EARTH DAY WITH PEOPLE OF THE EARTH

wrench

Yesterday I searched for my own definition of nature, came to see the natural world as whatever is not created by the human mind, natural meaning left alone by human mind. This does not mean to dismiss the human mind, which, itself is natural as a tree, a rock, a squirrel. The human mind, a microcosm of the Creator is a creator itself. Mind created civilizations all around the globe down through time. Mind created an historical legacy of art from beginning to present. In Athens, Greece, 1972, I went to the museum of Greek art. I saw some of the very first carvings in soft stone of the first human depictions in that part of the world of self representation. They were static, arms straight down for centuries. The Greek renascence, the Classical Age, depicted the human form in motion, in time. Art is one activity of the human mind, philosophy too, that a good case can be made for to include them as the same as the natural world. Plato continues to be as relevant to the human condition as Michelangelo and Matisse. Much of our own human behavior is natural as donkey behavior, or chimpanzee behavior, cat behavior. I believe it is that part of self, the natural world part, that I have aspired to find in adult life. To do it, I've had to separate myself from the games of the human mind like social climbing, making money as an end in itself, identifying with the most expensive house, car and clothes affordable, and the right people. That's the zone I consider unnatural; therefore, the world. The mind likes to attach itself to things as expressions of self. Of course mind is attached to things because things are creations of the mind. A rubber ducky, somebody's mind created it. God creates life, the whole cycle from birth to death, whereas creations of the human mind begin their process of entropy upon creation. I hesitate to use the word God, because its meaning varies from individual to individual, but it's the same with a lot of words.

ross

My way of living the natural world in human society is to have my right people be the people I naturally resonate with in varying degrees. Several years ago I decided to trim my associations down to the people I care about who care about me. I have enough people in my life I care about who care about me that I don't have room for gamers. When somebody starts gaming me, it's a very short time before it's a game of one, bouncing a ball off a wall. I quit playing bridge not long after catching on and finding it a fascinating game I believed I could learn well enough in a few years to become a player. But the temperaments of bridge players was something I couldn't handle. When I got cussed by my partner for playing the wrong card, I stood up, announced I will never play another game of bridge the rest of my life and left the table. How are we going to finish the game? I don't know, that's yours to figure out. My hillbilly blood shining through, back when I didn't know I had hillbilly blood, and sure as hell wouldn't have told anybody if I knew it. Blood is natural. I believe it is natural when somebody gets in my face cussing me to do something about it right now, whatever it takes, least violent recourse first, unless it calls for putting the individual on the ground. You don't have to be a fighter to be able to do that real easy. Just turn on the mode Justin calls survival mode when he's in a fight, when you do whatever it takes. Our feelings are natural as our bones. I'm recalling my friend Jr Maxwell in his 80s telling me, You have to go with your feelings. Another time he said, Patience is everything. He was a welder, a tractor mechanic, a sawmiller, heavy-equipment operator, farmer, bluegrass banjo picker and singer, husband in grief without his wife, a man of the real thing wisdom, who looking back over his life assessed himself a fool. I called him, in my mind, the wise fool. He used mind for a tool, for figuring out how to fix things. Money was what you needed to meet expenses, the rest of it was living your life, enjoying talking with friends around the wood stove in the tractor shop, enjoying playing bluegrass on weekends wherever the band played.

 

zak

 

Had to make a town run today for cat litter and gas for the car. Stopped at the Exxon station for four gallons, 80 miles. Walking from the pump to the station to pay, I saw Doris putting gas in a car for a woman I didn't know. I spoke to Doris, the woman started to drive off. Doris started drumming the trunklid with the palm of her hand and hollering for the woman to stop. She stopped. She was up in years. Inside, paying Doris, I said, That's me in a year or two. She said, I'm afraid I'm gonna be there too. It was an amusing moment, but it was not funny--if we live long enough, we will each have such lapses. It was a moment of empathy both Doris and I were feeling. I'm glad we spoke of it. I was thinking this is what I love about country people. Doris knew the woman and knew she could not put gas in her car, went out to work the pump herself. I just now heard the yipping of a pack of coyotes in the donkey meadow. I jumped and went out the door hollering GIT, loud like the giant that can kill you by looking at you. I had to holler several times. Each time I hollered, one or two stopped, until after half a dozen or more monster roars they quit. One stayed behind. It sounded hurt. But their yipping sounds like they're screaming in pain anyway. It continued to squeal for quite awhile after all the others were quiet. I hope Jenny nailed one. If she did, word will have run through the pack by now that donkeys fight back. I don't know how Jenny responds to coyotes, but I do know they scare her and Jack. It tickled me to show Jenny and Jack my psychic power over the coyotes. When the ice cream man brays, the coyotes scatter. After attempting to frighten coyotes by clanging shovels together or clanging pots and lids, I learned quickly they paid these noises no mind. But holler GIT in a bold monster voice, it gets their attention. They know it's the monster that lives in the barn. I don't mind the donkeys having coyote experience. Donkeys can kill coyotes, but Jack and Jenny don't know it yet. A highway of trails the night animals use runs just the other side of the donkey meadow. The night animals know two donkeys are living here by now.      

 

harry

 

I stopped by the tractor shop, Maxwell Equipment in Whitehead, to breeze with the fellers, smoke cigarettes and talk. It was Jr's shop, which Ross has now. Ross and Jr were friends since Ross was a child like Justin and I have been friends since he was a child. Ross is the natural next one to keep Jr's shop going. Zak went to UNC Chapel Hill in philosophy and makes pottery at home. He has a short-legged black and white dog named Rimbaud. Harry is a retired Army and Air Force jet and helicopter mechanic. Harry gets so much in retirement, he doesn't need any more money, so he hangs at the shop and works all day for something to do. All three of them have fast minds good at taking IQ tests, putting round pegs in round holes. Every job that comes in is something to do the first time. They use their minds figuring out as they go. All three were involved in work today they had to focus close attention to, so I left them to work without distraction and walked around with the camera. They know I stay out of the way. I've known the shop for so many years, it's as comfortable as being at home. I remember sitting in wooden chairs with Jr gazing at the cars and trucks going by outside the big garage door, talking for hours. These are people devoid of pretensions. None of them is going kiss anybody's ass to get ahead. In New Age speak, you might say they're grounded. All three are from here, all three from families that have been here a long time. They're Appalachian Americans, hillbillies, and wouldn't have it any other way. We are each very different people who share a respectful memory of Jr Maxwell and a love for these hills, would rather live poor here than rich someplace else. We are all people who have withdrawn from what we take for a fake society and live our lives the way we want to. Patti Smith sings in my head, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. These are people I value, people I look up to. I see them natural human beings as opposed to correct or right or best. I call them good people. Some may not. I don't care. I present them as examples of people I am drawn to who live closer to the earth than to the world.

 

found art

 

 

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THE PATRIARCHY IS OVER

 

the red squirrel outside my window

Lying in bed this morning after waking, I felt like I had a penetrating insight into the nature of God, and by now it's gone. I did not write it down and it went away. I've seen a news report recently saying brain science is discovering the brain is a microcosm of the universe. It sounds outrageous, but how could it be otherwise? A galaxy is a moving spiral. Planets go around one of the galaxy's stars, all of them spinning like cosmic tops. Though we're unconscious of the spiral motion going on all the time, we see it in cigarette smoke rising from an ashtray. It is in water swirling down the drain. North of the equator it turns to the right. South of the equator it turns to the left. Water flows in spirals in rivers, creeks, pipes, wherever it flows. An old tree in the forest dead for a very long time is a vertical column that is a spiral. Our bones have spiral grain. It is water flow that creates our bodies, meaning to me that we are the same as water running in a river, composed of spirals to the tips of our hair. Since everything in the universe is in motion, this tells me the universe is in motion too. A spiral motion the way galaxies flow in spirals, like planets twirl through space in spirals around a moving star, itself in a spiral. I suspect this explains, too, why spirals figure so much in ancient art. We live in spirals and we are spirals, though at our mentally developed level it is too subtle for us to notice. There was a time I was reading in a self-help art book, finding myself totally uninterested. One thing I found in the early part of the book, the only part I read, an exercise to make a spontaneous drawing every day for a period of time. I used colored markers. All I ever drew were spirals. I said, Why only spirals? Because spirals happened. I tried to go against it and drew some rectangles and squares by intent. Next day a spiral. I told myself to draw a profile of a face. I drew a spiral. I stopped doing it after more than a month because I only drew spirals. I wondered if it was telling me I was passing into a new stage in inner growth, like grow into this. I tried to find psychological or spiritual meaning in making spirals every day, not interested in drawing anything else. I found none. Learned not to question so much.

In the last several days or few weeks I've been focusing on the silliness of drawing conclusions. Everything is in motion and every non-thing is in motion. A momentum carries us through time and keeps everything in the flow. Sometimes it seems futile to me to paint still images. A stopped moment, like a photograph, a thousandth of a second in ongoing time. Continuous motion is the nature of life. How does a still image deal with that? Or even how does a moving picture do it? Dance and music perhaps honor the continuous motion that is time. It's by earth's motion in the solar system that we measure time. Time is a measuring tape we use attempting with a finger to outline a square on the surface of a river. That's about how well our minds are able to "grasp" reality, the reality that is in motion, that, like water, when the flow is stopped it makes a powerful lake that will break  violently through the force holding it back. Like in Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, building a wall to suppress the feminine, the feminine goes insane, breaks down the wall and the whole house. This continent and the South American continent had a lot of people living on them for 13,000 years. White man came with white man's insane belief system of superiority over all living beings and in a few hundred years has destroyed both continents. The Amazon rain forest will be desert probably before the end of this century, as most likely the western half of USA will be desert, too, if not the whole continent. This was done in attempts to stop the perpetual motion of life itself. The "primitive" (meaning first, not stupid) people who lived tribally lived in continual presence of the spirit of life, honored its laws, observed its subtle energies. White man comes along like a legion of army ants and destroys everything, even unto self. It has been the nature of civilization all along to deny the feminine, Grandmother Earth.

 

 

 

We've just completed 6,000 years of patriarchy, before which was 6,000 years of matriarchy. My feeling sees the Adam and Eve story a mythological (I don't mean false) story of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. As we humans have done all along when a new belief system takes hold, genocide breaks loose against the people living in the old way. I'd guess about everything from the matriarchy was destroyed with the genocide. Goddess figurines have been found in Turkey among Neolithic ruins. The Old Testament genocides were over the change from the Age of Taurus, Baal the Bull, to the Age of Aries, the sacrifice of sheep. Next, Pisces the fish, the symbol of the Christ. The Christians did their very best to eliminate the Hebrews of the Age of Aries. We are moving now into the Age of Aquarius. Our belief systems are changing fast going into this new Age. How did the song go? Peace, love and understanding. It's about time. Aquarius is taking us into the time of masculine and feminine in balance. This is what women's liberation is about, bringing us collectively into balance. In my personal assessment, women will be actively engaged in everything. The wrinkles are not yet ironed out. We have a large number of women artists at least the equal of the men. Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin in visual art. Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov, all three with recently released collected poems. And they're not the only ones. It was a gradual change from the time of George Eliot writing under a man's name to Jane Austin to Gertrude Stein to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, to now when there are as many successful women writers as men. This is the balance of Aquarius. Like white men are freaking all over the country around an enword president, hate boiling to the surface again. Boys are taught from birth to dismiss women. It is male culture from the core outward to dismiss women. Patriarchy. It has only been a little over a century that women have been allowed educations and careers. In times when men were largely educated, at least to some degree, the women were not educated at all. It follows that educated men as well as uneducated men would feel superior to women, add to it white man's need to be superior to all else and justification by the great patriarchal text, the Bible, women didn't stand a chance in white man world. It's the same in Asian, African, Middle Eastern.

 

 

 

The whole world is going through at least a century-long upheaval brought on by new cosmologies, belief systems, the old ones disproven, disregarded, done. Elizabeth Warren has the best mind of anyone in our government. I don't want her for president. Republicans would nail her to the cross. They have only contempt for intelligence and they hate it in a woman even worse than they hate it in an enword. USA is the cutting edge of the ship of civilization in this time of putting aside discriminations based in collective judgment for a very long time. The wars over the last century have been burning off the hate generated by traditions all over the earth breaking down and changing, traditional cultures everywhere fading away as the old people die out. Hate radio and tv in America is bringing the hate among us to the surface, alas, very dangerously. But hate is by nature dangerous. I heard Laurens van der Post say in an interview, "Evil is always in a hurry." It resonated when I heard it. Over the last few years I feel like I have found my flow and am happily flowing with it. Somebody comes along in a hurry and it rattles me. I get in a hurry and it feels like I jumped my track. I'd come to distrust hurry in others and self by the time I heard van der Post's interview. I felt like he was someone who had found his own flow. The prophecies say that after this time of war we're in, a thousand years of peace is next, after which comes another period of burning off hate, then hate will be gone from the earth and it will be peace ever after. This is why I call myself an apocaloptimist, meaning I see everything going to shit, then by surprise everything turns out all right. Makes a good story. A thousand years ahead we'll look back at this time as something like the medieval period seems to us now. And the history of this time won't be anywhere near accurate. The issue I had with history all the way through school was it gave no importance to the everyday lives of people living in the time who were not very well off. Possibly, this is the role of art as history, to cover the life spirit history bypasses.

 

 

 

 

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