Outside the window, there on the other side of my digital portal is the actual world-wide web - of life, of experience, of feeling, of nature and Spirit and soil and bone and water and leaf, coyote, squirrel, hawk, raven and worm. Outside that window lies a frozen lake of tears, hiding a world's-age of memories inside the stone-cold casing that allows us to walk like that mythological ghost-man from Nazareth. Outside that window is everything we've ever wanted, everything we've ever feared and needed and destroyed.
But we play with that destruction, those fears, those wants and desires in our virtual worlds, echoes of what was once real to us as our bodies cry out for justice as we force them to live at the portal of the virtual. We carpally paralyze as our hands are made more for chopping wood, skinning rabbits, soothing babies and welcoming friends than diving into the shallow bay of repetitive motion, sending ones and zeroes into the constant scream of consciousness that may be merely beckoning us to do that act of modern resistance - to go outside and play.
My body finds in it a simple, but tenacious growth, a widening of the midsection that brings some of our deepest adolescent and uninitiated fears to bear in the pages of women's magazines and men's magazines and health magazines and late night infomercials, "as advertised on TV", our banner ads poking and prodding our waistlines and our now wasted minds left dormant because we forgot to keep them both engaged as we wallowed at the portal of the digitally unreal...or at the altar of televisual god, a nasty, vengeful, ubiquitous god. So we attack the midsection, battle the gut with wheels and electrocution belts and lipid-burning pills and life-system bypassing choke chains, melting creams, salves and solutions that send incendiary messages to the part of the body that is more the effect than the cause.
And at the altars of modernity, we lie in abject torpidity, tired-blood offerings to our own social pathological demons, beleaguered by what we think life is, or worse, what it was, raising inaction, inactivity, inactivism to new and lofty heights of deism that have never been seen before and would have been the very scourge of any sane and conscious society. But we wallow on, de-activating the brain in ever-quickening spirals downward, downward, downward because we can't actually fly, more so because we've forgotten our kinship to the crow than that our wingspan is insufficient to be carried into ecstasy on the breath of our Ancestors.
We watch our children, the innocents, the tender, beautiful ones, kill us. They break our hearts. We damn them for not knowing. We scorn them for not seeing. We malign them for not becoming. We report them for failing, for shooting each other with impunity and we impune them when they use the very tools we created for the purposes we made them. We scream at them, even in the silence of our neglect, to do as we say, not as we just did to them. We lock them up in prisons because they disappointed our expectations. We lock them up in schools because we've forgotten to trust, forgotten to divine that they already know what they need to remember. We lock them up in our faulty, dusty, moldy, rank and file expectations because we fear we will lose the life of that child within us, but who dies from that self-same prison imposed upon it by all of the children who drive cars and dig mines and build bridges and run stock markets and who brutalize motherhood who never grew up in the first place.
I see a vast wasteland of the bodies of what we would call, what we could call, what we should call women and men, mere and rotting echoes of the spirit within. They are the walking dead in the night of the living, crawling out of the shadows for their forfeited life-blood pacts with the Creator, slavering after the elixir of life at the jugular well. Our telescreens dance with images of the zombied and and the vampirical, the ones who can't live without the others, the last living things on earth, running from the light, from their own death, from that which will pass them into physical oblivion even though that is the only way life can continue. The sapling grows out of the cool humus born of old bark and branch. What kind of hell is it in which the tree of life eats its young?
True pathology is not born, it is made, even if it shows up in the twisted body-mind of a newborn terminator-seed baby. Atrazine cocktails, the insanity of pharmaceutical aquatic concoction, poison-water amalgams of experiments gone bad, but cheered in great pomp and circumstance like the naked emperor in his new clothes. What kind of twisted kool-aid have we conjured for the kids? Living lives of disconnected, not asked, not told fantasies of something long gone, but waiting in our hearts' shadows, beckoning the vampire to walk through its twilight and back into the substance of a new day. The crime of the centuries has been committed and the smoking gun will always be responsible to the one that forged the trigger.
And we've integrated the virus into our very lives. We have committed them to the eternal Inquisition, to the mawkish embrace of the iron maiden, chained her to the boiling cauldron of our own demasculinized machinations into which we daily commend her spirit. If she floats we will kill her. And if she drowns she has killed herself. She asked for it. She is mine. She is mined for the liquid gold of her tears, her fossil-fuel blood spilling, killing her children. She is raped in her ability to give life and we will sell her tears in the twisted, dime store narrative of our own tragic buffoonery, drink from her cup that runneth over with her own endless capacity for acceptance and the making of peace. We have walked on her moon and left upon it the garbage of our mechanism, the spawn of the ma(n)trix. Her pill will be blue and she shall consume it verily, thusly and without fail, without hesitation, without protest, without consideration. This is the word of the lord. This is the world of the lords.
The penis was never a license to kill or to blind oneself to the gift in the hand that fed you or to destroy the essence of that which gave you life with that spiteful, sybaritic, saline solution of scientific human blasphemy.
Reconciliation is not the dizzny-fictional apparition of glowing castles, awakened walking-dead princesses or Powhatans and Pilgrims both marked as savages. How dare we act like this is so! Reconciliation is not the psychic-trauma-insult to colonial injury of some so-called truth panel pseudo-Khosa-celebre that leaves the crime yet unpunished, wounds bleeding out into continued township bloodshed and the sustenance of gated cities within nations of disenfranchised warriors who thirst for water, arable land and sweet succulent quiet soothing healing living breathing justice. Reconciliation is not the feel-good process that requires us to close our eyes to reality or to the corporeal nature of our own regret, frustration and grief. Reconciliation is not shallow forgiveness. Reconciliation is not giving up...or laying down...or giving ground...or giving in.
Reconciliation makes things real. It requires us to realize with real eyes what is, what was and what must be. We must be able to reconcile the dysfunction of a society that places great importance on the sustenance of virtual realities and in those same instances is destroying the balance of the natural systems upon which all terrestrial life depends, forsaking the real for the virtual, the actualized for the fictionalized, the Creation for the manufactured, the body for the robot, the ghost for the machine, the baby for the bathwater.
Reconciliation unifies experience. We must be able to unify our concerns for our own looks, our waistlines, our health, our lives and that our lifestyles are creating our wasteful styles and broadening waists. Our bodies are not the criminals, but we have criminalized, to some extent, the clarity that brings us to bravery that brings us to enacting the kind of change in what we eat and how we eat and how we more and why we move so that the beautiful ways we look and feel and are and become are born of the beautiful ways we treat each other and grow and cook and nurture food and nurture and grow life within our homes and villages, communes and communities.
Reconciliation requires the bravery and courage inherent in the execution of human responsibility. Reconciliation requires us to love the children more powerfully, most powerfully, who take up our arms and kill each other, whether in the villages of Uganda and the Congo, the inert-cities of Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles or the quaint, peaceful, idyllic and idealized communities of New Hampshire and Colorado. The children, the truant students, the inattentive fifth-graders, the violent gang members, the pubescent mass-murderers, the disrespectful teens, the ignorant mall-rat vermin consuming our high-fructose commercialism are not the problem, but the symptom of our own inability to reconcile the history of the modern manufacture of commodified youth, the recipients of every neuroses and disease, social or otherwise, that we adults could blindly and sometimes not so blindly create for them. Reconciliation calls us to look our children in the face, beaten and bloodied by and with our own hands and weapons, and see ourselves.
Reconciliation is redemption. Reconciliation is the ability to put our own mistaken identities of childhood and adulthood into the solitary confinement of historical memory and to forge into a new relation with the child within and the child without. Why is it that modern culture refuses to consciously and compassionately initiate its youth into adulthood, that we leave them with cinematic visions of the back seats of '57 Chevies and six-packs of beer and HIV-free and nubile blanched bodies as opposed to concretized stories of bodies-become-battlefields and nations-become-decivilized-warzones and futures-become-forsaken-dreams of drunken fathers and mothers pimped-out for their thoughtless, thankless ability to love? Why do we not teach them to envision a world boldly beyond the confines of our own spiritual disability? Why do we not prepare them fully and courageously for the world that we have actually created, but for the one we still fantasize about, but don't tell them because we were too busy dropping them off at soccer, dance class or into the hands of the cult of surreality tv. We don't have time. We are busy. We create a vacuum of parenting, mentorship and elder guidance and direction and we will allow our children to be sucked into that vacuum, to fill it with their grief turned depression turned anger turned self-destruction turned destruction. Reconciliation requires that we stop "teaching" and start listening because we've learned to trust that children come into the world with things we need and we won't figure that out from the results of a bastardizing, standardizing test. A gift is a unique expression of the understanding of one life form to, for and on behalf of another life form. Children are a gift for us. Our communally responsible adulthood, our Eldership, is a gift we have kept from giving to our children as they require. We are the shit of the next generation and we can continue to be a toxic-body-waste or turn ourselves gently over in the cultural compost heap of history and allow the hope of future generations to be fertilized by the gift of our death and the gift of what then will have been a life of love and purpose, responsible to time and space, to the sublime, to grace.
Reconciliation is a river bed through which men will make fertile the sacred forest of their own desacration by the volume of their new-found tears. Reconciliation requires us to look deeply into the mythology, real and imagined, of masculinity, of the maleness, of men, of what they think and what they do. It requires of men that we be singularly and communally able and willing to hold our psychic phallo-weapon in one hand and embrace the body and soul of those victimized of rape in the other. Reconciliation requires us to see, in our mind's eye and in the flowering of our cultural expressions, at the same and simultaneous moment of plausible and achievable absolution our birth mother and our earth mother - that our birth mother is our earth mother and that our earth mother is our birth mother.
Reconciliation requires in all of us that we see the unity in our actions and inaction, in our thoughts and in our behaviors, in our statements and in our production, in what we say we intend and in what we see clearly that we have caused to come into being. Reconciliation requires us to make peace, but not simply take the privilege of power and tell the disempowered that they have access to power, but still make it ultimately and tragically impossible to live peacefully on the land or in a house or with people who love and understand them or drink clean water or grow and eat food that actually is alive and sustains life without selling your body and soul to a machine that does not know your name, but can map your DNA as if we were toys for genetic-rape, tools for patriarchy's prostitution of everything sacred and repositories for drugs so vile that we rob our children of their spirits, their childhood, the food from their lips so we could stay high for one more day.
Reconciliation calls us to write history books that tell the truth of the world that exists in reality outside of the pages.
Reconciliation demands that we tell and disseminate stories that have everything to do with not only the world that truly is, but also the world that we know must and can truly be.
Reconciliation brings us home to the realization that we can not espouse one idea and act in such a way that devalues and unravels, confuses and distorts that idea with dissonant behavior.
Reconciliation is the act of seeing something that needs to change and grow and heal and then creating and manifesting and sustaining that change, that growth, that healing.
Reconciliation behooves us to be honest with each other in ways that our modern, anti-cultural story says is dangerous, damaging and damn-near impossible.
Reconciliation means we may actually have to talk about religion, about religions and their place in our past, present and future and if they should have and hold that same place in our present and future.
Reconciliation will be the perfunctory destruction and dismemberment not only of the ideas and ideology of sexism, racism, classism, ageism and homophobia, but also the structural, social, political systems that validate, maintain and sustain these social diseases.
Reconciliation does not exclude the possibility that we must destroy something that we wish to not even fleetingly gaze upon for the deep, corporeal and earth-shattering emotions it engenders within us.
Reconciliation does not exclude the eventuality that the enslaved might have to set fire to the house of the enslavers.
Reconciliation does not eliminate the necessity for us to come out on the other side of the process slightly or wholly and fundamentally changed for all time.
Reconciliation will bring us to the realization that we ultimate and finally need each other - for everything.
Reconciliation is fucking hard.
Reconciliation must be understood, felt, touched, created, nurtured, created, remembered, enacted, made real, made now, made eternal.
Reconciliation is one of the qualities, one of the energetics, one of the sacred facets of the Spirit of water, Kuon, in the cosmology of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Ghana.
And so it is that reconciliation is yet another water story. The spirit of reconciliation is in the water. The hope of reconciliation, of peace, of unity, of clarity, the healing nature and spirit of who we are as humans becoming human as Spirit embodied - is in the spirit of water.
In the Spirit of Water...
