Climate Changes Civil Society To Support Dreamers

"This morning Munira Sibai, a Syrian-American student with SustainUs, delivered this speech on behalf of young people (YOUNGO). Although many governments could not be bothered to listen to their citizens, civil society was present in force: supporting Munira and each other in a way that governments can only dream of. Onwards." Earth in Brackets BLOG (Dec. 7 2012)

Tonight, as I drifted away, I read the latest Democracy Now! headlines on climate change. Civil society and democracy are shifting gears for full speed ahead as the human race confronts the most pressing issue yet known to humankind: A Warming Earth. 

Read the latest World Bank Research analysis on the devastating impacts of unheeded climate change warnings. At 4 degrees warmer, the science begins to frighten. 

Earlier tonight, as I cycled home, I met a bewildered fox. Scared and nervous, we approached each other. My fear suddenly transformed as I saw fear in the fox's eyes. I glided past carefully. I witnessed this incredible animal confusedly find an exit from the paved city pathways to the nearby riverbanks. I think of Native proverbs that ask, "who will speak for our beloved animals?" 

________

The candles are now all reconstituted wax. The rain boils and steams before it reaches its earthen ground. The sky is on fire and I need a new name.

In Peril by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Through my window of impoverishment, a sanded frame of dirt, I see tanks spewing the ire of mankind. Fire is the breath of unreason. Violence spreads across the land.

Miniature diorama in the Herat Military Museum by Marius Arnesen

Bombs and machine tracks seed great pocks of holes in the earth. The clouds are dark with soot and anger. Lightning cracks through the smiles of silenced memories. Families are swept away like dust.

Lunshunku battle during the Sino-Japanese war (1895) by Unknown

Fending off the soul-puncturing thunder of war, I flee through the bureaucratic maze of a police state. Warmongers drive their piercing insanity into my eyes, as I feel my way through back entrances and obsolete hallways. The border embassy shakes at the foundation. Our earth will be interminably scarred. We are equally victims and perpetrators of widespread ecological domestic abuse.

The Immaculate Conception, detail: Dragon's Eye by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

In a vile trench of near-death urgency, I climb out, and into the sun of borderlands. Having escaped the eruptive core of my country’s open, bleeding veins of disintegration, I wade in scintillating wetlands. Vibrant green pasture, lily pads and low-lying bogs hydrate my contemplative sight.

Sunset over wetlands by Julian Falat

I can almost see beyond the untimely closure of history. Birds and insects sleep with day, at peace, like me, in restful respite.

_________

"Escalations nerve-wracking, lonely murmurs murmuring

Crescent peaks dangling under bums grateful with uprooted membranous petrified and calcified flesh

Journey to roust the kneeling mind, with the desiring missed find, to be missed by nations feigning the patient behind swollen gum-brain awry, with skull-ache

“kinj moduls vrent speen og”

Desiring missiles
Desired missing
Failing nations

Patient fang"

excerpt from "Cajoled Spine-Tap"

Basho Pops My Dream Bubble of Jungle

Picture and Poem by Matsuo Basho

Still I have always been drawn by windblown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering.

—Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road to the Interior, Translation by Sam Hamil

Source

_______

I walk into an ecological sanctuary where exotic plants and fish thrive in a hot greenhouse. The humid air transports one to a transcendence of spatial dimensions, wherein time breathes with the quickening pace of an intensified microcosmic environment. Jungle leaves brush against my face as lotus-bloomed lilies freshly spring from the fish-born soup of breathable life in the density of my deeply woven surroundings. A plant scientist and professor live in a nearby hut within the transplanted immersion of moderate rainforest. Also an active marijuana enthusiast, he keeps to himself, remote behind a fastened wall of swollen wood. I and a few friends meander through the delicate passageways, magically mysterious fruits and vines hang down with a gift of flowering beauty unknown to our Massachusetts scents. Our eyes glisten in the cool dank inner workings of such magnificent spires as they that mount upon the blank calm of a recess and serenity in this isolated outgrowth of our Earth’s most advanced biological developments.

As we glide effortlessly, weaving in and out of the rejuvenating corridors, a glint of an eye sparks in an unseen corner. The walls open to encompass the ever-widening viscera of inbound flora. A blue panther sneaks beyond the encircling brush, masked by the glowing façade of a charged, fearful night. We are unprepared. Dropping everything, we rush headlong into the deepest corridor, seeking refuge. This otherworldly animal, prehistoric and enigmatic, bleeds into the folds of any remaining sensation of physical security. We manage to find refuge beneath an enclosure of tables. Frightened beyond the immediacy of thought, we smash the external glass of the sanctuary and carefully stretch outside into the neighboring cold, modern presence of the un-bubbled Earthly night.  

________

Jungle

"The jungle in dreams represents the wild, passionate side of your personality. How you feel about the jungle in your dream indicates how comfortable you are with this side of yourself." (iDream)

_________

gills 

swung & cushiond by a sacrament of fear

bluish

fine heard at the doorstep 

launch into the outer, outer face

punishd by grub 

bleary & entwined 

drunken 

hatching

encouraged to bleed freely

whitish as the granted 

millions of empires 

hunting forgotten, manmade laws

strapped to so much matter 

wholed or scrappd

left out, dried

mushroom fat, swollen spiritual 

mind 

one  

- excerpt from "stir." 

Tara Sadhana for the Anthropomorphic Newborn

Three Bodhisattvas Witness World Compassion Harmonizing by Vi An Diep

Praising Tara by her divine actions of dispelling conflicts and bad dreams

Homage to you who are honoured by the kings of the hosts of gods,
And the gods and the kinnaras.
Through all your joyful and shining pervasive armour
All conflicts and bad dreams are dispelled.

Last stanza from “Offering the Mandala” 

Thus, O Sublime object of refuge,
Please quickly protect all living beings
From fears such as sickness, spirits, obstacles,
Untimely death, bad dreams, and ill omens.


Colophon: This sadhana has been compiled from traditional sources by Venerable Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche in response to requests made by students of Tara Centre, and translated under his compassionate guidance. September 1989.

Excerpts from Great Compassionate Mother. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche. Tharpa Publications. 1990, 1993. 

______

It's a very ordinary day. It feels like afternoon to early evening. I feel the constant presence of an animal. My albino rabbit, named Salt in life, visited me. His head is in my hands. I pet him. I let him out in the yard. It was snowing heavily, and he, white as the snow, only appears through his beady, red eyes. Then, I notice a child running through the snow. The child came into the house and laid its head next to my lap, and proceeded to nudge into my hand to pet him. It's a boy, a mute boy. He looks at me with colorless eyes. I figured, how wonderful Salt shape-shifted into a young boy. Salt, now a boy, would hop out into the snow around the trees just like a rabbit. Immediately, he shifts back to a rabbit who hops out of my vision. 

A very silvery, glowing white cat with stripes. Upon recognizing the face of this cat, it was evident that it was my deceased cat. All the features of my cat were displayed. His charm and energy radiates. My hands are warm as I pet him. Suddenly, I cradle him in my arms, looking behind my shoulder, I see my husband smiling and laughing. I am speaking to Max, now as a child. He is an infant with the same eyes as a cat, but with the face of a child, staring back at me with such love and affirmation. I speak in English and say, "I want you to learn Chinese because I am your mother. I would like you to preserve my lineage through learning Chinese." My husband, the love of my life, is laughing in the background. In synchronicity my husband and young son speak in English. My husband says laughingly, "he already knows how to speak Chinese." The child says, "Mother, I already know how to speak Chinese." In my surprise I notice my cat turned child changed to four to six months old. Beyond a brick stone ledge, dawn approaches as a beautiful golden sunrise. His dirty blonde hair glistens. His eyes, expressing inquisitive curiosity and a loving recognition, are deep emerald green and brown. Sitting on that ledge, I taught him to say, "eyes (gnan)" in Cantonese. He stuttered, but was able to repeat, the word for eyes in Cantonese. "Gnan" he says. My husband smiles as if to say, why are you trying to teach him what he already intrinsically knows from you, his mother. The child chuckles and says, "eyes, ears, mouth and nose (gnan, yee, hoaw, bae)" I was shocked with such gladness and immense pure unconditional love for this being before me. "Ma" he would exclaim. I already know. He became a toddler and hopped off the sandstone ledge. His head rested next to my thigh as I stroked his beautiful dirty blonde hair, glistening in such glorious light. 

He, in another dream, the third of the sequence, shifts back to a silvery glowing, white, very happy cat. 

________

as her son climbs the dismembered mountain,

trembling with rocks of tragic failure

rolling down to kill my boulder of trash

damming the flood of human night

- excerpt from "My New Bride"

Gothic Flight with the Wife-Sister in Mutilation

Supper Masks by Adolf von Menzel

I am in an setting strongly resembling the priest's starkly bleak and violently humorless abode in "Fanny and Alexander" by Ingmar Bergman. Between the cold stone walls that seem to press in closer and closer, I turn a bend to an outside court. I have a video camera in hand, and find a friend's father succumbing to a filthy heroin addiction. I video him shooting up and turning pale, with fangs as bloody and lifeless as a vampire's. In a kitchenette of sorts, a family sits around the table. The small home now mixes in an understated blur of unspoken silence. There is an inhumane stifled and drowned heart, now turned to meat in our soup bowls, its former life surrounds us quietly. I am reminded of a small kibbutz home that I once visited. The kitchen table is cornered in a lonely room. The family is missing the father, and I am seated without thought to mind the discomfort at knowing his whereabouts as he huddles lowered into the darkness of his poverty of will. Then, in the night, my room is ambushed by his figure, cloaked in staunch black robe. There is an air of over-religious prayer turned to a nightmarish cursing as he raises a black knife into the air above me. Motionless, I receive a monstrous gash beside my belly-button. I howl and receive two more along my side and below my left shoulder as blood streams effortlessly down my side. A gun is raised to my shoulder, and I receive a fixing blow below my right shoulder. Nearly inert, my mind turns to shade, yet my adrenaline picks me up with full lungs, I worry for my wife, now mere animal and sister of humanity, to be slaughtered by the tortured weakness of an insane mind frothing at the brim of his asylum grave; this house of fleshless waste enslaves me to a pain unknown, yet I feel life struggling to stand with the rhythmic plan of my heartbeat, calling me to go forth, and the beat is ever important as never before, if I falter I could miss one beat and fall into the void of the stale, rock floor. I finally find my wife, covered in the ash of wood burnt to its lowest ember, cursing through a throat densely saturated with blood overfull with pain. There is a spark of wonder at our meeting. How are we still alive? I am forced, embedded in this sick house, to confront the murderous wraith who balances life and death on the numb foresight of his insidious night killings. I quickly examine our wounds, and though we are in critical condition with flesh flayed in visible touch with our vitals, the swarm of inner heat beckoning us to kill the blind culprit sends me forth into the blackest corner of the most lightless room, to fulfill my fear's overcoming alas and travail the bloody path that I make walking inside the heavy wooden doorway to flash an uprisen knife and buckle down over loosened sinew and the butchered meat of this trivial nightmarish dream, imagining my blood sink with my would-be murderer and pave the stone floor with a distressed need to overcome this body of suffering, together with my sister of humanity.  

The Decapitated Head of Benito Juarez

Benito Juarez, Teotihuacan and the mystery of a figure in red shawl....

- Foreground to the Dream (actually lived-in-waking scene):

It is my second day in Mexico. I had only seen this country once in Tijuana almost a decade before just for the afternoon. It is now December, 2008. I am staying weeks in Mexico City. I find myself within the confines of a Zapatista demonstration. We de-board a small local bus, I let a young mother with her child climb out before me. She is dressed in perfect fashion to the trend of social and cultural resistance that has taken places since before the states of Mexico were founded. The atmosphere is young, vibrant and inclusive as I file past a scattered group of policemen, barred from entering the demonstration grounds as per an agreement with the Zapatista movement. The area attracts a united front of Mexican youth and longstanding social activists with the international community, mostly young travelers like myself in happenstance with a resonant ground of truth-seeking and decolonization. After perusing various photo exhibits, circus acts, a music stage and a gargantuan round of booths and cultural presentations from social activist groups, indigenous peoples and the Zapatista themselves, I find my way to a high-perched bleacher to gather perspective. The landscape is cluttered with the reality of living conditions in the Federal District; over 35 million inhabitants, almost as much as the entire country I had arrived from: Canada. The houses barely top two stories as they create a vast landscape buttressed on hillsides in the myriad colors so peculiar to and likeable about the Mexican cityscape. Two Mexican guys decide on sitting only a few feet away from my high vantage point. Laughing, they start lighting a pipe. Marijuana smoke lifts into my nervous system like a cool breeze. I smile at them. Offering me the pipe, I smoke and there is an immediate realization at how strikingly different we are. The only similarity between us three is slight laughter and comraderie of place in this fleeting instant. A mixed, flowing cacophony of sound travels into our minds, bespeaking the slogan of the demonstration: Digna Rabia/Dignified Rage. I hear the Mexican language. Completely unknown to me at that pont, I am enthralled by its fascinating brevity and speed of intonation. At this point I am very high. I look out towards the mountains. In the foreground is an immense statue. How could I have not seen this before? It is a human head. I point to it and look at one of my new friends. "Benito Juarez!" He says indiscernibly, with a thick accent only spoken to someone ignorant of Anglophone ears. I am bewildered by the voice from a peer of my equal age. He knows I don't understand, "Benito Juarez!" he says again. This time I understand. An early President of Mexico. His face becomes as strange as the thickness of his accent. I am taken by his features, which seem to resemble Aztecan myth in their distinct expression. They step down, leaving me to contemplate my surroundings high up above even the neckless head of one of the country's sculpted, public icons, high above the Zapatista demonstration, high above my own mind.

In Dream: I see from this vantage point. The head of Benito Juarez is changed to my imagination for the ruins of Teotihuacan. When I visited Mexico for the first time (and all subsequent times) I never took the chance to see the ruins of Teotihuacan. The grandiose pyramids depicted in the film, "Frida" and Sergei Eisenstein's "Que Viva Mexico!" still reside in my imagination. I can see only about half of one rising to its summit. The steps are gorgeously erected with frequent cracks. A massive field stands to its side. I'm sure there must be pyramids greater in size. In the field, walking in an easterly direction towards what seems to be greater pyramids, what I sense to be a female figure, wrapped in a scarlet shawl slowly walks into an unforgiving wind out of sight.


My backyard gives way to a mythical Mexican beach

In my family house backyard in Massachusetts, I sit with my friends. There is great emotion rising unto the visible empyrean gazing back at us as a smidgeon of existence in the universe. I am with old childhood friends, we trek through my backyard, and their presence is exchanged with that of my cousins. We walk until a downslope hill flushed with a sludge and grime unknown to us. I feel it half-resemble a part of the Tar Sands in Alberta somehow. The endless sludge gathers and quickens below our feet. One of my cousins slips clumsily and knocks into an evil-looking man who seems to hold an authoritarian position with the environmentally hazardous work about us. He eyes me vociferously, changing to a stern, violent expression of cruel intention. He speaks that he will ruin me if we cause any hindrance to his work. He says that he will make my position in Canada even more tenuous and that I will risk my marriage and rights to immigration if I, or any one I know slip up again and cause more trouble. I simply slide past down an aching earth, bleeding with tar.

Next I find myself walking along an unpaved beach sidewalk in a seaside neighborhood. Broken shells lay scattered on the road. As a group of local residents approach on their way inside a house, a mythical deer shoots past me. The animal bears an impressive mane, looking like a cross between an alpaca, a mountain goat, a deer and gazelle. The animal joins its herd, trekking about nimbly. As I follow the unusual herd of unidentifiable animals beyond the horizon, the land opens up into a huge Mexican beach resort. There are electronic billboards littering the oceanfront, as international commerce is exuberantly exhibited with dominance. I duck past the hill's outcropping before the steep cliff turns into beach and follow the animals in a small grove. I feel submerged in a temporary refuge.

A Procession of Shared Dreams

Corpus Christi Procession in Hofgastein by Adolf von Menzel

Orthodox Priests in Procession (dreamed by Poet Tree)

I was assigned to write a marketing brochure for Christmas that must include all the esoteric meanings, including the magi, the 12 stages of enlightenment, and the mas/death funerary aspects. This brochure unfolded in my brain as I dreamed, but it was completely lost the moment I woke up, like those Tibetan mandalas that are destroyed the moment they are created.

Transcendental Gadgetry

Apparently I migrated to a "vacant and available
house" somewhere in the middle astral domain. A
20-something guy with dark hair (who, as I later
realized, is in fact one of my very dear friends in
spirit...actually a joint/joined/shared
integration/incarnation of TWO of my very dear
friends...but that's a whole other story!) was walking
about the vacant house with me. We were discussing how
it might be used as a community meeting place.

At one point he said, "Let me check this room
out"...and literally SHOT across the room to look into
what apparently turned out to be an empty bedroom.
After checking it out, he then "reversed motion", and
zoomed back to me -- looking just like a video tape or
film loop being run in reverse! I asked, "Yo, what the
HELL did you just do...and how the HELL did you DO it,
anyway?"

He smiled and said, "Well, this helps!"...and I
noticed that he was holding in his hand something that
looked like the "remote control" to a video or
satellite receiver! I said, "WHAT is THAT"?!

He explained, "It's a time/space loop-around
transponder. It generates an energetic force field
which lets you navigate outside of conventional
time/space limitations, and basically 'fast forward'
to any place where you want to be in space/time, at
least within a bounded local domain such as ours.

Escaping the Primitive

I am with a childhood friend, enjoying the forest. Suddenly, there are wisps of arrow trails cutting through the air. One strikes a tree right next to me. I find my friend is evading an onrush of arrows. There must be at least 15 attackers. The arrows begin to fly in greater numbers. I duck and hide behind thin trees as the arrows pick up and speed and hit the trees around me with great thudding. In the tumult, an arrow strikes immediately next to my shoulder on the tree I'm huddled behind. I move slightly in the opposite direction and an arrow follows me before I can move past the thin tree trunk. I am immediately struck with a rush of adrenaline and bolt out through the forest. My friend seems to have survived, as we scatter leaves with a speed mustered only from animal surivial.

Next, we are on a ship. It seems as a migrant ship carrying immigrants across the sea. I lay back in comfort on the ship's deck. Enjoying cinema, and feeling a great pride at having passed beyond a reputation of near non-existence in a forest of mere survival instinct, enraged by the violent chaos. Soon I find this pride to be empty, and I feel no different than a bestial enemy being hunted in the thick forests of a newfound home.