in the quiet security of heart

lies the most valuable possession of a lifetime

three angels arrayed

three angels arrayed
up in a tree over my shoulder
just behind me
they talked with child-like Innocence
making me blush at Purity so near

RETURN
there is a new movement afoot
the transformation of the old becomes easy
what is so hopeful:

The Movement is Natural arising Spontaneously

I CHING

When i'm not looking

beauty sometimes sneaks upon me

overwhelming

Commit to Child-like Innocence of the Natural State

mesmerized

by a beautiful song

mesmerized
by a beautiful voice
by a woman song-bird
mesmerized
by a woman so beautiful
as only woman can be

COLD FACE
blowin down my back

drizzle melting Summers' stores

An American Insurgency

Urgency in the making
all Progress is from and thru Crisis

The Beast, Capitalism, is in its
Death Throes
we but need deliver its merciful end

VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY/BEYOND MATERIALISM

mission: create an Alternative Lifestyle
by changing our patterns of consumption
no longer buy or buy- into the Corporate Brand
Voluntary Simplicity is living in a way that is

outwardly simple and inwardly rich

a new balance between inner and outer growth
the way of life embraces frugality of consumption
and a non-consumerist lifestyle based on

being and becoming not having

recognizing the poverty of abundance

Co-operation rather than competition

our consumerist search for identity, finally peaks
identity is no longer gift-wrapped in materialism
no longer is there a need to buy things
we don't really need
for too many Americans consumption is not only
an expression of identity it is identity

All religious founders (Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tse, St. Francis)
agreed that the pursuit of material wealth is a wrong aim

the madness can stop by initiating some simple activities:

organic gardening, recycling, natural foods, simple clothing
biking to work, backpacking on vacations, family oriented
engaging in meditation or other growth processes
both produce and buy local

cottage industries

the ideas presented here are only a beginning
meant by way of introduction
the way is much, much more extensive and rich
fundamental change

THE SIMPLE LIVING NETWORK

hmm...lets see a society based on not-wanting?

or maybe just tempered by not- wanting

a new balance between inner and outer growth

but what of the consequences to GDP?

Oh, you mean a Radical Redistribution of Wealth...hmm, lets see

SARVODAYA

a form of Radical Simplicity espoused by Ghandi

a compassionate community welfare of not wanting what the least of the inhabitants of this earth cannot have

What you do unto the least of these you do to me
MATTHEW 25: 40

ABSENCE SEIZURE

a temporary suspension of the conscious struggle for existence

brought on by an irrational moment of instinctive awareness.

No matter who runs, the same side always wins

...awakened deaf
when truly awake we are deaf
sense perceptions are shut-out
that Soul may speak

if soap is a cleansing agent

why does it leave scum?

same principle as white trash??

oh well, i'm off to church...at the laundromat this morning

you meet the best ppl there...thoz seeking cleansing
thoz who bare their filth:

outwardly, openly, in humility

but what about

"never air your dirty laundry in public"?

ah but, confession of inequity

that's true cleansing

by repressive regimentation reason creates civilization
and thereby self-conscious reflection sends man
hurdling down a descent towards death:
(Marcuse)

"...for wherever conscious purpose is seen
there, truth and innocence have been lost...
by devotion to the divine spirit within
(instinctual awareness) man attains
an unsullied innocence that leads him

to do right with instinctive certainty."

redemption (from death) is won
moment-by-moment by a mind
natural and true...unshadowed by reflection
I CHING

it is written, that man is engaged
in a conscious struggle for existence
plodding along a road to nowhere
we must abandon this paralysis
and re-discover the path awakened moment-to-moment
along the yellow brick road to instinctual awareness

EROS and CIVILIZATION, Herbert Marcuse

in so much as i did not show love

that same is taken from me

what if they gave a sale and no one showed up?

Forget Marx and Engels, the most powerful force
we have as agents for social change is as consumers

Wanna change the world?
change your patterns of consumption

brought to you by: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach me, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau

in the Life of God, divine cognition
is but mere insipidity without suffering
patience and labour
of untroubled equality, unity with itself

in patience and humility
there is rear-ward
for the bowing of one's head
while standing in line at Walgreens or Walmart

Hegel, PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, p. 10

Life Eternal
like catching the perfect wave, riding the Eternal Crest
wave after wave moment-by-moment
being there, natural and true
its only when you fall
in-between waves, in-between moments
when you are out-of-step, out-of-place
that death draws you into its clutches

"Wherever conscious purpose is to be seen
there the truth and innocence of nature
have been lost"
Anake--the conscious struggle for existence
is the origin of death

when we get caught up in conscious plotting
struggle and strive
we lay ourselves open to death

A mind natural and true is unshadowed by reflection
and nurtures Life-Eternal
I CHING

sweetness permeates the Texas air
a rarefied gift this time of year

Old-oaks heavy laden with character

so, i will designate one of them

as my Christmas tree, this year

the preacher was reading outta the phone book
today
no worries tho, the congregation is deaf

"Why do you not understand my speech?"
John 9:14

butterfly rainbows dancing in the sun
close one eye, then the other
butterfly rainbows dancing in the sun

darkness preys upon Light
sucking all the life from it
that is why Light must flood the darkness
bringing the fullness thereof
to bear upon it

and with this initiative

Light tames the Beast and darkness attains its Beauty

the id comes knocking on our door
blindly striving to gratify its instinctual impulses
while ego desperately co-ordinates
alters, attempts to control and repress
incorrigible impulses incompatible with reality

the id in a tempestuous borderline truce
held at-bay tenuously, moment-to-moment

at last, the id hands ego
its head-in-hand

primal instincts (the id) press forth
the ramparts strain
forces of the ego falter
stumble-upon and wear thin
finally dissolve
the individual rejoices in liberation

there were the usual lines
albeit with new faces
somehow new yet familiar...homeless
more were women and children...homeless
those by-passed by prosperity
faces not yet weathered and worn
still, too fresh, but...homeless

as we must reconcile ourselves to death
so must we commit to life
as a moment-to-moment proposition
it is imperative that we
sustain momentary awareness
for lapses in-between moments
is where death lurks gathering itself
repelled only by leaps of faith

CONGRATS

passion is of the moment
it fulfills itself quickly
being of the moment but not transcending...
if only, we could nail passion down
substantiate it
but passion is not so easily caught
rather, it is as elusive as the moment itself

passion like a butterfly
lighting on this then that
but captured not...

sittin at the bus stop, talking to myself
when i looked down the way
and saw a blind man playing air guitar
on his cane
which of us is more crazy...
sittin at the bus stop, talking to myself

nobody feels any pain
tonight as i stand inside the rain
everybody knows
that baby's got new clothes
but lately i see her ribbon and her bows
haven fallen from her curls
she takes just like a woman
she makes love just like a woman
and she aches just like a woman
but she breaks just like a little girl

dylan

SPREAD THE WEALTH

from each according to his ability
to each according to his need
Karl Marx

all that believed were together and held all things in common

and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men
as every man had need...Neither said any of them that aught of the things
which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common

ACTS 2: 44-45

The day you were born
you changed my life
looking at you in your bassinet
i marveled in awe
truly, i believed you to be angelic
i stared at you incomprehensibly
i couldn't get my mind around "you"
standing an all nite vigil at your side
fearful that you might re-ascend

The day you were born
you changed my life forevermore
the feminine side of my soul
came to life with your first breath
i became aware of tender sensibilities
that i had left behind in childhood

Your birth was my rebirth
and tho you are a mite older now
the life you awakened then
has been my constant companion ever-since

profit pirates enslave us all

what costs are you willing to incur
to Purify
what expense to re-gain your Innocence

learn to live with your hunger
as we abstain from food
so do we nourish our Spirit

SACRED EARTH

once upon a time you dressed so fine
you threw the bums a dime in your prime
didn't you?

you used to laugh about everybody that was hangin out
now you don' talk so loud
now you don't seem so proud
about having to be scrounging your next meal

how does it feel?
how does it feel?
to be without a home like a complete unknown

like a rolling stone

dylan

when time reaches its end
it will have come around to the beginning
again
so, where did the Garden (Paradise) go
it receded into the unconscious
revealed, again, by expanding consciousness

heaven is measured (experienced) by our own depth of

consciousness

Aunt Sarah
"THE HANDMAID'S TALE"

"The mind of man is like a wall
that divides man from God"

Anonymous

FUELING THE FIRE OF REAL CHANGE
by Chris Hodges

Turn your back on Wall Street. Walk a few blocks up from the gleaming and soulless towers
of disintegrating capitalism to the shabby, brick Catholic Worker house at 55 E. Third St. Sit, as I did recently, in one of the chairs in the basement dining room with its cracked linoleum and steel utility tables.

"Works of mercy and contact with the destitute sustain the spark in the ashes," William Griffin, who has been with the Catholic Worker for 34 years and writes for the newspaper, told me. "It is with the poor and the indigent that you sense the imbalance and injustice. It is this imbalance that inspires action. Generations come in waves. One generation is inspired by these sparks, as Martin Luther King was during the civil rights movement. These fires often fall away and smolder until another generation.

The coals of radical social change smolder here among the poor, the homeless and the destitute. As the number of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our hope, our only hope, is to connect intimately with the daily injustices visited upon them. Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. Hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless to shower. Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly cast out on city sidewalks, take their medications. Put your muscle behind organizing service workers. Go back into America's resegregated schools. Protest. Live simply. It is in the tangible, mundane and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others and defy authority that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back. It is not Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who will save us. It is Dorothy Day.

Day, who died in 1980, founded the Catholic Worker in the midst of the Great Depression with Peter Maurin. The two Catholic anarchists published the first issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933. They handed out 2,500 copies in Union Square for a penny a paper. The price remains unchanged. Two Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in the Lower East Side soon followed. Day and Maurin preached a radical ethic that included an unwavering pacifism as well as a hatred of unfettered capitalism. They condemned private and state capitalism for its unjust distribution of wealth. They branded the profit motive as immoral. They were fervent supporters of the labor movement, the civil rights movement and all anti-war movements. They called on followers to take up lives of voluntary poverty. The Catholic Worker refused to identify itself as a not-for-profit organization and has never accepted grants. It does not pay taxes. It operates its soup kitchen in New York without a city permit. The food it provides the homeless is donated by people in the neighborhood. There are some 150 Catholic Worker houses around the country and abroad, although there is no central authority. Some houses are run by Buddhists, others by Presbyterians. Religious and denominational lines mean little.

Day cautioned that none of these radical stances, which she said came out of the Gospels, ensured temporal success. She wrote that sacrifice and suffering were an expected part of the religious life. Success as the world judges it should never be the final criterion for the religious and moral life. Spirituality, she said, was rooted in the constant struggle to fight for justice and be compassionate, especially to those in need. And that commitment was hard enough without worrying about its ultimate effect. One was saved in the end by faith, faith that acts of compassion and justice had intrinsic worth.

Many of the old stalwarts of the movement do not place their hopes in Barack Obama or the Democratic Party. They see their task as sustaining the embers of social and religious radicalism. They hope that this radical ethic can once again ignite a generation shunted aside by a bankrupt capitalism.

"If you lived through the civil rights movement as I did, you would want very much to vote for Obama," said Tom Cornell, who first came to the Worker in 1953, "but I don''t think I will be able to, given Obama's foreign policy and his failure to promote a health care system for all
Americans. I can't vote for someone who leaves an attack of Iran on the table."

Those within the Worker, however, worry that the looming economic dislocation will empower right-wing, nationalist movements and the apocalyptic fringe of the Christian right. This time around, they say, the country does not have the networks of labor unions, independent press, community groups and church and social organizations that supported them when Day and Maurin began the movement. They note that there are fewer and fewer young volunteers at the Worker. The two houses on the Lower East Side depend as much on men and women in their 50's and 60's as they do on recent college graduates.

Our society is more brutal than it was, said Martha Hennessy, Day's granddaughter. "The heartlessness was introduced by Reagan. Clinton put it into place. The ruthlessness is backed up by technology. Americans have retreated into collective narcissism. They are disconnected from themselves and others. If we face economic collapse there are many factors that could see the wrong response. Their are more elements of fascism in place than there were in the 1930's. We not only lack community, we lack information."

I do not know if our hope lies with the Catholic Worker. Institutions, even good ones, ossify. They can become trapped in the deification of their own past and rigid canonization of the views of those who began the movements. But as our society begins to feel the disastrous ripple effects from the looting of our financial system, the unraveling of our empire and the accelerated rape of the working and middle class by our corporate state, hope will come only through direct contact with the destitute. The ethic born out of this contact will be grounded in the real and the possible. This ethic will, because it forces us to witness suffering and pain, be uncompromising in its commitment to the sanctity of life.

"There are several families with us, destitute families, destitute to an unbelievable extent and there, too, is nothing to do but love." "Day wrote of those she had taken into the Catholic Worker House. "What I mean is that there is no chance of rehabilitation, no chance, so far as we see, of changing them; certainly no chance of adjusting them to this abominable world about them-and who wants them adjusted anyway:

"What we would like to do is change the world-make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute-the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words-we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world."

Chris Hedges, in COMMON DREAMS, September 30, 2008

MARTIAL LAW

change?

all we are saying is give peace a chance
all we are saying is give peace a chance

BEATLES

...a joy so deep and pervasive
that it transforms your experience of life

No matter what the injustice
what the oppression
in crying out to God
we breathe in Righteousness

out of the darken depths of consciousness
emerges a thirsting desire for Light
only thru Light
can the inherent destiny of consciousness
become manifest

if you want to be at peace
if you want to feel the love of god
in your heart
if you want to savor the present moment
then just let go of all the constraints
you have put upon yourself

minutes (linear time) can be expanded
into Sacred Moments
depending on our degree of consciousness
the object is the Eternal Moment

when you walk my way
obstructions fall away
when you walk my way
limitations dissolve
when you walk my way
i feel a joyful abandon

walk in a sacred way
the way of love

that i may abide with you knowing the fullness thereof

beyond the constraints of time
its secrets revealed
unveiled
there is a silver thread
connecting us all to the Eternal
to each other, to the Earth
it is a tapestry woven of Time

if i had never taken chances
if i had never made mistakes
i would not appreciate life
as i do

everyone in my life, as well as life itself

has become more dear, the value of life

more clear

by the winding path, i have followed

from a deep guttural-grief
gathered in primal depths
a union sublime emerges
an involuntary response to which
there is no conscious control
echoes of distant truths
permeate our being
eliciting disparate aspects
merging them into harmonic balance

the imprint of archetypal processes

Once I moved around like the wind
and now I surrender. That is all.


Geronimo

On this hallowed ground

Comancheria
The People roamed, wild and free
every hill, every hollow, Spirit-filled
but now, we are the hollow people
intruders, callous and crude

lacking the substance of its Native People

i

safe in my cave within
the moment magically unfolds
lost, it engulfs me
helpless, hapless to its power
all vestiges of ego dissolve
warm and snug within its reaches
i breathe, or better yet, it breathes me

letting go, i am captive to the moment

live from a deep well within
truly, what is substantive
if not spirit

should we catch a glimpse
of our eternal soul, that spark of light
the flame of which is inbred, encoded
with the need to re-unite
we so find our twin, who defines our Journey Home

when two, so suited, make love
they experience divine union
each gives the other the experience
of soul's completion

a physical sensation of spiritual union

and we two shared such a divine union, if only for a moment

lost dreams...
its time to pursue that of which we have lost sight
dreams are doorways to Truth
doorways to a Higher Reality
lost dreams should be reclaimed

its time to exert ownership over our lives

evolution is the present chasing the future
a future that exists outside of time
and in that which we call heaven, is the fulfillment of time
but in the present it is an unfolding, a process moving toward perfection

evolution is just a way of seeing heaven
thru the eyes of the present

Heaven...
heaven lies beyond space and time
outside the framework of mortal mind
heaven is superior to the limitations of the transitory
heaven is the harmonious working together of all that is beautiful:

When each thing receives its true nature and destiny
and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony

I CHING

I'm no holy man
nor, earthly king
but I look within
for the Peace with-out
I look within
for the riches of Soul
I look within
for the love which I desperately seek

When our eyes fixate on a moment in time
an injustice, such as the death of a child
we are blind to the force
sublime that dwells in primal depths
a power that thru perseverance
changes all things until
they are completely transformed in their manifestation
until there is the coming together of all that is beautiful

I CHING

a wanderer of the unknown
must have a trustin heart
dependent as he is

on impulses from heaven

Looking past your social masks
deep into your soul, therein
is where i love you
i love you from the inside-out

beauty
inner beauty
closely held, almost invisible
moves me to tears

a moment, lost
overcome by fear and doubt
in paralysis
the moment slipped away

i've washed my clothes
many times over, again
you'd think they would be clean
by now...

with the same resonance by which
Lazarus rose
(the power which commands attention)
a flower turns to face the sun
the world is transformed, brought to Perfection

by that vibrant resonance
are hearts joined
in the Sacrament of Love

To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal.
But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda
that tells them they are superior to others, and that others
are inferior to them.

Karl Popper

I dreamed of First Man
a small figure amidst the Forest dense
he sung out and the trees and leaves
reverberated with his song
swirling he vanished
from the vortex of my vision
yet his words were strong...

do not relinquish your personal power
the only way to preserve it
is to act upon it

A state of fear only engenders cruelty:
cruelty, fear, insanity and paralysis.
In the center of Dante's circle
the damned remained motionless.
If we do not become angry
if we do not muster within us
the courage to challenge
the Democratic and Republican parties
who herd us toward the corporate state,
we will have squandered our courage and integrity
when we need it most.

Chris Hedges