Sidpah - Years of Onanism and Barbarism From This Distant Shore

Through glass, through liquid thick, viscous, surrendering to the pains of old age with a pebble flicked to the brow, a ping light quick snap and then gone, surrendered to the immensity of extinguished…

 An old woman moves her fingers in complex theatrics, hexes an immigrant boy with a flower in his hair, who wants only to play the guitar and sing young girls into his bed. Instead he rasps, his throat full of cicadas, bed full of lice…

This old bruja is herself once an immigrant from somewhere south of her current residence. But she has no faith in folk. Has no compassion for the similarly disadvantaged.

She dresses like her ancestors, yet spits at their images, pissing on her fingers and flicking the droplets to their pained masks, cracked and split from the heat and mold of the tropics.

The boy drowns in fitful slumber underneath the oppressing stench of shapeless forms. The dark, the merciless, her shadow minions who plague his existence only because he chose to move his feet, to not rest on the same blood-splattered ground on which his parents were gunned down and laid to rest, also fitfully. The weight of conscience leaving the boy to his own pale devices.

How can they sleep peacefully knowing she is still out there with two eyes clear and one eye evil? Many children hexed in her passing. She is heavy, thick, spongy and taboo. Making her way in the world at the expense of the weaker, impoverished souls all – her miserable lot included…

We are just as a goldfish in a small aquarium, perched on the edge of an oceanic beach, who may look lustily, comprehendingly at the lapping waves, and long to feel the cool crest overtaking his fins and enveloping him – while knowing that it will remain forever out of reach thanks to the thick panes of glass forming the incomprehensible barrier of his existence – whether he fully understands the nature of their build like they certainly don’t care of his unique nature, he is nonetheless unable to penetrate the panes, neither with intellect nor physicality. He makes a semblance of peace with his surroundings, looking for tiny comforts, colorful nests, hidden caches of food beneath mounds of dissolving waste, markers of a good life –

As the sky clouds over and thin cold drizzle of an autumn evening commences, though he is not immediately aware – the water is rising – both the tide of expansive blue, and also the relatively inconsequential puddle in which he’s made his humble home. And as the tank grows at first imperceptibly fuller, the fish finds himself with just a cautious twinge of curiosity, able to swim to yet higher reaches of glass. Through the warped and shimmering lens, he believes he sees the ocean’s tide also swelling closer to greet him… And as he slowly realizes the dim possibility of this great conjoining, this unlikely concomination, he for the first time in weeks, decades, centuries, feels excitement rising too – the thrill of escape into the Unknown – Mystery! The Wild Everything where he Belongs!

And as rivulets begin trickling down over the panes of glass, and his nose approaches the edge of the rim, the ocean’s waves wash up to brush the tank’s base, then recede, leaving only a frothy white residue of their kiss – If he’s going to do this, his timing must be perfection, or else he’ll perish on the drying sand – or twenty years later in the tank – and what would be the difference? What would it matter? Do twenty miserable years equal a single day of blissful coherence?

I heard Kalday’s footsteps on the lawn, soft as a child’s fingers on your cheek, but I wasn’t ready to face him yet… As exhausted as I was, I decided it was time to explore. 

Sneaking away, I passed a raised stone well surrounded by no less than thirty different varieties of weeds, to one path or trail after another… only forest… the screeching of monkeys… crumbling stones that looked more at home in the mud than I’ve ever felt anywhere in the world… they were ancient and magnificent… exuding the nobility of kings never dethroned…

Eventually I came to a small village… At first a huge blue truck, stopped on the village’s threshold, the truck’s bed overflowing with plantains and thick green leaves somehow remaining suspended, never quite falling over the side. Two men, tall, dark-skinned, one with thin little braids not even past his ears and the other with head bald as the packed dust road they’d parked on, stood among the crops, grunting and shifting the load. I circumnavigated the truck, not sure we spoke the same language and not sure I had anything meaningful to say.

These men were hard workers, stacking hundred-pound bunches of fruit, while I’ve always been lazy, privileged and delicate.

But when the man with the braids started singing, everything changed. The song was just a melody of vowels, a pidgin language I could follow without ever having heard before. Together the melody of five or six notes grew as the other man took up the weight of the song as he took up the weight of the plantains. I was afraid I would insult, or at best, come off as an embarrassingly forward tourist if I sang along, but my mouth moved and perfectly tuned notes resounded from deep within my chest and I was overcome…

Overcome by the wordless song so sad and suddenly I felt that sadness, that deep deep heaviness of Oh, This Is Too Much To Bear…

I felt my ribs opening, tears flowering in my eyes like tiny buds – The song at its root… the cleansing of an exorcism…

Still walking around the truck, I began tapping light rolling rhythms on the blue sideboard, and heard the bald man mimicking on an old rusted-out gas can so I knew we’d made a connection. In this melody so sweet and innocent, sorrowful and wise, I found the first language with which I could honestly resonate…

 I am then instantly overwhelmed by lightning, bright flashes, each one focused directly into my nervous system. Heart stops and then races to catch up to the progressing rhythm. Brief moments of darkness ring with afterimages between attacks. Incandescent needles showering down around me, form horrible outlines I can’t stand to look at. I’d rather not admit even to myself what they appear to be... I close my eyes, his eyes, our eyes, and the dark grows darker as the ground grows to feel somehow less stable. Spongier, thinner, less substantial... Like I’m precariously balanced on a thin wire that could, without so much as a moment’s notice and only the slightest provocation, fray and split. As if all the solid substance in my world, a world whose veracity has proven itself tenuous at best, might just be some sort of thin veneer or thoroughly convincing hologram that I am now slipping straight through, but suspended, not yet falling, and finding that the descent isn’t so bad. Like floating but not yet falling… Like the wind is waiting, restraining its breath in anticipation to see what’s going to happen, and I am suspended, calmly suspended, searching those thin gauzy windows for everything that once was. Remembering every event that never happened with jagged clarity. Looking down at the incontrovertible future with no recourse and still not falling yet; not yet, but knowing that when I do, it’ll be the greatest feeling in the world...

And just as I give in, submitting my will to the possibility of remaining in that state for a very very long time, for as long as I need to before I can find an appropriate course of action, my body disappears, the mouth in the dirt swallowing me whole and I get to experience my first taste… Thunder like a rolling train, lightning and hail sharp and cold and deadly… The downpour subsides, and like a fool I mourn it like a friend leaving for the vacancy of a new world.

On one hand this transcription seems so important, vital for my own stability, for creating a future, or a past to lean upon and romanticize. So why on the other does it seem entirely futile? Like I have precognition of the outcome even while I play along? How do I delineate between what feels wrong and is wrong and what feel wrong and is the only valid approach to reconciling my existence?

I asked Clarence but he wasn’t much help. He said, “Those things you’re asking, they can’t be explained by no human. Those are biblical questions, son. T’aint nothin’ right, outsida you know who.” And sadly I didn’t know who. But I nodded my head like I understood...

Elijah was a bit more help. A bit. He told me, “You just have to go on like everything you feel is right. If today your gut says that the sky is green, then tell yourself, ‘Self, today the sky is green and I can accept that.’ And if tomorrow the sky is yellow, then the sky is yellow. Why always try to see things that aren’t there? If you wanna strip off all your clothes and jump off the nearest bridge and that seems perfectly logical and reasonable, then for whatever reason on that particular day, for you, it just is. And if halfway through your stripping, you’re standing there in nothing but your skivvies, and suddenly you think ‘My god, what the hell was I thinking? I must be insane!’ then you just put your clothes back on and walk away. And that’s perfectly reasonable too. Like I said, there ain’t no point in trying to force yourself to believe something you can’t believe. If it don’t fit, it don’t fit. Accept it.”

I wrote it down to ponder later. The more I reread it, the more sense it made. Elijah could teach in a university. At least do social work. The irony. Half a dozen organizations trying to help him get on his feet and it turns out he’s just on the wrong side of the desk. I should mention that to him…

Five beaten disciples sat lotused beneath the Guru’s sunshine bathing mountain glare.

“It has been my experience that events come with preparation. It is rare, though not unheard of, that an event should occur before we understand the previous event which precipitated its being. Now, it is more common to hear of one event having occurred and whether we anticipate the following event or not, find that it has come to fruition based wholly on the events presupposed.”

“Venerable Long-Bearded Guru,” spoke up one meager disciple, “could you share with us an example of your theory?”

Fallen sick, aware that today will be memorial only for the string of filthy men’s rooms and intestinal cramps, chaffed asshole and suppressed urge to vomit…  

Squatting in one of those inescapable stalls, the cobalt tile imparts to me a small bit of its accumulated insight and explains that the actuality of the day is dependent entirely upon my retelling of it… To provoke envy there was neither trace of cloud in sky nor physical discomfort in form.  Or for martyrdom or sympathy it was my absolute ruination; a luckless day that siphoned a lifetime of joy like a gastronomic black hole... Birds took wing, small animals burrowed into their nests in bracing spasms of inchoate fear...

Currently creating the past, I’m left to consciously enjoy all moments equally.  All my enemies once dead become my dearest friends... The actual roots of my unease are thoughts of future turmoil.  Worries about accidents and seizures, ambulance rides, transfusions, skin grafts, root canals, reset bones, diarrhea on full buses, starving years eating the streets… All bones forming the skeleton of my catastrophic survival…  

I’ve experienced them all, right now in their conception – Every day I’ve made them happen.  I’m doing it all again because I’m a sick man.  I must learn to debone the flesh, detaint the meat…  

The Big Reveal: It doesn’t matter what happened...  Never never never!  The only matter, ever! is my reaction to what’s currently happening.  It’s all a Doing, and never a done. All a Process, never a finished product.

Future is of no consequence: an impotent little imp hopping foot to foot waving rubber pitchfork threateningly in the air.  I and you alone possess the power to fill in, alter or wholly fabricate the past… Leaving the only thing left to be lost: The Now that I spend in turmoil trying to ease my entry into the impenetrable future which is nothing more than an imaginary version of This Very Now – still completely under my control...  

The Venerable Guru spoke thusly:

“There is no salvation in Fear, you know. Only Paralysis. Salvation comes with awareness of our own fragmented nature. Wrinkles prove the past, but the only proof of future is anxiety.

“Let go of the future and thereby let go of Fear. Worry is our only artifact of tomorrow. Silly things: will we have enough money, a roof over our heads, food to eat, a lover, children, will someone take care of us in our old age, will we even reach old age, will we contract cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, die tragically in an accident, bank holdup, mugged in a shopping mall parking lot, mauled by a wild coyote in suburban driveway? Anything to die sooner than we’d expect, though we never really expect to die.

“But if it does come to pass (and mark my words, it will) who’ll care for our progeny or pets or property? On and on this silliness.

I’ve been told there’s an unreachable place where an essenceless creature churns away, casting sparks and smoke waves used as screens for all sorts of Dimethyltryptamine visions that turn walls into portals.

Ostensibly mystical, this habit of viewing future vistas via inner sight – yet commonplace as radio waves.(There is music in this air, voices of news and lonely HAMs seeking companionship…)Carrying on conversations, alone in hazy shower I’m also fully clothed a week from now winning an argument that no one’s yet started in sun-streaked backyard, smell of watermelon splitting with a crack, black bean burgers grilling in smoke and young cousins lapping circles around folding lawn chairs…

Nor is it less magical to review dialogues of dark stout dorm birthdays, when the actors performing are now solemnly decaying in their reckless young graves –(yet I can see their cheeks peel back inside their caskets, side view of dirt walls and moldy black sport coats…)

And still I breathe upright with two open eyes to keep from falling down stairs or knocking over a curio cabinet full of high school ambitions. Each one hand-painted, hot fire molded, limited run… Each overlapping another to remind me the succession of my kicks. My new first love…

It’s this creature that I grow ever less aware of –who sets up the kiln, hires migrant workers to paint on the red lips, blue shirts, heavy lead glaze, and the inch of dust that crept through space between glass and oak frame.

This creature, not wanting to be seen, sets up shop as an anonymous factory. Who’s ever once truly seen a factory? What architect designs such utilitarian structures?… factories, abattoirs, concentration camps… We’ve driven past them, smelled them, felt the heat flushing out from their metallic black-stained windows, but who wants to acknowledge flat cancerous structures in our hometowns?

No signs, no painted murals, no paint in fact. Die-cut fecal brick decaying even before construction has ended. Windows installed with wedges of glass missing to save the neighborhood kids the risk of injured arms, ligaments torn throwing stones at them to hear the waterfall crash and run... On opening day a Notice of Condemnation is taped to the door.

Unfit for human habitation...

Flashbulbs pop for the front page; a bloated mayor smiles triumphantly; scissors snip the yellow ribbon signaling a hundred rat clans to run in to make the house a home… The factory is a haunted tenement. Ghosts of dead child labor come standard issue. This mythology keeps even stray dogs at bay. Ugly facades tend to hide the most intriguing interiors…

The factory is a hollow shell designed to produce something bearing no resemblance to its place of origin. Relying on its ambiguous nature to run without interference… Toy factory look no different from cigarette factory look no different from rat poison factory look no different from wholesome sugary part of your complete genetically modified breakfast cereal factory…

Red socialist flags wave on recommissioned poles because even anarchists have a trademarked logo…  Sweet angels steal their wings from the spines of the poor…

Boasting red and white eyesores these houses rally as one set of bars and stripes, ambling across a distended tapestry – White door, red brick, white siding, red wood, white molding, red cheeks surveying the street through white window panes with unceasing paranoia, red blood, white skin, the rumble of distant red bomb skies and deep fried white potato freedom fries, and redcoats in red ties shooting because they can’t see the whites of their enemy’s eyes… Red flags in black basements mourning spilled blood, plotting how much more’ll need to be spilt –

While above, white women who wish they’d been born heiresses, blue striped scarves double wrapped around bronze throats in late August Sun sip burnt Starbucks under black anonymous glasses, shivering to each other because it’s never been cool to be hot – And they’re gone quick as they came ‘cause life’s about the entrance and exit – The stay’s the least climatic scene –

Left fingerprints on glass tables, toe prints clinking toe rings cast in pewter by an Indian tribe whose name they never cared enough to pronounce correctly, on glass floors where their skirts would’ve been looked up if they weren’t wearing jeans molded tight so every ghost of undergarment excised for sake of unsightly lines could be ogled by a red-eyed degenerate sucking thin white cigarette to pacify his oral fixation – It’s not lit. He doesn’t like the taste of smoke, but people look down on you when you suck your thumb or pens or cocks, but cigarettes still get the public approval for now, so he can hold his head up, as he looks up the skirts of little white girls carrying little white dolls with red blush on their high plastic cheekbones…

And they wear short white skirts, both the doll and the girl because the girl wants to grow up to be the doll and the girl’s mother waxes nostalgic about her days when she exuded the polymer mystique, fresh allure of that doll, lives vicariously through her daughter and her daughter’s sordid little doll, and her father sneaks covert glimpses at the doll and gets a little hard-on and he wonders why he doesn’t get one when he sees his wife who was once his pretty little consolation prize… A ribbon of white gold wrapped around the ring finger of his left hand reminding him of his duties to this little girl and her little blond doll and his miserable wife and their red and white house and Hawaiian blue swimming pool and jade grass and imported tropical flowers of ruby, amethyst, saffron, his black car and his white-washed office and his black secretary at his white-collar job with his black suit and white cuffs and his black caviar and white wine and the black eye he gave his wife after drinking too much white wine and the blackout that followed the same white wine and the red flush his ears take on when he lies, little white lies about not sleeping with his black secretary and not taking too many of those little white pills and not giving his wife that black eye as an anniversary present and not that he noticed the man with the oral fixation flipping a spare cigarette between his fingers, rolling it over and under each knuckle and thinking about nothing in particular other than panties and air –

He’s not so much thinking about them as seeing them superimposed on the rolled up screen of the coffin nail that’ll never seal his coffin because he had the good sense not to set it alight, and he doesn’t wonder who’s dying right now on the other side of the world, who’s dying in this city only a mile away.  Alone in hospice, alone in a motel, surrounded by family at a ski lodge, driving to a concert or wedding or peace rally…  Will they clear their mirror or cling tightly to their ersatz riches? – He doesn’t wonder who has a bomb strapped around his midriff and who’s making his peace with his god, or wondering is his god the same as the stranger’s god or who will be invaded tomorrow and under what false pretext, who makes up this shit, who rolled that cigarette, who picked that tobacco, who profited from that tobacco, how many people those poor tobacco pickers indirectly killed, how many dollars a year the white man makes who’s fucking his black secretary and snorting lines of white Go Powder, and whether he ever thinks about panties and air or whether that’s all trivial to him as the tri-colored ribbon stuck to his black Lexus trunk with a magnet that’ll be stolen by some privileged white teenaged suburbanite who’ll sell it for ten bucks to an old lady who’ll think it’s the most touching thing that this youngster is so patriotic and oh, how he supports his troops! And the kid’ll laugh as he spends the money on condoms and pot and searches for more ribbons to peel off to sell the geriatric population… (this only works in little old lady white neighborhoods…) The ones with the red and white houses flying tri-colored flags with yellow ribbons tied around their old oak trees and young maple trees and middle-aged pine trees (because it’s the thought that counts) –

Ribbons tied on in a red rush of commitment, the feeling that we need to do something even if it’s only this, even if it’s only putting a bowtie on local foliage, even if it’s only bombing the government infrastructure, even if it’s only assassination, only genocide, only nuclear warfare… The feeling that change must be made and that the red of muscle and carnage will be seen on nightly news, in papers, on the street, on the lawns of every little white house, every Big White House, every little red house until the blood stops being shed – it must stop being shed, there’s too much blood run loose of body, too much counterfeit innocence, too much manic sadness, these are the colors flying on every doorstep, up every flagpole, on every faded-out bumper sticker that proves these colors do indeed both fade and run… They fly on rooftops and car antennas and GOP rallies superimposed beneath a 9/11 two stories high, behind sloganeering defendants bullshitting the bullshitters, the blood, the fraud and the tears, and they say you can’t bullshit a bullshitter, so they cut you down to the ankle and suture your lips shut before you get the chance to try –

I must remember to have compassion, compassion for the seeds they sow, the seeds that may take millennia to sprout and bear fruit, but will form forests in the wake of their atrocities…  

They’re ignorant – a disease like malaria – and because they live life spiked on illusion doesn’t mean I can’t mourn their future incarnations, mourn their future pain I will feel next to them as their mother when they’re lying half dead on a battlefield fighting for the war they were close enough to start and too close to run away from…

All things seem safer from a distance – Until the bomb whistles its homecoming tune...  

Remaining shielded and safe in bunkers and resorts… Until they join the ranks at the fresh age of seventeen because of some compulsion they can’t enunciate – It’s deeper than in their genes, it’s in their karma – In the Alayavijnana – Even now they warn you not to mourn the dead, so don’t mourn them when their intestines are baking in the desert sun, don’t mourn them when you get the call saying your son has died in the line of duty, don’t mourn the collateral damage, don’t belittle their sacrifice. Could you imagine mourning the virgin who was given as gift to your Mayan god?  You’re not a red-blooded American patriot if you love your enemy, (or don’t fear your god) – you have to live and die in the knowledge of your enemy (who is your warlord god) – know his weakness, his hunger, his thirst, his dirty little secrets to exploit (both your enemy and your vengeful god) – and you know them well because they are your thirst, your weaknesses, your same dirty little secrets (you and your ignorant god are already one) – and don’t be angry – I try not to be angry but I am, there’s too much fucking red in all our eyes these days – History shows red streaks and great red oceans seemingly insurmountable by few awakened minds whispering calm to enraged toddlers hurling explosive toys across the living room...  

Great Mayan pyramids stained crimson, ropes bleed from mouths and draw holy glyphs of implication – Kings shed their own life for the gods, shed the life of the queen through her forked tongue, empty their sex and their humanity onto an altar for the servants, for the multitudes who will never climb those steps, the surrogate self left locked in sandstone tomb painted the colors of sunset, too much red in those historic eyes too…

So the torn yellow ribbon still flaps years later because no one sees it anymore, least of all the little patriot who tied it there. Part of the old familiar scenery stripped of meaning.  Those solemn days are gone and he did what he could do, she tied a knot, bought a ribbon, profited a charity, supported her troops, hoped they’d stay there until the job was done which means one side or the other is decimated to the point of collapse.  

The error is in the distinction.  We see inside those vehicles, those layers of Kevlar and camo and remember these are human creatures, people, stories, and not soldiers… But that’s our error, because they’re Troops, they aren’t mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, they are the Military Machine. Visceral extensions of the tanks they drive and jets they pilot, and it is offensive to think of them not fulfilling their assigned duty, the culmination of their twenty-some year destiny.  Imagine the disgrace they’d wear in place of their fatigues, the indignation sported like the Purple Heart they never had the opportunity to earn because a bunch of commie liberals stood in their way...  They did what they had to do, as we all do what we feel we have to to believe we’re making a difference. Whether we want change or fidelity to the status quo. We are driven to allegiances straight and crooked, broken and bloodied, hidden and garish – unaware that in reality, there are no fucking flags – there are no fucking colors – only a single unbroken spectrum stretching far beyond our perceptual limitations…

…I snarl at the white ceiling with a bestial reel… Clear and blue tubes form veins of maps outlining undiscovered continents above my inclined head…

My teeth are too heavy today. And the sky is a red vice. My body’s a cog in a grotesque machine with one hand to bait and one hand to kill. One eye lies with a shyster smile while the other steals souls for its pleasure in the wet groaning darkness... How could anyone breathe with their ribs this goddamn tight?

I itch all over and proceed to scratch mercilessly every reachable extremity. Back, chest, ass, soles to scalp… Red lines crisscross with menace, a precursor to infection, defeat. I lay back temporarily appeased.

Looking down apathetically at my folded hand, tented over bellybutton, I find that there’s a dab of shit on my finger, and this disgusts me, being a clean and sanitary sort… That is, until I consider that there are thirty feet of chitterling-encased sausage-shaped shit currently gurgling and sludging its way through my torso – Inside! Inside! Nearest my heart cells spinning memory refrains and liver not quite turned to its own guilty foie gras...

Shit hauled around from class to grocer to restaurant, heaped in a chair all heavy and rank with moldering festering sog… Renewed, a persistent burden of desire… Right now, and a big double-fistful of organic raisin bran and strawberries, bananas and oats, all fated to join the steady sloshing parade of putrefaction that began the day I was born and won’t end until my skin and bones, sinew and grey matter have turned likewise into two-hundred pounds of ripe festering shit expelled by worms and hungry microorganisms, wild scavenging mouths dripping with the carrion of a body that now speaks English and sighs, and who‘ll take it upon themselves to provide a decent burial, the only one worthy, for this senseless meat as it passes from their tiny churning guts –

Hunched over yesterday afternoon, needing to stretch my spine, I leaned against my mother’s silver Lincoln, (well, my Lincoln now, though it’s certainly not my style and a purely temporary change of ownership) that hasn’t moved in months, the tires are getting flat and I’m sure the battery must be dead by now, and allowed myself in those few moments of waiting to look at my chestnut tree, limbs still scalped by last summer’s tropical storm. At branches pruned by unsteady shears over my head, scared of falling from second rung of ladder. But I didn’t right then recall those moments direct. I saw only this alien creature, alive, newly slumbering, months from budding. Awaiting rain and warm radiation. Still. And I looked beyond, through those bare gnarled arms and fingers to see the rich blue sky with its few ornamental puffs of cloud merging, changing subtly into faces of animals, cute and furry, crones, haggard and skinny, amorphous blobs tumbling to make children laugh in their sky-lit beds... But again, no labels on creatures; simple shapes, moving with absolute leisure, devoid of purpose, carried swollen with bliss as much as tomorrow’s freezing rain, contented, whichever way the wind would tug or push. And I sensed a stillness imparted to me from those calm apparitions. My limbs, like those wind-caressed branches, dragged with slow, steady ease. Not forcing them to slow down or to be aware as a cloud surveying the ever-changing landscapes with impartiality, we each simply were. We were easy and light, expansively unmanifest, and above all, patient. My thoughts rustled through the leaves unhurried, and a grin, conjured as from a soothing lullaby, bristling with joy at the absolute perfection of forms, even the perfection of a cracked driveway collapsing into a tiny sinkhole, oblong and joyous, and parking lots half-filled by rusted erratic vehicles, and weathered signboards with shattered names and missing bulbs... A small fountain of warm euphoria bubbled up my sternum into my chest with hearty blue light, enormous...

I’ve hugged so many girls, but after, I’m left to build my own monuments to them and then watch them burn down by the heat of another’s torch.

Sports create nothing, no beauty, no value. What do they create but rivalries and violent passions? Why teach the children these games of conquest? For camaraderie? For team spirit? These bonds are tribal, and at best, tenuous. A throwback to times of paranoia of the outsiders and lands to defend. They create heartache and unsustainable highs. Superstitions, like humanity isn’t already drowning in them... They cannot create harmony, not with one side vanquished and nursing their wounds, lusting for revenge and drinking down their shame. The only harmony is the ephemeral calm of a single battle won in an endless raging war.

What can they teach us, then? But that we need to stop choosing sides. Stop dividing the already divided into smaller and smaller partitions. We are already tribes of one. But these unsustainable bonds are fulfilling our own prophecies that we must fight for peace, defeat the other who is never seen as us, dominate and destroy for financial and egotistical gains.

From principle to darkness – A Mani Stone stares back from the skin of a rippling lake – Its eyes, sadder than I remember… The trees are breathing heavily this warm green morning…