A Call to Wealth - and to your Input

Hola Lisa,

     Thanks for your comments.  Yes, that's it precisely.  At times I'm appalled at how little real wealth there is in the U.S.  Everybody is eating out of corporate culture and, like you say, it's not just their food, it's their songs.  I call the U.S. citizens “the children of forgetting.”  No ancestral connection to and memory of the particularities of how their human rhythmicity got nurtured to where it's at.  Ever read “A Language Older Than Words” by Derrick Jensen?  It is an amazing book overflowing with exceptional insights into this culture.  One of them is that the U.S. culture operates very much like a culture of abuse.  Denial, wishful thinking, etc.  This is ripe soil for simplistic bullshit like “The Secret,” the new-fangled version of “see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.”  I think it should receive a prize from the CIA for “consciouness suppression” or “mass stupefaction.”

          And there's very much a sense in this culture that we don't really want to be known to each other because deep down we are foreign to each other and speaking to each other in this Americanized “English” to which our bodies have no ancestral connection.  We meet in the mind and the heart is left out in the cold waiting, the body is even further removed, the feelings. 

         And, of course, there is the history of this country emerging in this land through the finely honed art of cultural genocide, not only upon the native peoples who were here tens and hundreds of thousands of years before Europeans showed up, but also the cultural genocide amongst those Europeans, now “the Children of Forgetting.”

         And though we can, perhaps, watch “Dances with Wolves” and bemoan a bygone era and bygone freedoms, the story that still remains untold, unfilmed, unacknowledged is the story of  a “Sven Larsen,” for example.  Imagine a shining, vigorous, optimistic and resolute young man from the Norwegian countryside who decides to find his future in that mythic land of freedom whose very name rings with bright promise:  “America!”   I'd like to tell the story of Sven the bachelor greeted at Ellis Island by a Norwegian-speaking customs and immigration officer and gang-pressed directly into the U.S. Army in a Norwegian-speaking platoon so that he could ride the train directly out to the Dakotas and wage war against peoples with whom he had no quarrel.  I'd like to tell the story of that man broken by the U.S. Army and the cynical slogans of this country, ( “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave” seems to be amongst the most cunning in terms of guaranteeing that “Freedom” and “Bravery” will be reduced to belonging to a government killing gang) finally getting his “5 acres and a government mule” to go bust the frozen sod of South Dakota and still hold the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota nations at bay while scrabbling for the only recompense for his shattered dreams and humanity:  the land.  I'd like to tell the story of the Great Depression and the creation of the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Reserve Bank and how they finally hooked all the descendants of all the Svens across the Midwest and the West to accept loans to “modernize agriculture” and hook these independent, autonomous communities into the petrochemical and financial addiction at last, only to break them of the land their ancestors fought for with an even colder and more anonymous, self-justifying calculation that what the Native peoples were subject to. 

         And now, off to find more “Indian Country” in Iraq and to celebrate the destruction of masculinity, of humanity, of femininity, to salute murderers as “defenders of the nation” as the Idiot Empire guts its own people upon the altar of eternal debt and, thus, servitude. 

         And there is a great lesson here which can only be appreciated in the press of flesh to flesh, in the eye looking at the eye, at my animalness being in the presence of your animalness and the willingness, through the words, to sit through all of our own and each others' imaginings and come home to the soul texture of the tenderness that we are - and how that tenderness is or isn't welcomed within the parameters, rituals and institutions of our daily lives. 

          And for that to happen HERE, I think the U.S. dollar needs to collapse.  People still hang their hats on the hope that an Obama, a Clinton or a McCain will use coercion to make life better.  Every four years oppression gets a new poster child, a new charmer, and the Children of Forgetting at large fall for the same old hoax, unwilling to examine the coercion as long as they are beneficiaries.  And over 40% of U.S. people work for some form of government; i.e. their salaries are paid for through public plunder.  We've made heros of the beneficiaries of coercion:  teachers indoctrinating children and breaking their natural learning capacity in government schools, Government contractors, etc.  We will never divest ourselves willingly from the edifice out of which we feed ourselves out of parasitism, out of coercion and out of denial.  The whole damn structure must and will come crashing down and then we will rediscover common decency, everyday brilliance and what the lack of it costs us. 

      And I am convinced that we can then rise up once again to greatness.  We can rediscover individuality and that it is in the respect of particularity, and not the suppression of it, that we can rediscover the strength of a connection and exchange that is enriched by the diversity of our gifts.

      Thank you for your consideration and conversation.

         Hoka Hey!  It's a good day to die, and yet I am blessed with living another day.

Dear Carla, no news, no coffee, I loved both of your comments and, yes, our comments crossed in cyberspace.  Who is the “us” that “ours” belongs to?  Tell the termites that it's “our” termite hill.  Respect starts with differentiation.  Yes we are a Oneness AND we are a Oneness at play in differentiation. 

There is so much of your perspective that I love:  reaching across the counter to say “hi” to the cashier, reaching beyond our pockets, beyond our metaphors to the rumpled indescriptability of you, of me, to the willingness to laugh.

Carla, thank you for the invitation that you are.  Where is ABQ?  Sounds like Albuquerque or Abiquiu New Mexico, but your profile says Maine.  I want to hear more of the community of artisans and agriculturalists that you live in and the connectedness that naturally arises from munching the apples off of your neighbor's trees

And the secret formula:  I am working on that (and not-working at that too), because wealth is what we've abrogated to a monetary system that destroys it.  Song is what we've abrogated to a music industry that dispossesses and “professionalizes” music and leaves the “common wo/man” questioning whether they “are” a musician. 

And right now it's just a few good friends and one-on-one conversations with them, having their kids making funny faces with me and enjoying dimensionalities of hairless simian that we are in pure deliciousness…  Morning Star speaks eloquently to much of my frustration:  this absolute intolerance for or willingness to “be a pain in the ass” which seems a hallmark of life in parts of the U.S. that I've lived in.  In Latin America people are continually leaning into each other, literally and figuratively.  The webs of indebtedness and mutuality are complex and not expected to be “paid off” and made clean as they are here.  The embrace of individuals in their pesky individuality, with the attendant nicknames that people call you, and the ones they use for you when you're not around, makes for this rich mix of what I call hyperindividuated tribalization. 

     And I engage with people here and everybody's all about their very individual projects but not very interested really in the individuals they'd like to get on board?  Damn!  we are super-fine creatures worthy of relishing. 

      How can I reliish you more?  How is your circle with the Peace Chambers?  How is that medicine working for living beings seeking reconnection?  How is it working for you?  How's your son?  How's your snake?  How are your toes and have you had them rubbed deliciously recently?

       I am happy when I receive your greeting - way better than morning coffee - and THAT, dear Carla is

      mmmmm……mmmmmm
             mmmmm……mmmmm
                     mmmmmm….mmmmm

DELISH! 

    Just like you!  Right?     ;  )

Dear Carla,  thank you for your sumptuous offerings amongst which I am still feasting upon:

“without the friction of duality ONE ness cannot have an orgasm, and without orgasm there is no creation. Duality is the playground.”

It is so good to romp and roll with you on the playground!  I am wishing you all the bright, succulence you already are.  Look out for my chopsticks!

HAHAHAHAHa!

Bright greetings to Grandfather Joseph and I hope your hearts are all overflowing in springtime desert birdsong!

It would be easy to think that just learning Spanish would change something - but then listen to the Spanish as spoken by the Spaniards and their attitudes and you'll know right now it ain't that easy.  As a half-latin, half-slav with French as my mother tongue, it would be only too easy to agree with you; except  for my friend Julian Skinner.

What does Julian have to do with this?  Well, Julian, aside from being a Zen master in two lineages, a very fun and insightful person, also comes from England.  Now I've met my share of “limies” in my travels and, although I like their “taking the piss out” of everything sort of humor, I haven't found their English speech particularly enchanting. 

But with Julian it was altogether a different manner.  Julian is the first and only person whose speech made me feel directly the ancestral magic of the English language.  In French we are very, very aware of that.  Language, for us, is like a treasure, a gift, a way to not just converse but engage in profound, sensual, playful, philosophical, historical intercourse and, if you're my lover, if I can't have roundly and fully satisfying conversation with you it's doubtful that our love-making is going to feel nearly as full and juicy, playful and deep as I know is possible. 

And if the U.S. adopted Spanish they'd do it just like they did English:  half-ass, utilitarian, bare-bones, and with a devil-may-care attitude to the true meanings of such words as anarchist (no ruler), radical (goes to the root of things), etc.   In the U.S. there isn't the love of, and reverence for language that ancient cultures have.  We are a nation of the offspring of barely-literate foreign peasants.  An entire nation of people with very little cultural legacy, even in their native lands, mostly due to the Christianization and resultant cultural genocide of indigenous Europe. 

I've always been amazed at how little U.S. people read of history, philosophy, and how ignorant they are of the history of this land.  It's amazing to me.  Truly, if we revisit this wealth question perhaps there is a linguistic element at the root of it.  How do we reweave a rich social fabric of engagement with life and each other when the language that people are using is so impoverished and “mediated” by corporate culture? 

How do we re-en-chant the world?  Re-en-chant all of the aspects of our lives, our anatomies, our surroundings, our topography?  I don't think that this is so hard.  I see a culture arising of people for whom words become sumptuous morsels of love offerings they show each other with, weaving delightful new worlds for us to inhabit.

Where do U.S. people learn their songs?  their history?  etc.?  Surely there is tremendous variety and there ARE people with roots and still living in natural human communities, however tenuous in light of the separation of land-working people from their land thanks to the predatory property tax system and the resultant commoditization of everything. 

At the same time we are also faced with new horizons in imagination, such as what we're experiencing with gaia, such as the issues of a knowledge-based economy and resultant retribalization discussed so eloquently in The Sovereign Individual. 

And my question about reweaving rich wealth networks is not about “saving” anyone or anything.  Nothing that grandiose.  It's more about how much fun, adventure, love, and richness can small groups of 5-7 people share together and with the many people they interact with.  How absolutely delicious can it be to share any sort of togetherness, acknowledgment and PLAY!?  What manner of delicious song, poetry, courtship, frolic, business, creativity, housebuilding, community-building, etc. can we come up with?  And how can we make it simple yet embracing complexity, spontaneous yet embracing foresight and execution? 

Thank you all for enriching this conversation.  I feel like the luckiest man in the world, surrounding with sumptous, bright, luscious women gifting me with luminous wisdom!

Carla,

        I call myself a cultural mechanic but that doesn't quite get to the gist of the luminous mischief I enjoy.  Ran around with medicine people and was apprenticed to a coyote doctor since age 19.  Might explain some of the wild perspective.  Gaia sucks my posts whole sometimes, so I've just gotten in the habit of writing in a separate document and then copying here.

       I look forward to hearing from you and am sorry your post got inhaled.  I know how much that sucks, sometimes a rewrite just loses the fullness of the intentional moment.  Is it that way for you?

       Some day I'd like to talk with you up close and personal about your adventures with the Peace Chambers.  BTW, if you're ever in the Denver area I've got a nice futon couch you can stay on and you're welcome by.

       Wishing you deliciousness,  (i.e. it can be SOOO good to be what you is!)

                   O

Dear Carla,

            Thank you for your rich comment on my What is Wealth post and for moving the rocks around your sacred Peace Chamber, singing your sweet medicine into the lusciousness of openings into Earth.  I thank you also that you have listened to what I wrote and I’m glad that perhaps a smidge of the wisdom that comes naturally to Tiwa-nation people who are paying attention is perhaps reflected in my post.

            I am half-Walloon and half-Polish and had the good fortune of growing up in a family which pays attention to the world and remains profoundly attentive to the stories which weave our human sojourn into being.  Our European history. 

            I haven’t sought Native American people out but when I have run into them and become friends with some of them, being around them simply feels a lot like being around my Walloon people.  In 2006 I was down on the Taos reservation and my soul and spirit was absolutely fed, watered and feasted in the presence of the people in the old pueblo, many of them now shopkeepers.  I spent the whole day there swapping stories, laughing, flirting, and generally having a good time.  And, you know, I went to Taos and there were a lot of those shopkeepers reading books, reading history, tracking the movements of the world and of human beings.  You go to France or Belgium and it is this way:  people have this profound reverence that very high prices have been paid for the lessons available to us, prices in blood, shattered bone and babies, and the blood-curdling cries of women rendered by governmentalized gangs that know no tenderness for the Living.  So, for us, to read a book, to engage someone from another place in long, respectful, ambling, round conversation is a small price to pay for some wisdom that, handed down, planted in one’s own heart to grow and flourish in our own experience, might save one of our beloveds or one of theirs from the same horror that was spread upon these beautiful American continents and which has infested so much of the world, presently Baghdad and Basra. 

            Carla, I love what you say about “It seems to me that the way to feed this return to true wealth is to scoop up the mystery of life and plant each of our actions and goals and interactions inside of it.”    Yes!  How can I invite the full mystery of Life?  How can we enter into relationship fully, beginning with the mystery of our “selves,” tasting this Living-ness right here that has no name and is simply at play within the story of a self-imagined, self-languaged personality? 

            We are witness to changes that manifest the Beauty of the World, this beauty which devours all certainties and all of that which thinks that it can devour Life without feeding it in turn.  And if freedom and self-rule (starting with the individual) and community are so cheap and trite that they only serve as slogans for the 4th of July and the incessant celebration of militarization, then surely a people that cavalier with and ignorant of their own freedoms, their own legacy and our ancestral human aspirations might soon find themselves shackled and imprisoned and ruled into the most depraved debasement of their human spirit so that the value and the price paid for freedom, continually!, might once again be appreciated.  This is not prophecy, it is what happens in this world, and all too easily, one need only gaze about and become a little curious as to the fate of so many upon it. 

When I speak of monetary collapse, Carla, it sounds, as you say, “off the top,”  but talk to people from Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador or Zimbabwe and suddenly we see that it’ s not remote, abstract, or far off.  It’s happening in country after country.  Economies follow economic laws.  When a world has based its entire, global monetary system on debt (thus giving governments unlimited power to shackle their citizenry to servitude of debts both public and private, giving themselves unrestrained power in the governmental monopoly of violence-without-remedy) and the only way for the system to sustain itself is by the exponential increase of debt, then consequences are inevitable.  (Why the exponential increase of debt?  Because all the money in circulation is the principal on debt.  When you pay interest, you are grabbing currency that is principal on somebody else’s debt to pay yours, so the debt has to keep expanding with the resulting devaluation of every currency on the planet.)  Right now entire national economies fall in one fell swoop and then renegotiate their citizenry’s bondage with the World Bank and Intenational Monetary Fund for a larger slice of eternity.    Both Argentina and Ecuador saw their monetary systems collapse in the last 15 years and I have close friends from both of those places that I was in intimate contact with when their bank accounts got frozen, when they still had their jobs but there was no money to pay them with.  I also lived in Mexico shortly after the devaluation of the peso and the devastation and rediscovery that was wrought from that in a social structure that, prior to that, was hell-bent on becoming as “ gringo” as quickly as possible was impressive.  I was disappointed to discover that, now that their servitude has been renegotiated, they are back to hell-bent to destroying their Mexican legacy in exchange for a fraudulent U.S. dollar. 

Shortly after the peso devaluation I stayed with Zapotec friends whose economy was more based in their corn and beans and chiles and squash than in the money.  What did the devaluation mean for them?  Having to weave some of their indigenous clothes again and walking around with a few more patches on their pants.  But the wealth networks were still alive, though challenged given that the children were all being Mexicanized, evangelized by virulently infectious gringo evangelicals and enculturated into seeing little else in their ancestral culture than poverty which, of course, is all that remains once the living heart of song, science and relatedness is ripped out of the heart of these communities.  Then there are only smoky thatch-roofed houses perched on a muddy hillside with the evangelicals overpowering the birdsong with their dawn-to-dusk loudspeakers blaring the depressing Geez!-Us?  message.  (And they don’t know or care that the rabbi’s name was “Yehshuah” nor are they much inclined to consider that their own commandments say “Thou shalt not take His Name in vain.” To “take in vain” is to “consider without value, worthless.” ) To take a tribal medicine person’s name as worthless when they have entrusted that name to somebody who calls them teacher is so egregiously ridiculous that it alone should suffice to give one profound pause when it comes to Christianity.

            Monetary collapse in the United States will be powerful medicine and we will have to reweave true webs of economic connectedness such as those you have on the knees of Hatchet Mountain, there in that particular sweetness and economy (from oikonomia, Greek for “the administration of a household) of the Camden Hills which I would surely be privileged to know in its tenderness and ruggedness with you as my guide.  The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been warning the Federal Reserve Bank (privately owned, not Federal, no reserves) and the Treasury that U.S. monetary policy is following the model which led Argentina to collapse, except that the repercussions of the demise of the dollar will be global, not simply regional.  I’m sure that, seeing how astute they are, that they have well-wrought plans for the ensuing “emergency.” Tyranny loves emergency, it justifies every sort of oppression, viz  9/11/2001. 

            Although many people on gaia and in alternative forums have great ideas, many are either broke or employed by other people.  Although the United States has a tremendous entrepreneurial heritage, much of that was shattered subsequent to the dispossession of people’s lands during the Great Depression and the ensuing “New Deal” fomented by the leftist/fascist Roosevelt who played a whole nation into servitude, first of all driving them off their land and into the waiting hands of the mega-industrialists whose enterprises and market share were funded, regulated and protected by government, and secondly by confiscating their gold, thirdly by institutionalizing education, medicine, housing, welfare, etc.  Today over 40% of the U.S. population derives their income from the forceful takings of government.  The majority of the remainder are “employees,” hiring their lives out by the hour for somebody else’s purposes. 

            To reweave wealth networks implies, fundamentally, regaining control of our economic activity, gaining clear understanding of the monetary system we operate in, and moving forward consequently to secure our financial and economic existence.  Key to this is also developing learning nets that also generate cash.  Certainly all of my readers are moving forward on this path individually.  There is a path to synergized acceleration by having bright individuals whose particular adventures are compelling to others come together in a manner that reveals the natural collaborations and access to wealth powerfully, clearly and in a manner that is fun, profitable and liberates individuals together from economic drudgery. 

            I hear you, Carla, and Morningstar, and Victoria speaking of bringing this conversation into flesh and blood presence, where our songs, too, are invited, and learning to see each other not just in our fullness but emptiness as well.  This is the next step in building our Full Spectrum Tool Kit, because each of us has a small part of the puzzle.  It is in profoundly receiving each other’s individuality, supporting it, nourishing it and inviting it, that Life can then incorporate us into the body of a Greater Mutuality.  This is what I call Hyperindividuate Retribalization.  For just 5 or 10 or 20 of us to do this can be powerful beyond measure.  There is power in small numbers and deep connection, deep recognition and deep collaboration – not as forcing things to happen, but as becoming curious enough as to the natural invitation that each others is, and to discover our own connectedness and relatedness in ways which we don’t typically do, that all of a sudden it becomes apparent where the 1 ounce of effort delivers 10 tons of flourishing.  This is how nature works. 

            I have spent the last 5 years studying the economy, group dynamics and developing a method for re-energizing Natural Wealth Nets amongst groups of high-trust, high-affinity collaborators.  This model can be used for local collaboration as well as for collaboration amongst people who are geographically dispersed and has a focus of liberating people monetarily while accelerating and synergizing natural affinities for building and enhancing Living Wealth Systems. 

            I’d like to start having teleconference calls with friends on these topics with an eye to offering a 5 to 7-day event for 20-30 select individuals to explore collaboration and mutual discovery.  I have developed a program for going deep in discovery and implementation over a period of a year with collaborations extending beyond that. 

            The dawn of a new reality does not require any sort of major consensus.  It requires small, capable groups of individuals to activate fully the potential which exists between them, thus creating opportunities for work, study, discovery for others that will be naturally compelling to those yearning to live with dignity, honor, recognition, fun, and contribution to a growing, living, abundant adventure. 

Thank you Carla for keeping it juicy!