A Day in the Life

 

"No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right
That is I think it's not too bad...

...Always, no sometimes, think it's me
But you know I know when it's a dream."

-Lennon/McCartney, Strawberry Fields

I love this pic of a Siberian shaman because I imagine I know exactly how he feels. I get this very strong feeling from it like he's saying, "I know I'm strange, stop looking at me!" In his line of work, probably if you never feel this way and if you never wonder whether you've simply gone mental, and you never feel uncomfortable about being profoundly weird, you're doing it wrong. No matter what, at some point or other I always question whether I've just gone round the bend. Who am I to say that I am right and consensus reality is wrong? Maybe I'm just defective in some way. 

And every time, I smile, say "yep, could be crazy," and turn right around and do it some more. That's the other thing that comes with the territory. You are willing to put it out there, risk yourself. Most people leave this sort of thing alone. You have to be willing.

The gentleman in the picture has a swell drum. I don't have a swell drum, I don't have a drum at all, I have sticks. ;)  Two nice chopsticks, like you would get at a chinese food place except without any lettering or anything, just two tapering sticks of blonde wood. 

I used them today during my... what do I call it? Thanksgiving I guess, thanking various beings, but it isn't an organized ritual but rather quite a jumble, several things happening. I pour a little vodka in the little offering vial and light a tea candle in the shrine. I start out beating a rhythm with the sticks, trying not to think about the rhythm, just letting it come out of me. I make a few requests, problems I am working on and need help with. I start either thanking or well-wishing various beings, but then the trance kicks in and I start getting flashes of stuff. I start or stop beating the sticks according to some inner urging. I never chant, I wouldn't know what to chant and I think words would get in the way. If I were to chant, I would chant only sounds, not words. I get flashes...

...torrent of yellow autumn leaves falling down almost like a waterfall, leaves spinning slowly in the air, as if the leaves were a silk fabric rippling in the breeze... feeling of mortality... maybe just an expression of me always feeling like I am running out of time...

...Bare-chested, sitting in the dry grass, someone is rubbing something on my muscled back... it's not my back, not my body, much stronger... paint on my face... smell of fragrant sage... face set in determination, a challenge...

...different flash, hospital, that smell. That sickly hospital smell. Nurse going about her business, just another day for her. Someone is in a bad way. Is it me? Someone else?

What are these things, these flashes? I piece together a guess on the first one, I'm(?) being prepared for a Sun Dance. I feel it like I am there, but I don't know that it was(?) me. I don't know that it is in time past, I only assume so. They still happen today. 

...What these flashes are trying to tell me is pretty much a total mystery... ...maybe nothing but static in the lines today.... ...noise in the Dreaming... ...they all know how to get my attention when they really want to...

...back to the present, finishing up my good wishes and thanksgivings. Depending on who they are, I either thank various beings for their help or send them well wishes or both. The list is heavily weighted with plants, some well wishes for a few animals, prayer for my cat, well wishes for the squirrels and birds and a request for forgiveness for bringing a new predator into their world. Cedar trees, common elm, cedar elm, fig tree, sycamore and live oak all get their thanks or well wishes as the case may be. In the case of known allies, holy things, or known helpers of some sort, it is always thanks. Cedar trees, live oak at the Hill, mother fig tree. In the case of "friends" it is well wishes. Thanks given to the spirits of air, the spirits of water. I remember a few people, many others that I should have included I forget to. Sticks beat or stay silent, when I beat them it feels like I am reaching for something but I never know what I am reaching for until I reach for it.

One way or another I wrap it up, blow out the candle, put away the sticks. Another day in the life of a weird person. 

"What is the difference between assent and denial?
What is the difference between beautiful and ugly?
What is the difference between fearsome and afraid?

The people are merry as if at a magnificent party
Or playing in the park at springtime,
But I am tranquil and wandering,
Like a newborn before it learns to smile,
Alone, with no true home.

The people have enough and to spare,
Where I have nothing,
And my heart is foolish,
Muddled and cloudy.

The people are bright and certain,
Where I am dim and confused;
The people are clever and wise,
Where I am dull and ignorant;
Aimless as a wave drifting over the sea,
Attached to nothing.

The people are busy with purpose,
Where I am impractical and rough;
I do not share the peoples' cares
But I am fed at nature's breast."

-Lao Tzu, Daodejing, #20

Eating Beings

Beautiful and Terrible.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts

-Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II Scene VII

Despite all the whimsical talk of talking trees and water goddesses, I am not at all trying to tell you that the world is all fluffy stuffed animals and happiness. No. The world is trying to EAT you, and one day it will.

In case no one ever told you the facts of life: Momma Earth is gonna eat your ass one day. She's gonna scarf you down like a juicy Whataburger and maybe smack her lips. Would you like any dead fried potatoes with that, ma'am?

How do we make sense of a world where your being is only sustained by eating beings, and all those other beings are all doing the same? Even plants, even when they aren't actually eating living things (venus flytrap anyone?) certainly benefit from the deaths of beings. Moreover, I do not have the false comfort that many vegetarians have in believing that they are eating insensate beings. Plants are a whole other kingdom of existence from us and very very different, but they are not insensate. Some of my favorite beings are plants.

Obviously, space here in this world is at a premium. The rent is high, and those who can't make the rent are devoured by those still paying it. And sooner or later, for every being on the planet, the landlady comes knocking. Even the landlady's landlord comes knocking in a few billion years when the Sun goes red giant and gobbles up the Earth. That is assuming that the Sun's lease doesn't come up first.

This being the case, one might say, why be kind? Why worry about animal cruelty or using more of the planet's resources than we need or what in fact happens to all those other beings? Or even, why should we care what happens to our grandchildren's children once we are gone? It's a mercenary world. 

Or you may wonder: I do want to be considerate to all these other beings, to the extent that I can, but why do I want to? Is it not after all kind of counter-evolutionary in a way, to restrain your own predation? And how should we face death when our turn comes and it can't be avoided? Cry bitter tears when the rent comes due?

There may be more than one reason why I would wish to respect life in a predatory world. The very fact that we know that all these other beings are in the same situation as we and that we all strive hard to stay alive a bit longer in the world, leads me to believe that we are not all that different. If I do value my own life enough to kill another life to preserve it, I have to understand that they value theirs just as much. And perhaps, in a hard world, an act of mercy is the closest thing to the experience of eternal life that we can have while living. We are lifted out of ourselves into the world, and know that all these striving beings are also in a sense our own selves too. Our brothers and sisters.

When our turn comes, we need not lament it too much. We have eaten, now we are eaten. We were given life, loaned form and substance from the bodies of other beings, and now we give it back. We should reverence every life that we take, every forkful of food, every breath of air, every drink of water. Doing so, we cannot wish to take life in vain.

Perhaps a strange thing to comment on, but I was out walking on one of my ill-advised midday walks in the summer heat of Texas, and came upon a stream of ants going to and from a dead cicada. To me it was like a visual concretion of becoming: here this form of the cicada is going away, there those forms of ants are sustained and new ants are being birthed in the ant colony. This is what life is, a continual change of form, a continual becoming and fading away. Life is not made of discrete instants, it is like looking at a river through a spyglass. Here a drop of water enters the scene, there it exits stage left and something new takes its place. The motion never ceases at all, there is no point at which you can say definitively past, present and future, starting and stopping. This leads me to believe that the motion extends beyond the circle of our limited spyglass vision, and that it is moving somewhat like a circle itself. The World, which we can see, and the Dreaming, which we can't. And yet together they are one world, and not separate. The Dreaming feeds the World, and the World feeds the Dreaming.

You can use a stage play as a metaphor. The stage is of course where everyone wants to be, everyone wants the limelight. It's where the action happens. However a much larger space, backstage, is behind the stage, and from here the props and actors appear on the stage and to here the props and actors go when their time comes. This motion can be thought of as a river of sorts, or a circle. Backstage, the Dreaming, gets the props lined up for the stage, the World. They make their motions through the world, and then they go backstage again, back to the Dreaming. And yet the stage and the backstage are all parts of the same thing. The World and the Dreaming aren't different worlds, they are sides of the same world.

What happens when you enter the Dreaming, I do not know definitively. Maybe some jaded stagehand eats his lunch on your painted scenery. ;) Maybe the plasterboard backdrop of Venice gets repainted into the plasterboard backdrop of Los Angeles. I'm pretty sure nothing gets wasted though, and maybe if you are lucky your Dream is interesting enough to keep around somewhere, waiting for another go at the stage, or some other stage somewhere. ;)

Secrecy vs. Openness

Commonly believed to be a repository of secret knowledge. Actually a fancy tomb.

"From the very day when the first mystic was taught... he concluded that to abandon this mysterious science to the desecration of the rabble was to lose it."
-Helena Blavatsky

"Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

-John Kennedy

In the Western occult traditions that I have had some experience with (no longer a part of), and also in many other traditions, there is sort of a "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" mentality. You don't talk about the weirdness, you don't talk about what you do, it belongs in a circumscribed sacred space that is not a part of normal space. This is even to some degree shown in Native American traditions for instance and many others, although the context may be very different. With one exception, I don't agree with this state of mind for several reasons.

First off, I should try to address why that opinion exists and what it's proposed merits are. In this post, I do a lot of picking on Western occult traditions because I think they are part of the overall Western disease and aren't as focused on fixing it as I think they ought to be. Even Wicca, which is overtly a nature religion, has the same worms gnawing on its roots because it arose from a very Western occult tradition, not particularly an animist one. The diseased roots are the same as the civilization as a whole, focused on power, abstraction and individualism.

The first idea is that the opinions or feelings of the "many" somehow desecrate or desanctify what you are doing. This doesn't hold up to much examination: something doesn't cease to be what it is depending on how people feel about it, and there are more than enough bad vibes to go around in this world anyway, mostly going unchallenged.

The second idea, and one that should be taken more seriously, is that potentially dangerous and destabilizing powers are encountered that need to be kept in a circumscribed ritual space. In fact, in Western occultism I read that failing to "keep the circle closed" would cause you to lose sleep, have a mind continually on overdrive and this would lead to exhaustion and other bad consequences. Well in fact exactly that happened to me, except the exhaustion and bad consequences part. When I set up my version of a "kamidana" in the only space I had available, above my bed, I did lose sleep. I still lose it. My mind was on continual overdrive. This was in fact unsettling at first. 

And you know what? I'm feeling great. :) I still often don't get more than 5 hours sleep a night. My head is still in fifth gear most of the time. I've adapted to it.

I feel that in part the desire to keep the circle of secrecy closed is a desire to have power without accountability: to be weird in secret but still have your workaday life. Stand in the forest nekkid with witches at midnight, close an advertising deal with the lumber company that is cutting down the forest during the daytime.

There is also elitism (or reverse elitism) involved. To use an example in popular media, in Harry Potter there are the magic people and the "muggles," and never the twain shall meet. There is this feeling of "I'm not going to bother explaining anything to you, don't worry your pretty little mundane head about it, you wouldn't understand." Partly this may be because "sensitive" people appear to be kind of rare, but also perhaps more to the point there is a sort of reverse exclusion which arises when you feel that your points of view are discriminated against or not taken seriously. Because you feel excluded, you exclude. Needless to say, I don't agree with this. We should be above this kind of nonsense.

Another reason is totally practical, and this one is the only one I agree with. It's just inconvenient and counterproductive to do what you are doing totally in the open at the time you are doing it, because you have to stop what you are actually doing and deal with all the people who are looking at you like you have lost your mind. ;) For instance, when I hung the shide on the cedar tree, I did it at night. Why? I simply didn't want to risk having to stop this act of respect and explain a totally alien worldview to someone who was unlikely to be sympathetic. So secrecy while you are doing something, that I do totally agree with, for totally practical reasons. Afterwards, I'll tell you pretty much anything.

Having explained why the secrecy mystique exists in a wide variety of traditions, why don't I ascribe to it (aside from the example above)?

First off, if you are openly a little weird, the circle of sacred space is self-closing to a large extent. The problem that Western occultists have is that they want to be considered normal respectable citizens in their daily lives. There are a number of examples from the Golden Dawn of leaders in the group that also had very high and public positions of power, and that wound up being a big problem for them sooner or later. I don't have that problem, I am overtly weird. :)

What happens when you are overtly weird is, most people disregard you and only people who are themselves open to and curious about such things will take you seriously. Meanwhile, you are making yourself available to the largest possible number of potentially receptive people. So we don't have to close the sacred circle, it closes itself if you are open about everything. It hides in plain sight. If this is what you want to see, I am the literate equivalent of the street person mumbling to himself on the sidewalk. You can pigeonhole me neatly and go on with your busy day. Nothing to see here, move along. These aren't the droids you are looking for. ;)

For another thing, we as a species don't have time for this shit. 

Many Western occultists seem to act as if the things they do are just a superfluous addition to life with no connection to much of anything else. Like rich people having an eccentric hobby, or in other words, something that fits in with the rest of the Western worldview. I don't have a strictly Western worldview and I do think that what I do has some relevance to the larger world. Viewing Nature as sacred again is not about your personal growth or how you feel about yourself or some sort of airy mysticism, it is about life and survival. It's about as esoteric as a tumor. Until we start viewing our relationship with the natural world as a two-way relationship with non-human beings and ecological communities worth respecting, we are at risk as a species. While not everyone is going to experience these things the way I do, the more widespread transformation of consciousness to one that views all life and the world with respect is not that far-fetched. It's a very difficult project, but not at all an inherently impossible one.  

This is why I want to be completely open with what I do, because it isn't just a lifestyle accessory. It's your life, it's my life, it's the life of that bird in the front yard and the bees that pollinate our crops. In a sense, it is the most practical of things: life itself. It is only our twisted worldview that makes it seem bizarre. Yes, I will hide what I do at the time that I do it, but afterwards I am not hiding anything.

Fundamentally as I said before, my most important message is respect. Respect the natural world, respect the other beings that share this world with you, respect the food you eat and the water you drink. I would not be respecting you either, if I were to withhold these crucially important things from you. You are one of these living things too, however alienated your worldview might have become. I have no secret messages, no secret wisdom. They are only secret if you will not look at them.

Sacred space IS normal space, normal space properly seen.

Sacred Trees II: Windows on the Dreaming

A Thousand Year Old Yew Tree

"Nothing happens unless first we dream."

-Carl Sandburg

1. The Dreaming and Trees

Okay finally (!) we have a post about trees that is a post about trees, at least to an extent. What are my most characteristic experiences with trees?

First off I should say that I have very few experiences that involve gods or goddesses in a traditional pagan sense. That's one reason why I say I am not a pagan but an animist. This is not to say that I think they are not there, I have some reason to believe that something of the sort exists, but that if they are there I only encounter them through things in the world. If I encounter a spirit through a tree, I have no reason to think that the spirit is other than the spirit of the tree itself. In fact I always feel confident that I am talking to the tree itself, not a spirit inhabiting a tree. I recently had a goddess-like encounter with Water, but even there I cannot say for certain that it was an encounter with something entirely separate from Water Itself. This is not something that is faith-based, I only know what I encounter and experience personally through real things. I encountered Water in a fuller-than-normal sense, is all I can say for certain.

The most common experiences I have with trees, aside from the frequent simple happy greetings, are with trees as windows on the Dreaming. What do I mean by that?

First off, the future and past do not exist apart from the present: the present is all that is real, but the present itself is anything but a chronological dot on a graph. The present is as Heidegger suggested a continual hiding and unveiling, continual becoming, a continual birth and death, revelation and withdrawal. It is in fact something very alien to the usual chronological sense of time. Back in the beginnings of the Western worldview, the philosopher Zeno tried to prove through his famous paradoxes that movement was impossible, and thus everything was in fact static. This is part of the root that Plato sprung out of, and all the magic and mistakes of the Western tradition flow from those roots. In fact nothing is static, everything is flowing, nothing can be fully understood apart from its movement. The future doesn't happen at a different sequential dot in time, it flows out of the present and overtakes the forms of the present, in the present. The hidden place where the future comes from, the hidden place in the present, is the dreams and habits and actions of all the beings that are in this moment: plants, rocks, people, stars, everything. Thus the future exists in the present hidden in the Dreaming. This does not however necessarily exhaust everything the Dreaming is. Because the Dreaming is to some extent inherently hidden, we cannot know anything that is in the Dreaming until it chooses to reveal itself. The Dreaming is probably, to some extent, inexhaustible. What mysteries are hidden in the Dreaming are unknown until they are revealed in some way. Potentially entire worlds unknown to us, which are yet in some way connected to this world.

The best way to talk about how this is, is to give an example that actually happened today. I foolishly decided that I needed to do a two and a half mile walk in the heat of a Texas summer, with temperatures exceeding a hundred degrees. This is part of my overall personal recovery scheme, to work to repair the havoc of years of my neglect of my body. I needed to walk, and there was no other better time in my schedule than in the middle of the day, or so I was thinking. Had I known how close to the edge my walk would take me, I might have reconsidered, but also I had many very powerful experiences during it. Sometimes you have to commit your body to a risk, if you want to achieve anything. Anyway, when I got to Flag Pole Hill Park, I felt this live oak tree beckoning to me. It was standing alone in the grass. While this exchange did not happen in words, it happened. These exchanges never happen in words. I might actually say words to the tree, but what I am really doing is feeling and imaging to the tree and it is feeling and imaging back to me. Meanwhile I am touching and looking at its bark, looking up at its leaves, inhaling its scent, engaging it with my whole body. Anyway, I was at that moment very much in the grips of psychological withdrawals from tobacco (I have been trying to quit smoking) and that's what I talked to it about, and to me it was very much like a son talking to his father or mother. I did not encounter that tree as a peer, I instinctively encountered it as above me in respect. A holy tree, in other words. 

And then it showed me something remarkable, something I have a hard time putting into words. In part, it showed me a life that was already beyond tobacco, free and clear and whole, without any addicted feelings. As if I were already there. At that moment, in some sense, I was there, and yet it was also set out before me as a moral lesson of sorts. Something I should aim for, what I am falling short of, in ways beyond just my nicotine habit. But it was much more than that. There was also a taste, and I like to use non-visual words to describe it, a taste of something I encountered before. Of a place in the Dreaming I encountered before. Something I don't fully understand. I have a name for it: Elysium. 

My "kamidana," my equivalent of a Shinto home shrine. Somewhat similar in general intent, though not otherwise similar.

2. Elysium

I do not know what Elysium is exactly, these are my impressions of it. Shortly after I had dedicated my home shrine as a way of communicating with what I did not know, I was sitting in front of the opened shrine and meditating. The shrine has a lid closure of sorts, it is not normally open unless I am using it. As soon as I had put up and first used the shrine, I started having some sleep disturbances which continue to a degree to this day, I probably should not have put such a powerful thing so close to my bed but I was short on space. I wonder sometimes if it talks to me in my sleep. 

Anyway, I was sitting meditating in front of it, when it became as if a door to another place. It did not visually seem different, but it was different. It was if a refreshing cool breeze was flowing out of it, carrying sweet smells of grass and flowers and growing things, and if sunshine had a smell it would smell of that too. Anyway, to my eyes it looked the same, to my other senses, the senses I use when I talk to the trees, the senses I use to perceive the Dreaming, it was an open window not a wall, and on the other side of this window or doorway was something inexpressibly wonderful. I called it Elysium after the Greek afterlife of the same name.

It seemed a little bit like the Native American folklore about the Happy Hunting Ground. Neither the Happy Hunting Ground nor the Greek Elysium were considered to be exactly separate from the world we know, but as it were past the horizon of the world we know. At the same time, like the vision from the live oak tree, it was both a thing that could be perceived now, albeit in the Dreaming, but also a model for how things should be in this world. It was both a reality I could perceive then and there, and also what should be on this side of the portal. Both a reality and a moral lesson. From what I could perceive, it seemed to be much like this world, but one in which all things were optimal, beautiful and harmonious. The vision from the live oak tree was much similar to this vision, but a bit more practically-centered. In other words, the live oak was showing me the implementation of Elysium in this world. Since the physical shrine itself is not a being, something was using the shrine to communicate with me. Could something have been using the tree in a similar way? I cannot say for sure, except that my sense of it was that I was communicating with the tree itself.

You now know about all I know about Elysium, except for actually experiencing it.

3. Blue Star

This is not directly related, but it kind of fits in here. I find myself wishing that the Hopi prophecy concerning the Blue Star Kachina were true, but not believing that it is true. Fundamentally I am only believing what I am experiencing myself, and I have not experienced that. I am not following a faith-based religion, belief is to some degree or other irrelevant and actually counterproductive to me. Believing in what you have no way of knowing is just delusion. But it is possible that I fundamentally misunderstood what the "prophecy" is. I might not be alone in that misunderstanding either, the Hopi themselves may misunderstand it.

For those who might not be aware, this is the prophecy in a nutshell and I apologize if I am misrepresenting any part of it. We are living in a time of increasing insanity, increasing human lust for power, increasingly unnatural life, increasingly destructive life. At some point, the Blue Star Kachina will initiate the Purification, in which most everyone on the planet will die. If we are lucky, a remnant will remain behind to start things aright again, and the world will be renewed. 

Now why in the heck would I want that to happen, particularly if I and my loved ones would be among the casualties as would be likely? Well if the alternative is planetary death, ya I want that to happen. If the alternative is just increasing insanity and people mutating themselves and everything else into monsters, ya I probably still would prefer the prophecy version of events. Problem is, I don't really believe in prophecies too much. I think that the prophecy like almost all prophecies is almost certainly wrong. 

But what is wrong with this picture??? Why are the Hopis, who do not even have a precise translation of the word future in their vocabulary, now describing things that are going to happen in this future??? Future is an inherently unshamanic concept. It is a Western concept.

Where did I say the future actually exists in or comes from? From the Dreaming. What is this future in the Dreaming? Precisely the wishes and plans and actions and dreams and habits of all living things. Multiple potential futures exist in the Dreaming, though only one will manifest in fact. Does anything in my actual experience of the Dreaming correlate to the state of the world as it would be after the Purification? Yes, Elysium as implemented in the world.

So it isn't a prophecy at all. It is a realm in the Dreaming. It isn't a prediction, it is a misunderstood prayer. It is not that it will happen regardless of what we do, but rather that we need to be busy Dreaming it. We should be praying and working and living it into existence, not waiting for it to happen. It was never a prophecy at all, it's a project. If the alternative to the manifestation of this Dream is some version of what I have laid out, planetary death or increasing confusion and chaos and insanity and monstrosity, then ya we probably should get busy bringing it into existence, not passively waiting for it like dummies. And maybe in the real world, we can do it without the 7 billion casualties. That would be a plus, eh? Just a thought.

Sacred Trees

"Why are there trees that I never walk under but large

and melodious thoughts descend upon me?"
-Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road.

I engaged in a perhaps slightly comical act of guerrilla sanctification last night. Under cover of darkness, I gently and loosely tied a loop of kite string around the cedar tree next to the driveway and hung shide on it. I am not precisely Shinto (nor can you probably really be Shinto unless you are Japanese and actually living in Japan), but Shinto has a spiritual vocabulary, if you will, that I find useful. Shide are the zigzag paper strips like the ones hanging from the sacred tree above. Sacred trees in Shinto are called shinboku. 

My idea of such things is a little different from Shinto. In Shinto, a kami or spirit descends into the tree. To me, the spirit is the tree, the tree's heart or soul if you like. Although Shinto seems to preserve many things from what you might call primitive or ancient animism, there is also much that has been mutated by progress and the historical worship of the Japanese State/Emperors and so on, perversions honestly. In most Shinto temples there is an enclosure that is supposed to represent a house or dwelling for the kami: in the most ancient form of Shinto still represented in a couple places, the holy of holies is not indoors somewhere, it is the very tree or mountain or whatever that the shrine is built around or on. 

For the most part, there are seldom any new sacred trees recognized in Japan except in the places where an old sacred tree has died. I guess the idea is, guys in the old days had the perceptual wherewithal to recognize such things, whereas this ability has been lost in modern times. It hasn't been lost, it has been stopped. Why do Christians think miracles happened in Jesus' time and not now? They think that there was an "age of miracles" which ended somehow after New Testament times. It didn't stop itself, people stopped it. In both cases, when a Way stops being a living path of love and starts being a dead institution, this happens. The very word, Way, indicates a place where things are in motion. That was the original name of Christianity, simply "the Way." In Christianity and Shinto both, things ceased to be in motion because that sort of motion is inherently destabilizing to nacent power structures. You start getting Bishops, you stop getting John the Baptists.

Why was it a guerrilla act of sanctification? This was much on my mind as I was doing it, how bizarre this was. In this country, you can desecrate forests wholesale in broad daylight, and nobody thinks it is abnormal. If you acknowledge the specialness of a tree, especially here in the Bible Belt, people think you are damn weird and maybe dangerous, but certainly in need of some kind of mental health assistance. Put that boy on some Haldol, stat. ;) 

I didn't want to contaminate what I am doing by being put in a position of having to explain to someone that their whole worldview is desperately ill. Which is what I truly believe. But still, while I was doing it, I was thinking: 

"Either I am mentally ill or this society is, and I almost wish it were me.

It would almost be reassuring, to know that the
whole human world hasn't gone insane."

But, you know, it's not me. Sadly, it's not me. 

But silly me, I have been talking all this time about the human issues of sacred trees and not about the trees. Why have people held trees above other plants as sacred? Well this is not necessarily true in all cultures, in Native American cultures especially a variety of non-tree plants are held as sacred. Corn above all, for those who grow corn. Peyote for some. Other plants, some psychoactive, some not, are held in esteem. Obviously in a desert or plains culture, trees would barely figure in at all. Among trees, not all are equally likely to be held as sacred. Juniper is held sacred by a variety of cultures and by myself also, and oaks are well represented. Pines and various evergreens too. Of course the size and majesty of some trees seems to almost demand our reverence, or so you would think. I love medieval cathedral architecture, it seems to me like a book and a dream made of stone. Sadly, I have never seen one in person, but it seems even from this distance to speak more than mere words could ever have, a three-dimensional living incarnation of a worldview. But if you were to give me a choice between either every cathedral being bulldozed or every giant sequoia being bulldozed, I would tearfully send the cathedrals to the dump. I would rather be sent to the dump myself than have either of those things happen though. To see a giant tree towering to the sky inspires awe: that in itself would be a reason.

It just so happens though that trees are very special people. The great age of some of them may have something to do with it, some can be thousands of years old. The redwood tree above (no I am not that lucky devil hugging it) is a thousand years old. A thousand. When this tree was germinated, the Battle of Hastings hadn't happened yet, the New World lay virgin and pristine, the floating magnetic compass had not yet been discovered in China. 1013 A.D. That's a very very long freaking time ago. If my own experiences are to be believed, that is part of what they have to offer us: a long and very rooted view of time. And of course many trees have extremely practical things to offer us in the form of nuts and fruits and wood. I love my fig tree that has been giving me breakfast every morning over the past few weeks, I call her Mother Fig. It's amazing, how tiny the little seeds are in the fig. These tiny grains of sand almost give birth under the right conditions to a whole tree that can give you shade and fruit and feed the birds and squirrels. It's magic, truly.

What do we have to offer them? Well right now, only a few practical things. The vast majority of people in the world currently lack the mentality to offer them anything, except a pruning or a few shovels of compost. What should we have been offering them? What is the function of the human being in the world?

I would like very much to avoid ascribing intentionality to our existence in the world. Nature just does stuff. Nature just had a wild hair one day and decided, "hominids, think I will give them a try, see what pops up, what the heck." ;) Many such experiments have taken place, and many such experiments have faded away again in time. However I think that we did adapt to a certain role in the world and then lost that role for the most part. That role was as nodes of a sort, ganglia, in the nervous system of the biosphere. The neurotransmitters of this nervous system were prayers and praise and thanks. We would talk to the plant people and animal people and see what was on their minds, see what they needed, and then maybe we would talk to the sky people for instance if rain was needed, or if the air needed freshening. Tribespeople would ask for things and their medicine people would balance the needs of the people against the needs of nature and something would get worked out. Or maybe something was out of balance and needed to be corrected to restore the normal flow of things. Plants and animals might benefit from human spiritual energy in the form of praise and reverence and prayers and thanks, and humans would benefit from plant and animal bodies to keep their own bodies alive. 

Of course, almost nothing of this is happening now over much of the world. Something I have often wondered about or just ascribed to the general wonderfulness of their being: why are trees so often so glad to see me? In the days before the internet and radio, I would imagine that people would be very glad to see the postman, because he is their connection to what is happening elsewhere or to talk with distant family and friends or to petition their representatives in far-off Washington. A local node of their internet is back online, for the first time in gods only know when.

I will not say that this is our function necessarily, we probably don't have a function per se, but that it should be our function and once was. Whoever the people were who originally saw the sacredness of the trees and springs and other natural things now held sacred in Shinto belief, they were part of this nervous system. It is part of that function that we put ourselves beneath those we connect in this way. The Hopi for instance called the rainclouds their grandfathers, overtly because they thought their ancestors affected their world by bringing rain, but on a more basic level because they ask the rain to come through reverence and prayers. There could not be any greater difference between this and the Western occult ideas of magic, where the magician compels the natural forces to work for him. This is fundamentally what happened to us: because of our role we had a certain power, and we became enamored with that power and forgot what it was for. 

This is ultimately and fundamentally our problem, the problem of human beings in the world right now. We forgot what the power was for. We traded love for brute might. 

I'm doing it again, aren't I? I started out to talk about sacred trees, and wound up talking about us.

"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you

come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release

this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these

miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that

gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some

ways, responsible for all our troubles — 

this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people

when they see what they can do with their minds."

-Freeman Dyson

Mushroom Cloud, Hiroshima.

Collaborative Mind

"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it."
-William Butler Yeats

I've been making a lot of posts over the last 24 hours or so, which I generally want to avoid doing, but sometimes things are just happening.

For thousands of years from Plato to Descartes, the fundamental activity of Man has been considered to be extracting rational truths through thought, a solitary activity of mind. If you think about it, that's complete bullshit. A master carpenter or sculptor for instance may be considered the master of a tool like a hammer, but does his knowledge consist of the abstract knowledge of the hammer's mass or molecular structure or exact dimensions or the exact degrees by which a facet on the hammer's head is different from some other geometric face on that hammer's head? Absolutely not. His knowledge of the hammer consists of the embodied experience of using that or similar hammers in the pursuit of his craft. In many cases, such as a musician with his chosen instrument, the artist may speak of a relationship with their tool, as one body apprehending another body repeatedly through the life of the musician. And this is very much the case, it is a relationship between the body of the musician and the body of the instrument. Not only is rational analysis unnecessary to this kind of knowing, it would be actually counterproductive, because in the ideal state the instrument becomes as if a part of his body and these two bodies together are aiming towards something else, in this case music. Thus when an animist speaks of a relationship to an inanimate object like a rock or a place, this is not really as alien an experience as it may seem, we have these sorts of relationships all the time. It is only alien to rational thought, not to life.

Many (perhaps most) people, you sit them down in front of paper and pencil and tell them to make art, they would be quite totally lost, and you can feel this lostness, like you don't know how to begin. You have never begun to feel out these materials, you and they have never properly been introduced in this way. Since I am an artist, I would proceed to draw and not think about the tools at all, but only what to draw and how to approach it. Perhaps I wouldn't even think that, I would just begin to improvise. Improvisation itself speaks deeply of these kinds of relationships: not a solitary intellect engaging with himself, but an artist or musician engaging with what is around him, the instrument, his fellow musicians, his audience. He no longer even thinks about the mechanics of the thing, he is attuned to the musical conversation. The music is his product in a sense, the sense that it wouldn't be what it is without his talented body, but in another sense it isn't his at all. It is the product of the space he finds himself in and who he finds himself with, because the musician in an improvisational set with other musicians is not focused on himself or his instrument or his mind but on the sonic dance of each with the other.

You can notice this when you sit down to chat with someone you are very attuned to, you think of things together that you might never have thought of separately, because you are sharing a space in which your minds are coming together in the world. This can happen with your encounters with animals and plants too, if you are encountering them as another body and not merely intellectually. You engage and react to one another inside this larger space of engaging and reacting and creating and manifesting existence.

One of my favorite recent experiences is when I discovered that the (multi-trunked) cedar tree that I always considered to be one tree was in fact two: one that I already had sort of a relationship with, and one that I didn't. When I started to get to know this second very different tree, I had a very very strange sensation looking up its trunk into its branches that I was suddenly standing in that same place before there were any people around. When that tree was young, very few human beings would have been around. I very concretely felt that I was no longer surrounded by suburb, but by wilderness. Now does that cedar tree go around thinking about the 1890's all the time? I very much doubt it, but in conversation with my body, that's what came out. Squirrels, since I have a cat the squirrels often chastise me and Mango alike, and I talk to them. Initially they don't care, they are just making their alarm sounds, but then they start trying to grok me out, figure where I stand in all this. We are at that moment part of a connected space that is both between and around us, the squirrel and I. We are part of a collaborative realm. I watch how he moves, he watches how I move. When I meet a new tree and get a vibe for what sort of tree person that tree is, it is not that trees generally go thinking about people much or how to engage them. They are probably as used to ignoring people as people are used to ignoring trees. And then suddenly some weirdo like me comes along and they are like, "you can see me? You see me. Hi!"

Perhaps sometimes we may find ourselves in a crowd, pointedly trying not to be seen or engaged, and then someone does for some reason, and it is like you suddenly snap into a different reality and this strange and maybe vaguely threatening presence is interrogating you about something, or asking you the time, and you are suddenly thrust into a very different space, a space that has become charged between you two.

What does all this tell us? That the founding worldview of Western civilization which we have been working with for 25 centuries, since Plato, is wrong. We are not disconnected subjects viewing impersonal objects. We are all subjects in an intersubjective space, an immersed space to which there is no outside, no external point of view to which we can absent ourselves. And this space itself is more than the sum of its individual parts, but can create things that were beyond any individual participant. We are committed into the world from the beginning, we navigate through it with our whole bodies, caring and daring and regarding things as important and worth engaging in. Life ceases to have meaning when we cease to have something outside ourselves to care about and be engaged in, whether it is the collaboration of the musician with his instruments and fellow artists, a cook creating dishes with her whole culinary experience and not with recipe books, or a man who makes friends with trees. It is this connection to something external, and ultimately to something that transcends the human, that puts joy and purpose into our movements. These are not mere things, there are no mere things in the world. We are all dancing through this mysterium called life, and together creating new facets to reality and new interactions and music and strife.

Don't miss this. You are not alone, we are all doing this together. You, me, the guy next door, the squirrel, the tree. And who knows what new doors in the world, previously closed, will open to the one who is able to see where the doors are. Master artists are master artists because they can expose new potentialities in life that were hidden to the rest of us, the potential in a piece of wood or a stone that only he could see, because he engaged that material differently from us. This is not a thing restricted to art, it is part of life itself. 

I am intensely curious to find out what new thing will manifest tomorrow, what new thing we will find together, out of this great mysterious becoming. :)

The Worst Slaughter is Dishonor

This image is courtesy of the talented photographer/storyteller/troubadour
Jordan Bower, whose account of his walk from Canada to Mexico I have been

reading with great interest. His account of his journey is at
http://www.walkingtomexico.com/
and his website is at jordanbower.com
Also check out his Facebook group at 

https://www.facebook.com/lovewallah

I stumbled across the Walking to Mexico site in the way I often stumble into serendipitous things, I no longer remember how. Anyway, I thought it was a wonderful story in words and pictures. I am not much of a people person myself but it is clear Jordan is very much one and loves to find people and their stories. In the way stories often do, they reveal people in all their peculiarity and eccentricity, and yet with love and connection. I am still working my way through his account of his trip, I recommend following his journey yourself.

I guess this is part of my nature, when I saw his pictures of people I smiled a moment and moved on. Even when there was a bit of sadness mixed with the stories, I nodded and moved on. When I saw this picture, the one above, something else happened. A feeling like being punched in the gut. Grief.

I like everyone else use wood. I would like to use as little of it by way of felling trees as I can, but I use dead trees every day. It is a peculiarity of my situation that I am compelled to feed on those I do genuinely love, and to benefit from their deaths. I love trees, more than I love perhaps anything. They are not scenery to me, they are beings, and my friends. There are some trees that I can walk up to and immediately there is the feeling, bam, you like me. Like some animals, some dogs or cats, you know right away they like you. I like them too. I talk to trees, call me crazy. Some others are a little aloof, austere, solemn, they are all different. There was this live oak tree that I got this feeling from yesterday as I was walking, just an immediate "Hi how are you!!" feeling. I know that this immediately gets me labeled a fruitcake by most people, which I no longer take as a badge of honor as I once did. It makes me sad, not that they think less of me, but that they think less of them. They think less of my friends. I am nothing, disrespect me all you like, but when you disrespect a tree you disrespect life itself. 

Anyway, this picture to me was like getting hit in the stomach, and not because I don't think that we need wood sometimes, but because all this death was not honored in any way. A genocide is not sad merely because of the death, death is a part of life. It is because the life is not honored, that there is no respect for the fact that a life was ended for our needs or more often our mere desires. Dehumanization is an essential part of any human genocide, and depersonalization or de-sanctification is an essential part of the genocide we commit against nature every day. These trees were not merely killed. Their lives and deaths were not honored. Like human beings of Jewish descent turned into soap or lampshades by the Nazis, it's the same thing, and it is inherently unholy. Respect is more important even than awe or wonder in any proper religion, and there was no respect here. Neither those who killed nor those who will use nor those who will profit most by this killing gave any respect, or considered the lives they took holy. 

Perhaps in some way I can redress this wrong thanks to Jordan's picture: I acknowledge your lives, my brothers. You were holy to me, though I never met you.

I hate this word, shaman, but people always imagine that a shaman is someone who has all these kewl powers and lives an interesting if slightly spooky life far apart from normalcy. They never think, that if there are any powers they are not his but come from his relationship with his friends, and his relationship with these friends can be a source of immense grief when they are hurt in any way. Which they are. They are being hurt all the time. Worse, the suffering isn't even acknowledged by those who cause it. There was a scandal in the art world awhile back when a painting of the Virgin Mary was decorated with dung, and many Christians were very insulted. Well, people shit on my holy things every god damn day.

To be a shaman, if that name has any meaning, means to feel the grief of the world and the suffering of every thing that lives. Those are my kin, stacked there, and their sacrifice was not honored by those who committed it. Our magic, which is very real, is not Harry Potter. It is made of love and tears.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, 

I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,

 and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, 

I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to

hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing....

...love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; 
where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge,
it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 
but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 
For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.
Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

-1 Corinthians 13

Forgive me and assist me, sister

This is a very public prayer and apology, to a very maligned plant. It is not the plant's fault that we abuse it so. Perhaps it is the revenge of those for whom this plant was sacred, that it has killed so many: just as we committed genocide against them, their holy plant has helped us to commit a genocide of sorts against ourselves.

Like most plants and animals which we raise for our purposes, the well being and happiness of the organism involved is never part of our concern, we consider it just a machine for our use, to be raised and destroyed in such a way that only addresses our intended uses for it. This is true of every plant and animal we raise for our purposes, and it is a profoundly unholy state of affairs. As I currently consider it my path to listen to the non-human world and to care for it and to thank it for what it does for us, it would be grievously remiss for me to not fess up to a malign and abusive relationship to my sister.

Many people would find it strange for me to be expressing a sibling relationship with a plant, but I currently consider this to be, essentially, my task in life. To end, in so far as it involves me anyway, the war between the bodies of all nature and ourselves, or at least myself. To mix blood and sap in a solemn oath, that there will be respect between us, and more than respect. I am your brother. When you give to me or I am compelled to take from you, I will honor what I have received. When I give to you or you are compelled to take from me, remember me sisters. 

For the Native Americans, whose blood in a small fraction flows in my veins, it was used at every solemn occasion, the making of every peace, the asking of every favor from the spirits of nature and the giving of every thanks to them. Her smoke took their prayers out into the universe. A gift of her dried leaves was one of the most precious gifts. We, of course, being what we are, turned her into a murderous drug. I am speaking of course of my sister Nicotiana. Tobacco.

Since the age of 18 at least, I have been engaging in this malignant relationship with my sister. To be fair, for most of that time I had no idea what I was doing, just as most people don't know when they are doing when they give no thought to our system of agriculture or our use and abuse of nature. This abuse has become second nature to us. Still, when we know better, we should try to make amends.

I am struggling to try to quit smoking. I have e-cigarettes which help, but fundamentally there is something involved in actual tobacco that no e-cigarette will ever replicate. Perhaps, even though it is a twisted love, it is a kind of love I have for it. It is a sacred plant. I just need to smoke a whole ton less of it, and plus it costs a great deal. At some point in my life, I can almost guarantee that I will cease to be able to afford this. At the same time as I am trying to quit, I am trying to get on a physical fitness program and of course smoking has a very serious adverse effect on your lungs. I've been abusing my lungs for a long time, it's time to stop that.

In terms of adverse effects on the planet, of course the raising of tobacco takes land out of production for food, and due to our unhealthy agricultural systems pumps pesticides and herbicides and so on into the environment. It is amazing somehow that this is even legal, this wholesale spraying of toxins on the land. This does not mean that tobacco should never be grown, but it should return to its sacred function. It should take our prayers to the universe, not make Philip Morris richer and people sicker.

I have managed to go a few days without smoking at all, but today I broke down and got a pack. There is something about it that haunts my dreams, a kind of happiness that I miss. But what can never happen again is to smoke instinctively, thoughtlessly, unconsciously. If I smoke at all, every puff must be a prayer. I can't smoke like I did and hope to achieve what I want to in my time remaining in life. 

You were holy, a plant of prayers

your smoke rising in in the pines, over the plains, over the blue lakes

Sending your communications into the blue sky.

I assisted your enslavement in a den of thieves.

I sold your body in the slave market.

I'm sorry

I didn't know.

I pray to you now, sister

help me to either never smoke your leaves

or help me smoke them in the right way

and always hope that you will one day be free

and grown only by those who love you.

Maybe when the blue star falls from the sky

and the pure hearts inherit the world

you will only be grown for untainted reasons.

 I do not know that it will

I only hope.

Hope with me

Sister

Alienation Part Two: Body and Spirit

“So watch yourselves carefully... so that you do not act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water below the earth. And beware not to lift up your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, and be drawn away and worship them and serve them, those which the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven."

-Deuteronomy 4:15-19

“Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them... The animals had rights - the right of man's protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man's indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.” 

-Chief Luther Standing Bear

As a former monotheist, both I and other former monotheists I know often asked ourselves the same question: If there is a God, where is he? In fact through much of Jewish history this question gets repeated as well in another form: how long, God? How long until he acts, in other words. How long before he saves his people. For a deity that acts in and through the very Judeo-Christian-Islamic idea of history, not actually making history is rather a serious failing.

Polytheism has different sorts of problems but also some of the same problems. One problem I always had with it is the idea that there are exactly X number of gods (so there are exactly 26 and not 27?) But also, polytheism is still a theism. Gods are gods and not people or animals or places, there is a vast gulf that exists between a god and a spirit or a being. Gods in polytheism are still (generally) completely different kinds of beings from the beings we see around us everyday, and fundamentally inaccessible beings. In other words, polytheism is just like monotheism except there are more of them. ;) The actual is still deprecated to some degree in favor of an invisible arena that is off-limits to mortal beings. So just as we discussed in Part One, the actual real world is discarded in favor of a conceptual one. We are alienated from God by design, by the nature of our understanding of what a god is. We are ontologically alienated from him: he (or they) are simply not the same sort of being as the beings we know in our actual experience.

Honestly, everyone wants to talk with their god if they have one, and many theists do believe that they talk to him, but it is essentially a relationship with a person who doesn't talk back much. And it is a relationship to a person writ large, the otherness of god is not perceived as being an otherness of nature (Man is made in God's image) as much as an otherness of distance, and there is no easy way to overcome that otherness of distance. Otherness of nature to a degree is actually an approachable thing: for instance, my cat Mango has a very different nature from me in certain ways, but I can come to understand his differentness and perhaps he mine. It is an otherness that is not a closed road but an open one, an inviting one. An invitation to an enlarged reality. In any theism, that road is to some extent closed. You can't approach God beyond your intellectual assent to follow him, and God will let you know if and when he will approach you. God dropping in for supper might have happened to Abraham, but you certainly aren't Abraham. God is a rock star and you cannot have his autograph. For a theistic religion, whether polytheist or monotheist, respect is measured in distance.

Respect for life in a theistic religion is re-routed through these distant beings. You officially respect life, or at least other humans, because god told you to. I say officially because few people are so completely distanced from the real world that this is the real reason, but officially you respect life (usually narrowed to people rather than life as a whole) because that's what your god wants. Again, real-life respect is redirected to an abstraction as the cause of it. You don't murder because your god doesn't like it. As a result, this respect for life is also alienated from its real roots. Interestingly, atheists also locate the cause of their respect for life in abstractions, though they are different abstractions. This is because both atheists and theists are alienated both from god(s) and real life: theists are alienated from god because he is distant, and atheists are alienated from god because he doesn't exist. The left-brained, conceptualizing nature of atheists is fairly well known at least to non-atheists. It is as if what they think they are really is a cerebral cortex and the rest of their body is just the support machinery. In contrast, the nature of the self in animism and even in a vestigial form in Christianity is an embodied self. You are not just a brain but a whole being, a whole organism.

If respect for life is a dictate of a god, then when belief in that god fails the cause of respect fails. In the case of an atheist, if respect for life is a conceptual matter, then it is mere thoughts and as such lacks the substantive reality of scientific materialism.We are alienated from respect itself, respect for life or anything else, because our respect is re-routed through these fundamentally unreal things. Is it any wonder then why we are raping nature, why we are exploiting our fellow man? Of course we are, because our respect has been in one way or another attenuated to a godly ghost or a mental construct.

If you have already guessed what I am about to say, give yourself a gold star. :) Give yourself a hug from me in fact.

Respect is inversely related to distance.

We can have respect for all living things and each other because we realize we are related to them, we are not different in kind from them. I am not better than a grasshopper because I am bigger or smarter than one, nor do I in reality have any rights over that grasshopper that it wouldn't have over me if it had the power to enforce them. We are all kindred. I am kindred with the trees, with you, even with what is usually considered to be inanimate. I am kindred to water, because water made me and is in me. To kill a tree without cause is no different than killing a man without cause. Respect is the most fundamental perception of spiritual reality, more fundamental perhaps even than awe or wonder (though those are pretty fundamental too.) Yes, since animals and plants are a bit more distant to us than people, we tend to take respecting people more seriously, but that distance is of our own making or a symptom of our own neglect. Ultimately to disrespect any thing in the universe is to disrespect yourself or your blood relatives, because we are all in some way part of one body. We cannot live without the plants that give us air to breathe or food to eat; we cannot live without clean water and air. These things are a part of our bodies, but we are also a part of their bodies. If our respect is alienated from this fundamental reality, then it must wither and die to be replaced by hatred or neglect. As I touched on in the earlier post, even perceptually we are of a continuum with what is ordinarily considered to be other than us. Heidegger's convoluted quote that I shared in Part One, the realization of phenomenologists like Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is the same realization that native peoples have had all along. Our perception is embedded in a participant space of becoming and dreaming of becoming, there is no Cartesian objectivity to be had because we are enmeshed in being and in those things we call "objects" from the outset. To abuse an old detergent commercial: "Existence: you're soaking in it." ;)

In such a worldview, if there are gods they are not intrinsically more important than (or fundamentally different from) the fig tree in your front yard or the clouds in the sky. In most animist beliefs, even those which have some form of polytheism embedded, the most important relationships are the ones you are having right now with the beings in your revealed space. One example of that is Shintoism, which is a sort of modified animist religion. Some kami, spirits, are what might be deemed gods: Amaterasu, goddess of the Sun, is a legit goddess (though not different from the visible Sun). However many Shinto shrines are to very local kami: the kami of a particular waterfall or forest or place or spirits of ancestors who may have lived in that very same place. Kami and gods are not different in kind, gods are just a little more so. Susanoo, Shinto god of storms and seas, is in fact present in real storms and seas, not a sort of distant presiding official in an abstract heaven.

The failure of respect in the modern world is not simply something that affects other beings or people. The results of disrespect to the beings of the Earth and to people are serious to those beings and people, make no mistake. If you abuse any being, you are causing them harm, but you are also causing yourself grievous harm by cutting yourself off from your right relation to the world, your relatedness to the world. You are like a tree that cuts off its own roots in order to kill the rat gnawing on them. You are harming yourself AND everything else.

If you never take seriously any other words I ever say, take these seriously: learn your kinship with all other beings and how to respect all other beings, even inanimate ones. Do not accept it as an intellectual proposition or the dictate of your god: feel it in your blood. Feel it in your body, its relatedness to these very different and yet kindred bodies. Feel the flight of the mourning dove in your own body as if you had wings, feel the sunlight on your skin as if you had leaves. Talk to the plants and animals and attend to how they themselves communicate. Strange though it may seem to we alienated and estranged folk, this is the real spiritual world.