I got out my tools and pestered two pieces from out of 2008 into joining together because they seemed to need to do so. They are both from the Weavemother series but they were not originally consecutive. A little hammering, a little chiseling, some soldering, application of a vise or two and now they maybe work better.
The first was originally named Diversity and the second Integrity. There is a little bit from Waging Peace in here as well
There's music ahead...and some poesy.
The Locomotive's engineer cast hir mind outwards and sought awareness. The WeaveMothers, those consciousnesses which had distilled from the collective knowledge of all creatures in the Greataway were tending their flocks and new happentracks were condensing into existence. SpaceTime expanded. There were new choices for the path of the train to take.
The Storyteller plucked a poem from the past. The Listener perked up. The Passenger slept.
Every day people around me reveal that they live in
a country that shocks my soul. Words that they speak
suddenly open infinity between us.
Books or friends or conduct they embrace
recede to a pinpoint on my screen and go out.
It is my habit never to hurt these people
around me. Their offenses against my taste, my moral
sense--my religion--can't be allowed to darken
their lives or our joint residence in our time.
In separate rooms we are traveling our lives.
--William Stafford, Daily Writing, 2 June 1993
>
_ # ^ & _ # ^ & _ # ^ &
The WeaveMothers were one, yet they were also several. The collective rippled the fabric towards the Locomotive. They would have smiled if they knew how.
Learning to Smile was added to the To Do List.
Concentration returned to the brighter spot. WeaveMother births were exceedingly rare. There were too many stillborn, too many happentracks that withered and died.
The WeaveMothers prepared a space for a possible new cell.
_ # ^ & # ^ & _ # ^ & _
I know how the argument goes. It's not like I haven't heard it ten or twenty or a thousand times. Every member of a suspect group has heard it.
If humans could just learn to make some traits we have invisible, in whatever way they need to be, we would have no maltreatment based on someone having (or not having) that trait.
It sounds quite reasonable. Completely impossible, but quite reasonable.
I cannot not see what I see. I cannot not hear what I hear. I cannot not know the knowledge that I have.
But recognizing that people have different skin colors doesn't make a person a racist, no matter how much people who voice that above argument think it does. Being able to recognize someone's ethnicity from hearing the language they speak or the accent that they are speaking with is not a bad thing. Having knowledge of other religions and cultural customs is, in fact, very beneficial to a healthy society.
It's called diversity. We are all different. And that's good thing. Who knew?
The idea should be that we celebrate our differences. I celebrate yours along with you. You celebrate mine along with me.
Guess what. That takes effort. It takes living in each moment of our lives with an awareness of ourselves, of those around us, and our interactions with those others. It cannot benefit any interaction with others to be completely blind to the otherness each of us feels.
I become friends with the Thai lady who owns the restaurant next door, the Filipino couple who work as cashiers at the supermarket, and the Indian couple who own the Krausers. I teach inner-city younger people of all sorts of hues, ethnicities, religions, and cultural variations when I lived in New Jersey. The number one thing we all learn is to co-exist. That was part of our Mission Statement at Bloomfield College. It's why I aught there.
...The mission of Bloomfield College is to prepare students to attain academic, personal and professional excellence in a multicultural and global society.
The College is committed to enabling students, particularly those who have traditionally been excluded from higher education, to realize their intellectual and personal goals...
We recognize our differences. And we celebrate those differences as well as our similarities. We develop what some of us call empathy.
I fail to understand why anyone should think it's that difficult to understand.
I choose my words carefully. The "should" in the sentence above is there for a reason. I don't think we should find it difficult. It is with tremendous amounts of pain that I recognize that so many people do. I grieve for our species.
Perhaps a part of me dies every time I hear it voiced that this is inevitable. How does one change the direction of inevitable?
I am intensely aware that not everyone thinks or feels or believes what I do. We are who we are.
We are one. And we are several.
We are a community of individuals as well as a communal organism.
Mirages
Cellular Diversity
Organismystically
we form and transform
the words and thoughts
building an understanding
a commonality
cells aligning
and recombining
Not by becoming
blind--deaf--dumb
but through sampling
our differences
does this creature
avoid being stillborn
--Robyn Elaine Serven
--June 20, 2008
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I would hope that before any of us starts commenting upon the life of another, we would make the effort to learn who that other person is. Take some time. Read some comments, maybe an essay or two. Walk a mile or so inside someone else's brain.
Make an effort to learn that which each of us brings to the party. Make an effort to dismantle the barriers that separate us as individuals so that the organism can thrive.
If we can extend that to our personal lives, maybe the world has a chance of becoming a better place.
Just a thought.
With love from me to you.
_ # ^ & _ # ^ & _ # ^ &
And with hope this birth is not still, thought the collectiveness that was the WeaveMothers. They were one. But perhaps they were not complete. And they were several. But perhaps they were not enough.
_ # ^ & # ^ & _ # ^ &
The StoryTeller tossed another old poem at the Engineer.
Cliff Dweller
You could say I live on Acoma, steep
drop all around. Sometimes my foot
dips, and I feel that giddy height.
Often my words drop into nothing:
no answer comes back: a pale
whisper reaches up from the blue distance.
Relatives, friends who walked beside me--
I look around and they are gone. They don't
live on this rock any more.
Stories tell of a place where the land goes on,
firm all around. Your steps can be sure.
In my dreams I parachute into that land.
I wake up. A breeze is blowing the curtain.
I send out a few words toward the edge. Sometimes
they bring back a friend. Sometimes--the blue whisper.
--William Stafford
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The Locomotive switched happentracks.
_ # ^ & # ^ & _ # ^ &
The WeaveMothers, one and several, saw the thread snap. It whipsawed through the firmament as the tapestry of reality sagged and fragmented. Like so many other wherewhens, the place of weakness involved the worldtime of the brighter spot. As much as they could experience Fear, they feared another stillbirth should the loose cable strike the brightness.
And, one and several, they wondered if it didn't seem dimmer.
_ # ^ & # ^ & _ # ^ & _
The Engineer seized the braking lever suddenly and pulled with all hir might. The giant wheels locked and a plaintive squeal proclaimed the rending of the fabric.
The Storyteller ceased singing the song. The Listener's head turned to watch the Passenger fall from the seat and awaken suddenly. On the Passenger's head there was what could have been blood...near where there could have been other scars. Some of the Passenger's face came away in its forelimb.
Turning to look outside they all noticed a thread slicing through the Greataway which grazed the front end of the Locomotive and knocking it from its former Happentrack.
Reality vibrated with pain and sadness.
The Storyteller spoke the words, "There is no joy in Mudville." The Listener and the Passenger intoned, "Mighty Casey."
Quiet ensued. It was the quiet one hears after an echo passes.
Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ
Somewhere in one of the below places, as Sun was once again passing over, Canyon noticed a sudden fissure open and then close in the sky, leaving perhaps no change except less sky...and maybe less hope.
_ # ^ & _ # ^ & _ # ^ &
My brain seemed barely capable of stirring together a topic for this evening. But that was this morning.
Time to make stone soup? Maybe.
I had some set-ups, like buhdydharma's piece about why he is a liberal, like the wholesale denigration of community activists I've heard about, or like even Governator Palin, but to be honest, I avoided the RNC broadcasts as much as possible. Their message never changes.
_ # ^ & # ^ & _ # ^ &
The WeaveMothers were one and several. The several part was not without its danger. Getting lost in the a reality of a happentrack was an ever-present possibility. When that happened, sight of the larger tapestry was usually lost.
And when that happened, there was danger of the tapestry unravelling. There was even the danger that what had already going to be happening could be forgotten, so that it would never actually ever reach the state of having happened.
They came back together determined to repair the snapped thread. Raveling was kept to a minimum. A dropped stitch or four would have to be picked up. But only a few realities had ceased to exist. The WeaveMothers mourned the consciousnesses that were still. The Greataway would be poorer for them never having existed.
The collectivity willed the Locomotive into motion once again.
_ # ^ & # ^ & _ # ^ & _
The Engineer incanted, "What the world needs now."
The Storyteller chanted, "All you need is love."
The Listener watched the Passenger's head re-form into something approximating how it had looked before. Together they responded with the customary, "Jeremiah was a bullfrog."
There was a train reaction and the wheels rolled.
The Storyteller shared a tale. The Listener leaned forward intently. The Passenger once again fell into a sound sleep.
_ # ^ & _ # ^ & _ # ^ & _
Maybe this stew needs some herbage. Maybe it could be spiced by the show I watched the other night entitled
Chimps Are People Too. But I'm not sure about that. Maybe a dash of cultural relativity would enliven the flavor.
And a Monk marathon is running in the background...and I hear the words,
Here is a list of things you cannot flush down the toilet.
I hope the Constitution is on that list.
And morality. It would be nice if that was there. And maybe personal integrity. But that's probably where the division occurs. Those of us who think we can discern what is right and what is wrong through the use of our own native talents as human beings and those of us who require an Über-morality enforced from above.
I'm no doubt slow on the uptake with the Palin thing. I sometimes erect walls to protect the few unused synapses I have left from being used to store that which I do not desire in my brain. And I didn't feel I needed to see the irrelevant but inevitable sexist approach of some who think that's appropriate. Nor did I wish to read the gratuitous attempts at humor invoking the funniest thing going...people who have sex changes...as a means of denigrating a person's character. So I'm slow on the Palinator uptake.
Imagine that: the first ever woman candidate for Vice President of the New-Knighted States of A'murka™. Well, except for Geraldine Ferraro, but she doesn't count because she was a democrat. I understand Geraldine sympathizes somewhat. Not that Geraldine has been popular recently, but that may be a discussion for another day...or never. Whatever.
I only need to know one thing about Sarah Palin. It concerns the censorship of books. I had an interest and was spending time wondering which "objectionable" books Mayor Palin wanted removed. Then I realized that it didn't matter (though I'm laying even-money on Heather Has Two Mommies). Nor did it matter if any books were in fact removed.
When the matter came up for the second time in October 1996, during a City Council meeting, Anne Kilkenny, a Wasilla housewife who often attends council meetings, was there.
Like many Alaskans, Kilkenny calls the governor by her first name.
"Sarah said to Mary Ellen [Baker, nee Emmons, who was the librarian involved, as well as president of the Alaska Library Association--ed], 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?'" Kilkenny said.
"I was shocked. Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the line of, 'The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.'"
--Anchorage Daily News
What mattered was that Mayor Palin claimed it was simply a rhetorical inquiry. She was simply trying to gauge loyalty.
Palin told the Daily News back then the letters were just a test of loyalty
What kind of a person measures loyalty by asking if someone else is loyal enough to violate their own sense of morality, to abandon their personal integrity?
But that's an easy one. I've known the answer to that for-just-about-ever. A conservative. Loyalty trumps morality. Ideology dominates integrity. Isn't that primarily the shame of it all? And isn't domination their pot at the end of the rainbow Holy Grail?
Except, you know, conservatives apparently don't feel shame the way most of us would think. That little old traffic-cop-in-the-brain we call a superego has apparently been evicted, replaced by the external god-figure, whether that be an actual God or simply striving for personal gain (aka mammon). More likely both. Isn't it strange how the external god telling people how to behave is such a fellow traveler with that mammon creature?
Why is someone a liberal? Liberal is no doubt an ill-defined term. I'll accept the term if someone wants to pin it on me, but I prefer progressive. I want progress towards a better world more than a laissez-faire attitude about people's participation in this one. I believe in trying to fix a problem when I recognize it...or at least trying to instigate those who are better situated and have better tools to fix the problem to attempt to do so. Community organizers they are sometimes called. Sometimes I have included my self among their number, at least on certain issues. Some people even use the word activist rather than organizer. I prefer it myself because people who seek social progress are rarely organized.
See a problem. Fix it. Or try to get someone else...or a group of them...to help in the effort. Why the fuck else are we here except to learn how to get along and work together for common goals, paramount above all being to make this a better world, more bearable to live in for us all.
Suffer an indignity? Or recognize that someone else is suffering an indignity? Do your best to make sure nobody else might ever have to suffer than same indignity...or even anything like it. Persevere in that effort.
Never give up. Never surrender.
--Commander Peter Quincy Taggart
Alas, as I have gotten older, persevering has gotten harder.
Build a better world for us all.
And by "us all" I include the chimpanzee people and the dolphin people and...and...and...and even for people who are not like me.
Anyone else got something to add to the pot?
Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ Δ
For no apparent reason, other than that it always did so, Sun passed over Canyon. And Canyon felt warmer. Pine and Birch soaked up the radiation and exhaled some oxygen. The lives nearby brightened.
The WeaveMothers stared at the puncture and wondered if the autonomous beings would work to close it or to make it larger. As much as they knew sadness, it hung over them.
That is the thing about autonomy. The creatures would decide what song to sing.