Tag Archives: War of Love

Human Nation News

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It’s been a rough few years, and this past year has been the roughest yet in many ways. But it never has been easy, as Betony says in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Life isn’t easy, and nature is often brutal, pitiless. Humans make it harder than it has to be most of the time, though.

I’ve been thinking about doing Human Nation News (HNN) since 2003 or 2004, but I guess it needed to stew a bit. The idea was basically that we are all here on this One Planet, in the vast cavernous space around us, and we have come to the point where we must recognize we are One People. The Human Nation. The purpose was to write about this nation, focusing on our commonalities through story. To connect us through the stories of people everywhere.

This was way too broad, though–made even more broad when I set up the fraternal-twin websites of Handmade Shoes and HNN. Gestating in the same womb, but each from its own zygote. Handmade Shoes is soul musing, a journal, a place for dreams and for sorting through my life and finding my way. HNN is more outward-facing but still firmly planted in soul soil. I’ve been dabbling in here for a few years, testing the waters and allowing myself space free from others’ eyes for the most part. Things do need darkness to grow sometimes. Even the trees, who love the sun, will tell you that.

Back in the early 2000s when I went deep into the darkness of my own mind and soul, propelled by the accumulated and ongoing insults of life with humans, I also went into the woods. Nature, who offered me succor and magic all through my childhood, once again became prominent in my daily life, and as I walked outside with my dogs (first Heidi, now Lucy) daily around the neighborhood and every weekend at Thacher State Park, I became friends with the beings we encountered. One tree in particular, an old maple at Thacher, became a “someone” to me, and I greeted her with joy each time we passed by. Over the years I would often stop and talk to this great being, and when I was feeling utterly lost I would come right up to her and wrap my arms around her and cry, letting out all the poison.

This tree did not mind. In fact, I felt that she appreciated my attention and talking and even tears. Until, after many years of greeting this being and talking to her and loving her, I was once again in a very dark place (I know the dark places well) when I visited her. I put my hands on her trunk and my forehead too, and said, “I feel so bad,” and felt that badness all through me, in all its possible meanings, from all the accumulated and ongoing insults of living with humans and being a human. The tree, this magnificent old being, took me down deep into her roots, into the darkness where the creatures of the dark live and never see the light. There she told me not to be ashamed of the darkness. She told me darkness feeds Life.

Over all these years wandering in the woods I have come to understand that the Human Nation is one among many other nations Here on Earth–which goes against my indoctrination, which says humans are the ones that matter on this planet, we are the smartest, we are the conscious ones, the most important ones. We alone of all living beings have Soul, and all the other beings on Earth are for our use. Our use.

Except we treat “other” humans as though they were expendable/beneath notice and, often, as though they are there for our use. To make profit off them. Within our own groups, even the smallest groups, we treat certain members as though they do not matter as much as other members, effectively rubbing them out.

Human history is very dark, filled with brutality that has its source in a concept of power as physical (and physical wealth is an extension of physical power). The atrocities that have been carried out upon our own species in the quest for power have never been adequately healed because the victims have been obliged to get back in the game or perish: a game whose rules are defined by those who have managed to grab power over others. Unresolved trauma gets passed through the generations, leading to perpetuation of brutality through retribution and acting out patterns of abuse upon those who are physically and economically weaker.

But something has been happening. The darkness has been coming up to be acknowledged and healed, in my personal life and in the world. Concurrently, a reemergence of the consciousness of our interrelatedness with one another and all of life on Earth has been gaining clarity and force–connecting direct back to the true source of power: the place where we all ultimately connect.

Now, after all these years, I’ve decided that Human Nation News is to be an exploration of the re-emerging consciousness that we are all interconnected–not only all humanity but all living beings. This includes the compassionate observation of what comes up to be healed and let go as we dismantle the old physical power paradigm and embrace the life-giving power that resides within each of us. It is also a battle cry in the eternal War of Love, sending dispatches out to humanity in the name of all life Here on Earth. Calling to all who feel their innate value and who understand that each human possesses this innate value regardless of their position in the current crumbling hierarchies. Calling to all who, conscious of their own innate value as living beings, also recognize the innate value of all living beings.

Escarpment Trail, Catskills, 42.20004, -74.05873 to trail head. June 2019.



Rocks

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In Memoriam.

“Rocks” is a reference to the Jewish custom of leaving rocks on someone’s grave, in remembrance. “Rocks” is a place to re-member those whom I have loved or admired, or who have done good service in Thee Old Cause. (I am not Jewish, although I feel an affinity with Jews and if I had to choose a religion I would be a Jewish atheist.) I first learned of this custom from the movie, Schindler’s List, in which the survivors and their families lined up to place rocks on Schindler’s grave. It has always stuck with me.

Today, on the hunter’s moon, October 2018, I’d like to remember my professor, Arthur Clements. I took a course with him in fall 1993 that wrapped together Medicine, the New Physics, Mysticism, Poetry, and damn–D.H. Lawrence! I’d never read Lawrence before, and we didn’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover either. We read The Man Who Died. It was a great class. He was both fierce and compassionate–if you didn’t read the material, he might kick you out of class, but if you did he would listen to you, even if you said strange things, and take you seriously. I contacted Art in 2003 because I was writing again, and we talked a few times on the phone. He was dying of cancer then. In the spring of 2004 I got an email from his companion–that is what he called her, which seemed to me both cozy and maybe a little distancing for a lover–asking me if I would be willing to speak at his memorial, that he had wondered if I would in his last days. So I wrote the following piece and drove to Binghamton, where I stood, and shook, and read. One last lesson.

Art and Life

I took one of Arthur Clements’ classes in the fall of 1993, my second semester at Binghamton University. It was not an easy class, and I regard it as formative. I am still learning the lessons he laid out for us then, for, as so often happens with a good teacher, I understood what he was talking about while there, in his class and steeped in the material, but it has taken me years to apply it. I am still weaving it in, and I suppose I always will be—because the subject Art concerned himself with was far more than academic; it was Life.

Allow me to give you an example. Our final paper was to be 16 to 20 pages, discussing the works of Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Galway Kinnell. We were to “find a theme tying them together—what is common, what is distinctive, and how they distinctively express what they have in common.” A difficult task indeed—one which I worked very hard to fulfill. On the last day of class, before we handed our papers in, Art told us we had a choice: we could tell him not to count our paper, in which case he would automatically give it an A, or we could tell him to make it count, in which case we took our chances on the grade it received. I still remember the mingled fear and hope of that moment when I gave up a guaranteed A in favor of an honest appraisal of my work.

This is what I am grateful for—he took pains to elicit the very experience of being awake and alive that we were studying in these authors. He tried to show us that every moment we have a choice to either make ourselves comfortable or take the opportunity to push our boundaries, defy convention, give up the standard measures of success. “The object,” he once told us, “is to live intensely, feel intensely, love intensely—happiness is not a state of constant comfort and ease of soul.”

It is therefore with conviction that I can say to those who are feeling pain in the wake of Art’s passing: he would want you to embrace that pain and see it for the gift it is—another opportunity to experience the fullness of life, here and now.

April 2004

Arthur Clements

“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.” ~Rumi

October 10, 2016

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There’s a foul wind blowing across the land–
Hold on to your good nature, my friends.

I felt it keenly this weekend, and all day Saturday the phrase, “a foul wind is blowing” kept repeating in my head, even as I walked through the woods. The peaceful woods, where I go every chance I get to wash myself clean of the things I pick up that I wish I hadn’t. A foul wind is blowing, a foul wind is blowing…an evil spell that has affected us all. The id of humanity has woken and is running amok. A meanness is in the air–has been building for years but it seems to have crescendoed in the past few months, dragging even the most mild-mannered, careful people into its maelstrom.

Other thoughts were tracing themselves in my head this weekend, too, though. The first-year burdock that had grown almost exactly in the middle of the path–spindly and beaten down but still there, spreading its leaves–made me think of the random nature of life. A burdock growing here is stepped on and struggles to survive, while a burdock sown a few feet over, off the path, thrives. No blame can be attached to the burdock on the path–it was born where it was born, and according to the law of nature does its best to live. No blame. Just the luck of the draw. The spindly burdock isn’t inferior, and the thriving burdock isn’t superior.

The thing is, science is finding that plants are part of a complex network, and will help one another through that network, sending out nutrients and warnings about danger, and even killing off invading plants. So I’m thinking about all this and talking to my husband, saying that since all of life is connected, it stands to reason that humans are part of this network just as much as trees and plants–except we’ve been doing our best to destroy it instead of participating in the give and take. And Bob says, “Yeah, how strange it would be if I got a cut on my hand and the cells around it said, ‘Oh well, too bad. Tough luck. You’re on your own.’ Then my hand got infected and became gangrenous and I had to amputate it.” (Well, he didn’t say anything about gangrene and amputation, but I like the effect.)

So the thought of “no blame” attached to those who are sown in difficult places–such as ghettos, or Syria–and the thought of the network of life–how the refusal to participate in the give and take of life breaks the network–came together in my head alongside the “a foul wind is blowing” mantra and produced the little almost-rhyme couplet above.

A foul wind is blowing across the land–
Hold on to your good nature, my friends.

It is time for a full-on War of Love. This war has been building for a very long time, too–you can read about it in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Homer, the prose of Maya Angelou and Emerson, the fiction of Philip Pullman and George Eliot; you can hear it in the music of Beethoven, the Beatles, the Wood Brothers; see it in the art of Van Gogh and O’Keefe; study it in the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, laugh and gasp in pain and love and horror, swimming in it being transformed by it with Sherman Alexie or Leslie Marmon Silko. Of course this is just a taste, a taste of all the voices of humanity that have, over centuries, sung their souls for Thee Old Cause, the War of Love.

Don’t expect it to be easy, but take a step and another. Get through a moment and another, always turning toward love. Go home and be kind. Listen to your children when they talk. Watch them when they play. Cook wholesome, real food. Take care of yourself, love yourself, and love this beautiful world. Go outside and behold the beauty of sky, trees, wind, sun. Turn off the TV, throw away the fashion magazines and gossip rags and read again–really read. Read those you can trust and discard the rest. You’ll know who you can trust because it will nourish your soul. It will strengthen your bond with the goodness in yourself and others. Love may be roused to anger but it never counsels hatred. Ever.