadcast scripts.

It wasn’t until three days later (still working on the scripts) that it hit me. I have written over 200 pages of poetry for Grace Independent in the past year. That gave me pause and made me start to look at the other perceptions I was holding on to.

Perception is a funny thing. We tend to think that what we perceive is reality when it is anything but. Our perceptions are based in our expectations and experience. Just look at what happened during Iowa. Google Plus was a hoot to read. Depending on who was posting (and who they supported) their perception was always skewed to support their most rewarding belief. In the same way that I have noticed that on Facebook (and now on g+ since there are more people there now) that the people who post most often the passive aggressive status updates (that are never specifically directed at anyone) also are the people who share links about how horrible the world is, tragedies, and constant please to “copy and paste this as your status to show you care.”

Our perceptions not only create self-fulfilling prophecies, but they are revealed in every choice we make. I watched one person on G+ post, for 5 days straight, pictures of morbidly obese people with comments like “Too Funny!” or “No wonder!!” This same person then got off that kick and started posting in the defense of Ron Paul and the charges of racism, as part of the defense, the person pointed out how they did not have a prejudice bone in their body. They then got highly offended when others posted comments like, “oh really?” and “Could have fooled me.”

It would appear the person that we are most capable of deceiving is ourselves.

One of the things I am learning is that within the statements we make about what we are or are not lies the clue to our areas of self deception. Our identities and our perceptions of reality and intertwined as a kind of armor or masque that we wear, not to fool others, but to fool ourselves – to prevent our seeing our own reflection in a mirror. Instead, we choose to see the masque of how we would want to be.

One of the worst pieces of advice I have ever heard given to someone who is seeking to grow and change is the infamous “fake it till you make it.” Now, to force yourself to smile when you do not feel like it is one thing. There is a definite correlation between the muscle movement of a smile, people’s responses to a smiling person and an increased (slight) state of well being. But there is no correlation that faking an attitude, belief, opinion or motivation does anything but increase your sense of worthlessness.

Change and growth come through change and growth and a lot of the time it is a very difficult transformation process. But it is not an endless process. Letting go of the safety found in having preconceived perceptions and expectations can leave you feeling unmoored. But it is temporary, and worth it. Learning to meet life as it is allows you to make realistic and effective choices.

So I rewrite the message and realize, I have been incredibly busy writing poetry only – it is not important to me that the poems are out there under my name. They are written for a purpose outside and beyond my own life and I am starting to recognize just how much I have benefitted from this exercise.

I am really starting to like how this year is shaping up.

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Lectio Divina

2012-01-04T13:35:00.001-08:00

Tonight at Midnight EST on http://blogtalkradio.com/grace-independent I am going to be an introduction to Contemplative Prayer. You can listen live, listen through your cell phone (347-326-9632), come back later and listen or download the show through the blogtalk player at the same link or, find the podcast on iTunes.

I recommend, before you listen, that you grab a candle, a little incense and create a quiet area where you can sit comfortably and be undisturbed while you listen and perform the exercise.

Contemplative prayer is a tradition in almost every belief system. From the Buddhists to the Christians to the Muslims to people with no belief in a Universal Power or God but who engage in meditative processes. Prayer, after all, is a form of meditation – just a more directed one than many other types.

Lectio Divina is a Latin term for the practice of using sacred texts for divine guidance. It is the core aspect of Contemplative Prayer. You read a passage (or several) slowly and when a word or phrase pops out and grabs your attention, you use that as a kind of “mantra” for the meditation. Repeat the word or phrase over and over in your mind as you sit still and slow your breathing. Allow the phrase to drive all other thoughts from your mind. During the course of a contemplative prayer session, there is usually a kind of revelation that occurs as to why that word or that phrase was so important to you now.

For people who have tried meditation but been unsuccessful in quieting their minds down to nothingness, contemplative prayer is a good way to begin. The directed nature of it, the intuitive response to the reading all help to make it an accessible form of meditation for all. More advanced practitioners enjoy it as it helps them to integrate an exploration of their spirituality and beliefs into their meditation practice.

Tune in and try it out. It is a great habit to start in the beginning of this New Year.

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

the bomb, the poll and the cosmic teddy bear

2012-01-03T19:17:00.001-08:00

Today has been a very strange, almost exciting day. Not exactly how I imagined it would be, but sometimes that is a good thing. It started with my not going back to bed until 4am and promptly waking up at 7, as if I had a normal night’s sleep. And for whatever reason, I opted to get up and make coffee and the smell was just amazing. Usually, I am so used to the smell I don’t even notice it, but this morning – it was as if I had never smelled it before. I should have taken that as a sign.

I went to walk down to my café/office and half way there, chugging down the sidewalk with my head in the clouds – I noticed the squad cars blocking the way up a head. And then I noticed the police tape. And then I noticed the fire trucks, the huge white escalades part diagonally across the street and the extreme quietness of the street. As I got closer, one of the officers began to take the tape down so I kept right on going. There were people standing outside the bank and one woman (who had just arrived and was oblivious to the squad cars, escalades and 12 other unmarked cars with flashing lights) asked, “Is the bank closed?” And the people lined up to go in looked at her for a moment and said, “There was a bomb scare, they are just getting ready to open up again.” I kept on going and as I passed the Escalades, I looked over and saw the radio controlled robo bomb sniffer mini tank thing.

None of this was reported in the news. The odd/sad thing is that when I talked about it with a few people they all had the same knee jerk reaction, “I bet it was the 99%.” That reaction to me reveals more about the opinion held of the Occupiers than any news report or press release. Mind you , the people saying this are technically part of the 99% (but not part of the Occupy scene) and hold many of the same opinions/complaints as the Occupiers and were cautiously supportive of them before, but over the past few weeks – there has been a steady shift from support for the campers to a kind of…well…disgust and anger. There is no other way to put it. The New Year’s move in NYC has proven to be the last straw for many people. Not the part with the scissors, but the part where on one of the most difficult nights for the police, when they are stretched very thin, that the protestors choose to engage in what can only be described as a half assed prank just to stretch the police even thinner. In essence, they chose to put people’s lives in danger for a bit of press and grandstanding and that rates as a huge “so not cool” with a lot of people. That and the scene in that coffee shop. It will be interesting how Occupy moves to try to regain the sympathy and support of people. I have read some comments on their sites that there is an awareness of the damage done by the antics over the past week, but there are stronger voices that just plain and simple – don’t care.

This brings me to the Iowa caucus and the online poll nonsense going on. Depending on who you want to win Iowa – you can find a reporting poll that supports you. On g+ I have been highly amused by the spin that people are putting on the polls – I mean really, with only 1% of the poll sites reporting you can predict the winner? However, on a lot of the poll/blog/article combo sites there are some strongly comments about the sheer bias of the people reporting.

Which led to several discussions about how unwilling or lacking in time or skill people have become that they do not bother to check the sources or political connections of the places where they get their news.

By this time, I had way too much coffee so I took off to Salvation Army. I needed a cosmic teddy bear (don’t ask, but now I have a bear with permanent earmuffs and a scarf). Got the bear and scored a travel guitar that whoever priced it thought was a child’s toy because of its size.

A walk in the cold cleared my head and I went back to the café and back on line. To find a link to something that is probably the most exciting online site I have seen in a long time. Not just exciting, but with all the complaints I just listed in this blog, the first sign of hope in a very confused world.

http://www.popvox.com

You can register with popvox as an individual or get your organization an account for free. On popvox, you will find links to every bill that has been submitted to congress – from ones that are in the House or Senate to fresh bills that are in committee. You can go and read a summary of the bill, the entire bill, see who presented it, who supports it etc and so forth. Then, you can choose whether you are for or against the bill. You can opt for a form letter or to send a personalized message to your Representative or Senator (the site requires you enter a verifiable name, address and phone number). Hit send and your message is posted to your legislator.

Now….here is what makes it different from anything else out there. Technically, the legislator’s staff sorts through, reads all the communication from constituents, and then summarize whether or not they support a certain bill for the legislator. This does not happen often because it is a hell of a lot of work. Usually it only occurs on major bills with a lot of media coverage. What popvox does is create data summary reports that represent the combined views of all of the constituents responding to a particular bill and sends them to the legislator. It is a simple graphical report. The legislator can then opt to see the specific letters but what it does is give them a snapshot of the opinion of their district.

Now, being that the career of a politician is being a politician and it is lucrative – re-election is a primary concern. Having at their fingertips a summary of the opinions of their constituents cannot do anything but influence whether or not they support or decline a bill. For the first time ever, the public has a viable way of joining in the political game and gaining influence because it is a direct, immediate and constant way to keep the legislator informed of their chances for job security.

I was amazed at the bills that are in committee right now and the ones going through the House and Senate. Some of them stand to create a major impact on our society but you never hear about them.

Check it out, this is a way to empower yourself and have a true voice in the political process. But it will only work if the public uses it. The service is free and it can help prevent all of us from being blindsided by bills that we don’t find out about until it is too late to do anything about them. This can serve to redefine the protests are done. Right now, our protests are ineffective because they are modeled on the tactics used in the 60s. The world, communication and politics have changed greatly over the past 50 years. It’s time that our manner of protesting and being active does too.

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

if

2012-01-02T21:01:00.001-08:00

If you fall asleep at 6pm and wake up at midnight, does that count as a nap and can you still check off things on Monday’s to-do list or do you have to make them a part of Tuesdays? Assuming, of course, that you plan on going back to sleep by 4am.

There is something so mystical about the power of a to-do list. That reverential moment when you pause, pen in hand, over the paper and inhale the smell of accomplishment, self-esteem and success before plunging down and crossing an item off the list like you were eradicating the common cold from the world. Just about everyone I know admits to this habit. I think today I am going to cheat, although it may be just Tuesday where I am, I am going to rationalize and say it is still Monday somewhere so I get to keep crossing things off my Monday list until 3am my time, in which case it is Tuesday everywhere (unless I really want to stretch it and can look to Asia).

Paul Krugman, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, published a piece January 1st on the economy called, “Nobody Understands Debt.” You may have seen it or seen quotes from it as it is making its’ rounds on the Internet. The problem with the piece, like the problem I am trying to resolve with my over-napping instead of working, is that the basis for his stance comes from statistics that he has misconstrued or misrepresented. However, the tone of the article (implying that most Americans are economic idiots and only he possess understanding) and its source, the long revered New York Times make people less inclined to read with a critical eye and just accept what is written as truth.

Firstly, taking the tone that your readers are idiots is never advisable. Especially if you manage to have the wrong facts and numbers yourself. Secondly, while the NYTs enjoys a historical reputation of reliability, over the past ten years it has become notorious for fraudulent reporting, fact manipulation and out right lying.

I am not going to recap the article however I am going to reprint a discussion between myself and another person on google+ about it which says it all. (BTW, the original post was public)

Peter Bromberg - 8:49 AM (edited) - Public
Yep! Here's Paul Krugman again - telling everybody they don't understand "debt"
"the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit." "Governments don’t [have to pay back their debt]-- all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base."

Who doesn't understand debt, Paul? Our debt is NOT growing more slowly than the tax base. It hasn't in years. That's why we have a ballooning deficit!

Nobody Understands Debt

The obsession with deficit reduction is wrongheaded and ill-informed.
- Comment
+1
1 share -
7 comments

Mike Trani Robbing from Peter to pay Paul. A very old proverb.How much kool-aide did this guy imbibe?
8:54 AM

cassandra tribe - is it just me, but the logic in that article just did not make sense at all? I read it twice and usually I can get something out of any article no matter what the opinion but this one was just...weird...not to mention his stats about Britain's debt to GDP are way off (he omitted that his stats are for Net debt only if you include the Royal Bank of Scotland, lloyds and other private financial institutions). In 2011 their debt percent barely broke 62%. I am really getting sick and tired of pompous people with the wrong facts who try to tell the rest of us we have no idea what is going on. Mr. Krugman, you might want to try the novel idea of rough draft - review - edit - fact check and rewrite -- it's what the rest of us poor. confused and ignorant people rely on to try and not muddy the waters more
9:02 AM - Edit
+2

Dave Rozzana - Hate to say it, but whenever Krugman makes a statement it's just plain weird. As +cassandra tribe implies, he's just on a different planet....or just lazy.
9:48 AM

cassandra tribe - +Dave Rozzana I have to admit, I stopped reading the NYTs about 10 years ago because the quality and reliability of their journalism and commentators has just become....so poor (to use a kind word).
9:54 AM - Edit

Mike Trani - The problem with statements and articles like this is that the public believes all this tripe.
9:55 AM
+1

Peter Bromberg - +cassandra tribe I gave up the Times years ago. I just read Krugman and a couple of others online in order to assure myself I made the right decision. Actually he's right that debt doesn't have to be repaid. But you still have to service it. And when the payments get too high, guess what?
10:10 AM (edited)

cassandra tribe - Well, he is right and wrong about that...a) look what happened in Iceland and b) the perceived ability to be able to repay that debt determines the willingness of loaners, no matter that the realistic expectation is that it won't be repaid - and you are dead on about the servicing. Not to mention the whole complicated interplay of debt ratios to inflation to funding etc and ad nauseum. I think the general public believes this pap and nonsense because a) it is spoken from a place they expect authority and b) we don't teach people how to think critically anymore. When they go looking to educate themselves on the web, this is what comes up as an authoritative answer. His argument that for every dollar borrowed we have 82 cents loaned out is beyond ignorant. The only way you could use that kind of stat as a justification of stability would be if for every dollar we have borrowed we were loaning out $1.15. Ugh...
Collapse this comment

c.2012. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

The Ladder and the Wreath

2012-01-01T14:41:00.001-08:00

I did so too wake up at 7am and think about going to Mass at 8. However, the mad kitten was purring madly, the coffee was perking and I hadn’t gotten to sleep until 3am so I opted for the 10am Mass. A little weaselly but the universe definitely has a way of getting you back.

I bundled myself off at a reasonable time and had a great time. Mind you, I was back in a church I had left and that would consider me a heretic because of what I do with Grace Independent but…overlooking our differences, it is entirely energizing to sit in a room full of people and sing. Plus I love the ritual and the meditative aspects of it. I am discovering that it is possible to maintain a balance between institution and belief. Not in the sense that one can ever make a corrupt institution acceptable, but that one can only benefit by acknowledging what remains good in the institution and allow it to help and support you while you work to completely undermine and replace it - : )

Then we got to the end of the service and the pastor stood up, announced she was retiring in the spring and then said she needed people who were good on ladders to stay and help take down the garlands and the wreaths. I stayed. So did another fellow. Several other people did to but they were ground-bound, taking the decorations of the pews and guilting people into taking the poinsettias home. The fellow went to the basement to get the taller ladder and I wound up with the rickety special. I would not be surprised if it is as old as the church. As I carried it onto the altar, one of the old duffs said, “Ay watch that one, it’ll close up on you when you are on it.”

Great. I spent all fall sick, finally feel better and now I am going to crack my head open on an altar trying to be nice. But then an even older member of the choir called out “Just climb up on the altar and stand on it, no …you don’t have to remove the cloths.” And suddenly there was this panic. There were three other guys with me and we all looked at each other like “climb up on the altar? Stand on the altar cloth?” It is amazing how deeply the rules about the sanctity of church objects can run. I thought the guy next to me was going to bolt. His wife looked panicked. So I quick quick jumped on the ladder and then onto the altar.

Mind you, this church was built in the early 1900s, even though it technically existed long before that, the original building burnt down. Here I was, standing on the altar, the big one, the original all the way in the back from when they used to have their backs to the congregation and were so far away you couldn’t hear the service. I was face to face with a 3-foot high gilt cross and as I raised my eyes to the top of the 4-foot diameter wreaths to see how they were attached, I noticed that some bright bunny had tied a loop of fishing line around the woodwork above the altar. Year after year they have hung those wreaths with bent cost hangers on the same fishing line. I reached up, lifted the wreaths down and handed them to the guys who literally fled into the hallway with them.

Then we all went for coffee and it was the pastor’s birthday. So we sang. Ate and left.

Grace gets into trouble for several reasons. On the mild side is the insistence on the tenents of Christian Pacificism and the placing of priority on Christ’s two commandments over all else. We believe truly that Christianity is found within the four gospels – end of story. Everything else was written by people trying to organize a group. But the thing that gets me in the most trouble is the part where, in each of the services, I say that you do not have to profess a faith or be baptized to join the communion AND, you don’t need anything more than a cup of water and a piece of bread to participate. “For God so made the world with ease he can surely make of what we have a good and holy thing.”

Heretic.
A heretic on a ladder fishing down wreaths while standing on a consecrated altar.

But we were all there for the same reason. It is a mistake to believe that every member of the congregation believes the same things and in the same way. Every person there has their own private faith. It is the community, the sense of belonging and sharing that draws most people to join in a worship group. It does not matter whether that group is in a church, a mosque, a synagogue or a grove of trees – it is the gathering and sharing of community that makes the worship.

Without a doubt, this has been one of the finest New Year’s I have had in ages.

c.2012 ----YAY! Cassandra Tribe. All Rights reserved.

Resolutions

2011-12-31T16:14:00.001-08:00

It is New Year's Eve and I am feeling kind of good and kind of goofy. Actually, I am also feeling kind of tired and spacey too. The mad kitten had a...spell...last night where she went from delightful and sweet company to hell on wheels until about 1am. In and out and in and out and if I shut the door she would mew and scratch and look pitiful. So...we were both up way too late. A nap has taken the edge off but I am still a little out of it. At least it is only 7 now and she has begun her in and out and in and out madness. There is hope for sleep in my future.

And tonight, at 10:30pm EST on http://blogtalkradio.com/grace-independent you can listen in as I take to the airwaves as the voice of Grace Independent to perform the New Year's Eve service. If you can't listen tonight, follow the link later and listen to it through the Grace Independent player or find the podcast on iTunes.

There...business out of the way : )

I have been back and forth about making resolutions for some time. Most of us have had the experience that our resolutions seem to last about as long as our holiday and within a week or two, life reverts to the same-old-same-old and our motivation and commitment to change seems to disappear. Or, if we are lucky, we do pursue and realize our goals only to discover that they haven't made much of a difference at all.

So, I have been reading and thinking and contemplating about what I could do as far as using this very public moment that is supportive of change to try and come up with resolutions that were effective and could be achieved. I should have saved my progressive list of ideas and posted them. You would have laughed, some of my ideas were out there and just...embarrassing.

And then, I came across some work done by a woman named Sonja Lyubomirsky. She is what is known as a positivity psychologist and she set herself the task of performing a clinical study on the common traits of happy people. She came up with 12 basic common traits, all of which were things that these people developed as attributes in their life and continued to make an effort to keep active in their experiences. She also wrote a book, The How of Happiness, which I am thinking I would like to read.

I read her list (and don't worry I am going to post it in this blog) and started to think that maybe, taking on a few of these as a resolution would be a better idea than having some very narrow goal. All of the traits come with their own actions and they are all doable. It would be a different kind of resolution that losing weight, getting fit or saving money because those resolutions contain the hidden hope of creating happiness while actively making the pursuit of the traits of happiness is totally above board and very clear. Resolutions that are made without a clear understanding of their motivation are most likely to fail. As are the ones with hidden motivations. For example, for a lot of people losing weight is a resolution for reasons of health and well-being, but their hidden motivation may have to do with an absolutely devastated sense of self esteem and a desire to prove themselves to a world they perceive as having judged and rejected them. That is a resolution with a hidden motivation and it will be damaging in the end because the core motivation is not recognized and the elemental issue is not addressed and healed.

So, think about it.

Here is Lyubomirsky's list, the added commentary is from Jacob Sokol of Marcandangel.com. They are considered to be "happiness habits" maybe they should be the habits we all should try to develop in the coming year.

1. Express gratitude. - When you appreciate what you have, what you have appreciates in value. Kinda cool right? So basically, being grateful for the goodness that is already evident in your life will bring you a deeper sense of happiness. And that's without having to go out and buy anything. It makes sense. We're gonna have a hard time ever being happy if we aren't thankful for what we already have.

2. Cultivate optimism. - Winners have the ability to manufacture their own optimism. No matter what the situation, the successful diva is the chick who will always find a way to put an optimistic spin on it. She knows failure only as an opportunity to grow and learn a new lesson from life. People who think optimistically see the world as a place packed with endless opportunities, especially in trying times.

3. Avoid over-thinking and social comparison. - Comparing yourself to someone else can be poisonous. If we're somehow 'better' than the person that we're comparing ourselves to, it gives us an unhealthy sense of superiority. Our ego inflates - KABOOM - our inner Kanye West comes out! If we're 'worse' than the person that we're comparing ourselves to, we usually discredit the hard work that we've done and dismiss all the progress that we've made. What I've found is that the majority of the time this type of social comparison doesn't stem from a healthy place. If you feel called to compare yourself to something, compare yourself to an earlier version of yourself.

4. Practice acts of kindness. - Performing an act of kindness releases serotonin in your brain. (Serotonin is a substance that has TREMENDOUS health benefits, including making us feel more blissful.) Selflessly helping someone is a super powerful way to feel good inside. What's even cooler about this kindness kick is that not only will you feel better, but so will people watching the act of kindness. How extraordinary is that? Bystanders will be blessed with a release of serotonin just by watching what's going on. A side note is that the job of most anti-depressants is to release more serotonin. Move over Pfizer, kindness is kicking ass and taking names.

5. Nurture social relationships. - The happiest people on the planet are the ones who have deep, meaningful relationships. Did you know studies show that people's mortality rates are DOUBLED when they're lonely? WHOA! There's a warm fuzzy feeling that comes from having an active circle of good friends who you can share your experiences with. We feel connected and a part of something more meaningful than our lonesome existence.

6. Develop strategies for coping. - How you respond to the 'craptastic' moments is what shapes your character. Sometimes crap happens - it's inevitable. Forrest Gump knows the deal. It can be hard to come up with creative solutions in the moment when manure is making its way up toward the fan. It helps to have healthy strategies for coping pre-rehearsed, on-call, and in your arsenal at your disposal.

7. Learn to forgive. - Harboring feelings of hatred is horrible for your well-being. You see, your mind doesn't know the difference between past and present emotion. When you 'hate' someone, and you're continuously thinking about it, those negative emotions are eating away at your immune system. You put yourself in a state of suckerism (technical term) and it stays with you throughout your day.

8. Increase flow experiences. - Flow is a state in which it feels like time stands still. It's when you're so focused on what you're doing that you become one with the task. Action and awareness are merged. You're not hungry, sleepy, or emotional. You're just completely engaged in the activity that you're doing. Nothing is distracting you or competing for your focus.

9. Savor life's joys. - Deep happiness cannot exist without slowing down to enjoy the joy. It's easy in a world of wild stimuli and omnipresent movement to forget to embrace life's enjoyable experiences. When we neglect to appreciate, we rob the moment of its magic. It's the simple things in life that can be the most rewarding if we remember to fully experience them.

10. Commit to your goals. - Being wholeheartedly dedicated to doing something comes fully-equipped with an ineffable force. Magical things start happening when we commit ourselves to doing whatever it takes to get somewhere. When you're fully committed to doing something, you have no choice but to do that thing. Counter-intuitively, having no option - where you can't change your mind - subconsciously makes humans happier because they know part of their purpose.

11. Practice spirituality. - When we practice spirituality or religion, we recognize that life is bigger than us. We surrender the silly idea that we are the mightiest thing ever. It enables us to connect to the source of all creation and embrace a connectedness with everything that exists. Some of the most accomplished people I know feel that they're here doing work they're "called to do."

12. Take care of your body. - Taking care of your body is crucial to being the happiest person you can be. If you don't have your physical energy in good shape, then your mental energy (your focus), your emotional energy (your feelings), and your spiritual energy (your purpose) will all be negatively affected. Did you know that studies conducted on people who were clinically depressed showed that consistent exercise raises happiness levels just as much as Zoloft? Not only that, but here's the double whammy... Six months later, the people who participated in exercise were less likely to relapse because they had a higher sense of self-accomplishment and self-worth.

Happy New Year!

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Dogs and Kindness

2011-12-30T16:40:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I wonder how people come up with ideas for scientific research. Some of them are downright bizarre and pointless, and some, are actually quite good. I was reading about a study today that was looking at whether or not dogs could perceive kindness. What they did was put too people in a room at a table with a bowl of cereal and sausages between them. The dog was brought in and sat at a distance and watched as one person asked the other for some of the cereal. Sometimes the person would say “no!” immediately and sometimes they immediately offered the bowl to the other person. When the dog was permitted to approach the people, they would invariably go to the person who offered the food immediately.

What was said was unimportant, but the tone was very important. When only hand gestures were used, the dogs did not approach either person.

What all this proved was that dogs watch us and assess whether we are kind in nature or selfish. They make judgments about the generosity of our character based upon the tones of our voice. To date, the only other species known to do this are chimpanzees and some larger fish that approach smaller, cleaner fish for help.
“To show how good dogs are at studying humans, Marshall-Pescini and her colleagues had them observe how readily two actors shared small cereal and sausage bits with another person who came to beg them for some morsels. After the beggar had either been shooed away with a harsh gesture and a firm "No!" or received a tasty tidbit along with some words of kindness, the dogs were given the choice of approaching one or the other actor.
In two-thirds of all trials the dogs went straight for the generous person. This wasn't merely a preference for a friendlier voice: if the "beggar" wasn't present and the dogs couldn't work out who was most generous, they were no more likely to approach a kind-voiced actor than a harsh-voiced one.
Nevertheless it seemed to be the tone of voice that the dogs used to make their judgement, because when the actors used only gestures, the dogs had much more trouble picking out the generous guy. "We were surprised that the voice had more impact than the gestures," says Marshall-Pescini, arguing that much work so far has pointed to dogs being more talented observers than listeners.”
(Nora Schultz, Short Sharp Science)

It reminds me of another study I also read (I was procrastinating today) about an area in Africa where the trees were being decimated by giraffes over feeding. The trees responded to this by producing leaves with high levels of tannin, which made them taste bitter to the giraffes. Scientists discovered (how, I have no clue) that the trees had somehow communicated to each other via an exchange of gasses. I wonder though, which trees started it all.

It is interesting to me, as I read these things, to then drop back and read some of the plans of the Presidential Candidates that involve the environment or animals. Needless to say, the concept of their being a sentient being there would never cross their minds.

Then again, there is not much I really understand of late about what is going on especially with the Republican candidates beyond the simple fact that not one of them is on the up and up. Voting records don’t match rhetoric and none of it matches historical records of their speeches, books, actions and newsletters. Ron Paul fascinates me because the Democrats seem to view him as a dangerous, ultra-conservative Libertarian and the Republicans view him as a dangerous, ultra-liberal, left winger. God bless him, looking at his record he could very well be both. But it amazes me how there seems to be little hanging back and assessing someone’s nature by observing them with others. It amazes me that in this age of great, global internet communication – there is so much misinformation.

Somehow, we have lost the eloquence of trees.
Somehow, we have stopped looking for who is generous and kind and instead run to the first person with the treat.

New Year’s is tomorrow and I am oddly excited.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

What percent are you?

2011-12-29T10:49:00.001-08:00

So, not only have I been out of the news loop as of late, I have also been house bound for a while. Today was the first day I have been in downtown Providence in god knows how long. It was the first time I saw the Occupy Providence encampment. They are all over the news today as the City is considering their offer to break the camp if the City opens a day shelter for the homeless.

I was there to catch a bus. A long bus ride and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me about the encampment. At first, it was the fact that it was obvious they were getting little help insofar as advice on how one prepares to camp outdoors when the weather turns cold. There were tarps on top of the tent, but none below. Simple, basic camping survival. The park was a mess because of the windstorm from the other night and the City had brought trucks in to help them clean up. All in all, OP has had a decent relationship with the City, they even moved the encampment for a bit so the City could get into the occupied park to winterize the underground sprinkler systems.

There have been issues, of course. Some violence, some drugs, some crime. But that does not so much reflect on the people who are a part of the Occupy movement as it does on natural social group dynamics in this culture. No matter why a group is gathered there will be some who will see it as something to take advantage of or use for their own gain.

The bigger issue was over the presence of the homeless. Burnside Park, where OP is set up, has been the local homeless refuge for decades. Suddenly there are expensive tents, free food, laptops, cell phones etc and so forth. A couple of thefts later and many people wanted the homeless banned from the park. That is a discussion that is plaguing most of the Occupy encampments. They are the 98%, don’t like the 1% that are wealthy but have no idea what to do with the 1% that has been out of the social loop for years. The movement is mostly focused on the idea of people who have lost jobs or are unable to get jobs that are sustaining; the presence of the homeless puts them face to face with a community that is so far down the scale of problems. A job would be nice, but so would food and shelter. The addiction and mental health issues many homeless develop because of their homelessness is something that many of the student occupiers are not equipped to deal with.

I read a great article (and wish I could remember the link) that interviewed several of the Occupy “leaders” and they talked quite openly about the difficulties of trying to resolve all the different approaches (political activism versus drumming and chanting) and trying to figure out where the homeless fit into all of this. As I said, Occupy Providence has made the issue of a day shelter for the homeless a primary and single goal. I have a feeling they might achieve it. One single-minded goal is easier to achieve than 20 or 30 vague statements. That does make me proud of them.

On the bus ride back I figured out what was bothering me. It really has nothing to do with the Occupy people but instead with the reaction of the City and state to them.

Back in 2009, a group of homeless banded together and formed two tent cities. The tent cities were tucked under an overpass, out of the public way fare and the camps were very well organized. They created the camps because there are both not enough shelters to handle all of the homeless here and, many of the homeless do not wish to go to a shelter because they are dangerous and dehumanizing.

It took very little time for the City and state to come down hard on them to break the camps. The state Supreme Court ruled that camping is not allowed on City land and this ruling allowed for the swift eviction of the homeless.

One of the things that is tricky about the Occupy movement is that many are not aware that for some, those who are in the 99% in one arena are in the 1% in another. I have no doubt that the presence of the students in the tents had a great deal to do with the lack of swift action to break the camp. After all, a student in college is usually the product of parents that vote.

The homeless are seen as even lower than animals by most of the authority institutions (including the very ones who are created to “help” them). There was no fervor to provide them with food and blankets and first aid and Wi-Fi and phones and charging stations. They got some community assistance but they did it themselves. The tent cities were the ones who truly started to create a new society, not the Occupy encampment. People in the tent cities stepped out of the mainstream society and began to make their own way and they were absolutely stomped on. People in the Occupy movement climbed onto the back of the mainstream society and are receiving accolades in many forms.

Perhaps the difference is that the tent cities said, “We don’t need you” and occupy has said, “We need you to change.”

It has made me a little angry when I made the connection today. But then again, it is an example of what the problem is – my 1% may not be yours and yours may not be mine. But I do value my integrity and for that reason, I think more lessons can be learned from looking at the various homeless tent cities then the occupy encampments.

Occupy is evolving, into what I don’t think anyone knows. It will be interesting to see what happens in DC on the Occupy Washington Day. Will there be a single goal that all will come behind and achieve? Or will it devolve?

But I will say this; Occupy Providence deserves a pat on the back for calling for that day shelter as a condition for their leaving. I said it once and I will say it again, I am deeply proud of them.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Mirage

2011-12-28T14:35:00.001-08:00

Blissfully, I have been out of the loop news-wise for a while, now I am slowly creeping back into it and it just leaves me in a constant state of sighing. The Ron Paul nonsense is enough to start me shaking my head like I have acquired a tic. Newt Gingrich is playing the field like he is related to the Kardashians. Mittsey is just hucking money at crap and Obama, well, I have always wondered why a party assumes that just because they have one candidate in office it means they have to automatically accept them as the defacto choice for candidate in the next election.

Anonymous has posted a survival guide for violent revolutions. Occupy Wall Street struggles to overcome their media and themselves. Housing prices are falling. The troops are coming home, oh wait…they are going back out again. The EU is failing, oh wait, they are redefining themselves as stronger than ever before. Tom Cruise has a hit movie (why?). And Hollywood decided to remake The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before the original film is even out of the theaters.

In the middle of it all I came across a post on a social media service (which one, I don’t remember) that slammed Obama for being un-American because his family does not believe in giving gifts on Christmas. I had to read the post several times before I believed what I was seeing. The writer not only declared this practice un-American but unchristian. Lately my secret habit has been watching youtube clips of Kathy Griffin. She is rude, crude but very honest. A contemporary Joan Rivers. For some reason, watching her balances out my slow digestion of the foul, moldy food of the news.

And the horrible thing is that there is no news. Not any more. No matter what opinion professed, a “news” outlet will report in favor of it and include statistics manipulated to support the opinion. I came across a news sight today that was a sign of the times, their front page was honest to god reporting (slanted, but reporting none the less) but all the other articles listed as additional news items were not news items but sourced advertising or spin-doctoring. One of their major stories was on the unknown truths about the price of gasoline (written and published by the Exxon corporation – you had to look at the fine print on the article to see its source).

I did read an excellent review of the Republican primary process that pointed out that we have now moved into an electoral process that is entirely dependent upon performance in the reality show setting of a debate. There is little consideration of a candidate’s history or record of accomplishment; whatever happens in a forum of what is essentially entertainment is what people base their decisions on. It is why there is such a fuss about Ron Paul. He performs very well; in fact, he is outperforming the other candidates right now. His history and track record is abysmal, naïve and just plain depressing. But that doesn’t matter does it?

When showmanship is worth more than ability, you get what you deserve.

The question again is, what are realistic and pragmatic solutions to the problems we have and the problems that are getting ready to come down the pike? What are practical ways to keep hope alive for a better future so that people are motivated to seek solutions?

The first step is to imagine what a resolved life would look like – personally, locally, nationally and globally. It is only when we have a “big picture” in mind of what a completely healthy and self-sustaining society looks like that we can move towards creating it. Right now, we are trapped in an endless funnel of details about what it wrong. It is a self-perpetuating cycle.

It is almost New Years. A traditional time of new beginnings and new commitments to change. What will yours be?

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Furry

2011-12-27T17:58:00.001-08:00

Last year, I had a travel alarm clock with a built in thermometer that I obsessed over to make sure the cave stayed warm. Then, in the spring, the battery died and it would seem to be an impossible thing for me to remember to get one AAA battery to fire it up again. Impossible, but not really necessary as well which is, I think, half the reason I have not gone out and done it. You see, I discovered that I have another thermometer in the house that is much more reliable, the Mad Kitten.

I can tell the comfort level of the house by how she is sleeping. If it is chilly, she curls up. If it is cold, she tucks all her paws under her body. If it is just right, she sprawls in a manner that borders on the pornographic. I have never met a cat who can make sleeping look like such a luxurious hobby.

It has been a long but good day. I had to finally pry myself out of the cave and go work at a café because I was constantly succumbing to MK’s charms and just not getting anything done. Six hours later, I am significantly caught up with my work and with the magic of deep breathing, my heart rate never broke 84. Until I was walking home and snapped my favorite pipe and had to go get a new one. It was slightly embarrassing to be shown the “idiot proof” pipes that the owner of the shop thinks will actually be able to last longer than a month with me. Maybe if I can keep my stress down I will be less prone to breaking things.

It’s a funny thing how life goes in waves. In the past week or so I have been surrounded with chance encounters with people all concerned about the same thing – ridding themselves of the old tapes that play in their head. They can’t hear them, but they know they are there, acting like poison on their mind, body and soul. Everyone has a different plan for how to overcome these hidden messages. There are charts, graphs, worksheets – you name it. But is may be as simple as recognizing when one of them is playing (and I imagine a wall with speakers in it when I say this) and choosing to go around the wall instead of over or through it.

Sometimes we can get caught up in trying to see exactly what the bricks are made of, or trying to hear the words clearly – but sometimes, what is there is so….ancient, so unimportant – really just a lingering ghost that the specifics are not important. Like the phrase, “I am not what I have been; I am what I choose to be.” Focus should be kept on becoming who you want to be, achieving the life you want to have and at some point the past must be relegated to a history book. You will never lose it, but the power it extends over your present life is greatly reduced.

It would be wrong-minded to dismiss the experiences of the past completely, or as the saying goes, you are doomed to repeat it. The things that happen to us change us, but they don’t always have to change us for the worse. Yet, continuously placing a great importance on what has been gives it a kind of supernatural power over your life in the present.

It is windy and pouring rain here. A friend just sent me a link to the new AbFab special that just aired. I am tired and a little written out from the madness of the day. Tomorrow I get to do it again. But it feels good to know that as well.

The Mad Kitten is sprawled. It is late December and she has taken over my good winter jackets again. Tomorrow I schedule the New Year’s eve show for Grace Independent and start writing it.

It feels so good to have both feet planted firmly on the ground and my head returning to the clouds.

Onward and upward.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. Alrights reserved.

the heart never lies

2011-12-26T04:56:00.001-08:00

On Christmas Eve, I wound up at a church for a candle light service. It was beautiful. The sheer act of singing was a profound release physically. The sound of the bell, one of the last real bells in New England, was like a blast of purity within the soul. All of these strong songs, all the breathing required – these are all holistic techniques to soothe a person and they work wonders. It did not matter that the furnace was out and it was so cold in the Church you could see your breath. Even just being out of the house and with a group of strangers was uplifting.

There are times when the ritual, the community, the long held practice of release through song and sound supersedes anything you might rationally be thinking about religion, faith and organized churches. And I “got” why having something like this is important in my life. As important as having something like Grace Independent, my project that is antithetical to organized religion. I need both to create a balance. The naïve belief in what is, and the strong rational belief in what should be. Sometimes, in a full-scale rejection of what has been, we can miss understanding why they have existed for so long. Like staging a revolution to overthrow a government without understanding why the government exists – you can be left without direction, without purpose and without being able to be effective once you remove the institution that was targeted and all that does is leave the door open for something exactly like what was there before to come replace it.

Balance, after all, is not a state of stillness but a constant shifting between two (often-conflicting) things. They conflict, but only in their extremes and when pursued with fanaticism. The balance occurs when what is good from each can be used towards a goal. Maintaining balance is a state of action. Too often, we are taught that to be in balance we must choose to not act. Balance is the preface to change. The change lies in the new goal that is being created, a hybrid of the two extremes glued together with a separate understanding.

This weekend I was introduced to Biofeedback. Now, I have always sort of known what this is but not really. It is a process of monitoring certain aspects of your body (heart rate, temperature, brain waves etc.) to allow you to begin to be able to visually see when your body is under stress and reacting so you can learn to control it and walk yourself down. You can go to a professional for sessions or, you can use a mirror, a thermometer that you hold in your hand or a cheapy heart monitor. It has proven to be extremely effective in helping people control stress, pain, gastric disturbances, substance abuse, urinary incontinence and anxiety.

I opted for a heart monitor watch that I wear on my wrist so I can check my heart rate throughout the day. Within in hours of putting it on I was shocked to discover that I really have no idea when I start to be stressed out, but my heart does. It is letting me get to know myself better in a way. The heart never lies.

As you begin to learn what your body actually feels like when it is under stress (what I recognize as stress is much further down the path from where it begins) you practice controlling and relaxing the body until that process becomes intuitive.

It is odd to think how divorced we are from our own bodies. We view the mind as separate from the body as separate from the soul and they are all connected. We are integrated beings that have been taught to view ourselves as separate pieces.

Case in point, I would never have thought that writing a blog was physically stressful to me. I enjoy writing these posts and doing everything that goes into them. However, by the second paragraph, my heart rate had jumped from 83 to 111. That puts me into the range of someone who is subjecting their body to cardiovascular exercise. If I were to go from the blog to say, a stressful encounter with someone, my heart rate would keep rising or at least, remain in that stressed state that will then begin to have a mental and emotional toll. Who knew? I would not catch on to being in a stressed physical state until later this evening, when it begins to affect me through muscle tension. By that time, my body has been subjected to massive amounts of adrenaline and cortisol for a span of hours, and that can create numerous problems.

But does that mean that I stop writing? No, that would be one of the extremes. It means that I have to recognize it as a source of stress and change how I approach writing in order to maintain a calmer state.

This is the ultimate geek hobby. It is actually more nerdalicious then when I had to monitor by blood sugar all day. The ultimate goal with all this is to make the process of calming myself intuitive. That should only take 3-6 weeks of consistent monitoring and practice. In the process of all of this, it also changes how one thinks by changing the old tapes we play that we may no longer be aware of because they are intuitive. The biofeedback process forces you to interrupt the tape with a new message.

Odd to think that I am a stranger in my own house, so to speak. Yet it is exhilarating to discover that I do have power and control over my own self. There are not many places in which we receive that message and even fewer places in which we can see evidence of our own self-control.

I have a feeling this process will be life changing. I feel as if I have found a treasure map to a land I have been stumbling around in for years.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All rights reserved.

the importance of Christmas

2011-12-24T15:06:00.001-08:00

Usually, around the time of Christmas et al, I blog either about the over commercialization of the holiday or about how to handle holiday grief. I rant and rail, console and counsel and mourn the simplicity of the holiday. This year, I have learned much about the importance of these holidays that goes beyond whether or not you believe in them, approve of them, celebrate them, are made sad or happy by them or even notice them.

The past four months have been very difficult for me (hence my absence from the blog) but they have also been a gift in many ways. The gift has not been easy to receive and by no means do I have it completely unwrapped or assembled yet, but I can see what it is and am endlessly excited by it. Because of what I know the gift to be, I have deliberately waited until Christmas Eve to reopen the blog again.

There is no doubt that the “meaning of Christmas” has been forgotten by most, subsumed by politics and consumerism (just witness the ridiculous violence over those new Nike shoes). There is no doubt that the endless focus on Christmas and the debate about the appropriateness of nativity scenes, trees and even the phrase “Merry Christmas” is offensive to people of different faiths, cultures and ideologies. It can be offensive, oppressive and discriminatory. For people who believe in Christmas, the same debates are threatening, insulting and demeaning. What a fine thing we have turned a celebration into as a society.

To say that Christmas is one of the most complicated publically acknowledged holidays is to make an understatement. The holiday is ingrained in our social fabric, like it or not.

But there in lies the true importance of Christmas within a society as diverse as Western culture has become.

Christmas is one of the few-shared milestones in a calendar year that we have with everyone around us in this society. It is a common marker. And this is important to establishing a common ground between us. Joe Shmoe that I may wind up chatting with in line will not connect to my personal timeline of basing everything off March 28 and I may not connect to the importance he places on his birthday, but we can establish ourselves within a common timeline by saying “That was during that blizzard about a week after Christmas.”

Having a common sense of time through history is important because it creates a bridge between two individual experiences and creates a common one. A common sense of experience encourages compassion and empathy. A shared point of time aligns people and draws them together. It is why parades are so important in towns, or big football games or local custom celebrations. These shared markers enhance a sense of community identity, a sense of belonging and a sense of shared responsibility for each other.

It’s why holidays such as this are such whiz-bang times for people showing up to feed the homeless and take care of others – because the shared day creates a feeling of connection and responsibility.

Whether or not the personal interpretation of the day is shared, the communal one is even if only to underscore it as a day of giving or showing up for others. Even if all it does is give two strangers a starting point to put each other’s stories into context on a timeline.

How we frame our anniversaries is very important. The key to framing them is to understand that we can reframe the importance we place on days at any given point in time. This reframing is personal. But the anniversary may be universal.

Rather than focus on the difference in the importance we assign this day, perhaps it will make it easier for all if we seek to share in the fact that it is simply a day of universal importance. Then assign to it a reframed meaning that makes it your celebration. When you meet a stranger, you will find you both have shared the same day of celebration and from that connection – bridges may be built across any chasm.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All rights reserved.

Pepper Spray

2011-11-25T02:44:00.001-08:00

When I was in the military, during my advanced training in preparation for being an MP (and on riot squads) we went through a special certification on how to use pepper spray. There was the obligatory 6-hour class aimed at a 7th grade reading level, a multiple-choice test, and then we were taken out for the field-training portion.

First, we partnered up and alternated who pretended to be sprayed and the other person then had to go through a routine of immediately helping them to wash their eyes clean. That was one of the regulations of using pepper spray. Once sprayed you had five minutes to give first aid assistance or you were in deep doo-doo. If you could not do it directly (because oh say hey there was a riot going on, there was a special snatch and grab team that would take them and help them).

The second part of the field training required that we all stand in a single line at attention and the drill sergeant walked down the line and pepper sprayed each of us in the eyes. To make sure we understood what it meant to use a weapon such as this.

I am not sure if that is how they train civilian police, but I do know that where I was stationed – with riots every Friday that included Molotov cocktails and physical attacks, that spray was never used. And I highly doubt that the holiday shopper who had seen fit to arm herself with the spray had even been taught how to remove the cap. It is interesting, this mythos we have about weapons being a deterrent. All they are is a weapon that has not been put into use yet, trying to project how the sight of them will affect another is like trying to mind read. Their presence in our hands is all about our being willing to take.

I have had a really rough few weeks medically. It culminated with me trying to get a little calm and rest by taking some Valerian. Something I have done before with no issue only this time, it would appear to have been a bad batch and I had an allergic reaction. So bad, I landed in the ER twice because of the hives. One visit was a prolonged stay while hooked up to heart monitors and having all manner of steroids and etc pumped into my body because the hives had joined and they were afraid they were entering my breathing passages. I cannot even tell you the threatened madness of the pain and itching.

Now, they are getting better. I look a bit like a sunburned leopard and am on eight different medications to reduce the hives, stop the itching and pain and keep me from losing my mind. Needless to say, it was a wakeup call for me about using all natural remedies. Many of them do work well but few have a regulated manufacturing process. The ER nurse explained that if even the smallest part of the wrong end of the root made it into the capsule then POOF! Instant human balloon.

So I am stumbling around in this semi narcotic state – most of the eight things they gave me are pharmaceutical grade anti-histamines, which do nothing but put you to sleep. What is surprising to me is the amount of work I have gotten done at the same time. And good work too. What I was doing as work dried up and went away so in the middle of this I have had to scramble. Don’t think, just scramble and the end result is opportunity. I have sold feature articles to print magazines, signed on to write ebooks, create courses, you name it.

So we shall see where all this brings me, once – that is, I can stay awake for longer than three hours at a time.

But I opened up the news this AM and saw that woman pepper spraying another shopper at a black Friday sale and thought, “oh come on.”

Oh, come on.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

cats on valium

2011-11-15T14:09:00.001-08:00

Have you ever had one of those days where you know, by all rights, you should have lost your mind and yet somehow – you are doing just fine? I have found that most of my days that turn out like this have their root beginning in the Mad Kitten insisting on getting up at 2am. She is being difficult about letting me clip her nails this week so she has a needle fine hook that she can use in my septum to make sure I am bright eyed and bushy tailed right along side her.

I will never understand her logic. Some days she sleeps curled under my arms. Some days it is in the crook of my leg. Sometimes she stuffs herself in my panniers and on still others, she stays in the room next door.

Every so often I look at her and remember that old adage about people resembling their pets and I worry about my life.

Her latest thing is something I call the “arm trap.” She has this unique skillset in which she can take a flying leap at me when I am sitting down and land in my lap, already curled up as if sleeping. When she arm traps it means that the front of her body is completely on and wrapped around one of my arms. If I am lucky it is my left arm (because I am right handed) and I can still hunt and peck at the computer. If I am not lucky it only takes a few moments for her to become annoyed and start biting and kicking my hand. Right now it looks like my hand has been sewn onto my arm because I have a perfect deep scratch running across the wrist.

But I don’t know what I would do without her. I spend some awfully long and lonely days in the cave and she at least is always there – poking at me, annoying me and giving me a moment’s distraction from living in my head. I try to remind myself that I am grateful for that when she is being particularly annoying.

I can’t remember, I don’t think that I had started blogging when my dog was still alive. I think I started all this shortly after he finally passed away. I had him for a long time and he was big as a house by the time he was ready to go. Hugo. A black lab/border collie mix which meant he was this perfect balance of being really smart and really stupid but just sweet all the time.

I got him at a military animal shelter. He had been wildly abused, so much that they thought he was fixed and it wasn’t until a few months passed that his junk dropped that we realized he had been so scared he had sucked it inside himself. Our first week together we spent at a friend’s house. Hugo started doing this weird thing where he would climb on the couch, lift up the cushion, puke and then put the cushion back in place. It turned out he had Parvo. I spent the next week visiting him at the animal hospital and taking him for little walks while I held his IV bag in the air. I think I should have known from that beginning it would be a strange relationship.

Pets on the brain. All my pets have been strange. The dog was prone to fainting and would tear a slice of pizza up into dainty bite sized morsels to eat, the cats have all been bad climbers and constantly get stuck on roofs. I had a rat that loved to hang off the front of my shirt and eat my buttons. I had a bunny but he ate a piece of litmus paper and was bunny no more.

All the animals that have lived with me have been strange kinds of pacifists. The Mad Kitten has perfected catching mice without hurting them so she can have friends and often plays with squirrels. My dog used to always have strange cats walk up and rub against him. He was desperate to play with squirrels too (ahhhh another common thread) and one day he figured out it was his size that scared them away so he lay on his belly and tried to shimmy up to one. It didn’t work.

I am wildly over caffeinated and have been sitting at my computer all day slamming out articles on anything and everything in between. I feel like I can’t blink my eyes. The thing I look forward to most is in one hour I get to stand up and walk to a different city. It’s Rhode Island, we can do those kinds of things here.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe All Rights Reserved.

Madness

2011-11-14T14:33:00.001-08:00

Yesterday’s post generated an awful lot of email. While I try to respond to all of them I am still catching up from my past few weeks of being discombobulated, so please be patient. I think that the gist of most of the emails is what will direct this post today.

There are two hard and fast rules to life that you need to internalize if you are going to keep yourself healthy, sane and whole.

1) Everything changes. That is the nature of life even on a cellular level. We, and everything around us, are in a constant state of change. Our psyches are no different. Every second affects how we perceive and interpret the world.
2) There is nothing you can do to change the past. We can act in the present and choose to prepare for potentials in the future but we cannot go back and change anything that has happened. This, as well, applies to the human psyche.
Now, apply rule number 1 to rule number 2 and the result is that everything changes including what has happened in the past. Seems like a contradiction, doesn’t it? But as our psyches change, how we perceive events in the past changes as well. Our understanding of the hows and whys of things and their impact on our present is always in flux. We cannot change what has happened, but the place events hold in our internal histories is constantly moving.

This is the core element of the process of healing. By allowing our perceptions of a past event to change, we begin to heal – to act in the present and to make choices to prepare for our possible futures. It is when we engage in a kind of frozen perception that madness can occur. By clinging to a single interpretation of an event, we go against the laws of nature. We become unnatural. And in becoming unnatural we can make ourselves ill, full of dis-ease and dis-order.

In Erich Fromm’s book, The Sane Society, he posits that the modern western industrialized society has made itself insane by placing too great a value on homogeneity and stillness. The invention of the assembly line, in which every part is the same and processed with the same action, invited in a kind of societal madness. The suburbs, with their repeated house designs and even the reconstruction of the American Dream to state that everyone could achieve the same thing was the beginnings of a great, mass psychosis.

Baumeister hypothesizes that the reason there is such a drive towards escapism (through substance abuse, spirituality and other repetitive behaviors) is that we can no longer bear the responsibility of being independent persons on a full time basis. We reject functionality and seek dysfunction for release from the sheer stress of living as moral and responsible beings that constantly have to respond to change by making choices. We have become a society that is incapable of independence. It is too stressful for modern man and we seek release from it through a variety of passive, sedative activities (movies, TVs, yoga, hobbies etc.). The more numb we become the easier it is to let go of that evidence of self that I talked about yesterday. The more numb we are, the more open we are to a kind of self-induced ICU psychosis, only this is occurring on a mass level and psychosis, as Fromm states, has become perceived as sanity and the sane are labeled ill.

Independence, the illusion of individuality, has become commoditized to the point that there is even an assembly line feel to it. Our philosophers teach us that there are no new ideas. On that point I half agree, mostly because I agree with Chesterton who said that there could be no new ideas until we actually follow through and finish some of the old ones. But the old ideas – of equality, fraternity and independence proved to take too much effort and they were abandoned. As were the original ideas of most faiths abandoned when they proved too taxing to live. These old ideas have been replaced with corporatism, homogeneity, codependence and fanaticism – assembly line thinking – that still clings to their original names but beneath the masque, there is no relation between how these ideas were intended to be enacted and how they are lived today.

As I watch the news there is an orchestrated effort to begin dismantling the Occupy Wall Street protests. You cannot ignore that fact as videos and photographs surface from city after city, all within the same week, of the camps being taken down. There are, in many cases, valid reasons for the dismantling of the camps. But the reasons were actually created by a very flawed and ill society.

Watching the protests, seeing the interviews with many of them has been a painful experience. There has been no greater showcase of the loss of our ability to think independently then this movement. In wanting to break down the greed machine, they were demanding a new kind of assembly line. A somatic guarantee that there would be no worry or strife. The lack of focused protesting is worrisome. In the sixties, on which this protest was modeled, the protests were focused – this one is about war, this one is about race and so on. Focused protests achieve change. Look at what is going on in Chile.

If I were to suggest one thing for OWS to focus on that would be the beginnings of a return to the burden of independence, it would be for the removal of the rights of corporate personhood from the law books. The concept of corporate personhood is the embodiment of the assembly line – where no individual exists, no person is accountable, no living being drives the machine that affects so many lives.

But advocating for this implies that we are willing to stand and bear the responsibilities of our past. Our participation in a society based upon assembly line action, greed and manipulation. And that, is a burden that I am not sure many psyches can bear.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe All Rights Reserved.

the speckled bellied platypus

2011-11-13T02:20:00.001-08:00

Identity is a funny thing. We use many words to describe our identities like artist, doctor, writer, mother, son and so on. These words feel important and we wear them like badges and use them like calling cards. Have a conversation with any stranger and pay close attention to how they work into the exchange some verbal clue as to what they perceive as an important part of their identity. The clue may lie in the vocabulary they chose to use, or a reference that they make – the verbal clues we drop as to who we think we are and how we want to be perceived can be very subtle.

But there are other clues to our identities that, while not subtle at all, are barely acknowledged. Sort of. People see these clues and register them very quickly but we are the ones who are dismissive of their importance in our lives. These clues are visual – how we dress, our hairstyles, jewelry, makeup, tattoos and so on.

During the Inquisition, one of the punishments for more minor crimes was to shave a man’s beard off. Removing the beard (a symbol then of status) stripped a man of his sense of identity and place in society. Strangers could no longer simply look at him and know how to behave toward him. If our personal, visual clues are stripped from us, we will have a difficult time recognizing ourselves in the mirror and that is one of the most disconcerting feelings around. It is why people receiving chemo who lose their hair are so thrilled to have wigs or hats – it is not about covering the baldness, but regaining a recognition of the image of their selves.

It is a strange fact to wrap one’s brain around but since time began, humankind has been incapable of recognizing themselves except through external means. Think about it. Think about what your external clues to yourself are and imagine what it would be like to have them taken away from you. Would you be able to function? Or, I should say, function as well?

I used to think that it was possible to maintain recognition of the self through internal methods but I believe I am changing my mind. We are mammals that are sensory driven. We perceive everything through our senses, absorption of the external and it would make sense that our perception of ourselves would also be the same. Even in heightened states of meditation and “nothingness,” our sense of not being is defined by an external sense of ourselves in relation to the world.

I just learned about something called “ICU psychosis.” It is a temporary psychotic state induced in ICU patients from….the television. It is common in ICUs for the TV to be left on 24 hours a day as company and entertainment for the patients. What happens, as the person is lying there divorced from their body, is a constant barrage of sound and images overloads their external senses. They can’t move to “check themselves” and wind up internalizing a hodgepodge of images and sound as their thoughts and experience. Outside of the ICU, we can protect ourselves from similar barrages of sound and images because we can move and experience our bodies. We affirm our selves through our sensory experience of our bodies. To prevent a similar psychosis or identity break in quadriplegics, mirrors are often fixed so they can look at their faces and have visual evidence of their existence.

Evidence of our existence.

Viktor Frankl wrote, of his experience in the concentration camps, that it was those who could remember something outside of themselves – a love, a faith – that reflected back their identity who did not go mad or succumb to subhuman behavior for survival. That is important to remember, if you lose what reflects the evidence of your existence you go mad.

I usually, about this time of year, do a post about holiday grief. This season there is a new kind of grief that many people are sharing in and that few recognize. That grief stems from the loss of jobs, economic security and hope for a better future. This is as powerful a grief as that which stems from the loss of a loved one but it is slightly different. This new grief does not have an immediate end in sight. There is no body to be buried. No memorial to attend that signifies that this passage has ended. The best way to understand it is to imagine the kind of grief a caregiver experiences while caring for a loved one who is terminal but has months to go before they die.

In this day and age, our jobs are often the strongest reflectors of the evidence of our existence. We don’t have the kind of culture that has equally strong sources through religion or art to supplant that mirror. And this puts many of us in danger of developing that kind of “temporary psychosis” in which life becomes unreal, unstable and infinitely frightening.

Whether you agree with the Wall Street protestors or not, bear in mind that they have created something that reflects the evidence of their existence. They have, in fact, avoided madness by creating a new mirror.

This holiday season, bear in mind that grief stems from many sources. And if yours comes from the instability of the economy – create a new mirror. Find something outside of yourself that you can hold on to that shows you your face. It could be a renewed closeness with a loved one, long term volunteering for a cause that is important to you, developing your faith in something larger than yourself that cares for you or even working to develop and maintain consistent online friendships.

The mirrors we hold do more than just reflect our image, that reflection is also the door that allows us to enter the world beyond ourselves.

Mirror, mirror on the wall
Prove to me I am even here at all.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Occupy This

2011-10-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

It’s been a rough few weeks but as they say, the sun is beginning to shine from behind the cloud. It serves as a reminder to me of the power of choice in life. We may not have control over some things that happen to us, but we do have control over our response to them. It is something called “coping skills.” How you choose to cope will define how you heal.

And I have pulled in many of my “tentacles,” for health reasons. I have been spread very thin and it just combined to make things even more difficult. The result of putting aside some of my efforts is that I am able to focus on some things that are much larger and more important in the immediate present.

Can you tell where I am going with all this?

I have spent the morning catching up with the news, specifically about the Occupy Wall Street movement. We have our own small version here; I have had quite a few people stop and tell me stories about it that were none too kind. But the focus is not on the bitching, the tattle tailing, or the excuse mongering to avoid facing what the protests represent. The focus is on, or should be on, the issue of what the protests represent.

I read the major news reports on the protest. I went and read a ton of the forum discussions on the actual protest site. I zoomed around and read blog posts from people for and against. Then I took a walk.

Much has been made of the fact that the mainstream media has not been covering the protests to the extent that the participants felt they deserved. Even more has been made about the fact that when they are covered, the media tends to only show the worst of the bunch – the so-called trust-fund babies who come across as entitled and out of touch with reality. Locally, much has been made of the sheer cost and quality of the camping equipment of the protestors and their demands to have the homeless removed from the park they are occupying, a park the homeless have used for decades as their home away from home. But it still doesn’t make the news.

If you do a little searching on the web, you will begin to notice a small and unusual thing. Across the world, there are small, similar protests that are receiving news coverage – prominent news coverage. The coverage gives passing mention to the fact that the protests are inspired by Occupy Wall Street and instead, focus on the demands of their protestors and the response of the government. In Chile, for example, the student protests are demanding free education for all (through the university level) and the government is balking and offering concessions on loan rates instead. This ongoing dialogue is…how do they say it? Newsworthy. The students are gaining more and more support because they have settled on a single demand. The demand for accessible education is the beginning of all change. An educated populace thinks and has tools to critically evaluate policy and make changes.

On the Occupy web site, the forum echoes that need for definition. One person complained that the protestors of the Arab spring were not covered by a media that read a list of 20 ambiguous demands with each broadcast, but by a media that repeated their two concise demands with every mention. A slew of people agreed with this person. I have read the list of OWS demands and it reads like something created by someone who is deeply apathetic, a charge the protestors level on the American populace but that they exemplify.

Apathy is defined as absence or suppression of passion, emotion, or excitement; a lack of interest in or concern for things that others find moving or exciting.

The ultimate political expression of apathy is the creation of policies that have no clear purpose or definition. It is only through clearly defined goals or purpose that motivation can be brought to bear on the implementation (or protest) of the policy.

To rail against corporate greed sounds fine until you begin to ask what that greed is composed of, once you begin to ask you realize that my version of what is corporate greed may be very different from yours. Is it the presence of excess profit? Or is it in how that excess profit is used? Is it a tax issue or is it in how the tax is used? To what extent should monetary success be penalized in order to ensure fairness? And what then, does fairness look like? And if you penalize monetary success, who would want to create the success that could fund the fairness?

Do you see the problem? Like the Tea Party (which more and more people are identifying as identical to the Wall Street Protestors), the protest is against things of such ambiguity that instead of gaining momentum through arousing passion – we disappear into the nit-picking of meaning.

In Bristol, England, the protestors are unhappy that the local council will not provide them with running water, trash and postal service. The council pointed out to the protestors that they are occupying the square and that occupation is not something that community taxes should be funding. The protestors came back that they were doing something for the community. Something.

In Chile, the Red Camila is demanding a strictly not-for-profit education system that is free for everyone. Chile, by the way, has the most privatized education system in the world. Next door, in Columbia, students are protesting and waving Chilean flags in support of their neighbor’s demands. The government is in mediated talks with the protestors but there is no resolution in sight.

While the anarchistic design of the Wall Street protest is a fun thing, it is self-defeating. Without a willingness to overcome their own apathy and pick something to believe in and stand by, the protests will be little more than an annoyance. Revolution occurs because the protest is centered on a set belief that those protesting are willing to die for, end of story. That is not a metaphorical statement but a truism. The depth of your conviction will determine the results you receive because the depth of your conviction will determine your ability to make choices in coping with what opposes you. It is your ability to choose how you cope that determines how you heal.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Tartuffe

2011-10-01T07:38:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I had the chance to go sit in an outdoor theater and watch a performance of Moliere’s Tartuffe. Originally called “Tartuffe, the Hypocrite” it was rewritten multiple times by the author to try to get around censorship by the Church and was subsequently renamed – Tartuffe, the Imposter. It was wonderful. I haven’t had that much fun at a play in years. And given everything going on in the world is was a perfect satire to watch.

If you weren’t paying attention, you would think Tartuffe was about the hypocrisy of organized religion. It isn’t really, that is just the vehicle, Moliere pokes a finger at every aspect of society that allows hypocrisy to become its ruler. It makes me wonder where the satirists of our times have gone. I would think that between the tea partiers and the 99%, anonymous, democrats, republicans, liberals and fundamental Christians they would have more than enough material to embarrass us as a whole and perhaps prompt us into a little more realistic assessment of our actions and motivations.

Moliere’s grandmother in the play would have stolen the scene even more as she castigates the family with a vicious string of slogans, platitudes and quick solutions that make no rational sense.

I am still reading Aftershock, almost done in fact. And I recommend the book to anyone who cares about the functional quality of their life and economy. I think it’s a good read for anyone who wants to know how the recession happened, where it is going and for the most part, how to survive it. Granted, it is written only for the upper portion of the 50% of Americans with any kind of stocks or savings, a great deal of it can be applied to any economic status. It has been refreshing to see someone (a group of people really) writing without a political/social agenda and with a tremendous emphasis on reality. These economists happen to love what they do. What they have to say is not pretty or pleasant, but it has the ring of truth because they take the time to show you how they arrived at their conclusions.

That said, unless a miracle happens in the last 4 chapters, Weidemer has missed the greatest bubble of them all. The bubble that has made all the other bubbles possible. Obvious, but then again, as he points out, it is hard to see bubbles before they pop. But I will talk about that later. I have to bring the level of my explanation up to meet the level of theirs so the two ideas can fit together and be used. I also have to wait until I get through the next few weeks. I hope that I can do this without exploding.

Seeing Moliere brings Shaw to mind. Specifically “The Unsocial Socialist” and “Major Barbara.” Both I return to read quite often because they are good ways to ground oneself in reality.

That and “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”

One of the plusses (to pardon the pun) of being on google+ is at first it was a predominately tech crowd which was like getting a crash course in how companies on the Internet operate and why our productivity and innovation in technology has been so effing slow. In that regards I fully agree with Weidemer in his assessment of American production, we stopped producing or being innovative about 30-40 years ago. That is not to say that we haven’t done anything, but when you place it against historical leaps and growth the impact of technological advances has been practically nil. We have a bunch of gadgets and widgets that essentially allow us to do nothing but consume and to not even do that well. What I have learned about business on the Internet has given words to my suspicions. Anything that Facebook is slammed for doing is what everyone else already does. Facebook has rarely been an innovator, merely an ingenious mass marketer.

With all that I have learned to taken into my circles people who identify themselves as having very different opinions. Conservatives, Liberals, Tea Partiers, Anarchists and so on. It is like seeing identity psychology in action. While each label has a very fundamental ideology that is bandied about, few of its members agree with the ideology in whole. Yet, in this era of consumer ease, the political process has become the equivalent of a fast food restaurant and the actual views and opinions of voters have no way to be represented. Each label deals in broad simplifications that are designed to disallow effective discourse or action.

Like the immigration thread from earlier this week. There is no “immigration” issue or policy. Right now, there is a very strong issue about preventing Latin Americans (read Mexicans) from entering the country illegally or gaining citizenship. I say this not to fly the “oooohhh its racism flag” but to point out that the entire history of our immigration policy has been designed around responding to ethic and race controls. Just read the titles of the historic immigration acts, it says it all. What has never been undone is that from the get go our immigration policy was geared to preserving a white population. That is not an interpretation; it is stated in the Naturalization Act of 1790.

We have lost our ability to openly discuss our concerns under the banner of being politically correct and promoting equality. If we were talking about creating a Mexican Exclusion Act (ala the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act), the conversations we would be having would be much different. We like to perceive ourselves as being the land of equality and freedom but our core concerns do anything to support that. How many people, do you think, would be willing to support a Mexican Exclusion Act versus an Immigration Policy? Not many, because it removes the illusion necessary to believe in justice, fairness, equality and democracy. Remember what Baumeister said, self-deception has a limit but it always has a basis in fact. The self-deception is the formation of something dubbed an “Immigration Policy.” The fact is that it should be called the Mexican Exclusion Act.

It is like watching what has happened to affirmative action in universities. Where it has remained, it has been delicately gotten around to meet loose racial/ethnic quotas (i.e., black but not American blacks) and where it has been done away with (California) they are just now starting to see the damage it is doing to the Universities and communities as a whole (and building) because it takes 10 years to move through the cycle to remove people from the system who otherwise would not have had a chance to participate.

While I am not a fan of focusing advocacy on individual identities to the point of excluding their relationship to a global identity, I do strongly support that things, acts and advocacies do need to be called what they really are and not dressed up in fancy and non-specific words.

If I am homeless, please do not call me a constituent – doing that makes the fact that I am homeless less important than finding short term comfort solutions to guarantee my vote.

If I am ill, I am a patient, please do not call me a client. Calling me a client implies this is a business transaction and that my life is not as important as your dollar line.

If I am poor, do not call me “the salt of the earth.” That plays into the idea that you will always need me to be poor in order for your life to have flavor.

Red eye flight tonight. Ticket purchased and confirmed but there are no seats available on the plane. This should be interesting. I still have to post the dates for Mexico but in a nutshell…I will be appearing on the Mexican National Radio on October 13th for an interview and to read filemon in Spanish, then I will be at a local high school on the 14th for an appearance, and then at Casa del Lago on the 15th for the performance at 7pm. The performance is free and open to the public and I will get details out soon, but if you can scoot on down to Mexico City for a bit and like poetry, I think you will like Poesia en Vox Alta 11. They have selected poets from many countries to come do their thing and it will be a blast.

Ok. Coffee. Packing. Hours of stress about getting a seat on a plane and then back to the mad kitten.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Struck

2011-09-28T14:57:00.001-07:00

It’s funny but first I was complaining that it has been hard for me to slide into daily posting because I am just spinning and overwhelmed with everything that needs my attention these days and now – I am having a problem writing a daily blog post because I seem to be stuck in a state of “huh.”

Yesterday is a good example of huh. Between starting to read “Aftershock,” finishing reading “Orthodoxy” and then going out and having a few – not strange encounters, but definitely different ones I sort of sat back and went “huh” as all the little bits and pieces continue to tumble through my mind and find their places.

I am enjoying Aftershock, it is very simply written and the use of “bubbles” to describe the various aspects of the economy that are in danger of popping is a quick and easy way to visualize what is often made a fantastically complicated topic. Economics is not that difficult when you can give someone a clear path to follow to begin to understand how the pieces work together. I will be interested to see where Weidemer is going as far as his conclusions and solutions. He states in the book that bubbles are more clearly seen after they pop and not seen before for a) lack of willingness to acknowledge reality and b) lack of ability to imagine each element as it interacts with another. I have a sneaking suspicion though, that when I get to his conclusions and solutions he will have missed the biggest bubble-set of all. I am almost willing to bet myself money on it but so far, the way the book is shaping up, this bubble-set (which I will not name yet) casually appears in the pages and so far, is never considered. It is strange, almost as if it crept in unnoticed to the manuscript. My hope, and the reason why I am not going on and on about those bubbles, is that Weidemer is foreshadowing and doing a fabulous set-up for their inclusion. An inclusion that would be the most shocking economic revelation in the book.

This of course brings me right back to the Demon of Hope. Which is something that Weidemer threads through everything, it is because of our Hope that is based on false convictions and wishful thinking that we are able to deceive ourselves so easily about all of these economic bubbles. The two simplest examples he gives is that housing prices cannot exceed the income of the community or the price is false and the housing market bubble it creates will eventually burst and, that stock prices cannot exceed the product profits ratios of the companies or the stock prices is unrealistically inflated and the stock bubble will burst. Common sense. If companies are not creating profit through product, than how is their value increasing? Too often, it is through the acquisition of debt in purchasing failing companies. Think about that one.

In order to get to Hope, I have to get War off the beach and into the City of Love. I am almost at that point, but it is tricky. For War to enter the city she must rise above false desire and wishful thinking, yet having done so, she then encounters the dangerous charms of Hope.

Sun goes up.
Sun goes down.

I cannot wait to get through the next three weeks. It is just this delicate balancing act and is entirely too stressful, all this constant juggling and redefining and traveling. And then – winter. A long, slow winter of moving into the next phase of things. After the City I am going to play, my plans are to write a version of Antigone and one of Iphigenia before launching into more of the tale.

Ack…there is just not enough coffee in the world today.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

island to island

2011-09-26T14:30:00.001-07:00

Today, I am setting off to take a few hours between things to sit and write a letter. It is something I do every month or so with my particular penpal. It is funny, having a penpal, half the time you have nothing really in common and it takes about a year or two to get past that kind of “let me recount to you what I have done for the past 30 days’ stage and begin to connect. The unusual thing is that despite starting out with nothing in common, you eventual discover that you have quite a bit you share. It is almost like being on a desert island with a stranger. Eventually you have to talk because we all need that kind of human connection.

Oddly enough (well not really), I have been reading a lot of economic theory. I tend to stay away from philosphers who don’t also include a succinct economic plan because I don’t think that you can write about the nature of humanity without including the nature of community and its commerce. It could be a bartering commerce or a monetary one, but like it or not – economy is the proving ground of society. In the same vein, I am equally dismissive of economists who never theorize how their plan would work within the culture of the society. I think I am at the point where I am interested in people with plans, not theories, if you get the difference.

I have read all the major and well known communist, socialist and capitalist theorists. I got all excited at first when I found the darling of the Libertarians, Hayek, only to discover that Hayek got to the point where even he realized his plan was a recipe for disaster and stopped writing or commenting about it. My new one is “Afterschock” by Wiedemer. You might remember him, he had the book that predicted the crash of the housing bubble and the recession. Mind you, those were all things predicted by other economists around the world looking at us, but Wiedemer and his crew were one of the few American voices that were put out there.

It has made me curious, especially Wiedemer’s book and the struggle going on about the debt and budget in Congress just how all these plans really applied to people who were not involved in 401ks, stock portfolios or able to snatch up meaningful amounts of things like – gold. So I started poking around and discovered that over 50% of Americans do not have investments, not even a retirement or 401k. Making the leap to the assumption that they don’t have the disposable income to stock up on bullion is an easy thing to do.

Knowing this, sitting there with the statistics, cast all of these debates about the coming bubble bursts (I agree with Wiedemer that the two bubbles to go next will be the dollar and government debt) in a slightly nasty light. Where are the practical plans for surviving the next bursts for the people who will be effected by it in the majority? Over 50% of Americans will be more radically affected by those bubbles then the housing and stock bubbles. When the dollar bursts (and the debt) the very things that they support (services such as unemployment) that have help so many of that 50% survive this portion of the recession will be severely damaged. Yet there is no one talking about how to help these people survive. It is as if they do not exist and yet, the other 50% seems ignorant of the fact that these are all the people who make daily life possible.

The potential for a catastrophic class divide in 2012-13 (when those bubbles are predicted to burst) is beyond high.

I am pondering this and will talk later about what I think of Aftershock when I am done reading it.

Oddly enough, all of this economic reading is for two reasons. One, it is giving me enormous insight into the character of the Demon of Hope in the poem, the City of Love. Two, as I work on finishing my own manuscript of social theory/plan I am steadfastly poking it with the stick of history to see where my weak spots are.

Sometimes I do feel like I am on a deserted island. And then I pick up my pen and write to my friend, pages and pages of just…speaking of life and wondering aloud how things can be so terrible and so wonderful at the same time.

And then I wait.

I wait for him to write back.
From one island to another.
We sustain each other.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

The Justice of Twitter

2011-09-25T07:23:00.001-07:00

Last week, in the aftermath of Troy Davis’s execution, I read several articles that analyzed what happened as far as the social media influence on creating the delay and in uniting people across the world in advocating for his life. Most of them proclaimed that social media (read Twitter) was an absolute failure because the million or so tweets failed to influence the Supreme Court. The quote I remember is that activism is becoming 21st century while justice in America is still in the 20th century.

The funny thing is that the massive social media activity surrounding his execution was very successful, and stands to become very influential in future actions to stop the death penalty – but you wouldn’t know that it you were analyzing it from a 20th century viewpoint.

This is the problem with most of the media and the Internet pundits that write these commentaries and reviews. They approach analysis based on a set of criteria that examines products or actions based on a very limited, linear and orthogonal basis. They look at success or achievement as an either/or cause and effect process. For example – if one has mass numbers of followers on a social media network than one must have influence and celebrity. This is not true. Acquiring numbers of followers is an automated and passive experience that occurs once but says nothing about the interactive relationship of the followers to the followed. You can’t even look at the instances of reposting or commenting to gauge influence. In order to gauge influence on the Internet you must be able to examine how the influence washes off the internet and into a real time action and then, returns to the Internet. Influence on the Internet is not shown by someone engaging in an immediate dialogue in response to the post but in the later retelling of the follower to the followed of the evidence of change/influence the post created in their life.

In sales, on the Internet, success is not determined by the amount of units sold in relation to any given specific drive, but by the long-term brand loyalty created. It is not the people who are first time buyers that are important, but the ones who keep showing up and then purchase because the brand has created a relationship with them.

In regards to social justice, what happened with Troy Davis proved that it was very successful in motivating people to pay attention. It opened opportunities for discussion and education. More importantly, it served as a bridge between groups that would normally not interact and joined them in a single line of thinking. Missing was the real time response to all the phone numbers etc that were posted. It was that real time response rate that would have made the twittering madly successful for Troy Davis because it would have created an off line influence.

It was, however, the unrelated news article that appeared shortly after the execution that shows that the kind of Twitter event that happened surrounding Troy is about to step out into the world of real time influence.

As they are progressing in the trial against Michael Jackson’s doctor, the court issued a decision that specifically referenced social media. It said that lawyers could examine Facebook, Twitter and other social media feeds of potential jurors and admit the feeds as evidence for dismissing a potential juror from the pool. Social media…public posting, just got its foot in the door as a legally recognized representation of a person’s opinions and beliefs. It lends an almost unbearable weight to public posting because now it is beginning to have real time judicial influence.

That, to me, is a signal that the mass unity about Troy that happened on line is a success. One that measured by a specific result but by creating a general atmosphere of real time influence. It is also proves, as I often go on about and rant, that what one does post (public or not) should be treated carefully and approached with a healthy set of responsibility because more and more it is becoming a recognized real-time version of you. Even if you may never visit the country or see the room and the table and the laptop and meet the person reading your post – it is as if you were standing there.

Once you accept that responsibility and reality, you are also charged to change the way you ‘listen’ to what is posted. It can be harmful or helpful but it always contributes to the sphere of influence that you walk in through your real-time life.

Social/cultural change is never measured in a single instance no matter what the media and people who want to be perceived as experts will proclaim. The atmosphere it creates measures change and in the subtle shifting of what has been to align itself with what is demanded should come.

As I tweeted this morning, pessimism should marry our optimism to create change. In recognizing the worst that may happen if we do nothing, we are then motivated to either do something or give up. If we give up, it means we accept our destruction. If we do something, we may not achieve the change we desire, we may reveal that for each small gain there is more we must do but that is a part of living.

Nothing in life is capable of standing still without falling apart under its own weight.

There are more executions coming. Not all of them will garner the same attention as Troy. But with all of them, we can respond so that injustice does not become acceptable.

Never lose sight of the fact that as a species we always stand at the brink of our own destruction. But the same energy and innovative drive that has brought us to the brink and diverts us to a path along the edge of the cliff. There will never be a moment when we are not in danger of our own destruction, but that does not mean that we have to accept that as inevitable. Constant vigilance, constant action, choice and a true desire to be present in an ever-changing life will save lives – including our own.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Running in Place

2011-09-24T10:57:00.001-07:00

I think there was a point this week in which I threw my hands up in the air, letting go of all my careful schedules and plans, and just started running in place to try and keep up with all the things raining down around me. Think about that image. Does it make sense to you?

But there is a point in which you are not really moving forward, but sort of – stationary – yet expending more energy than if you were flying down the road towards a destination. Sometimes, the final sprint towards the finish line of something leaves you in the exact same place. It is in recognizing when you shouldn’t move, but should be infinitely more engaged in the present that the greatest leaps of accomplishment occur. Sometimes.

When it is over, you are just sort of trying to catch your breath while you look around at all the things that have fallen off your shoulder, or out of the sky where they have been hanging over your head, and although you have not moved – you have lost burdens that will now let you walk the final mile with ease.

This has been a week of wonder and disappointment. In all aspects of social things, more masques have slipped out of place to reveal what lies beneath. Some of the faces have been hideous, and others have shone with an unexpected beauty. Within that revelation lies the source of direction that comes next.

When we get a chance to see the person beneath, what we come to know is not the person that they hid, but we get to learn the extent of what we seek. Have we sought the company of people who are not what they seem? But what they seem promises an effortless acceptance or answer? Have we avoided the company of those who are different from us, who may speak another language whether literally or experientially, that unmasqued reveal our same longing for value, beauty, peace and love?

Troy Davis was executed and the process revealed both the beautiful and the damned within the world. And it showed us how close we all are to losing our humanity because it would be so easy to not try, to expend the energy, to not struggle against things we both no are wrong and realize we may not be able to change in our lifetime.

Yet to stop struggling, to stop trying to correct what is wrong is to give up on all life but most importantly, to give up on our own. When we say that anyone’s life is not worth an unrewarded effort, we say that our own life is not worth effort as well. In that lies the greatest sin, of giving up on life.

Life is not always beautiful or fair. It is not always just or kind. Yet the beauty of life is that it is beautiful, fair, just and kind. To cease demanding that it become a place of wonder and peace for every life is to give up on its potential to balance the worst with the best. To sit and passively wait for the balance is to remove its possibility.

All shall be well,
I say that often but now I understand the missing part of that phrase.
All shall be well because all is not well and that shows me the areas that most need love and action.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

boom boom crash

2011-09-20T14:41:00.001-07:00

I started out writing a totally different blog today but then boom boom crash! Everything got turned upside down the same way it has for the past month. In good ways, but still, disruptive.

But in the middle of my disrupted day I had to sit, glued to the laptop and Internet, which is something that does not happen much anymore. I tend to touch base with everything via my mobile phone or other computers scattered about as I go from place to place. But here I sat – cat in lap (cat in hair, cat gnawing on foot, cat on keyboard) and had to stay in place and do one thing.

Which meant I did about 12. That is the average amount of tabs I have open on a single computer and I typically run two if I am in and working.

Which let me follow two discussions, or rather events, on several different social media and news platforms. One, the denial of clemency for Troy Davis. Two, the simultaneous publication of several articles that google+ is dead along with the announcement that google+ is now open to the public.

Troy was more of a topic on FB and twitter. The status of google+ was more popular on, well, google+.
A large part of this has to do with demographics, both in the positive and realistic way and in the negative and realistic way.

The nature of the restricted google+ invitations has led to a more tech heavy crowd, but that is how new social media begins. FB and twitter have a broader public base so more of a broader slice of public life comes into view. Now that google+ is open to the public, I give it about a year before it provides the same kind of representation. All the platforms have their good points, and all of them have their failings.

But one thing that is very indicative of a rising trend is that social media is not being “raised up” as social media. One thing the BBC recently commented on in a discussion of whether or not there will be a social uprising in America is that “no, the people that suffer the greatest are too demoralized and there is no social activism organization that has affect.” The article went on to say that Americans have lost the impetus to raise their voice because they know there is no one of import and persuasion to hear and respond to them.

One of the other google+ threads that has been running strong (besides the nymwars) is about the algorithms of searches that places like google and facebook use to tailor the information you receive. It is not so much about fishing for keywords and demographics to direct ads to your page, but based upon the friends you network with, their location, keywords and the types of links you click on and post – changes the search results you see when you look for information. Rather than being a neutral search result, it is tailored to your tastes and opinions.

Rather than being the last bastion of the free press and freedom of information, the Internet is becoming the castle of close-mindedness. Unless you spend a balanced amount of time searching, clicking and interacting with people with opinions different from yours – you lose out on finding information that may educate you, illuminate your own opinions or maybe even facts that will change them.

I am going to do my Faith Popcorn impersonation now and make a prediction. The future of social media is only in being social and self reflective. It will become a limited means of outreach, advertising and education because it will become as passive a form of entertainment as the television. I predict the rise of the epress as a means of interaction, and if you can’t imagine what I mean then think about way back when the greatest thinkers of our times had their debates by publishing monographs, books, essays in response to each other. Right now the ebook market just throws crap out there, but I forsee it becoming more directed. More interactive, more passionate and influential.

Social media is a dead end. Not now, it still can rake some money in, but money is becoming useless. Thought and effective action are becoming the new currency.

Troy Davis had his clemency denied. He is scheduled to be executed tomorrow at 7pm. His case, his prosecution and conviction have seriously fallen apart and need to be reviewed. This is not a matter of whether or not you approve of the death penalty, keep that opinion to yourself right now he needs you in other ways, this is about class differences in justice in all aspects of life. Troy is, whether you realize it or not, the symbol of our tax imbalance, recession, class separation, racism, and treatment of the lower middle class and working poor in America. He deserves a serious review of the fact that all of the eye witnesses have recanted their testimony in a case with no DNA or physical witnesses.

When people stand up and say “I am Troy Davis.” They mean it. I am Troy Davis because I have been ignored or denied or pushed aside because of the “way things are always done.” I am Troy Davis because I am poor and what hope would I have if wrongfully accused against a judicial machine that has its basis in supporting career politicians? I am Troy Davis because I have loved one and have loved others and felt powerless to help them in the face of injustice. I am Troy Davis because I am a member of three hated minorities and know that at any moment anyone could do anything to me and get away with it. I am Troy Davis because I love people who are in minorities who suffer and they have no recourse. I am Troy Davis because I believe, with all my heart, that whatsoever we do to the least among us, we do to the essence of life.

Please sign the amnesty petition. Email the District Attorney at Chatham in Georgia, phone them and fax as well. Tweet it, share it, spread it around.
LCHISOLM@chathamcounty.org
Telephone: 912-652-7308 Fax: 912-652-7328.
http://blog.amnestyusa.org/deathpenalty/not-in-our-name-georgia-must-not-execute-troy-davis/

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

let them eat cake

2011-09-16T09:23:00.001-07:00

A few days ago, when a question was posed to Ron Paul at a GOP debate about who would pay for the treatment needed for an uninsured 30 year old man with a life threatening condition, Ron Paul responded that one of the perks of freedom is that you assume risk. If the man had been able to afford to pay for medical insurance but chose not to then it was on him - not the community to provide care. When the commentator then said, "Then the community should let this man die?" The crowd responded with an enthusiastic "Yeah!"

Marie Antoinette is inaccurately remembered as having responded, when asked what the poor should eat since the cost of bread had risen so much as to be beyond their budget, with "let them eat cake."

To say that the entitlement system of social security and medicare/caid is deeply flawed and bloated is quite an understatement. To want to force everyone to purchase medical insurance is to be ignorant of the financial realities of more than 3/4s of all Americans. To want people to accept "the risk" of choosing not to have medical insurance is so...lacking in a sense of compassion and responsibility AND ignorant of the financial realities of more than 3/4s of all Americans it beggers belief.

I wonder, how many in that audience who cheered the idea of that man dying because he didn't pay for medical insurance, have insurance that is provided for them by employers?

Ron Paul's answer, by the way, is it is the church's responsibility to provide care for those without medical insurance. Now, what if that man chose - in expressing his freedom - to not be a member of any faith?

On both sides it is plain to see that there is a lack of consideration or even awareness of the reality that the majority of American live. From all sides come unrealistic plans to do...well, nothing about the quality of life in America. There is either this absurd focus on all of our economic problems stemming from not taxing the top 1% of income earners enough or, an equally absurd emphasis on crafting everything to provide perfectly for the lower 15% of the population. Each side has probably spent the equivalent of a state education budget on producing colorful infographics to prove that the recession is the other sides fault.

Economic problems like what we are experiencing do not create themselves overnight, or over a four-year span or even a twenty-year one. Problems such as we have are symptoms of a deeply and long term flawed political, social and economic culture.

Blame is far more entertaining than looking at the reality of what needs to be done. That is a sad truth. 30 second commercials that promote misinformation or incomplete information but appeal to emotions have more sway on public opinion than a series of facts that then are pulled together to present options.

Part of the problem, besides a cultural phobia of suffering for the cure, is that both sides are trying to modify machines that we know no longer work rather than looking for innovation. Privatized insurance has created an industry that values profit over service, a sure fire way for any business to fail. Government sponsored healthcare is too poorly managed to be effective or affordable. Trying to overlay government regulations on private healthcare industry is disastrous. Trying to bring business style competition to government care breeds incompetence and fraud. So now what?

The audience response during the debate is one of the keys. The audience behavior was typical of consumers. Nothing matters and nothing is real until it affects you personally - that is the nature of a consumer. As long as the consumer can access what they currently believe is important to them, it is not important that their neighbor cannot. Because a large part of the consumer identity is defined not by having what your neighbor has, but by having more.

Ron Paul's call for churches to fill the gap would be viable - if we had enough churches left in America that believed in community responsibility to participate. But most of them adhere to prosperity theology, which is the religious form of consumerism. The proof of God's approval lies in the things we receive on Earth. One of the few religious communities that works and believes in community responsibility is the Catholic Workers. Not to be confused with the Catholic Church or Catholic Charities. The Catholic Workers are out and working in every community to help those in need - they do not care who you are or what you believe. Other faiths with very active arms, notably Muslims and Jews, tend to keep within their defined communities. The remainder indulge in a kind of feel good shim sham in which help is given and time committed, but only to causes that are far away - a form of community denial.

And the new age people and alternative faith communities? Well...most of them pursue a mindset of being absolutely divorced from life or rely on a type of prosperity meditation in the same way prosperity churches do. Louise Hay, the New Age pundit, recently said that poor people are poor because of their thinking and that "wealth has to do with consciousness and deservability." Many people use a warped understanding of karma to allow them to accept the state of things for others.

This is not to say that within all practices there are not individuals who are committed to acting within their extended communities. It is to say that there are next to no faith communities who act within the extended community they are housed.

Ron Paul's world no longer exists. Mr. Perry's exists, but I think only as a low-budget horror movie. Mr. Obama's world is clicking their ruby heels so hard the sequins have started to fall off. And the people who could do something realistic about this, where are they? Where are the leaders of tomorrow?

They are trapped in an inertia created by passive indoctrination. They are everyone who seeks their consistent escape in a TV or movie. Who spends more time posting about atrocities and wrongs on Facebook then they give of their time to show up and do something about those things in their community.

Iceland voted to suffer as a nation in order to take the time to fix their woes - from their banking crises to others that are similar to ours. They chose to build something new, rather than modify what has been. To do this meant the population had to accept that things were going to be difficult and government had to yield to the will of the people. Yet Iceland has a population where over 90% of the people turn out to vote and are educated on the issues.

Perhaps that is where we need to begin? Educating people to come out into their communities and put their hands on what is wrong, even if it does not touch their lives, in order to experience it first hand and THEN come up with an idea of what to do about it. Right now, our community efforts are mostly designed by people with next to no real time understanding of what is wrong but a lot of theory about how to make it right.

Perhaps then, the one phrase that is present in almost all traditions (although worded differently) would begin to become the defining mantra of our society and start to shape our policies.

That phrase?

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

I AM TROY DAVIS

2011-09-13T05:34:00.000-07:00

“Troy Davis was convicted of murdering a Georgia police officer in 1991. Nearly two decades later, Davis remains on death row — even though the case against him has fallen apart.

The case against him consisted entirely of witness testimony which contained inconsistencies even at the time of the trial. Since then, all but two of the state's non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or contradicted their testimony.

Many of these witnesses have stated in sworn affidavits that they were pressured or coerced by police into testifying or signing statements against Troy Davis.

One of the two witnesses who has not recanted his testimony is Sylvester "Red" Coles — the principle alternative suspect, according to the defense, against whom there is new evidence implicating him as the gunman. Nine individuals have signed affidavits implicating Sylvester Coles.

Breaking News: An execution date for Troy Davis is scheduled for September 21! In the days before Davis' execution, the Georgia Board of Pardons & Paroles will hold a final clemency hearing – a final chance to prevent Troy Davis from being executed.

READ MORE

GET INVOLVED

Take Action: Sign petition to oppose the death penalty for Troy Davis

Watch Videos: Learn and educate others about Troy Davis case

Spread the word: Sign and circulate sign-on letter to legal professional

Spread the word: Sign and circulate sign-on letter to religious leaders

Learn More: Notable Leaders, Artists and Other Troy Davis Supporters

Listen: Amnesty's telephone conversation with Troy (mp3)”

(from Amnesty International)

visit http://troyanthonydavis.org and find out how you can stand up and say "I am Troy Davis" and stop the execution.

The Executioner’s Song The Executioner's Song - Cassandra Tribe

By Cassandra Tribe

My hour of worship is midnight.
The moon bright altar flame.
I am the hope
of forgotten men.
God in a world without blame.

The cross blankets body thought.
Sometimes it cushions with deed.
Food is proof of kindness,
kindness bargained for peace.

Prayers are said.
Permission loomed.
So it begins.
Death enters the room.

The life that waited,
retreats from the world.
The soul is forgotten.
The body pieced by worms.

Death will go back to living,
until he is needed again.
Memory will be argued
by no one called a friend.

Compared to a soldier feted
for killing in the name of caprice,
death in the peace is kept hidden,
blind justice fails its increase.

Even on
battlefield, there is no face.
Even in
war, rules contain blame.
At home,
where soldiers are bootless,
death is recruited and paid.
Service requested and rendered,
secrecy hides all blame.

Judas fed coins to soil,
the only seeds that ever grew,
trees to watch the world,
and man as he stumbles through.

Bright moon finds swaying face
to hide and reveal again,
flashes of effort misplaced,
spun chance revealed, forsaken.

In solemn place,
the body strapped down and blinded,
still communicates.
pressed wafer provides the food,
food to assuage the weak,
leaving the body hungry,
crying one last speech.

Bright moon finds swaying face
to hide and reveal again,
flashes of effort misplaced,
spun chance revealed, forsaken.

I have gone
to husbands who were fathers,
I have gone
to wives who were mothers,
wanting them to serve, solid food of better.
The plate they gave me was empty,
'though 'twas turned just so,
hoping I wouldn't notice
broke finish mold and go.

Brother and sister after,
forgot me and argued on how,
when wine had been flowing so freely,
their cups were empty now.
Not agreeing with any reason,
they decided each other to slur,
the wine soaked into the ground,
no pool of bliss any more.

No one in this world,
that loves its secrets revealed,
wants to know
the why of I am.
Even the Christ on the Hill,
was asked the source of his plan.

I am the secret son of faith
who chose a different stand,
following words inspired,
but written by human hand.

My temples you'll find in castles,
filled with forgotten men,
Each of them sacrifice,
food to man's growing sin,
I am the one who goes on.
The one who should be condemned,
but I make the sleep of the world,
quiet
dismissive of kin.

One day the world
will go blind
and in blindness finally see.
The flame on my altar will fade,
and midnight will never be.

Till then,
I am always invited,
false promise of life believed,
for I am the Christ of the Chamber,
these castles only I enter,
yet rule I both land and man.

My hour of worship is midnight.
The moon bright altar flame.
I am the hope
of forgotten men.
God in a world without blame.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

What's the matter, Harry Potter?

2011-09-12T06:11:00.001-07:00

I meant to write this post last week after seeing the latest (and supposedly last) Harry Potter movie at an IMAX no less. But the past few weeks have just been a basket full of bizarre. I mean, really - even for my standards the universe has been a bit freehanded with me. There is a part of me that wonders, as I look forward into what is coming in the next few months if it is actually trying to do me a favor by getting all the strange out of the way before I start running my mad race which is called 'the Fall.'

Harry Potter.

Now, I am not a fan of Harry Potter. I neither like nor dislike the series. I tried reading one of the books but it was just not my cup of tea and didn't get past the second chapter. I did see the second movie but only because I was chaperoning a group of 12 year old boys. Harry Potter is not my first choice for a cinematic experience. However, a friend had a groupon special for two for one and on Tuesdays, all the shows were $6. Combine that with my gift coupon to a local restaurant and we managed to celebrate her 40th birthday for about $8 (ignoring the $5 bottle of water I had to buy because of my coughing fit at the beginning of the film).

The film was fun. It was in no way 3D, or if that is what 3D has become now I don't think I will bother with it anymore. The story was broad, sloppy, ridiculous at times with its attempts to solve all the doubt in humanity with simple solutions and an absolute hoot. The makeup and prosthetic work was surprisingly bad, some of the effects were spot on and others looked like they were just an excuse to have an effect on the screen but - this is not cinema, this is Harry Potter. And if you let go of all the expectations of film craft and narrative, it was a great way to spend an evening. Particularly if you were there with a die-hard Potter fan.

But...(you knew that was coming)

Sitting in a theater of die-hard Potter fans, all of them over the age of 30, I had this vastly uncomfortable sensation caused by my having just begun to read another Baumeister book. This one is called "Escaping the Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, and Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood (Basic Books, 1991). Even though I am only half way through it, it was hard not to sit in that theater and question what exactly was going on in the people who sought...not sought...but craved each Potter release. Then my mind spun out to think about the youthful demographic that has seized on Twilight and I made a mental note to rent those films.

Baumeister talks about the self in terms of a modern definition of the concept. Much of how we discuss the concept of self is based in centuries old hypotheses, a kind of idolization of a historical self that Baumeister says no longer really exists. The core nature does, of course, but what the self is and how it is expressed has radically changed. Not necessarily in a bad way.

He writes that as we grow and mature into an adulthood separate from being cared for by parents and institutions we have to create a self that holds our identity. In a way, it is as if we create a public mirror of our inner perception of ourselves. It is the actuation of the inner self. With the advent of the Internet, social media and a loss of geographic boundaries - our public selves have become much larger and more demanding of our time than our inner one. The inner self, the core, is pretty much still back in rocks and sticks time as far as its needs to be nurtured and maintained. Our public self has begun to demand a constant stream of external evidence to maintain its life outside of our individuality.

This is, he says, beyond stressful and tiring, so we seek ways to escape the burdens of having a self. Even without a modern, public self - there has always been this need to escape because it is within the self that we form our self-awareness and from there the constant stress of making moral judgments and choices. The most stressful thing about having a developed self is that you are in constant awareness that you must choose and act without the knowledge that what you are choosing and doing is the right and good thing. You could hurt someone you love. You could hurt yourself. You could do something thinking it will bring joy and freedom to the world and instead, it will close doors and set the world on fire. To have a mature self is to be aware of this lack of surety at all times and yet still chose to do, to be and to act.

In its healthy state, our very humanity needs to escape the burden of self in order not to be overwhelmed by this despair. The paradox is that it is a choice of the self to forget itself and therefore, never really can. Healthy escape can include anything from the nightly cocktail, meditation practices, exercise, prayer, hobbies, fantasy, creative enterprises, sexual masochism/sadism and acts of charity. These are all momentary practices in which we are freed of our selves but always accept that we must return to them and accept the responsibility and accountability of being in life. Being in life requires the motivation of the self to make choices and to interact with life without surety. It is, in a way, the ultimate act of being present. Note also that love is not considered an escape, if anything it demands our presence the most in life.

In its unhealthy state, escape seeks to annihilate the self. To remove the self completely and to render the person incapable of choice, action, participation and a return to being.. A person without self cannot be present because they cannot interact and make choices, which would lead to acts of compassion, empathy and innovation. Unhealthy escapes include obsession, fanaticism, nationalism, masochistic/sadistic lifestyles, an overt demand of the denial of self by any means - physical, mental or spiritual. Unhealthy escapes also include an insistence of anonymity at all times, the ultimate in the prevention of accountability and responsibility. It is very much characterized by orthogonal thinking.

It was funny to sit in the theater and have my thoughts slide in and out of the absolute fun mayhem on the screen and thinking through my own life and habits. That brought me to thinking through some of the changes I have been making and going through this past year and given me a new understanding into what I have been doing and where I have been going. It is through recognizing your escapes that one begins to understand the burden that your self carries and then can go on to make better choices in both the expression of self and the means of escaping it from time to time.

Food for thought.
Food for thought.

My writer's group is gearing up to start meeting again, which is exciting but I have to get my act together today and submit the next part of the City.

Yesterday, I went looking for the Mad Kitten and could not find her anywhere. I searched and searched and then finally saw her paw kind of waving at me from beneath the ground. I went over and saw she had found a perfect Mad Kitten sized hole in the yard, in the sun, and had crammed herself in- on her back - and was sunning herself just below ground level, hidden from the eyes of the world.

Sometimes I look at her and worry. They say people's pets are very similar to them.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

banking the ashes

2011-09-05T17:47:00.000-07:00

It's been one of those long, slow days. Not a holiday proper, I actually intended on getting some things done but have been sort of in this contemplative loop when I should have been on a work speedway. It's strange, restarting the blog after a month off, it has always been. On the one hand, I have tons of things to say and on the other, nothing at all.

And some things, I have realized, that I am not saying them because I am not sure who they need to be said too. In some ways, that is the crux of the shift that has occurred (or come into focus) over the past month or so. What is the best way to be present in life and to participate in living?

I have watched quite a few sites this past month, read quite a bit about people's interpretations of everything from politics to education to economy to the value of the Internet and noticed that while no one agrees, everyone is doing the same thing. There seems to be a mainstream trend toward trying to apply the standard way of doing things to situations that have become out-of-standard. In other words, trying to fix what became broken in doing things one way by insisting we all go back and take the exact same steps again with the hope we will arrive somewhere different.

It reminds me of something that Chesterton once said, that the reason we have no new ideas is that none of the old ones have been seen through to their completion. They have not even been discarded because we learned something in pursuing them that allows us to correct our efforts - but have been abandoned because they take too much effort. We cannot come up with anything new because we never finished what we started so as to learn from the experience. As examples he held up pacificism, democracy and Christianity. All of these great and grand ideals were quickly abandoned when it became apparent they were hard work to achieve. But we, modern society, have kept the labels and the ideals and blinded ourselves to the fact that not one part of what we now call pacifism, democracy or Christianity bears any semblance to its original goal.

And I just want to define the term 'goal.' A goal is not something you achieve; it is something you strive for. It embodies Longinus' Grand Conception. A goal gives shape to your life. It is what gives you the ability to choose different actions with purpose. The current treatment of a goal as an "attainable and specific object or point" creates a very limited potential. A goal should be that which serves to increase the potential in one's life, not to close a door.

Today, I received an email from a poetry publisher that was outlining their upcoming changes to their publishing model. Poetry is not one of the grander occupations when it comes to making money. In light of that realization, they are going to start asking their authors to begin to contribute to the publishing costs of the book. Same selection process, but once selected the author will have to pay.

It is a sad state, but good business sense. Except for the bad business part.

The bad business sense part about the email came as the owner continued on about how they got reams of Christian themed material and "for whatever reason, that sells" but they were going to hold on to the poetry that doesn't sell and keep going. The tone of that section of the email was downright...nasty. That is fine, that can be their new mission statement. I, for one, will no longer promote, mention or encourage anyone to use them. If they had written the same thing but substituted Islamic or Jewish for Christian, there would be a great outcry.

Much to the dismay of the conservative right, America is not a primarily religious country, much less Christian. But it does make a good generic flag to wave to distract people and does give people who do not like the conservative right an easy catchall condemnation word. Christian themed poetry most likely sells more because it has the cheat of being written with a purpose. Whether you agree with it or not, like it or not, there is a grand conception behind each poem that carries a religious theme. It is that sense of purpose and meaning that makes the poems desirable to readers who are not poets or part of the poetry scene.

Yet the poetry community clings onto its "separateness" and disconnection while at the same time, bemoaning that their art does not sell.

I ascribe to the currently unpopular belief that artists are the shamans of the community. When despair is racing through a country, its artists should be willing to bleed onto the canvas or the page to give to the people reading the knowledge that they are not alone, it is not the end of the world, and that each aspect of their experience is a jewel that fits into a crown that we just haven't seen yet. Poets, especially, translate the universe and the divine. They are who we turn to in order to understand our dreams and our hearts. The special gift and practical skill of poetry is that it is speaking of things that do not need science or ritual to be believed. It is why it is often said that Science rises from the dreams spoken of in poetry. Instead we have fallen into the habits of believing that there is some kind of "specialness" to what we do that prevents it from being understood by a non-artist. Our schools follow the trend of excising the humanity out of the words and the paint and is this not a harsh reflection on what has become of modern life today? No room for the living. The only time life is allowed in is when the artist indulges in a formless rant and revelation about some aspect of their life and emotional state that they never pause to think if there is a purpose beyond writing it than their own personal and momentary release. There is value in that, personal value - but it does nothing to connect to the community the artist serves.

If how you have been running your business has almost put you out of business, what rational sense does it make to continue to do business in that way? Like in the article I posted today about diversity, we have come to love identity so much that we fail to see reality. We have come to hold on stronger to old promises than to look at how they have failed and think through what should be changed. And we definitely have a problem with staying committed to something long enough and being willing to sacrifice to achieve what we believe is good and right.

Back to poetry for a bit, poetry sales are not the marker of success. Like any other kind of artist, a poet knows that they will write even if they know none of their work will ever see the light of day. They write because they have something to give, an understanding to share and their audience may not be anyone who has ever read one line of their work, but people who are moved by the kind of person that they experience them to be. And note I did not include the phrase "poets write because they have something to say." We all have something to say, it is in figuring out if it will do anything for anyone else for us to say it aloud that is part of the skill of being a poet.

More and more, as I filter down everything I have been watching and reading, it is the issue of Identity that keeps rising up to the top and causing all the fuss. We lack identity. We take sexual orientation and mistake it for culture. Celebrity for accomplishment. Ritual for faith. Memorization for education. Specialization for effectiveness. All these little snippets of life that serve to place limits and boundaries around us and give the false assurance of understanding.

Then we tend to find the people who will agree with us and we talk at each other, rarely engaging. There is little discourse or debate between people of differing viewpoints which is not surprising because there is little dialogue between people who have agreeing viewpoints seeking to deepen their understanding.

All of this leaves me looking at my life and involvements and where I have chosen to put my energies. I am a firm believer in having a plan, but also, going back to check on how that plan is really doing. So slowly, I am shifting my energies again. A little more focus here, a little refinement there, and a couple of big old messes that I am just going to let continue on because they haven't gotten far enough yet for me to see where they need changes.

Hmmmmm...perhaps I digressed? Heee....somehow, mysteriously, I "forgot" to get minutes for my phone so I am phoneless for a day or so. I think I may just be reluctant to give up my "quiet time."

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

towards a moral economy

2011-09-04T06:57:00.001-07:00

The mad kitten...I should just stop there and let your imagination fill in the rest but no, I want to share.

:)

On day 5 of being without power (6 days total, I have it back now) the mad kitten was bored with being in the dark. And so was her latest mouse friend. She woke me up by dropping the mouse on my chest while I was sleeping and then the two of them chased each other around the bed. I sprang up (silently, but damn fast) took one look at the two of them running around and decided that it was a fine time to go down to the gas station and get coffee.

It is strange how she doesn't like the dark. I didn't realize how much she was bothered by it until I turned on a flashlight and every time I pointed the beam at the floor, she would run over and lay down in the light. It was strange how stressful and depressing being without power was. The cave only has one window and it was not enough, even in daytime, to let in light. I was deeply envious of my next door neighbors who have what is called a "Craftsman" house - these are houses that were designed to let in the outdoor light as much as possible.

The act of being without all the various electronic goodies I have become dependent on removed a great deal of the functionality of my life. It is often heard that it is a good thing to "simplify" or to retain vestiges of more hands on living, but the reality is that we live in a highly energy dependent society. Without energy, our ability to participate is hampered. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that when we choose to simplify or take a vacation from power that it is by choice and includes the surety of being able to return to the powered life at will. When that choice is taken away, when no preparation or few options exist - life can become difficult.

One of the concepts I have been turning over in my mind this past month is the idea of what a "moral economy" would look like. It is something of which we have very few models. Our economies tend to lack the flexibility of morality. Which are two words you rarely see in a sentence together - flexibility and morality; and you hardly ever see the word flexibility and economy together either.

But most of our economies are suffering from a lack of flexibility and most definitely, a lack of morality. Morality, in this instance, holds the meaning of having a standard as to what the health of a community and the individuals in it would be. A moral economy recognizes that it only functions well when all of its members have a level of confidence and security that translates into both trade and innovation. It retains flexibility in ordering priorities because it defines that at no given time will everyone be perfectly provided for but makes allowances to provide for those in need until they are no longer in need and are back to contributing to the whole. A moral economy sees both the "person" of the community and the "person" of the individual and recognizes that one is not more important than the other but that both are of equal necessity to the health of each.

It is that standard and understanding that guides the economy and allows for fluctuation without panic or recession.

In America, we have grown a highly immoral and inflexible economy. We perceive need as something outside of growth and health and create a separate and static payment system for providing care that does not allow for the people involved to move fluidly to another status within the system. Economic health and growth is defined by very limited criteria that cannot accommodate fluctuation. Black and white thinking, either/or and this or that logic creates community boundaries without care for seeing the potential for how a community's boundaries may grow and shift over time.

There are two camps about success in America - both view monetary success as something that separates a person or business from being an integral part of the community. One group would penalize success by demanding they pay more to support the unsuccessful and the other would penalize the community by demanding that success be kept isolated from its potential to contribute. Both are immoral positions because they do not allow for standard that is flexible enough to respond to the needs of life - individual and communal.

Our economy is also hampered by our limited definition/understanding of what makes up an "economy." It is a definition based in monetary values and ignorant that these are only tools of an economy and not the definition of it. An economy is a system of resources that are used by a community to sustain its population. It is not limited to labor, land and capital but is inclusive of all the elements of society (education, religion, class, quality of life etc.). The definition of what makes up a society is also the definition of what that society's economy is.

To begin to move toward a moral economy we need to start changing our definition of what constitutes an economy and that change begins with each individual. To begin to see your household budget as inclusive of not only money going out and money coming in but also time spent in activities or committed to family will begin to change how we perceive the potential for use for our various resources. Removing the lines of separation we have placed between the factors in our life (this is my work life/this is my weekend life) will begin to bring more unity and cohesiveness into our ability to plan and act within our total lives. Doing this within the micro-economy of our individual lives will help to give us an understanding to what changes need to occur in our larger community economy. In a way, we need to attend the business school of our lives in order to be able to graduate with a degree that will let us understand the changes that need to occur in our national economy.

Enough of that. Coffee now. Well...more coffee now. I ended this week beautifully. Not only did the power come back on but also I underwent a kind of change too and stepped forward again into the life I want to be living. All well and good, but damn I hope it is a long time before I have a week like this again.

The funniest thing is that over the course of the week I got a chance to see and participate in something that was all about revealing the levels of wrongly placed intolerance. I say wrongly placed because there is rightly placed intolerance. I surfaced with a finer definition of my own morality and it has made me absolutely intolerant of certain behaviors and attitudes. And with that lesson written on my soul - I begin to clean my house again.

I will be posting details about the upcoming performance in Mexico City soon. Right now, I am enjoying turning my lights on and off and on and off again.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Finding Irene

2011-09-01T16:29:00.001-07:00

The end of my month off from blogging included: one earthquake, one hurricane, two deaths, one planting of beautiful and the loss of power to my cave. The latter issue is still going on and may not be resolved for several more days. To say the time off has been needed is an understatement. It was not so much that rest was required as a chance to step out of the middle of things and look at what was going on around me.

Sometimes you can get so involved in the doing that you cannot take your eyes of the road long enough to see what lies ahead. It is in the taking a moment (or month) to reflect on things that allows you to see if you are still on the right path. One of the problems with using a phrase like that - the right path - is that it implies that damn orthogonal thinking again, the idea of their being a right path and a wrong path.

We view our paths as coming in these black and white options and being littered with small bridges that connect the two. The general belief is that you start on one path and then whoopsie, veer off on a small fork and cross a bridge to the other path. When we finally notice we are not going where we want to we go through an entire dramatic process of "getting ourselves back on track."

There is only one path ever and it can become the right one or the wrong one at any time and then revert back to its former status. What determines the...nature of the path on you is whether you are obsessed with watching the ground or do you have your head up to see not just where you are going, but what you are passing as well. How you are seeing what is around you and what lies ahead, what you choose to see of it, is just as important as the steadiness with which you walk on the path. Walking this path is like walking any other path in the world, one rarely goes non-stop but pauses, wanders around a bit exploring, then walks back to the path and continues on.

Loveandwords.com is still a work in progress but there is now a lot of new material up. And when I say,"A lot." I mean it. I will be continuing to add and open up new areas of the site as I go, so keep checking back. Not only is almost the entire text of my collection "the Decagon" now available, but there are workshops, other writings, ebooks and more. Best of all, you can now read it (including the blog) from any phone that can access the mobile internet.

The mad kitten had a bit of a rough time because I was away for a week or two but now she is happy. I am home and she corners me with that loud, rattling purr which tells me there is something she wants me to do and I am paying my dues without complaint for having traveled around so much.

The two passings were just what they were. The end of two full lives. One, I did not know well but came to know the impact he had on other's lives and the other, I came to know deeply. Truly I can say that there is no greater teacher about the importance of purpose and choice in life then to see the power of will a dying person can exert to follow through on bringing the their life to a good and generous close.

I have also witnessed love. Love of the kind that nobody likes to really promote because it is complicated, full of dualities, passionate, fierce, wonderful and painful. And witnessing that has opened doors in my own heart in ways that almost feel like a relief.

And I have been given the opportunity to plant beautiful in my life. It is awe inspiring and I am glad this chance has come now and not earlier. Earlier I was not the kind of person who could have willingly shouldered the responsibilities of what it takes to make beautiful grow and bloom.

I have watched the news and decided that pointing out everything that is wrong is just feeding the machine. So for my 5th year of blogging I am going to try to walk a steadier line towards promoting resolution and growth in response to whatever is going on. I think the reign of both fear-mongering and cheap promises should come to an end, don't you?

Most of all I realize, as I sit writing this in candlelight with the laptop battery steadily dying, is that the Internet has a wonderful capacity to foster change, education and growth. But we need to begin to look at what we are asking of it and what we are looking for when we are on. Tons of information and slick, speedy programs are fantastic - but if one doesn't have an idea or plan for what they are trying to do all of that information and speed is useless. We wind up recreating only what we have known and not seeing the sea because we have fallen in love with the tidal pool.

And that the one question I will explore relentlessly this year is how do we go from a society that acts based on fear to one that choses to act despite fear?

Alright...the battery is dying and I have to walk down to the library to charge up for the night and post this.

It is good to be back.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

the whales of august

2011-08-01T04:27:00.001-07:00

The Whales of August is one of my favourite movies. It stars Vincent Price, Lillian Gish, Betty Davis and Ann Sothern - all in their twilight years.

It is now August 2011. The world is full of unfolding dramas - some real, and some pure drama. I have been absolutely overwhelmed as life and projects come to their crossroads - some ending, some beginning and great change is in the air.

Last year, I forgot to take August off from blogging and things got really messy.

This year I am remembering to do it. The world will still be here when I will return however, my patience and joy will be very much renewed.

That said, one of the things I am working on finishing while I am away is the complete overhaul of love and words. I will post at some point during this month when the revamped site is released. LoveandWords.com will now have all of my projects under its banner - from Grace Independent to MyProtopia to a variety of free workshops. The Decagon will also be released through the new site, that is 10 years of my poetic work and that release is in preparation for the 2012 appearance of the City of Love. Grace Independent will also be returning to the radio in September as well.

For many of you that only know of me from one aspect of my work, you will discover that there is much more going on under the loveandwords name. Key to the overhaul is that I have finally made the decision to release everything in a format that will be accessible to everyone with any kind of internet access - from the lowest end cell phone with a simple mobile web connection to the most high powered tablet on the market. That decision has been the result of two years of testing different types of coding, access, and reviewing traffic data. The world speaks and as it moves more and more online its on a low end phone.

And given the whole debt ceiling/economy nonsense I think it behooves my entering the election process having had a bit of a prepatory rest - lots of vitamins and water and liver and all that.

So enjoy your month! Keep an eye out for the occasional announcement posting and I will see you on September 1st!

-CT

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Confessions of a Table Leg

2011-07-28T13:13:00.001-07:00

That is actually a title of a book I have been dragging around and meaning to read. It is sort of a memoir of a table leg and all it witnesses at breakfast after breakfast in each household that owns it.

Sometimes, it is in looking at the simplest things in life that reveal our complexities and hidden dramas. I read another book, The Autobiography of a Flea, which was on the same lines - only this one turned out to be Victorian pornography. I was so shocked, I read the whole thing in one sitting to make sure that is what it really was about.

:)

Ok...hours have now passed...I am trying to shift gears back to whatever I was thinking this morning. I started writing this morning at 5am and actually had coherent thoughts. Now it is gaining on 5pm and I am a bit scattered.

The other day I actually managed to see the news on TV. An oddity for me that still holds charm. At the end of the news show, they had one of those feel good segments, this one about a doctor who was 100 years old and still lively, engaged and practicing. They kept saying he was going to talk about the secrets of good health and a long life. He is a specialist in the treatment of arthritis.

My friend and I engaged in mutual eye rolling every time the teaser for the segment came on. It promised to be yet another round of magical elixirs or rituals to stay eternally young. Neither of us intended on actually watching long enough to see what the segment actually had to say.

But watch it we did, and what he had to say was surprising and downright refreshing in its honesty.

He said that the secret to a good, healthy and long life was to find someone you loved and marry them and something you love and go do it. They asked him about exercise, diet, and vitamins and he responded, "More people have lived longer and healthier lives without any of those but with a good marriage than those without."

And he is right.

Love is a peculiar thing. It is, in essence, one of the most sublime forms of prayer that exists. When we love, we find the immortality of life within the person that we love and in worshiping that, we discover it in ourselves through the reflection we see in their returned love. There has been case study after case study that has scientifically proven that prayer and the presence of love are more capable of restoring or sustaining health than any other medicine or regimen available. Love can do what man cannot understand. It is an expression of faith, a fulfillment of promise, nourishment that sustains us through even the worst because we have hope for the future. A future we find through our beloved.

Vicktor Frankl wrote a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" and in it, besides outlining the basis for his approach to psychotherapy (called Logotherapy) he recounted his experience of being in a concentration camp in World War II. He found then, and after thorough investigation, that the people who survived - who were less damaged in mind, body and soul - were people who had a deep and loving commitment to someone else. And he was not talking about a brotherly love or a universal love or an unconditional love - but a powerful intimate, committed and romantic love. These were the prisoners whose bodies managed to survive the worst kinds of malnutrition and abuse, whose minds held against the worst tortures, and whose sense of humanity survived intact no matter what level of despair they were exposed.

Love is the ultimate recognition of the self. It is the understanding that in this brief time that we are here, we are not only important, but a part of something larger. Intimate love is unique. It is blessing and it is curse for the greatest of romantic loves also holds the most powerful promise of grief.

In modernity that has been distilled and cushioned into the mantra that the way to keep a relationship fresh and lively is to always imagine that it will end. In reality, the end lies in losing the loved one to death or even, to just imagine life (itself, not bound to you) without their existence. This man, Dr. Ephraim Engleman, has never lost sight that it is our greatest potential for sadness that also grants us the greatest potential for living.

We strive with our diets, our exercises, our promises, contracts, compatibility tests, vitamins, surgeries, medicines and polyamory to put from our minds the greatest source of our despair and the greatest source of our joy. We shorten our lives spiritually and emotionally when we try to avoid their reality. We shut down our potential for meaning when we place our most meaningful relationships into the category of "replaceable." We lose when we fore go the risk of commitment and make none of our intimacies unique to our emotional relationships. We become machines that function without souls, capable of performing the physical feats of the young - but withered and dried within an empty age.

For what is the good of being able to walk, if you have nothing to walk toward? What does your love mean, if it can be given to anyone or divided among many? How present can you be in life if you are unwilling to be there for all of its potentials?

By the way, Dr. Engleman just celebrated his 70th wedding anniversary. When was the last time you heard of that?

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Kiss me, I'm Cherokee

2011-07-26T13:17:00.001-07:00

The Cherokee Nation is the only Native American group to recognize heredity/lineage as "proof" one is a Cherokee. It rather shows a bit of truth in the NA joke that all white people claim to be Cherokee because technically you are allowed to claim that you are "part" if your great-great-great-grandmother was mixed.

The US Federal government will only recognize that someone has Native ancestry if they meet requirements for both the blood quorum and blood quantum. The requirements more or less boil down to being no more than 5 generations removed from an attested ancestor or having 1/32 blood from that attested ancestor. An "attested ancestor" is a Native American who was documented on one of two census rolls - the Dawes Rolls (Final Rolls Of Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes) taken in 1893 or the Baker Rolls of 1924 (Final Rolls of Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians).

The Cherokee Nation will accept blood quantum from unattested ancestors. The majority of the Native American tribes, however, accept neither. This is something that the Nations struggle with as they seek ways to preserve both indigenous culture and to manage land, funding and future developments. It is a point of identity that many non-natives not only do not understand, but also are hardly aware of its existence.

Oddly enough, it is the rise of Facebook that has brought the discussion back to the top of the list - well, one of the things. As more and more kids have become involved with social media, they have become more comfortable with sharing and posting things that are considered sacred or at least private to the Nations, both individually and as a whole. Many tribes have opted to ban Facebook from their land, but it is a hard call to make. On one hand, the opportunity must exist so that their children can gain fair skills, and on the other hand, there is the importance of the preservation of their way of life.

In the Western world, we usually take preservation to mean a very passive and static thing. We preserve "ways of life" in living museums so we can go see actors pretending to live in a certain way. We "preserve" a way of life by setting aside time for it to be visited. We like powwows where we can go experience a weekend of Native culture and perhaps lay claim to the thin traces of blood from them in our own lineage.

For indigenous people, preserving tends to mean living. It means they retain the right to live as they choose, in the modern way or in the traditional way. That said, it is important to understand that the two are kept in very distinct categories with very little overlapping and some things - like Facebook and traditional rituals, are kept so distinct they might as well be on two different planets.

A part of this stems from the Native recognition of there being a duality in all things and that the dualities coincide but do not mix to become one. Creatures, human or animal, may cross between two worlds but at any given time, they are acting one - yet they retain the awareness of the other.

In most Native communities, being recognized as a member is not dependent on ancestry. One cannot, literally, sit by oneself in an apartment in a city and be a "Native American." More and more they have moved towards a definition of identity that is dependent on how the individual interacts with the community. Being accepted as a member of a tribe requires a commitment to be there in and for the community. One has to make a choice whether one will be an Indian - which encompasses a history and living community or, one will be a modern man and live in a world where community is defined by what it can give you in the immediate sense. Modern community is there available to you, but it is not a part of your history nor is its health important to your legacy. The well-being of the community, for modern man, is not as important a consideration than their own well-being.

Native culture holds a tremendous appeal to Westerners because we see the kind of purpose and placement in life that they have and witness how it gives their lives a kind of meaning. That is so very attractive to us because we exist in a constant search for meaning and place having none in our own lives. We tend to attribute it to the trappings of Native life - ceremonies, myths, practices and rituals - things we can preserve and go visit and hope that by playing at them we can attain the same sense of weight to our lives.

We assume the symbols of native life in hopes that possessing the object will give us both internal and external recognition of place and meaning. However, we miss that the sense of belonging and purpose comes from the fact that the individual life is inseparable from the community life. In simplistic terms - there is a difference between a man standing alone in the woods with an eagle feather in his hair hoping that he will have a special experience, and a man in the woods who shares a vital connection with the spirit of the eagle and wears its feather as a badge of honor and a sign of commitment to its history and future that will govern his actions. Actions that he cannot do alone or determine alone, but must be done in relation to others, much as the solo eagle flies independently but always in awareness of the territory of other eagles. The first man would take a picture of himself or his surroundings and share them as proof of his existence to others, the second would live the existence.

While the two coexist, in the end it is recognized that it is the life of the community, the people that is immortal and most important - the life of the individual is important in regards to the person's role and ability to help sustain the community. Each member has a specific call to live their life to the best of their ability but not to do so in conflict to the health of the community. It is what has allowed for the duality of genius and self-lessness to exist within native communities.

The Western world, in our searching for place and meaning, returns to the orthogonal premise of either/or. Either we are independent geniuses or we are self-less extensions of a community body.

It is interesting, to be a sort of fly-on-the-wall to the discussion going on about redefining the limits of identity within the Native American community and to also be a part of the Facebook/Google+ move. In a way, it is a kind of metaphor for the struggle. In Facebook, you can dress yourself in signs and symbols of your identity and lay claim to it without having to participate in the community (except at your pleasure). Google+ is crankily developing into a community of individuals who recognize that the life of the community is an extension of their own and requires a daily amount of participation.

Even with my changing involvement with the various poetry communities on and off line, I am beginning to see the distinct states of being. There are the communities who exist solely for the living poet, are used by them at their discretion, and our viewed by their members as being in service to them; and the communities that who exist for poetry and the members serve the community out of recognition that its life is so much greater and so much more eternal than their own.

Perhaps the root of all of our solutions is to recognize that all life goes on much longer than our own.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

if and or

2011-07-25T17:58:00.001-07:00

The heat.

I think that is all I have to say about that, once the heat wave hit it is like energy, motivation and IQ just plummets. While I have been good and staying indoors and not doing much, the rare times I have had to go out have just sucked the life out of me. Today was dramatically cooler and everyone's response seemed to be to want to curl up and just stay in bed.

I am sort of in this bizarre holding pattern. It is a mix of heat and being overwhelmed. It suddenly hit me just how much has to happen over the next three months and I am still in that paralytic stage of "Oh Sh*t" and haven't quite slid into the motivation stage.

Is that true?

Not really, but that is how it feels. The truth is that I am moving very slowly as I assemble a framework from which to do all the things that have to be done. I have learned a great deal over the past year and even the act of combining all of my websites is letting me really take stock and review the direction I am going. There are old things to be closed out, new things to give attention to, and some surprising recent commitments I have made that are absolutely life changing.

It's been an odd week for more reasons that the heat. Amy Winehouse died, which has really caused a surprising schism between people. Events in Oslo were horrific. Needless deaths in China, Yemen and Texas all hit the news and handing over absolutely everyone in the world is the continued dickering about whether or not to raise the debt ceiling and it becomes easy to bury ourselves in the grief and worry of living.

It is easy too, to swing to the opposite end of the spectrum and become just as unrealistic about how "everything will work out" or "there is nothing we can do but be in the present."

But it is neither the end of the world or perfectly fine. It is a little of both and yet everything in between as well. We make a mistake when we grab a hold of one or the other or, when we become so wedded to a middle-of-the-road attitude that we do not validate the potential reality of the extremes.

A lot of what I am trying to feel my way through now falls in the same category. Decisions have to be made but they have to be made with the knowledge that they are not so much black and white decisions as a set of chosen directions. Choosing a direction requires both some sort of vague map and an idea of where you are going. In the process of getting there you can change the route you are traveling, but the objective and purpose always remain the same.

It is just that sometimes, what looked like an easy and practical path on a map, turned into a road split by chasms with dangerous turns. You have to be able to turn back in order to turn again and try a new way. But too often, the traveller will simply throw up their hands and declare the entire venture "impossible" or "not meant to be."

And that is not true at all, now is it?

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Seeing the World Through Google+ Eyes

2011-07-21T14:51:00.001-07:00

So I finally nipped over, accepted my Google+ invitation, and have been exploring for the past few days. I have to say, I have been very impressed, so here I am...thinking aloud...about what Google+ means for me and why I have made the decision to migrate over there.

First off, when I say, "migrate over" you have to understand that this is a process that will take me months. I am connected to or syndicated on over 64 social network sites with status updates, the blog and general idle chitchat. It has been a long building process and one that has reached its peak for me and is now undermining the rest of what I am trying to do. Many of these sites indulge in the kind of proprietary coding froufrah that means for lack of one common element, they must be posted to manually. Over the 6 years or so that I have been involved with social networking (and the 12 in which I have had my websites) things have changed. Trends change. Active sites rise and fall and at this point, I have a web full of holes, but I haven't been able to fully drop sites because friends linger on some or there is some other redeeming factor. A few sites, like MySpace, I made inactive over a year ago because the way in which their membership and activity changed was either in a direction I did not support or, was just frankly - a waste of my time.

I went on Facebook a while back and have been desperate to get off it since about oh-say-hey day two for a variety of reasons. The strongest being the disregard for users shown by the administrators of the site and the culture that has grown on Facebook that emphasizes a lack of boundaries, narcissism and general puerile behavior. I like to fool around online just like everyone else, but I like to do it with my friends - not with a bunch of people who think they know me because my name shows up in a list.

But Facebook has been a challenge to get rid of because you weren't able to tell where it was going. A lot of the decision I make (and have made) over the years concerning managing my online presence has been based in trend forecasting in regards to the Internet. With Facebook, like Twitter, there was the sense that it was more than a fad but what it was has really never evolved.

And along comes Google+.

It is by no means a perfect and finished thing. It is, however, a ray of hope for the future for anyone who lives a life in which all the aspects of your life are intertwined and integrated with a virtual life. If you are someone like me then the majority of your communication with friends, family and work related things happens on line. Sometimes it feels like I have a gazillion little programs to let me stay connected - video chat, text chat, email and so on. To not be online, for someone like me, is to become socially isolated.

Given the extent of the work I do and its online publication I combat the fact that I have 12 web sites that I run and 6 other services I use for everything from writing to teaching to video to music. This does not even begin to touch the 36 video sites I have accounts on and numerous audio and eBook sites my work is distributed on.

The majority of my entertainment and sources for news are also all web based. I shop online. I read eBooks, I book travel online and on and on and on.

In the end though, the one window that is always open on my computer through which my entire day revolves around is - Gmail. I use Gmail, Google docs, Google calendar, Google apps - if it has a g in front of it, I use it.

And along comes Google+.

So what makes it so great?

Start with how you make connections. Google+ lets you assign people to "circles" like friends, family, acquaintances, work etc. They even allow you to define your own circles. As you make connections, you drop the person in their circle. Now - here is what is important about circles - no one can see what circle you have placed them in and when you post something you use a simple drop down menu to select which circles will see your post. Google+ also gives you the option to "Follow" people like on Twitter.

This structuring of connections is the first reflection I have seen of the reality of mature boundaries and relationships online in a social networking environment ever. Let me repeat that - EVER. Gone is the encouraged illusion that everyone is buddy-buddy with everyone else and surprisingly - and I will talk more about this later - this is perhaps the single most important aspect to how they protect your privacy on line. By allowing you to manage your own boundaries. Even if you choose to "like" a status update and someone else does too, everyone can see the count of likes but not the names unless you have that person in a circle.

Does Google mine your data and activity? Of course they do. That is how they make money in order to offer all these things free. However, the way the data is packaged and sold while still basically intrusive and unfair is fair because the primary area in which privacy violation harms people - when their personal info (and I am not talking name, location, etc. and so forth - all that info is in the public domain anyway) but their personal info - their feelings, moods, opinions and thoughts are protected because the user sets the boundaries as to who they communicate with - BUT - they do so without building isolated communities that would promote sub-culture rejection of outsiders because on a larger level they are still participating with the community at large.

Everyone is all excited about the "Huddle" feature and I will get to that but more important to me is something called "Sparks." With "Sparks" you input in a series of things that interest you like "art, social theory, economics, fashion, Twilight" whatever and all day long a little Google bot goes and finds you new posts and links related to those interests. When you want to browse through and find something juicy to read, you click on your Sparks to see what it has found. Nobody else can see what you have set as a spark.

"Hangouts" is sort of a status that you broadcast saying that you are "hanging out" online and maybe want to do something. Like watch a YouTube video or play a game or chat. You pick the circle that gets to see this status, your friends then can join you and watch the video with you and you can chat back and forth.

"Huddle" is kind of a Skype thing. It is a multi-user video/text chat stream where you can invite people into your huddle and converse as a group.

All of this will also be coming to mobile phones.

So far so good. Better yet, Google did not remake the wheel when designing all this and it is easy to use and designed along the same lines as Twitter and Facebook. Although Facebook has been trying to steadily block the Google+ apps, there are plenty springing out that allow you to import your photo albums and friends over to Google+. There are also apps appearing to help do this for other sites as well and one's available (if you are using Chrome) to integrate your FB and twitter streams into plus so you can see them and post to them through the plus updates.

But larger than this is the network in which all this sits. While in Google+, I can monitor, read and respond to my Gmail. Several services that I use like blogger are also Google products. And, because I am looking at all this and seeing the enormity of the connections possible on a global basis, I am making the decision to move all of my websites over to Google sites and then integrate them into Plus through Chrome so I can monitor and respond to comments and all sorts of things that will make my life easier via one network.

Google+ is not a Facebook killer. It is the next step for people who are using the Internet as a means of enhancing their lives and expanding their communities. I could see it damaging Twitter quite a bit because it is as easy to use but allows for the option of a richer content environment. Combined with mobile computing, I think that Messrs.' Google have finally hit on a product that will only grow but do so in a way that does not become a sprawling mess.

It is the dawn of maturity on the 'net.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Explaining the Debt Ceiling (part 2)

2011-07-20T06:11:00.000-07:00

So...as you found out with Delores, the debt ceiling is like a very large mortgage. It represents not only the money that is needed to pay for something that is not realistically affordable, but also, due to credit ratings, holds the potential for how much money can be borrowed above and beyond that as well. The worse the credit rating, the lower the amount available and the higher the interest rates.

That is the debt ceiling in a sort- of over simplified and slight wrong way, but it will work as a basis for understanding.

In America, 40 cents of every dollar that the government spends is borrowed. And borrowed mostly from China these days although we borrow from just about every country there is. That means that we only produce 60 cents of every dollar. Producing means to raise revenue through exports, taxes or gaining investments.

Now, here are some very important things to understand as you witness the arguing going on in Washington about raising the debt ceiling.

Fact #1: The US does have to make payments on the money we borrow from other countries and/or show that when the notes come due, we will be able to make those payments. The other countries that we traditionally borrow from, because of their own economic problems, are not looking at us kindly because of Fact #2, which leads them to believe that we are setting ourselves up for a fall that will hurt them first and foremost when we default on our payments through delay or simply not being able to meet our obligations.

Fact #2: Every argument you here concerning whether or not to raise the debt ceiling is an absolute lie and part of a game that is constantly player by our political parties and leaderships. It does not matter if we are talking about conservatives or liberals, democrats, republicans or tea partiers - all of them are lying and playing a game. Why can I say this? Because implicitly understood whenever the houses vote to approve any type of spending - whether it be for a war or funding a social service program or a tax break - is that it raises our debt ceiling. That the debt ceiling must be raised is already understood, accepted and agreed upon every time funding happens.

If someone wants to preserve a tax break or not raise taxes with knowledge that 40 cents of every dollar is borrowed - they are accepting and approving that the debt ceiling must be raised.

In the same vein if someone wants to make budget cuts but still spend over 60 cents of every dollar amount committed - they are accepting and approving that the debt ceiling must be raised.

When it comes to the actual act of raising the debt ceiling, a drama is played out in hopes of gaining influence and status among popular perception.

Since 1962, the debt ceiling has been raised 74 times. It does not matter who is in charge, we keep increasing it.

The reason for our abysmal debt is not rooted in our spending.

Here is Fact 3, and this is the important one, you should write it down, tape it to your bathroom mirror so you see it every morning and then start to ask "Why?" It will not make you popular, but it will begin to open your mind to the kind of critical thinking needed to get out from under the soap opera we have been allowing to distract us from reality.

Fact #3: The US has gotten in increasing amounts of debt not due to government spending so much as do to our lack of earning money. We have ceased to become inventors and innovators, we do not manufacture things in a manner where they produce competitive and desired products and we have ruined our education and social welfare systems to the point that the less capable you are, the more you are rewarded. We have equalized business opportunities through regulation to the point that we are all equally allowed to become failures. We punish success because unless we think everyone can achieve it then it must be bad. We guarantee entitlement programs and never look at the fact that equality in life is an illusion in this country, yet rather than address the illusion that seeks to hide our classism and racism and oppression - we shower it with money and promises. We rabble about raising taxes on the rich when it is not the rich who should be taxed, but the poor who should be given the tools to become rich. We defend illusions of who we are with wars we cannot afford and aid packages to preserve a lip service to our place in the global community. We value appearance over substance. Gratification over growth and honestly think that in the span of 2 to 4 years someone can make or break our economy.

In essence, the US is caught in the payday loan cycle. Rather than look to change our circumstances and look to why these circumstances have been created we like to play victim and point fingers and place blame on people, places and things that if you think about it for even one minute - make no sense.

We have become consumers who cannot even afford to consume. We have ceased to support ourselves and want the rest of the world willing to become our welfare state. We are not independent, we are dependent.

And until we begin to see the reality of that, we will believe the smoke and mirrors of arguing about a debt ceiling that has already been decided and raised. We will wake up in shock when our credit rating is officially labeled as "at-risk" and cry at the speed with which the effects of that will be felt.

Stop believing all the nonsense. There is no such thing as separate parties. This thing we are witnessing in Washington right now is just theater. We have all done this together. And it is time to start to relearn how to think and to relearn how to live and to rebuild ourselves and to become independent. Time to start electing leaders and not actors. And you know what? We won't find any leaders among the generation of career politicians we have now, from any party.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Laineta on the Wave (excerpt from The City of Love)

2011-07-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

(In Act 1: Scene 1 - Sadima, the Goddess of War, wakes on a beach unable to remember who she is. The Lord of the Ocean in passing sees her and falls in love, but he cannot speak to her for he has no human form. Laineta the Waves - his twin, offers to find a way for him to speak to her.

Act 1: Scene 2

Laineta leaves, walking towards the Heavens on the back of a rising wave, to seek out Issand, the Creator of Man.

LAINETA
Issand has been known to spin clay
as so all ownership begins,
I am sure he through kindness shall make,
a vessel through which my brother's heart may break.
For though I know him to shape with good meaning,
his crafts are not known to longevity.

'Tis madness, folly,
yet to my heart the reasoning is sound.
My brother from shade risen,
the thunder of his voice again tremors earth round.
All at the sight of a stranger,
one any can see
is naked, torn and wounded,
damaged in ways I am sure have yet to be seen.

Who am I to judge
what is flint to his tinder? And how dangerous may be the flame?

I am shamed my question
reveals the depth of my preference,
my unwillingness to upset the stasis,
to have so new a brother again and to fear his leaving so
I would judge his chance for happiness.

To this end, as penance and shift,
I shall go and beg this gift .
I pray to be rejected.
That half-awake my brother shall tarry,
unable to abandon my company.

With shame, I admit his future I would be dull and same and joyless,
to spare me the pain of his absence.
My wounds have only begun to heal.

How long has it been?
Since love's rage burned through this family?
Setting brother adrift, sister drowning.

How long has it been?
Since I have had to build life around
pieces that were missing?

To reclaim my brother,
to even be blest with his scorn,
to the Ends of the Earth I will go.

To rid his eyes of sorrow,
to unbind his heart and end silence between us,
to the Ends of the Earth I will go.

To beg of the Creator folly,
to plead with him to break vow,
to the Ends of the Earth I shall go.

These are words, only words,
but do I have the courage to step from currents even breath
onto diaphaous cloud?

Water at least permits distorted view of the ground.
Here in Heaven's realm there is no telling up from down.

Metaphor this,
God's heavy vision,
my feet unseen walking on unknown ground
towards a place only rumored to be -
to what cliff shall I come?

Driven by guilt and remorse edged by things not done,
on what precipice shall I be found?

Abandon Hope all ye who enter here,
for I have need of my wits now.

----

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

Explaining the Debt Ceiling (part 1)

2011-07-14T02:51:00.001-07:00

The Panic Sisters are in the air - in more ways than one. The plane has finally left the ground and they are on their way. Both of the sisters, Delores and Melinda, were hoping that when they left the ground they would also leave behind a few of their worries - but the worries seem to be clinging to the plane, much like that demon in that sci-fi movie that came out a long time ago. Melinda shivers just thinking about it, it was the one by that King fellow and had the girl with the spina bifida and no mouth.

Delores and Melinda are married to Joe and Al. Delores and Melinda, despite popular and passing belief, are neither twins nor are they even sisters. They are just long-time friends. Friends that share so many things that yes, they have taken on the same appearance. Although (hard to believe) Delores is the more nervous of the two.

Delores is in a panicked state right now and Melinda is trying to comfort her. They have decided to take this trip together to try to find some order in the panic and see if maybe they can find a way to save Delores from her demise.

Delores is on the verge of losing everything she has - maybe. An outsider would pause here; brow furrowed and wonder, "How can there be a question about whether or not you are going to lose everything?" Well, she is not really in danger of losing it all - yet - but she is in danger of her life undergoing an enormous change, one she is not sure she quite understands.

Both Delores (and Joe) and Melinda (and Al) have decent lives. They are neither well off nor poor. Delores-Joe-Melinda-Al all have careers that they have worked at most of their lives. I won't reveal ages, but all four have discovered that in recent years there is a slight thickening around the middle that grows during winter and then takes longer and longer to get rid of in the summer. Joe and Al have reached the point where they have stopped trying the latest hair regrowth tonics. Joe has accepted his disappearing hairline. Al began shaving his head and grew a goatee that he obsesses on as if it was his private topiary and main attraction.

All four have houses that carry mortgages, nothing extreme. None of the four has children. They drive nice, but not new cars. Take vacations, but not extravagant adventures and have a minimal savings for retirement. Most of which, takes the form of investments.

During the course of the last two years, Delores and Joe have had to repair the roof on the house, perform some major repairs to their car and opted to do some landscaping. The latter was a bit more expensive than either was comfortable with, but in realizing they needed to stay home more to save money (and to avoid terrorist bombs) both thought it was worthwhile to invest in beautifying the property to make it more of a place one would like to spend time. The roof repair required borrowing against the mortgage, that is how they got the money for the landscaping as well, it didn't add too much to the rates to tack on several thousands to the loan and they spread the payments over the next 15 years. That means the house and the loan on the house would both be repaid before they retired. The car repair hurt a bit, most of that had to come out of their immediate savings although some was tacked on to the loan but it was damage that could be recovered from since they both work. Overall, Delores and Joe went from owing just over $4k a month to $4,450 a month. Not too, too bad, a little bit more of a stretch but nothing that would bring the house down and repairing the car was a necessity because they still owed on it. The repairs had to be done for it to retain a trade in value and it was just about time to get a new car anyway. They also bundled in (at their banker's suggestion) an extra $5k into the loan as "nest money." Just a little extra, unneeded funds for emergencies.

Delores and Joe have a good credit rating. Part of their security is the knowledge that should they need funds, they can be approved in a matter of minutes. They have equity in the house, credit limits, and businesses clamor for their accounts. They pay their bills on time. They are viewed as "sure risks." No one would hesitate to give them a loan or extend them credit.

Then...Joe was laid off. Not really laid off, but downsized because of the economy. He has been out of work for months. Although he has been bringing in unemployment benefits, they were far less than what his income used to be and the benefits are getting ready to run out. Delores' salary is not enough to meet the bills. Their investments have taken a hit too, but these things always go up and down. Both are confident that the economy will recover in the next year or so and they just have to find a way to hang on until then.

When they went to the bank to take a loan out against the mortgage to get through, they were surprised by the reaction they got from Barbara, their personal loan officer. Usually, they sailed in and out with all the necessary paperwork and the money arrived shortly after and life went on.

This time, Barbara hemmed and hawed.

The problem, she said, is that over the course of the past few years they had made some decisions (and some with the bank) that increased the load of debt they were carrying. They did this without putting a plan into place to repay the increased debt, which normally wasn't a problem because their debt to expected income ratio was close enough to cover the minimum payments. Even if the bank saw that they had little chance of paying it off in their lifetimes, the property value and their other investments promised that their estates would pay off the balance and even it all out. Now, because of the previous loans, unexpected debts and the loss of income - that debt to income ratio has fallen below the level that made the bank comfortable. 'This doesn't mean, ' she was quick to explain, 'that we see you as a poor risk or are turning you down, it's just that certain options need to be explored and decided on.'

They could balance out that ratio by raising the amount that they were allowed to borrow by refinancing the mortgage. In other words, by redefining with the bank the amount they would be allowed to be in debt and still assure the bank that they would make the minimum payments. Or - they could stay at the debt level they were allowed now and try to pay it down and live within their means. The mortgage and other debts they carried, Barbara explained, added up to a total amount of debt that they were allowed and still be perceived as being able to pay it off. The bank was questioning whether to allow that amount to be raised since they didn't seem to have a means in place to guarantee they could pay off a higher debt. Yet, Barbara said not looking up from her papers, you both have such good credit ratings it may be a risk the Bank is willing to take.

Delores and Joe were shocked. They hadn't thought that their spending or borrowing throughout the year would add up to this kind of total perception of their reliability. They just did what needed to be done and the money was always available to be borrowed in the moment (with the understanding it would be paid back). The new minimum payments they would be responsible for were beyond their budget even they could see that. The problem both were aware of is that without a new loan, the existing minimum payments on everything they owed were now beyond what they were bringing in. Something would have to give.

For now, they could just pay interest on all their loans. The car and the house were the most important, but that put some other payments at risk and Delores frowned as it hit her that her treasured credit rating, the Father Christmas of discounts and vacations, would disappear. She wondered if this is what her accountant had been talking about when it came to "financial planning." She and Joe had rather assumed that just meant for retirement. As long as everything was paid off before they were retired, they were supposed to be good. Both she and Joe "got" that one of the things Barbara was telling them was that if their credit rating became even slightly damaged, chances of them getting a loan against the house in the future would be slim. But what if something came up? What if they needed that money?

If they agreed to take on more debt that would also increase their capacity to borrow against it - like a rainy day fund that only existed if you need it - then they had to find some way to guarantee that they could repay it. Delores was calculating in her head, now she was beginning to understand how all of this really worked.
They may owe $345,000 on the house, but that also meant they had the ability to borrow an additional $100,000 should they need it (as long as their payments were in good order). I mean, that is how she and Joe had felt comfortable spending what they spent in the past year, they knew if they needed to borrow money it was there. If they could refinance the mortgage, they could get the money now to pay off what was needed and also "gain the right" to borrow up to $160,000 more - should the need arise of course.

None of this seemed real. I mean, she and Joe owed over $600, 000 on paper, it's not like anyone really felt that they owed that much or expected them to suddenly be able to pay back that much - it was just a series of monthly payments, as long as the monthly payments were kept in check everything was good, wasn't it?

(to be continued)

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

The Devil in Miss Bass

2011-07-12T13:28:00.001-07:00

Julie Bass is facing a sentence of 93 days in an Oakland, Michigan jail for the crime of planting a vegetable garden on her front lawn. She was told she is in violation of the local city screening and landscaping ordinance that states,"All unpaved portions of the [screening and landscaping] site shall be planted with grass ground cover, shrubbery or other suitable live plant material."

This same ordinance states that there is an exception made for "flower gardens, plots of shrubbery, vegetable gardens and small grain plots."

Nevertheless, Miss Bass has been ticketed with a misdemeanor. She is refusing to pay the fine and going to trial. A trail, I would assume, that will cost the city several thousands of dollars ( a conservative estimate).

At the core of the charge are two complaints about the garden that a city councilman received. Both complaints stated that the garden resembled a "New Orleans' cemetery." (ABC News, Reshma Kirplalani reporting).

Julie Bass, by the way, is a mother of six who paid over $500 to have raised garden beds professionally built and the garden designed so as to make it appropriately appealing for the front yard to avoid offending anyone. She decided this after having her entire lawn dug up for a sewer repair and deciding the cost of re-sodding the lawn was beyond her means.

Why would a vegetable garden cause such a stir? Especially in a time when people are seeking ways to save money, eat healthy and there is even a national effort to encourage people to grow their own fresh food? Not to mention the orgasmic joy expressed by many city councils over the development and presence of community gardens - why would one woman's garden be considered so criminal?

A case could be made for rats. But more rats will come linger in the shade of the gorgeous and wild flower beds people seem so found of and a vegetable gardener who is serious about eating their harvest takes steps to keep them away.

A case is being made that the garden violates community standards, enshrined in city ordinances, about what is "suitable" in a residential neighborhood.

It is this idea of suitability that lays bare the nature of the criminal offence of Julie Bass. Like the very facetious reference to an infamous movie about the results of conformity (and excess) that gave this blog its title, Julie Bass has inadvertently crossed not just social boundaries, but several defining aspects of the American myth. Now she is stuck, like Miss Jones, in a room with a man completely uninterested in her life and more interested in catching flies.

The American concept of a Lawn was adopted as a means of establishing not just an image of wealth and well-being, but it also was seen as evidence that the occupants of the home were reliable and trustworthy. After all, they took care of a lawn which meant not only did they nurture something, but tried to appear neat and orderly for their neighbors. The original lawns were copies of English lawns found on the estates of wealthy landowners. With the rise of the suburban movement, lawns gained a kind of social value - the better your lawn, the obviously more in control of your life you were. When Levittown, NY was founded, the population was encouraged to fertilize their lawns 3 or 4 times a year because super-green lawns "stamp inhabitants as good neighbors, desirable citizens."

An entire industry grew up on the selling of the perfectly green and weedless lawn. Generations grew up associating lawns with the kind of life that comes with a family, career and stability.

Today, the reality of lawns is only beginning to sink into popular thinking. They are, perhaps, the single most visible means of giving the middle finger to the economy, ecology and ideas of social responsibility that exists unchallenged in America.

Melissa Breyer, Senior Editor for Healthy and Green Living, lists just a few of the realities of the costs of the American lawn:
*    Acre for acre, the American lawn receives four times as much chemical pesticide as any U.S. farmland
*    An estimated seven million birds are killed yearly in the U.S. by lawn-care pesticides
*    Phosphorus runoff from lawn fertilizer causes algae blooms that suck oxygen out of our waterways, killing all aquatic life
*    In the summer, over half of municipal water usage goes to lawns

When I lived in Albuquerque, there was great concern over the rapidly changing weather patterns over the city. Year after year, there were increased floods and heavy snowfall. When they finally did a thermal study of the city, they discovered that all the lawns created to support the many golf courses had begun to change the atmosphere directly over Albuquerque. Lawns have a profound effect on their surrounding, one amplified by the ill effects of our concrete jungles.

Julie Bass also brought forth some other nasty hidden traits in our middle class society. One, she has six kids (and this is not socially acceptable in most of the country). Two - she is struggling in these hard economic times and visible evidence of the struggle was placed on the front lawn for all to see (including those who would like to ignore how others are struggling). And three, her garden raised the specter of "New Orleans" in local's minds. Now, I am not going to say anything about that, I just want you to sit and think about the nature of the complaints "it looks like a New Orleans' cemetery" and ponder the meaning of that statement. What has New Orleans come to represent?

Sit and think about how we have come to value the appearance of prosperity over the reality of providing and being prosperous.

The population at large lives in deep fear of poverty, this is something that is not acknowledged directly. Most of our racism, classism, fattism, age-ism and hate stems from our fear of being impoverished - so we create groups of people we can point to and say "they are not as good as us because they do not have enough as us." This enough could be money, property, education, will power, self control, intelligence, spirituality, love or humanity. It is the essence of materialism - this definition of life as something that one has.

And poor Julie Bass, in trying to be responsible and make a decision that would allow her to not only provide better for her family but to engage in a life-giving activity - has run afoul of a society of necrophiliacs.

I hope she goes to court. I hope she wins her case. And I hope they fire the people responsible for this insanity and make them reimburse the city for all associated costs out of their own pocket.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

snip snop

2011-07-11T17:40:00.003-07:00

"Pretty pa-peep/pretty pa-pop/let's go do a little snip-snop." The Mad Kitten has learned enough English to understand that this phrase means I am going out to trim the edges of the lawn in front of the cave with a pair of scissors. This is her cue to run, hide, leap, attack and otherwise harass me during the process. My neighbors have grown accustomed to our odd antics in the back yard.

The grass tends to keep the her paws from becoming as gummy, sticky and gluey as they seem to get during the winter. Which means less keys stick on the keyboard and I no longer have a scapegoat for my spelling errors.

:)

The trade-off however, is the increased moth population inside the house, being dive-bombed as I try to walk across the yard and the introduction of little wet pawprints everywhere.

We had a moment last week when her latest mouse friend passed away and she got very upset. I was working at the desk, not paying attention to her, so she picked up the stiff little mouse corpse and walked over and pitched it on top of my bare feet. She then sat there looking at me like, "Do something."

Randy Schutt says of modern advocacy that "After suffering years of frustration, many progressive activists are content merely to "make a statement" instead of actually being heard or to be heard rather than having influence or to have influence instead of having decision-making power or to seize decision-making power rather than creating a true democracy of empowered citizens." (Inciting Democracy [48])

I posted a bastardized version of that across my twitter accounts today (picture the whole quote shrunk down to 140 characters) and it is something I am starting to bang on dishes and rant about more often because there is something deeply wrong with our advocacy efforts today. I went through a phase of blaming facebook and our generally narcissistic culture, and while that is a part of it, the majority of blame lays on the advocates themselves.

One thing I hear all the time is that advocates are striving to "give a voice to the voiceless" or to raise consciousness about an issue. They use models for advocacy protests taken from the 60s - marches, candlelit vigils, disruption of hearings to stage their interventions. The problem being that the type of leadership that existed in advocacy in the 60s, that made the Civil Rights movement as effective as it was and was capable of using techniques such as those as a tool for change - is no more.

Erich Fromm points out in his lectures "On Being Human" that advocacy changed in the 70s, where rather than it being a group effort to raise the standards of all, it became more about every different element getting its moment of recognition. What was lost was the planning and implementation necessary to utilize the people drawn into awareness through protest to create actual change. The act of protest in and of itself is not a method of change or even effective at raising awareness. He points out that no protest will ever attract enough people in and of itself to generate the kind of revolutionary focus and energy needed to create change. The focus and energy of change comes from what happens after you catch people's attention (with a protest or march) - it lies in giving them tangible things that they can then be a part of doing to create change.

The way we act has evolved greatly over the past 30 or 40 decades, but the need we have for our actions to fulfill has not. We have moved, like our industry and society, from tangible interactions with real things (a water fountain, a seat on a bus, the right to vote and to be eligible for jobs) to confronting the intangible (property vs human rights, empowerment vs institutionalized management, distribution of funds to services that we do not get a chance to participate in implementing). Part of our core need to have a sense of purpose and placement in life is to be able to see results of our actions.

It is no wonder then that a momentary protest may generate enthusiasm among hundreds and that these same hundreds will then not show up to do more work, but will opt to play a game on facebook that gives them purposeful feedback. People who are not motivated morally and ethically to accept sacrifice and hardship for a cause need a steady stream of encouraging results to grow into that kind of social being.

In the transition to the "Me" generation, where validation of individual aspects of suffering and oppression became more important than seeing oppression as an ill of an entire society, an entire generation of political and social approach grew up that is distant from tangible results. In trying to advocate for solutions to social injustice, the advocates of this day and age are also out of touch with the language of realistic approach - mostly because they have become lost in the language of process. Process, is very distant from the idea of a person who is affected and then affects a community and vice versa.

We don't need more marches or protests or sit-ins or disruptions in hearings. We need more thought put into planning how to answer the question "What can I do?" realistically and with a way that provides a tangible result that encourages the person reaching out to be a part of the solution to step forward towards the more intangible parts of the struggle.

We rally for peace and an end to war and yet cannot define what that would be like.
We protest cuts to social service programs and yet have no idea how to use monies beyond sustaining and maintaining the problem because we have lost or rejected our social thinkers that dare to suggest that these problems need not exist.

The famous quote, "The poor you shall always have among you" means that there will always be someone in need - but not the same person and not all their life. That is the charge to the community. The charge to advocates is not to raise awareness, but to teach a way of living that brings change. Advocates would do well to realize that the problem does not lie so much in ignorance of issues, but of a rejection of awareness of them because left without any idea of how to tangibly work towards their solution - their immensity is overwhelming for many. And it is easier to show up and sing a song and go home and not follow through with what needs to be done simply because no one is showing anyone what steps need to happen that they can start to do. Real steps. Not esoteric steps. Not theory, but practice. After all, the more we can practice at something, the better we get and the more complex challenges we feel confident in taking on.

Snip snip.
Snop snop.
Trimming lawns with scissors
Tends to lead to such thoughts.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.

The United States of Texas

2011-07-08T06:35:00.001-07:00

Over 6,600 Americans were arrested and imprisoned in foreign countries last year according to the US State Department. Over 1/3 of these Americans were arrested in Mexico. Of the top 10 cities in the world that Americans tend to be arrested in, Mexico has the top five slots. The majority of the arrests, some 70 percent internationally, were drug related. The punishment for drug offenses in other countries tends to be far more severe than in the US ranging from flogging to life imprisonment to execution.

It has been through the intervention of the US Consular that many Americans have been freed or their sentencing reduced to reflect the punishments accorded to our standards and laws. This is possible due to the signing and ratification of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in 1969. This part of the Vienna Convention was an agreement to ensure that all foreign nationals detained were to be granted access to their Nation's Consular. However, even the countries that have not ratified the treaty, such as Iran, have honored its conditions by following the protocol for contacting a foreigner's consulate upon arrest. Such was the case of those two US hikers detained in Iran. The hikers credit the work of the consular with their eventual release.

The United States is the only country that has signed and ratified the treaty but rarely follows its conditions, particularly in regard to capital cases. Yet, we expect everyone else to follow it to the letter in regards to our own citizens abroad. It is interesting to note, unlike most of the international treaties and covenants the US has signed, this is one of the few that we have ratified and therefore consider legally binding. Typically, the US will sign but not ratify a treaty so that while we are publically and politically seen as agreeing to it in principle, we are not legally bound to obey its conditions.

It is also interesting to note that of the 173 countries that have signed the Vienna Treaty, only 40 endorse capital punishment (of which the US is one). And, of the 50 states in the US, 34 endorse the use of capital punishment. Iran, by the way, is one of the countries that endorses and uses the death penalty. Those hikers were facing possible death sentences for spying.

Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two Americans held captive in North Korea in 2009, have gone on record calling the Vienna Convention a "lifeline." The North Koreans allowed them access to US Consulars during their entire period of imprisonment. Just the knowledge, Lee has said, that there was someone outside working for them helped to sustain them. She firmly believes that it was the Consular presence that prevented their being mistreated by their captors and eventually being released.

On July 7, the state of Texas executed Humberto Leal Garcia a Mexican national who was tried, convicted and sentenced to death without ever being informed that he had the right to seek assistance from the Mexican consulate - assistance that in his case would have made the difference between life and death.

The U.S. government and Solicitor General, former diplomats, military leaders, judges and prosecutors, and legal organizations representing Americans abroad were among those who joined to call for a stay of execution. Oddly enough, in our polarized political climate, it was a balanced mix of Republicans and Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives who banded together to call for a stay. Even former President Bush sided with President Obama in the push to get Texas to stop. The Mexican government has long ago filed suit against the US for violation of the Vienna Convention in regards to the 51 Mexican Nationals held on death row.

The Supreme Court refused to enforce a stay, as did the Governor of Texas and the execution was completed.

Everyone is waiting on a piece of legislation to be passed that would require all US States to abide by any international treaty or convention signed by the Federal government. Without this piece of legislation in place, there is room for each state to act on its own accord in regards to respecting international treaties.

But not really, believing this shows a very limited understanding of the Constitution and the 10th amendment, the one that defines the separation of State and Federal jurisdictions.

The 10th amendment states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." This is, in death penalty cases, interpreted to mean that no federal law may be passed outlawing executions; just as there can be no federal law mandating states to allow gay marriage. How states manage their affairs in these areas is not seen as important to a sense of national security or economic surety (the basic limits of federal jurisdiction).

Except, that in this particular instance, the state of Texas has placed a significant strain on the economic security of the nation by not respecting a federally ratified international treaty. In risking economic sanctions from Mexico, Texas has thrown into question the surety of the economy of 22 US states and the national economy as well. Most people are unaware that Mexico is our third largest supplier of oil, and a primary economic partner (both in imports and exports) second only to China and Canada. Not to mention that over the past 10 years there has been a significant rise in Mexican investment in US businesses and a concurrent rise in Mexico allowing US companies to expand into their country - aiding the economy on both sides of the border.

Mexico, by the way, is the 13th largest economy in the world and the 11th largest in terms of purchasing parity. While the rest of the world has suffered greatly during the current recession, Mexico has retained a positive economy with a GDP of 6 percent. Their economic crises came back in 1994 and they learned from it. The crises that they experience that we most focus on now are the drug wars, something that the US illegal drug trade is the most prominent reason for its existence.

Yet because of the gap in standards and luxuries between the US and Mexico, the US tends to perceive Mexico as an impoverished country that is dependent on our goodwill. The statistics support that there is dependence but it is a mutual and equitable one. Recent trade agreements and treaties signed with Mexico stand to boost the US economy across 22 states. This recent execution has now thrown all of that into question.

Texas, in acting like a sovereign and isolated nation, did not assert its state's rights so much as interfere with the rights of 22 other US states, the national economy, and lessen the credibility of the nation in international legal agreements.

There is a clause attached to the 10th amendment that, in this instance, defines the actions of Texas as being in violation of the Constitution and acting to prevent the Federal government from fulfilling its Constitutional Mandate to safeguard the security and economy of the nation as a whole. It is called the "Commerce Clause" and states are prohibited in acting in independent manners in such a way as threaten intrastate commerce. In such instances, Federal law may be enacted and the states bound to follow the regulations for the good of the economy of the country.

There were 58 Mexican Nationals on death row in the US as of the morning of July 7.

There are now 57 more Mexican Nationals on death row in the US. Fifty of these are considered to have been denied consular access by international law and their execution will be in violation of the Vienna Convention.

For a country in such desperate need of a boost to the economy it makes no sound sense for any portion of the United States of America to pursue a course of action that places us in direct conflict; disregard and violation of treaties with the very countries we need good relations with to create jobs and economic growth. Mexico is not asking for the sentences to be commuted, but to be re-examined in terms of consular assistance and perhaps re-tried.

It is no less than what we ask for of other countries for our own citizens when they are imprisoned on foreign soil. That we may have the right to provide for them support, adequate legal assistance, language translation assistance and to ensure that they are fairly represented in that country's courts of law.

Feelings about the rightness or wrongness of the death penalty aside, the economic fallout of these executions stands to affect the economies of 22 of our 50 states. That is unconscionable behavior on the part of any state government. Due to a short sighted lack of willingness to honor a treaty that only benefits all of our citizens abroad, Texas has put the economic well-being of over half of the population of America at risk.

c.2011. Cassandra Tribe. All Rights reserved.

Love and Family

2011-07-07T05:38:00.003-07:00

(Editorial from the July Issue of Street Sights, read the whole issue @ http://bit.ly/pPDfAi)

Love and Family as Important as Food and Shelter
By Cassandra Tribe

Abraham Maslow developed a pyramid of human need that has come to define the social service system and social attitudes toward the homeless in America. In this pyramid, the needs for food, shelter and safety must be met before a person is considered capable of pursuing the "higher needs" of love, morality and fulfillment.

Studies done around the world have disproven his theory repeatedly. One of the most noted (Somalia Mental Health, Schuchman et al, 2004) contained a series of interviews with women in Somalia who had suffered through both war and famine. Without fail, each of these women stated that before food, before shelter and before safety came their need to love and be loved. They showed that of all the horrible things that happened to Somalians during the war and famine - it was witnessing the loss of loved ones and social isolation that led to the greatest instances of developed mental health problems. The loss of food, shelter and safety - while deeply traumatic - were not nearly as dangerous to the human psyche as the loss of intimacy and social connection.

Despite this evidence, along with dozens of other studies, the American social service system still structures itself based upon Maslow's theory. The result has been a creation of mental health issues in a population that typically did not have them upon entrance into a state of need.

Being in a relationship while homeless is something that the social service system rarely acknowledges. If you are married and become homeless, there are only limited spaces in shelters that allow spouses to remain together who are without children. 95 percent of the time, spouses are separated - removing the primary support system for each person.

No studies have been done on the impact of forced separation on the mental health of individuals in a relationship or, the impact on the relationship.

Curfews, separation of sexes, and a lack of realistic support for those in relationships creates an environment in which adult persons are treated as if they were children. The fact that intimate relationships (both physical and emotional) are one of the strongest sources of support for an individual that helps to prevent disorder and disease is ignored. With Maslow's blessing, once a person is given the title of "homeless" they are perceived as existing in a state in which they must be taken care of and do not know what is good for themselves.

No matter how desperate the needs for survival, as shown in the study in Somalia, we seek intimacy, union and bonding. Forming a bond with another human being is a part of what allows us to survive the worst of the situations in our lives without becoming permanently damaged. And it does not matter if you have no shelter, no money, no safety or lack the best of clothing - what we seek and offer in relationships comes from a portion of our selves that is not dependant on material things or even on physical necessities for our body's health.

Intimate trust is an essential part of our survival as mentally and emotionally healthy human beings. The more that both the homeless and the service agencies begin to recognize just how much a person has to offer to another - no matter what their circumstances - the less dehumanizing the entire system will be and the less disorder and disease they will create.

(Editorial from the July Issue of Street Sights, read the whole issue @ http://bit.ly/pPDfAi)

The Freedom of Casey Anthony

2011-07-06T10:20:00.001-07:00

"In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place."
-Ghandi

Casey Anthony was found not guilty of 1st degree murder (premeditated), aggravated manslaughter of a child and aggravated child abuse in regards to the death of her daughter, Caylee Anthony. Casey was found guilty of providing false information to law enforcement.

The verdict came as a shock to the Prosecution and the Public. The Anthony family has since received death threats. The Internet is all a buzz with people talking about the similarities between this case and the OJ Simpson case and how they cannot believe that "she got away with murder."

After all, so many people sat - day in and day out - watching the drama unfold in the courtroom. Hearing the details, seeing the evidence and coming to their own seasoned judgments as to the guilt of Casey Anthony. Many comments on the Internet point out that the jury was out of the room for what has been considered some truly revealing and potentially pivotal arguments in the case. A general feeling of a miscarriage of justice is the majority opinion of the verdict.

But is it?

There are three things that are commonly forgotten. One, that the American legal system is not about justice, but about law. Two, that Court TV is a kind of reality TV in which reality is simulated, but not entirely true. And three, when bad things happen, there is no way to undo the hurt that is done.

There are three parts to the definition of Justice.

The first is as a "principle of moral rightness; equity. Conformity to moral rightness in action or attitude; righteousness." This definition holds all of our cultural, religious and emotional experiences. Experiences that are mostly subjective and rooted in the need to project black and white (orthogonal) thinking onto events in order to understand them. Doing this allows a person to regain a sense of safety and surety through that understanding. Justice, much like evil, is in the eye of the beholder. My justice is different from the justice seen by my next-door neighbor. Our sense of what is just and what is not just comes from our sense of morality, cultural mores, group identities and emotional histories.

The second part of the definition states, "The upholding of what is just, especially fair treatment and due reward in accordance with honor, standards, or law. The administration and procedure of law." The law is the community compromise on a standard of rightness in action that all are held accountable to, yet represents no one sub-group in the community more than another. Mind you, this is not about whether the application of the law leans more to one group within the community or another, but that it is to "with blindness" hold all to the same standards. This is why many new laws wind up in the Supreme Court. Laws are created all the time that attempt to favor one group over another.

The third part of the definition is, "Conformity to truth, fact, or sound reason." This part of the definition means that justice with a capital "J" can only be seen when it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. This is the part of Justice that enters a court of law.

The facts in the case are as follows - Caylee died in an unnatural manner. Her body was transported and concealed.

The sound reasoning in the case is that Casey Anthony did not react to her daughter missing the way in which one would expect a reasonable parent to react.

The truth - Casey Anthony lied to law enforcement agents about people, places and things during the period between Caylee going missing and her body being found.

That is all that the Prosecution could prove in the courtroom. By charge of the Law, jurors must conclude that beyond a reasonable doubt Casey Anthony did, with pre-meditation, plan the murder of her daughter, commit the murder and hide the body. They could not do this, even if they may have felt in their hearts that she did, it would have been an injustice to convict her based on an emotional and subjective response to the case rather than to consider the validity of the evidence.

Which many people who watched the trial on TV cannot understand. They saw enough. But, back to the concept of Reality TV as myth, what viewers saw was a form of "court as entertainment," a faux trial that was coexisting, perhaps overlaid is a better word, with a real trial. For ratings sake, Court TV shows all the things that the jurors don't see because it makes for good entertainment.

What the audience forgets is that underneath the show - is reality. The jurors are removed from the room when arguments or evidence are to be presented to be ruled on whether or not they are admissible in the trail - whether or not they meet the criteria of truth, fact and sound reasoning. So, we the audience, get to see many things that are inappropriate to a trial of justice but do not separate the information out of what is legally and fairly allowed. We do not filter the entertainment from the reality. Aiding us in this delusion are the legal pundits commenting on every breath taken in the courtroom, while they may be lawyers, none of them have seen the evidence or conducted the appropriate investigations and research to have any more a learned opinion on the case than the rest of us. They are part of the audience to, but give us the illusion of being informed. They are a voice of authority that the audience allows to interpret the information seen in the show.

Any trial is not so much about the persons being tried, but about the society and community. In our courts of law, we are constantly revisiting the compromises we have agreed upon in order to preserve the relationship of the community. For this reason, sometimes obvious and heinous things go unpunished because to punish them would mean breaking a compromise to the whole that would then endanger the community. It is why so much pressure is on the Prosecution and Police to follow their strange protocols etc. and so forth, they have to prove - to the standard of the community - what has happened. They cannot, like in a therapy session, look solely for what happened in the moment and between two people.

Like it or not, "justice" has been served. The Prosecution tried their best, but in the end, there were no facts, truth or sound reason to support a guilty verdict on those charges.

And it breaks our heart for Caylee, to think the crime against her will go without justice. That the perpetrator will be free to go on living their life while Caylee's sinks further and further into the ground. And that is painful and upsetting and yes, unjust on many levels.

Yet, why such outrageous passion over this? Why the death threats? The libelous status updates? The absolute hatred expressed towards this woman in such a public way? Why this rejection of the verdict?

Casey Anthony is seen as a monster for she is the embodiment of our own lack of emotional connection to life and lack of meaning and purpose in our lives. She has thrown in our face the shattered glass of our illusion about the black and white nature of life and our own belief in our goodness and morality. She has broken the myth of the mother/daughter bond. She has held up to the cameras a lifestyle in which "living in the present" is more valued than anything else and the kind of emotional conceit that requires. She has treated horror and trauma with a casual disregard because it didn't really affect her. She is the American Society without its mask of sanity.

Watch closely the people you hear crying the loudest against her and you will see an interesting thing unfold. It is widely known and accepted that expressions of hate towards someone stem from fear. The idea that a mother would kill their child strikes fear in many parent's hearts - not because it is unthinkable, but because who hasn't had a moment when they have thought, "I wish they would just go away."

Casey Anthony is condemned as a heartless, party animal who wanted to be rid of her daughter so she could live la Belle Vita - but who of you with children is not aware of the sacrifices that have to be made - from your life, to be there for them? And who among you has not had a moment of resentment towards your own child? Who among you has not made a choice that you know may be seen as neglectful by someone else? Our buried shames can fuel our surface reactions.
Baumeister defined evil as the willful decision to lose control. Many of us have had thoughts such as these but we have chosen to remain in control, but we never lose the awareness of the fact that we had to make a willful choice to do so. Casey Anthony strikes fear in many because she is a mirror of our own potential and that, is unacceptable to us in this day and age. We like to believe that one decides to be good once, and that is the end of that.

We like our black and white things, our boxes. We like to believe that bad people are all bad and good people are all good. But we are always in a constant motion of making choices about our actions. Our collective denial about the nature of our humanity is challenged, threatened by the Casey Anthony's of the world. She does not even have to commit murder to do so, just to be seen acting in such a callous way in regards to a murder is enough to trigger this fear and stir up our secret shames.

Watch, as well, the people who seek to defend her, saying, "If she did it, it was because she was mentally ill or had been abused as a child." These are more rationalizations to absolve Casey of willful choice and therefore, protect ourselves from connecting to the reality that these things are choices for us as well. Not one person worth their weight in the therapeutic industry believes that "abused children become abusers" and very few criminal acts are committed by the insane because too much planning and consideration of consequences has to occur. But these are the myths we have embraced because they allow us to remain in our fairytales, where dragons are killed by heroes and the kingdom becomes peaceful again.

Before posting or talking about the verdict, I would ask you to do one thing, and that is to consider your life. Consider your life in regards to the fact that what we first think, our first reaction to something - is usually false. It is what lies beneath that reveals our true feelings and opinions. We tend to grab for the one that can be most easily understood in black and white terms to alleviate fear and stave off our own painful memories of shame.

If you are absolutely repulsed by the verdict, ask yourself why? What is it about it that affects you? Why is it really so upsetting? What does it bring up for you? And think it through.

There are some harms in the world that once done, can never be healed or given closure. One of them is the death of a small child. Yet we constantly do a disservice to their memory by trying to capture them in little boxes and simple explanations - we say that some people are out of control and that is why they hurt them or, that God called them home, or, that something so so bad happened so that something good could come out of it. If you stop looking for definite answers to define the "why" of something unexplainable, you begin to open up to the totality of life. A wholeness that includes us all, the living and the dead, the good and the bad, and reminds us that in the end it is about being there - with all our memories and unresolved parts, all our traumas and hurts and joys. Because when we are actually in the act of being alive, we create a broader range of choices for everyone, including ourselves. The more choices we see, the less we are to pick the one that will cause suffering.

Consider your life.

Think before you speak.

Consider, especially, that your posts and statuses may be read by people who you are hurting with your hate and anger and vitriol. It may not be your intention, but when the only reminder of a child's death surfaces in the absolute hatred inspired by the death of another - it creates a feeling of isolation in others who have lost too. It hurts those who have already been hurt. It does nothing to memorialize Caylee. Most of the loudest people now will forget her in few months when the next bit of human drama unfolds.

Honor her by becoming the kind of person that inspires others to see more choices in life. Honor her by creating a world in which harming another is unacceptable under any circumstance.

Honor her.

c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.