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November 2009 
What does sustainability mean for you?
Posted on Mar 25th, 2008
by 
Little Big O
Little Big O
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for March 25, 2008:
Sustainable, to me, means that which is willing to surrender form to nourish those forms which have sustained it. It is to recognize that continuity and contiguity are no respecters of persons, yet individuals can illuminate their paths and those of others with bright flashes of luminous extravagance, wisdom, calm, fierceness & purpose. Once we, as descendants of marauding tribes dispossessed of ancestral vocabulary and connectivity rediscover, reframe, remold a vocabulary and connectivity of our own making, then the possibility of Hyperindividuated Retribalization reappears.
Then I realize that there are no white people, black people, human beings, polar bears, glaciers, flowers - there is only Being and it is infinitely diverse and shimmering throughout the whole of it. It invites me to commune with it in its particularities which are extinguished as soon as I label it. In the same way, I am invited to commune with my no-self, i.e. to liberate myself from all imaginings of "self" and discover who this is that is now arising from a night's slumber, peeing in the pot, plucking out yesterday's leavings between my teeth with floss, beholding the birds come to feast upon my sill. I realize that I am sustained, that the nuclear warheads in their underground shafts are sustained, that the last speaker of an indigenous language, wisdom lineage, or storyteller tumbling to her grave is also sustained.
And then I am called to examine what It Is that is Sustain Able. What is able to sustain itself? And whereas, perhaps, the English word "sustain" might suggest permanence, I look at Being and, looking closely, behold a world that is never the same and makes no investment in our fantasies of continuity, quite the contrary, it delights in devouring form.
And so, as I behold this Bright Shimmering, this Apparition which beholds me in turn in the unitive enchantment of the Inescapable Female, pulling me with that tug of delight, eros, and uncertainty that drops, as if down my esophagus to the pit of my stomach, resting with weighty emptiness upon my pelvis, upon my balls -
- and I know that as surely as I was delivered from watery, female rhythmicity into the bop and shimmer of this watery world, so, too, this world shall yet deliver that which inhabits it to another.
This is sustainability, though her Form nourishes all things and we bask in the rhythm of her sensuality, to attempt to grasp it, the very attempt to "SAVE" which lies at the heart of the Romanized Christian paradigm is precisely that which undoes our connection to this rhythmicity. And this undoing, this disconnectedness, and all of our wondrous shenanigans, wars, festivals, meditations and terrors are like gas bubbles in the colon of Beingness.
What are you willing to feed? Be prepared to be devoured by Everything!
Life has no remedies, only feasts!
Then I realize that there are no white people, black people, human beings, polar bears, glaciers, flowers - there is only Being and it is infinitely diverse and shimmering throughout the whole of it. It invites me to commune with it in its particularities which are extinguished as soon as I label it. In the same way, I am invited to commune with my no-self, i.e. to liberate myself from all imaginings of "self" and discover who this is that is now arising from a night's slumber, peeing in the pot, plucking out yesterday's leavings between my teeth with floss, beholding the birds come to feast upon my sill. I realize that I am sustained, that the nuclear warheads in their underground shafts are sustained, that the last speaker of an indigenous language, wisdom lineage, or storyteller tumbling to her grave is also sustained.
And then I am called to examine what It Is that is Sustain Able. What is able to sustain itself? And whereas, perhaps, the English word "sustain" might suggest permanence, I look at Being and, looking closely, behold a world that is never the same and makes no investment in our fantasies of continuity, quite the contrary, it delights in devouring form.
And so, as I behold this Bright Shimmering, this Apparition which beholds me in turn in the unitive enchantment of the Inescapable Female, pulling me with that tug of delight, eros, and uncertainty that drops, as if down my esophagus to the pit of my stomach, resting with weighty emptiness upon my pelvis, upon my balls -
- and I know that as surely as I was delivered from watery, female rhythmicity into the bop and shimmer of this watery world, so, too, this world shall yet deliver that which inhabits it to another.
This is sustainability, though her Form nourishes all things and we bask in the rhythm of her sensuality, to attempt to grasp it, the very attempt to "SAVE" which lies at the heart of the Romanized Christian paradigm is precisely that which undoes our connection to this rhythmicity. And this undoing, this disconnectedness, and all of our wondrous shenanigans, wars, festivals, meditations and terrors are like gas bubbles in the colon of Beingness.
What are you willing to feed? Be prepared to be devoured by Everything!
Life has no remedies, only feasts!
Access: PublicTagged with: QaR, sustainability, planet, future, green, leaders, change, unitive enchantment, Inescapable Female, weighty emptiness
You've nailed something that has nudged me for a while, that construct that Earth is broken and needs fixing, or saving. Is she our decrepit little old Mother in her dotage, that needs our constant care and power of attorney?
Or is she the one I just meditated with, the Divine Woman/Mother, who feeds me energetically, with bounty, and vibrant energy, through my womb.
It goes without saying that I would behave with respect and appreciation, doing no harm.
But that is not true. I live a modern life unashamedly, and that kind of life is not sustainable.
I enjoyed the spirit of this.
And also my googled list of defintions of sustain reproduced in breif here
prolong:suffer: undergo;
nourish: provide with nourishment;
supply with necessities and support;
hold:
confirmIn conclusion I concur that perhaps the Idea is a myth with the possible exception of God, (who only really knows)
Feast On
yep, you nailed it, what i would have tried to say had i attempted this question..
why this human notion of “sustaining” anything? why not allow change to happen, rather than trying to prevent it or hurry it up? it's all gonna change whether we want it to or not. the new is born, grows old and dies, but leaves something new to take its place. something DIFFERENT, not the same. and our attempts to sustain anything, you are right, are nothing more than gas bubbles, maybe fun for a giggle or two, but gone as soon as they are experienced.
Thank you Carla and Shanti (and now Stacy - how'd you pop in there?) for your comments.
Yes, Carla, you live a modern life unashamedly and you’re right: it will not last. What does? Nor does living like a dinosaur. We are part of something way bigger than our imagined “bignesses.” Even that which we do is bigger than our own imagined doings.
When I come to know bodily that there is Only One Movement, then a world of possibility opens up that is way bigger than what I’d like to “fix.” See that man in the canoe napping on lazy desert rivers? Because he naps, the boat rocks, because the boat rocks, the heron flies a little further down the river, down where the white egrets that showed up in the Americas from Africa about 20 years ago, on their own. Because now that are 3 egrets and 1 great blue heron, the Colorado suckerfish splash. The raven, of course, proffers great, resounding comment bouncing off canyon walls as she circles on thermals loftily. Her shadow on the river makes the beaver slap his tail which makes frogs mating in Spring puddles feel a little more urgency to “get it on” and to let the world know with the song of their rhythmic odes to horniness, to life, to desert water, to puddles and tadpoles and the flower pollen inebriation. Beholding which, two canoeists feel inspired to sample their own waterinesses in the shade, …
The movement is Unitive. Who is moving? Who is the doer? Really? Look again? The world which you would save is YOU! You can dance it, you can bury it, you can heal it, you can heal it, you can love it and court it to jump up and live.
Let us realize that Death is the trickbag to fear that the West operates out of. What is death? What is life? Did you eat today? What did you eat? Was it dead? Did it make you alive? Maybe this whole explosively expansive universe is really the space between the nucleus and electron of a macrocosmic atom spinning in the colon, the womb, the mind, or under the left toenail of some Greater Beingness.
How would my life be if I wasn’t trying to save anyone, not even myself? How would yours? How’bout if I even refrain from saving you from wanting to save something! Ha, ha, ha! Are you laughing? Are you happy? How does Spring make you feel? How does having toes feel to you today? Are you scrumpshulating into the succulence of your Beingness?
Welcome to the Feast! All the dishes will be emptied, even after the feasters are cooked into the next round of dishes. Let’s enjoy our no-selves, let’s enjoy the planetary no-self that astounds us with roundness and warmth and wetness!
May we LIVE unabashedly and still enjoy our moments of bashfulness!
O
you so ROCK!!
thank you
Where did I go? I missed this response from you.
Unabashedly delicious.