Dear Survivalist Fear-Monger …

Dear 2012 Official Countdown:

After your last email, I decided to remove myself from your mailing list–but somehow I forgot. Today, you sucked me in again with your “37 Items” video. I figured, as prepared as I feel, what if there is one (or more) items on your list that I DON’T yet have stockpiled?

So I started my day listening to your grim, long-winded message. The fact that you addressed me as a “patriot” should have been a red flag, but I listened on–in case you’d share just one item that you thought we’d need to survive a disaster. Just one! After all, you could still get people to buy your information about the other 36! But no, there wasn’t a single bit of information in that strange, sad audio–just another pitch to buy something.

I did get one “laugh out loud” moment when you said that people would accuse you of trying to make a buck off people’s fear, and you admitted that you deserved a buck (or more) because you’d done the research. Ha ha!

When the world ends, you WILL be that guy locked in his house with his food stockpile, laughing at the poor starving children outside your door. But you don’t have to explain your motives to me. However, if there is a day of reckoning coming, you might have to explain yourself to the Creator of the Universe.

I’ve actually been kind of looking forward to a paradigm-shifting disaster that would shift this nation’s focus AWAY from greed and toward love for humanity. (And I’m sorry, greed masquerading as love for humanity doesn’t quite count.) Now, because of your letter, I’m hoping that the world survives 2012 just so you and other fear-mongering capitalists will be caught without something you can use to terrorize people into buying your survival wares. I think your pitch will be harder to sell in 2013. I hope we’ll see.

I know I could have just unsubscribed, and I do want you to take me off your damned mailing list, but I didn’t want to miss this chance to also say: Shame on you. You exemplify the worst kind of human being. If you have information that will help save lives, for heaven’s sake, just put it out there. The universe will reward you amply for your kindness and generosity, and it will be good for your soul. I’m not a religious woman, but believe your soul needs a little help.

Peace & Love (Not Profit and Fear),
Me

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Truth is

The truth is, you had the means to get back all along.

There, on your feet.

Click your heels and say

There’s no place like it.

Once, twice …

Wait, before you go

Kiss the ragged man

Praise the beast, dry the metal one’s tears

And wonder

Why we didn’t tell you all along

About the damned slippers.

 

here’s the deepest secret

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

 

ee cummings

The motions

Sometimes there’s this feeling, maybe the way the air is–bright and quiet. Mostly it happens in the afternoons. It makes me try to remember something I can’t quite. But my instincts tell me if I could, if I could remember it, it would be something long ago and sad.

I say I’m taking a nap, but really, I want to lie down in a darkened back room and ponder, let myself sink into that feeling, let it all wash over my heart and hope the details will emerge. Hoping that maybe when I get up again, I’ll have it still in my grasp.

It feels like some Big Truth, some big answer. But if the answer is really that far away and that sad, maybe it’s better that I don’t know.

The outer layers of me are growing more shiny and facile, and now sometimes I can talk to anybody. Like it doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t. Because as the outside is growing shinier, inside I’m getting even more confused.

I feel like this life, if it were a symphony, would have started with dramatic, minor chords and progressed through dreary, repeated themes, ending here finally, in the orchestra’s random meandering as it tunes up the instruments. The endlessly de-evolving symphony. The last five years have been so random. None of it makes sense, and my joy is all fake.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone that the last thing that broke my heart … that was the last I saw of my heart. It hasn’t been heard from since. I’m the walking dead now, faking everything, going through the motions.

 

 

Nerves

That’s it, I’m never watching I SURVIVED again. Because for every one person who showed remarkable courage and stamina (“A grizzly chewed off my scalp and I was still able to dial for help!”) there are two stories that show just how horrible people can be (“We rescued a stranded motorist and he raped and killed us both!”)

Fear

I had many, many thoughts about fear last night. It occurred to me that we are all working in terror. And we’re the only ones who are afraid. We’re afraid that we’re going to die, because we KNOW we’re going to die.

Now, animals die also. Plants, too. But they don’t seem to be aware of that. They’re not looking ahead to the time when they no longer exist, and viewing it with fear. Only man gets to live in a perishable meatloaf body covered with soft, vulnerable skin, filled with vital, fragile blood–and know what kind of peril he’s in. How terrifying. No wonder we’re all scared all the time.

Fear rules humankind. Greed is a form of fear, fear that there won’t be enough. Hatred is fear, fear that some other group is more safe or more able to take our safety away. We’re scared, and we have a REASON to be scared, because none of this is in our control.

I read that the basic message of every religion is, FEAR NOT. Jesus was saying, you have more power than you think. But still not enough power to save your own sorry ass. Even he, in his amazing wisdom, could not keep from dying (whether on the famous cross scene or later, in Eqypt–at some point, he also died.) Or maybe he was like one of the gurus who just walked up into the sky and vanished, leaving behind no meatloaf body at all. Either way, he couldn’t stay.

How do we combat fear? Faith, I suppose, if you define it as the belief in things unseen. If we can somehow trick our brains into believing we’re safe, then we’re safe. Then we don’t have to feel every instant as if we’re about to die–although we ARE going to die. That’s absolute. It’s coming, and we have to know that, yet not be afraid of it. We have to not know what’s on the other side of death, yet not fear it. How the hell is that supposed to work?

We can combat fear with gratitude. We can notice how especially wonderful everything is, and that will reassure us that everything will be wonderful after death, too. We can live in the moment, because for this moment, we are still alive — until that moment when we’re not, of course. Should we still live in the moment at the moment of death? Maybe especially then. Maybe life can’t slip away from us if we’re really paying close enough attention.

Bread

Give us this day our daily bread. There’s a lot in this line. First of all, he has something we want and need, and we are asking for it. In fact, we are demanding it. Give it to us. There might be an implied “please” but we are definitely saying, this is what we want. Bring it here.

Not forever, mind you. For one day. And not an unlimited supply, but just one day’s worth. Give us THIS day our DAILY bread.

And why bread instead of, say, fruit? Why not say, supply us with something that falls in our laps, falls off a tree, is freely given all over the place? Maybe bread is a reference to the manna from heaven from another, older testament. That actually was a kind of tree sap or something. But bread is something not natural, it’s what we make out of something natural. There’s a lot of manpower and man will in making bread, harvesting the grain, grinding the grain into flour, mixing, baking. We’re asking God to give us something we make ourselves, maybe to give us the power to make it, the right to make it. After all, he grows the grain. We plant it, but some magical, subtle energy causes plants to grow. Maybe we are asking that he enable us to enlist that power to create what we need, one day at a time.

Him there, us here

Who art in heaven. Meaning, the guy who created and protects us is actually somewhere else, and we are somewhere else, and we want this reality to match HIS reality. On earth as it is in heaven. On earth, where crude creatures roam the earth, as it is in heaven, where intentionality rules all.

Hallowed be thy name. Fox says the name of something means it’s true identity. We are saying something to God about his true identity, what we recognize that to be. Hallowed. Holy. Sacred, spiritual, above the crudity of the lower planes of thought and consciousness. We are saying, Creator, your true nature is of the higher essences.

Thy kingdom come — Again, he’s somewhere else, his world is NOT the same vibrational level as this world — his kingdom is not our kingdom, but we are saying, Come. We are welcoming it. We are intentionally opening ourselves to that vibration.

Thy will be done — Now we’re talking about HIS intentionality. He has a will. He has a plan. And we are saying we’re open to that, too. We are welcoming his plan to manifest, without our resistance.

 

Line by line

As a morning meditation, I analyzed the Lord’s prayer, line by line. Our father. I understand what Emmet Fox said about that, about how if we refer to God as “our father” we cannot feel that we are special and another group of people is not, because he is the same father to everyone. And he’s a father, meaning the one who created us AND protects us. Nice word choice by JC there.

The rest I have been trying to view through the lens of my latest concept, that there is a magical subtext to all things, a subtle layer of energy, and that’s where everything REALLY comes from. Healing means manipulating that subtle energy. Manifesting, likewise. The only power we really have has to do with manipulating this subtle energy substream, yet we’re mostly unaware that it exists. When we see it have an effect on something, we call that a miracle, or magic. We think life is out here where we are crudely trying to manage the elements of life. It’s like baking a cake with a sledgehammer and a snow shovel. Clumsy, overwrought, minimally effective.

Intention may be everything. Intention is the way by which we manipulate the subtle energy substream. Really, the Bible says this over and over again, in its most confusing passages. Ask and it shall be given, knock and the door will open. Greater things than JC did shall we do. GREATER things. He wanted us to know how powerful we are. That might have been his whole message. But we misused that energy to wreak havoc, to kill him actually.

Matthew, interpreted

One who made us

It’s all about you.

We want to be like you, be with you, be loved by you.

We want our world to be like the one you imagined

When you created us.

(We have only a vague idea what that might be like …)

We need so many things and

we need your help to get them.

We make so many mistakes

Please don’t hold that against us.

(We promise to also forgive each other …)

It’s so easy to be wrong.

Don’t make it any easier.

If we see darkness and light, turn us around

to face the right direction.

(We have no idea why we are here, or which way to go …)

This is your place.

You’re the only one strong enough to help us.

We promise to give you the credit.

whoever you are.

Amen.