My Sweetheart Wants to Walk Goats

1-      My Sweetheart Wants to Walk Goats

We all wonder in these days what we should do.  My sweetheart wants to walk goats.  By walking goats, I mean that she intends to spend most of her time in the Northern California wilderness, walking from homestead to homestead with goats and a few companions and tend stands of wild vegetables along the way.  They would harvest seasonal vegetables for food, medicine, cordage & basket making material.  Milking the goats at least once a day, they would walk for a week or two, make a larger camp, where they would choose and slaughter a goat, process the meat & hide, make goat cheese, dry goat meat and so on.  To many, this may sound like a ludicrous endeavor, but I wish to speak to it in very practical and very political terms.

2-      Arhats & Bodhisattvas

 We all wonder what we should do.  In the Buddhist lexicon, there are two general styles in the path to enlightenment.  One is the path of the Arhat, where one chooses not to directly engage with members of society or even a spiritual community necessarily, in favor of allowing people themselves to best be the guides to their own enlightenment.  An Arhat is not removed from human interaction entirely.  If they are asked questions, they offer the best insight they can, and they then continue on.  The path of the Bodhisattva has at its core the desire to be of benefit to other human beings, and to allow this assistance to be the path upon which one travels to enlightenment.  At the center of both practices is the need for skillful means, a need for acting appropriately in situations.  The question becomes, 'what is appropriate for individuals in society, and can we, the generally unenlightened, ever truly help other people without imposing upon them our sense of duty, justice or will?'  The degree to which one is engaged or removed from a society can define whether one chooses to walk goats or chooses to do community-engaged urban farming, as two relative and personal examples.  Both are in a sense political, in that they are seeking to redefine how individuals relate to their landbase and their food, but both have very different implications for the arts of living and one's involvement with a larger community of beings.  One impacts exclusively, or nearly exclusively, human communities.  Urban farming is a wonderful way to educate people about the disconnection they have from their food and, coincidentally, their environment.  The environment sounds like an abstract term, but when we speak of familiarity with landbase, what we really mean is the trees you've marveled at, or the wonder you've felt by a running stream, so clear and clean you can drink from it, a freedom many of our ancestors held as a daily ritual.    Tending stands of wild vegetables may sound ineffective, but it is a way of directly supporting the landbase, or, to put it in terms of popular rhetoric, it is very directly being the change one wishes to see in the world.  It is a personal solution, but it is also a withdrawal from a way of life that is in dire straits.

To be frank, we are at a point of significant spiritual crisis, heretofore unknown in the history of humanity.  That is a lot to say in one sentence, but let me put it this way: there is a profound level of discontinuity between many people who are using many of the earth’s resources, and the understanding of the abundance, or not, of those resources themselves.  Again, put simply, we’re running out of many of our most basic resources for the sustenance of biotic life on the planet.  Topsoil, fresh water, ecosystems, mountaintops are all being eroded or destroyed at speeds that paralyze the imagination.  What do we, collectively or individually, do about it?  Do we try to educate a populace that is ensnared in the demonic dreams of self-importance that posit that no species exist save the human species?  Do we try to dispel the imagination of those in power, or those without power, to attempt to convince or suggest that the way of living as practiced these days is nowhere near what will best keep trees and rivers and salmon and eagles and ospreys around for another 50 years?  Do we write off a society that many of us hardly believed in to begin with and walk goats?  Do we plan attempts of restitution on behalf of the natural world; do we educate each other on the need to remove dams from rivers?  To stop clear-cuts in the United States, in Indonesia, in Burma, in the Amazon, in any number of other places where the vital, wild areas and native people are being irreparably destroyed?  Do we attempt to mitigate the destruction by passing a few laws to curb the ruthless and immoderate appetites of capitalism?  Do we walk away from all social obligations, as such, choosing the company of trees and rivers, in order to better define what is necessary and what is most helpful for ourselves, and the community of birds and fish and trees and shadows and whispers and elk?

These questions pit the individual practitioner against the overarching power structures of society, oftentimes, but they are necessary in these days, when so much is being redefined and commodified at such rapid speed.  When defense of the wilderness is viewed as anti-commerce, and larger religions have necessarily defined themselves as allied with commerce, it follows that only the individuals can stand up for the wilderness, until the time that the major religions define themselves as both in concert with the natural world and, in so doing, against the will of capitalism.

To speak of the need of defense for the wilderness and its relation to Buddhism, many mystical religions have primal need for wild places.  Buddha was in the jungle for six years.  Jesus' days in the desert and Mohammad's retreat to caves speak to this need as well.  These practices draw strength and insight from the wilderness.  But then, in Buddhist terms, why is the line of karma's interconnection so often drawn between the humans and other species?  If we do share an obligation of the Bodhisattva to benefit all beings, and these beings include non-humans, don't we need to immediately and irascibly defend natural spaces? Do we not need to immediately dismantle all state and corporate institutions which dominate the landscape?  Why have there been so very few defenders of the wilderness from the Christian community, the Islamic, the Buddhist?  

3-      The death wish

We all wonder what we should do.  My sweetheart wants to walk goats.  She wants to renew the landscape and not be a part of a suicidal, ecocidal machine, or if she is a part of it, she wants that interaction to be entirely on her own terms, within her own power and not to lessen any ounce of her wild spirit.  I can’t say that she shouldn’t go, and I can’t say I want to join her.  Not just yet.  This brings about a political and personal question; how much of any of our involvements in social activism have to do with us individually trying to reconcile our own past traumas experienced in the course of political engagement?  I wonder how much of my own past I am attempting to exorcise when I speak to a police officer about fulfilling their duty to actually protect and serve the populace of a city, and not just the landowners of a municipality.  That I ask them to question why they are being asked to clear sidewalks or secure neighborhood gardens with threat of force, when these places should be public spaces, not demarcated for private profit, when these places are in such genuine need for the people.  Are the police protecting only profit, either individual or communal?  If so, are they acting in accord with their own conscience?  What bizarre point in the history of the nation we are at when police are necessitated to enforce laws, in some instances, solely to raise money for their own viability, and that, by working so, they are enforcing laws to ensure the private profitability of the criminalization of the citizenry they are vowed to protect?

In many sections of the world, police and military have stood up against injustice, proclaiming that there is no line between cop and citizen, that we are all citizens and deserve equal respect.  Could such noble principles be present among the police in the industrialized world?  Will the cops lay down their guns and pick up shovels to help communities grow food for those who lack decent nourishment?  

This culture is infatuated with death, though it does everything it can to avoid it.  Superstars never age and these days, with endless facsimiles of past realities flashed into people's eyes, superstars never die either.  This is a worrying predicament for a society that is on the brink of self-asphyxiation.   We, as a species, are undermining the earth’s ability to support biotic life.  This is not hyperbole, this is the fundamental reality of our age, and our response to it will define whether we flourish as a species, or become a grand and brief flame in the history of our planet.   

There are so many tales of how this will happen; with terrorism, with disease, with famine, with climate change, even with alien invasion.  People have, for a long time, perhaps forever, wanted to both know where they were going, and perhaps more curiously, have wanted to have the importance of feeling as though they are at the end of times.  Yet, in our days, we can see through the lens of science, that we are actually reaching the practical ends of our support here on earth, and we do not have the capability to travel to the nearest star, where we might find another blue gem to despoil.  Though climate change is in progress and we are certainly already feeling the effects, we also have 10,000 years of agriculture to tend with as we attempt to rebalance our imaginations towards the genuinely sustainable.  The rules the planet has operated under for the last 10,000 years are being rewritten now, and the earth herself is treating the human species like any being with a virus.

Does it not make sense that in such a twisted environment, where relationships, towards oneself, with others, to be in companionship with the environment, are generally viewed as liability, does it not make sense that the response to that would be the leering culture that has death as a theme park attraction and, to speak personally, why is it that even leaving the death culture itself feels like a form of dying?

4- Agriculture as pathology

My sweetheart wants to walk goats.  Agriculture is a broad term, and when I use that term, I mean a practice that generally displaces people from their connection with land.  This has been so internalized in the current age that connection with land is seen either as a frivolity or as a sense of backwardness.  When I use the term agriculture, I mean a practice that deforests an area, the same practices that built ancient civilizations in Mohenjo-Daro & Mesopotamia, built those civilizations, and also caused their collapse.  When I use the term agriculture, I mean a practice that needs to build walls, because centralized, monocrop agriculture causes surplus, surplus that needs to be stored.  When I use the term agriculture, I mean a practice that raises armies, like the wheat it sows, pathologically identical in appearance, raises armies and allows its citizens to kill in war, and asks these same humans to return to ordinary lives of peace afterward.  When I use the term agriculture, I mean a practice that is willful in its use of slaves, often of conquered people from conquered lands, for rational human beings do not generally wish to overwork themselves in the abhorrent way this culture demands, and would be much happier, indeed as the prosperous are these days, to spend deeper time with friends and in nature.  When the rich are the only persons who can afford to visit the existing wild areas, it’s worth asking ourselves what sort of society we are creating.  The average Indian in the Americas worked an average 2 hours a day to provide for their needs.  These hours of 'work' were often accompanied by stories and songs and ceremonies. 

My sweetheart wants to walk goats and to practice a style of 'agriculture', which is closer to harvesting and tending natural areas of bounty.  She wants to ensure that her efforts are assisting the natural world directly to recover from the damage of 200+ years of colonization in California.  She generally does not wish to sign petitions, generally does not attend protests, but has fervent political beliefs.  Do we check-out of a system that seems to force us too often to act like a person in a codependent relationship, making excuses for ugly behavior, expecting change, when no, or pitifully little change is apparent?  I categorize clearcuts as ugly behavior.  I categorize mountaintop coal removal as ugly behavior.  I categorize tar sands oil mining as ugly behavior.  I categorize fracking as ugly behavior.  And my reasons for doing so are in part political, but mostly, they are practical.  If we keep destroying landscapes, are we not hurrying along the day of our own extinction?  After ingesting so many lies of technology 'making things easier for us', we have yet to realize that technology, as it is currently performed, is a pusher, a snake-oil salesman wanting to get an entire citizenry hooked on electricity, while the ability to support life is slowly and irrevocably eroded under our feet.  There are ways in which the Bodhisattva's tribute and effort begin to look more like codependent enabling, and the modern human positivity movements like turning a blind eye to injustice while reaping the rewards of enslaved peoples.  Modern agriculture as practiced displaces human beings from their land in 'the global south', as well as in the global north, and then enslaves those same individuals solely as instruments of commerce.

During the Buddha's lifetime, Mohenjo-Daro had already come and gone as a civilization.  Theirs had walls, running water, heated pools, annual crops, granaries, all the signs of civilization present in the contemporaneous Mesopotamian culture.  Both civilizations had deforestation as a defining characteristic and, as Icarus's descent, both civilizations were brought back to earth when they had to 'domesticate' lands further and further away from where the people were concentrated.  Can we draw a line showing geometrically the distance of a human from their food, the level of abstraction of the natural world, other humans, the level of coterminal violence that is acceptable in the forms of overt and covert slavery, overt and covert oppression, of women, of those of a different skin color, of those of a different way of seeing?  Did the Buddha hear of Mohenjo-Daro, a locus of civilization that had failed to support the upwards of 35,000 citizens who lived there at its height?  Did he sense or see that over-reaching grasp, the society straining against that by which it had to define itself  and had told itself it could not do without?  Did he see, foresee, the inevitable rise of cities, of what's called modernity, with over half the world's 7 billion people living now in cities and nearly all surrounding environments so far depleted as to resemble ghost deserts where no birds, and scarce a human heart is bold enough to take up residence?  We are told by the demon-dust pushers that only the human economy must be serviced, at the expense always of the natural world.  But the world can function perfectly fine without the human economy, and can in fact thrive without it.  We cannot exist without the natural world, and everyone who is eager to say we can still eats, likely, several times a day, eats the food that still comes from the life-systems of the earth, still breathes the air offered by trees, by kelp, by phytoplankton, still is held, in the same way we all were, in the beginning, in the darkness, before we breathed the oxygen of this realm for the first time. 

  5 - The sky-clear flame

My sweetheart wants to walk goats.  There are questions of tactics, of what we choose to do with a life.  Within the Buddhist lineages there are many stories of creatures sacrificing their sense of self-cherishing in order to perform karmic feats.  In our modern time, such feats seem the realm exclusively of the mentally unstable.  Yet, within a society, if individuals begin to truly understand that the human species is wearing out its welcome, that it is operating beyond its means, and being sold further and further methods of addiction by a pimp uninterested in our individual, collective or cross-species health, then would it not follow that individuals would wish to radically alter or abolish such a system?  The other day a friend of mine and I agreed to stop calling whatever was happening currently 'revolution'.  I'd prefer not even to use terms that have gone around lately in its stead, '(r)evolution', or even the more poetic 'lovelucion', and prefer instead 'metamorphosis'.  Interpersonally, the 20th century, or the 19th for that matter were very good for the 'poor' of the planet.  Many were forced from their homes, some by gun-point, but more were forced by the point of debt and official government policies.  Is this the past that we are responding to in order to form the future?  Must we not form something that does not resemble the genocides and ecocides of the 20th century, but something that looks and feels far different?  

For if we are at a point of extreme sickness, as fracking, mountain top coal removal, tar sands oil removal, 2 mile long, 1 mile deep ocean trawlers destroying millions of years of growth in coral reefs indicate, then must we not then consider something, a state of interaction, of association, of society, which acknowledges these wrongs, but is not controlled by them?  If we respond merely to the problems of industrial capitalism, we'll receive a lot of work to perform, but I personally get the sense that what is necessary is something, a way of being, as to be unrecognizable by most of us.  This way of being is not ethereal, but rooted deeply in the earth, is not vague and does not waver.  It senses what the earth can provide and sustain and operates in accordance to that exclusively.  We are unable to inherit the bounty of billions of years of cumulative evolution of our ancestors, and the large leap forward presented by GMO and biotechnology are gross manifestations of the arrogance of the human species in assuming that we have all the answers.  There are reasons that nature took billions of years to sort out different organisms.  Evolution is a slow and stupid process for the most part, but it generally does have one thing going for it: it provides a minimum of disruption to ecosystems.  I find it hard to believe that by making further leaps into uncharted territories of genomes, gene-splicing, etc, we will not create further imbalances that will, like the wrecked ecosystems of wetlands, of mountains, of forests, of rivers, of seas, need to be contended with, if not right now, at some point in the not very distant future.

I spoke with another friend last night about righteousness.  We had just watched a moving performance of music and dance about fracking.  I said that I worried about the sky-clear righteousness that it is easy to feel when one studies the environmental catastrophe we have inherited, and begin to parse together the biologic bounty that has been utterly squandered within an eyeblink of geologic time.  There are plenty of reasons to get upset, but response is again something that becomes far more difficult to ascertain.  Do we walk goats?  Tend stands of wild vegetables?  Renew the landscape in a tiny way, knowing that as civilization begins to crumble, one is building not merely quaint skills, but ones that could be practically useful for survival, genuine survival, and not just for one, but for many?  Is this the path of the Arhat, to be removed from society to care for the later generations, to care for the seekers one meets on the solitary path?  To care for the creatures, the 'least' among us, as Jesus and St. Francis preached?  Is it the path of the Bodhisattva, to walk away from a society which is plainly so tone-deaf that it can't hear the planet wailing in pain?  I distrust my righteousness, and there are many times it is difficult to quell indignation when one realizes that another day has passed, and the forces of destruction have cut down many more trees, slurried many more sides of mountains, slashed many more forests, put more duress on many more people.

At a time when we are approaching the end of rapidly available energy, with many technologies in the works, but none, I repeat, none, able to power the engines of modern technology with the same flexibility as liquid oil, it make sense to ask what we learn from our days.  If my sweetheart walks goats, she practices each day the knowledge of which plants are safe, how to keep other animals well cared for, how to receive from nature what is offered.  The machine culture will continue for quite a little while, and those who swear allegiance to it will be fed and clothed commensurate with their level of belief in the system.  Violence will become more widespread, people the world over will continue rioting over food, armies will be called out and everyone who has a conscience or a soul will have to ask what is going on, and how much they really believe in a system that is more willing to shoot someone than to feed them.  If society continues as it is headed, towards militarism and fear, we, the caring hearts, weary worn with grief from losses, will be offered, as the Indians before us, smaller and smaller areas within the society at large, and we will at some point need to walk away from the death culture to spare ourselves the cruelty and passive brutality that they conjure and coerce so many of our brothers and sisters with.

I don't intend to swear allegiance to this dying system; rather, I intend to offer my companionship to nature, to the natural processes that take a long, long time to learn, a long, long time listening in order to better listen.

 6 - Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes

For much of human history, it seems we've been astonished and thrilled and inspired by stories of the underdog.  People root for the doomed Trojans, some for the 'doomed noble savages' of North America.  For some of us, the underdogs were not pushed back in grand battles, but in wave after successive wave told in the conqueror's language as progress.  We lost many many ancient trees here in California, cut down by the brief hands of man.  The redwoods went to buildings and mines, many of which have now, at least partly, returned to the earth.  Many massive sequoia were felled for no more human use than toothpicks.  We lost many people, and many many languages, many ways of seeing.  In learning the less-told histories of this land, we learn that the magic songs which coaxed rivers to flow and the sun to shine, are almost entirely absent from the human creature these days.  We learn in this learning the learning of loss.  We root for the underdogs, and the more one studies the language of the land, the more one roots for the little that has escaped co-optation, homogenization, the diseases of sameness.

For a moment, what of the colonizers and colonized? Once we feel the grief of being callously or kindly crushed, as a soldier or a missionary seeks to unutterably alter what they fail to see, what to them appears as narrowness is in fact belief in how Mother Earth embraces life, and to date, has tolerated the indulgence and arrogance of some of us humans who didn't have the good sense to disagree with a situation that didn't ennoble their heart, but paid in dollars instead.  It's a human sadness, of how the colonizers and the colonized were coerced so thoroughly, of how the modern magicians wooed the senses with chemicals, with lights and motion, how they covered the stars at night, dammed the flowing rivers or filled the air with the burned breath of ancient plants.

On the subject of resistance, principally modern resistance, three countries have had series of non-violent uprisings in the last few years in order to gain liberation from their oppression.  Tibet, Burma and Kashmir, all three had some form of violent government who seized power from the people, disallowed what passes for democracy these days, and, essentially, paid young people, mostly men, to move to a place as soldiers and brutalize native people from that land, people from a different perspective.  Modern colonialism happens directly in these places, even if it does not make much news in America.  Each of these countries, as I said, have held non-violent uprisings, mostly led by their religious leaders, monks in the case of Tibet & Burma, and the Muslim clergy in Kashmir.  None of  these countries have yet achieved autonomy, let alone independence, and their stories often languish on the back pages of news magazines, achieving the attention of the wider world only when a great many people are killed.  Is this actually the world in which we would aspire to live? 

I bring this up to directly question the efficacy of non-violent resistance in a time of ongoing global decimation of people and culture.  In what passes for the environmental movement in America, or even within the larger struggles for social justice, it is often posited that what is needed is not more radical tactics, but more people.  Individuals are asked to attend protests and encourage others to do the same, with the height of dissent being a symbolic act of non-violent direct action, namely risking or getting arrested.  If our success is merely based on numbers, and not on actual results, I fear that we will lose sight of the fact that the environment is being willfully eroded at an enormous rate, and that merely getting more people signed up, or signing on will not be the difference that the planet needs to continue the experiment of biotic life.  Over a thousand people were arrested in the summer of 2011 during the Keystone XL pipeline protests.  Certainly more people know about the Keystone XL pipeline, now over two years on, but we are also now over two years after the protests, and the Keystone XL is still up for discussion, and every day of those two years the tar sands have been grinding up the forests of Canada without relent or mercy.  We mistake gaining public support for actual efficacy if we deem awareness equal to resistance in this case. The same was exemplified during the second invasion of Iraq, primarily by the United States, in 2003, for which an estimated 36 million people protested for a single, clear objective: to stop the invasion of Iraq.

We ask questions of lost causes.  If suffering is a predecessor to statehood, do not Kashmir, Tibet & Burma deserve statehood?  I don't think that it’s appropriate to invoke indifference. Cynicism is the slick soil whereby oceans are set on fire.  If we believe in lost causes, if we believe people have the right to live without outright oppression, then perhaps we begin to believe in that other lost cause.  Perhaps we begin to believe that the ways of inhabiting the world that were thought to have died out are in fact alive and barely surviving, that the means of biotic support on the planet are actually in need of our assistance, that the human species is in fact quite possibly the largest lost cause we have been offered to date. 

Do we believe that humans can garner enough courage, perhaps this time not from technology, but from the natural world, where people have always drawn courage?  Enough courage to change the little things, and change the big things, to live a life worth living, to dream dreams worth dreaming?  To love people worth loving, or cry for things worth crying about, or grieve for the things worth grieving for?  To love, to grieve and to dream about the things that actually give us life, that have always supported us, and are waiting, ever so patiently, for us to once again realize our place in the natural world, one of many, those things waiting for us, ever so tenderly, to come home?  In coming home, we realize that we have many tasks for our hands, for our hearts, and that those tasks have been offered to us now, at our present moment, to help us, once again, to understand our place.

The Dragonfly

`The Dragonfly

A dragonfly begins life as an egg laid in water.   They grow and molt changing forms gradually in a process known as 'incomplete metamorphosis'.   Dragonflies molt eight to fifteen times, but spend a majority of their lives with gills on their rectum, sometimes for several years, feeding and living underwater.

~

Begin sitting down, with your knees bent and the soles of your feet resting on the ground.   Place your right shin on your left knee.   Twist to the left and dip your right elbow into the middle arch of your right foot.   Twist gently.   If you still can, dip your left hand, placing both palms flat on the ground.   If you still can, tip towards your hands, your right foot on your right elbow or upper arm.   When we encounter difficulties, we usually hold our breath.  Remember to breathe.   If you still have room, lean to the side and balance on your hands, extend your left leg, parallel to the ground.   You are flying.   You are weightless.   Breathe, and balance, and breathe.

~

Walking east of Summit Lake, in mid-autumn, lively insects cross your path, wily-nily.   A small bee nibbles the skin on the top of your hand and since you haven't said a word out loud for several days you let it.   It keeps nibbling.   It flies close to your eyes, batting your eyelashes with its beating wings, nestling into the bridge of your nose, and then nibbling the inside ball of the eye, the lesser twin to the eyeball, that thing you never thought had a name, that you now know is called caruncula.

~

East of Summit Lake, midautumn, lively insects cross your path wily-nily.   A sudden, golden dragonfly, black striped, speeds sideways, hovers above water, speeds sideways again.   You pause, your eyes, in all their motion, flicker and follow.   You cannot tell if wonder is holding you still, or if marvel has stilled your lungs with water.   Its flight forked lightning, swimming, slicing of air.   Its globes of eyes, the 30,000 ways of seeing in all directions and several realms of color unvisible to humans, seem to center on you, human, as it now buzzes to you and hovers, its four wings gathered sunlight holding it aloft, beating wind that ripples off its face facing you.   And you wonder.   You marvel.   The dragonfly leaves, zooms up and East, which is the way your feet are headed, the way you must leave.

~

In the Lower 9th Ward, in New Orleans, your body was pushed through several forms.   When you went back there you wept, nearly.  Covered in a white sheet, the Claiborne Bridge, that night where your hand dusted the brakes and shouldn't've, where mist met metal and stole your lover's left knee, your left elbow, is now your wreckage being painted, not repaired, in the late season sun and warmth, not heat.   By the Industrial Canal, you can see something small struggling.   You stop and look, a brown dragonfly wriggling on the bike path.    It is delicate, its wings beat erratically.   It looks like its dying.   You hold it in your hands, it flies slightly, you catch it, it calms, feeling the soft moistness of your palm.   You do not wish for it to die alone.  You carry it til its movements turn shallow and then vanish.   A friend says that maybe its not dying, but changing.   Maybe it needs to breathe the wild.   So you find a bush and set the dragonfly to rest underneath, near the ringed wattles of an abandoned sparrow's nest.

~

Twisted in the dragonfly pose, Judy balanced on hands as though the human sweat of the yoga class, the beating wings of lungs, lifted us into bright new form.   When I asked what she knew about dragonflies, her look deepened to crisp pools of iridescent light.   The Hopi and Pueblo peoples hold dragonfly as a protector, a medicine spirit, who helps humans heal from the wounds of this world.   She spoke of how on the day her mother died, a dragonfly landed on her, soft and visible, and near through tears.

~

And when Brooke heard about the dragonflies of this poem, she shared the story of her aunt, and how she had had a son who chose suicide when he was 23. She said he had gained the balance of four wings, and had become dragonfly, and then had the strength to visit her everyday.

~

When I walked back to the sparrow's nest, the late autumn bayou afternoon heat was close as i talked with Thomas. He had helped me open to New Orleans, helped me listen to marigolds, to dance the unbound waterbeaded sunlight, our throat-notes sounds and skins of sweet sadness, sweet joy.   I returned to the sparrow's nest and there was nothing.   Had it flown away, was it eaten, or did it pass onward, into air? Sometimes you get answers, sometimes, and sometimes it's late in the day, you hear the voice of a friend calling to you, and all you can do is turn your feet towards the dusk and start the long walk back west.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

David Foster Wallace - on Franz Kafka's ;funniness' and teaching that to students

"And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.  It's not that students don't "get" kafka's humor, but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get--the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have.  No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke--that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inescapable from that horrific struggle.  That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.  It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me.  You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka.  You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door.  To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc.  That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along.  Das ist komisch."

http://cliffordglee.com/Site/EXSupplementalReadings_files/DFWALLACEONKAFKA.pdf

Outcasts, from The Ohlone Way

following from the seminal work of Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way:

To be sure, there were a few people among the Ohlone who did not fit in--people who were felt to be greedy or aggressive.  They generally lived on the outskirts of the village or sometimes across the stream, shunned and sneered at by the rest of the people.  If a person's manners were completely unbearable--say, if he was a bully or a murderer--his family might ultimately desert him; and once deserted, the other people of the community might assault him or drive him from the village area entirely to live as an outcast.  Such a person would survive as best he could, without friends, without anyone to help him when he was sick or old, without anyone to protect him from evil shamans and malignant spirits who would instantly recognize his vulnerability.  He would lead a lonely, impoverished, and frightened life, an object of distaste to the whole tribelet and a lesson in morality to youngsters.

Such outcasts, however, were rare, and the Ohlone ethic of sharing worked to the satisfaction of almost everyone.  The poor, the weak, and the elderly were taken care of.  Even lazy or incompetent people were fed and housed--for they too had relatives.  IN fact, the way of sharing worked so well that, as several early visitors remarked, there was absolutely no robbery among the Ohlones--this despite the fact that, as la Perouse put it, "they have no other door than a truss of straw laid under the entrance when all the family are absent."  Stealing was simply unnecessary ina  land so varied and fruitful and among a people so generous.

Shraring was the underlying element in the Ohlones' economic system.  But sharing was much more than just economic.  Born into a tribelet of no more than one, two or three hundred people, the Ohlones felt very close to family and community.  They had no choice.  To be an Ohlone meant that one could not move away and start afresh somewhere else.  To be born into a certain family and bound to certain relatives and a certain triblelet--these were the major, totally inescapable facts of one's life.

Cold, by AS Byatt

a telling of the ice princess, the story 'Cold' by AS Byatt, read by myself.  organized a bit of music around and throughout it.  i admire this story a great deal for not only its proficiency and ability to describe reality, as well as the gaps between knoweledge and genuine awareness, but i also admire and love this story for its ability to be a story, to live inside the heart and emotions of the reader, or the listener in this case.

http://www.bit.do/ice-fire

enjoy!  let me know what you think!

from The Toe Bone and Tooth

lengthy selection from Martin Prechtel's The Toe Bone and Tooth, this one about the public tribunal of a prospective seminary student, Gaspar Culan, and the prosecution and defense of indigenous beliefs in Guatemala before the Civil War.

from The Toe Bone and the Tooth

Like a big city man on a date with a girl he thought he'd never get, Stan started off the first morning by boring the entire board of examining priests, the Bishop and one hundred and thirty monks and students by talking very slowly for an entire hour about himself and his mission.  As with anything that had poor Stan in it, there was a lot of sleeping going on, but he finally brought it all to a close, raising my blood pressure by introducing me with several derogatory remarks about my mixed heritage, calling my wife my "tortilla-making woman" because we weren't married in the church, while expressing his worries about my poor unbaptized older son, who ironically enough actually was baptized, and commenting on the "secret study" he thought I must be making of what he'd hoped was the dying practice of Mayan shamanism.
I let all his unkindness slide, for my goal was not to be right, but to get Gaspar and I back into the arms of the things he mocked, by which he'd never be held and myself away from this terrifying collective lack of vision.  So I thanked him as a brother and let Gaspar begin his charlanda, his discourse.
After standing like a rector, putting on his horn-rimmed eyeglasses, Padre pulled out a snap-ring binder from his backpack, unlocked a couple of laminated leaves and began speaking in a deep, aggressive, open-jawed, non-mayan voice, not unlike orphan Indians do when raised by Norwegiens or American missionaries; a voice that didn't match his face, a voice I'd never heard before.  Like a pushy socialist church historian, he cited the data of certain anthropologists and the conjectured opinions of some scholars about Mayan ritual, blaring on about the grandness of Mayan spirituality before they had become acquainted with the advantages of the modern Catholic church, which took the better part of an hour.  For the next hour, he expounded unimaginatively but with great detail on why he was disappointed with the Catholicism of the Spanish conquest and how all of what the Oklahoma Catholics were doing to rid the highlands of these vestiges of damaging spiritual superstitions and the people's persistent veneration of idols through their mistaken understanding of the statues of the Spanish catholic saints left over from the sixteenth century was very laudable and slowly having a positive effect, as far as he could see, and of which he was an avid supporter and so on, and so on and so on.
With his coffee cup held on his thigh, the Bishop tried to look as serious as his position demanded, but every hungry monk could tell he was pleased with this clear, positive delivery of his party policy by this prized Indian candidate.
I think there was a great longing for what they knew as God among most of the monks, seminarians and a couple of the priests, but for them God was not in the ground, in the whiskers of jaguars, or in the utterances of mad street women; God was only in the caring that humans had for one another and was therefore a deified institution.
The remainder of old boy curates from the American middle corridor, who were the hierarchy and core of judges here, feared what the others desired; God for them was a stack of rules and rightness, a place for their conquering football instincts to gain territory for the church.
Almost all the seminary students here were young Mayan men from various villages and linguistic tribes, some of the Quiche, Ixil, Mam, Cakchiquel, Kekchi, Pocomchi, Pokoman and Tzutujil and everyone of them spoke their mother tongue.
Made to stand as a crowd behind the seated bishop, Pachito and the old boys embedded in the couches, the only seminarians not present at this welcome flamboyant interruption to their predictable daily routine were the youths assigned that day to bake the bread and cook the meals, who every chance they could get joined the ranks of the wide-eyed, loyal audience, bronze-faced would-be priests with their delantales still tied on, everyone dispersing to eat their lunch when Pachito finally rang his little bell.
But in the afternoon the wrestling began and the first words that were aimed at Swordfighter's grandson came from a known enemy of the Bishop's, who, in tolerable Spanish with a bad Okie twng, matter-of-factly blurted out, "What about this image of San Simon you were out there worshiping?  He's anything but God; isn't he an image of the Devil?"
"I wasn't worshiping this idol," Padre retorted with his strange non-Indian voice still in place, "I was kneeling at its feet, praying to Jesus to help my people to see the way and come away from such things into our holy church.  What better place to do this, as Padre Francisco says," pointing to a very worried-looking Stan, "but in the very places where the people have laid their mistaken faith?"
Though I couldn't endorse either side of such an argument, as far as Christian spiritual wrestling went it seemed that Padre had the edge, but the big guy from Oklahoma who was sitting on the edge of the couch now wasn't about to give in.  "Even if we are to believe that you could keep your eye on Christ surrounded by such a presence of the Devil, isn't it true that the idol at whose feet you knelt is considered by your people to be a God and that anyone who worships him has more than one God, and don't they call this idol the 'horned one'?"
Finally, I found a loose brick in the wall of their mediocre dogma and in an attempt to earn and be a worthy keeper of the story of The Toe Bone and the Tooth, I spoke up not only in defense of Gaspar Culan, the Grandson of Swordfighter, but in defense of Holy Boy.
"This deity you speak about is indeed an ancient God," I finally spoke, my voice also not sounding entirely like my own, "But was never called 'horned one' by anybody until your religion showed up to show the people what to call him.  Before the coming of the Spaniards and the arrival of Catholic Christians he was called the Lord of White or the Clear Unblemished Boy or Holy Boy, all names still used today.  It was before this God of both human frailty and possibility that people had always gone for alleviation of their hard lives, as they still do today, and more importantly for you to recognize, they went to this Clear Youth to be given the blessing of forgiveness, the forgiveness that people are not so good at bestowing."
This large priest who I stopped short of calling Buba was getting fairly excited and, widening and bracing his seat, he severely crowded little Pachito, who sank back involuntarily into the hollow wake of cushions created by Buba's forward lurching.
"You're just trying to whitewash the Devil," he yelled out in his Oklahoma-accented Spanish, the Indian men wide-eyed and open-mouthed, taking it all in.
"Isn't it true," Buba continued, "That the Tzutujil and every other kind of sinner, go before this devil with pagan shamans, zajorines, to which they give all their hard-earned pay and sell their sins to this demon with tobacco and liquor, finery, money and licentious words for which he adopts their sins for them and which they continue making, so they can live in this world, unaccountable, having traded, like Mephistopheles, for an eternity in hell where this devil rules when they die.  Isn't this true?"
In a policy I learned from Chiviliu when he'd been confronted for his habits and understandings, I took up where I'd left off instead of biting on the barb and baited hook of his interruption.
"Before your people came here, I mean white folk from abroad, this God you call the 'horned one' was the Mayan equivalent of Jesus; an unmarried, magical boy whose annual sacrifice caused the world to flower and the earth to provide again; whose disappearance every year, like Jesus' crucifixion, caused the people to grieve and weep; whose tears fertilized the earth, his mother, whose womb brought fourth a new 'clear child,' like Maria does every winter..."
I hadn't wanted to explain the intricacies of how this deity transformed annually thirteen times, and how because there was no verb "to be" in Mayan language there was no issue of one-ness and because of that sometimes he was a woman, and that he was built of lighting thoughts and ropes of two hundred and sixty Gods of deified Time from the Tzututjil versions of the more generally known Mayan calendar, whose knots created a supernatural net of fire who were the stars, which in turn were the spark souls of a million types of life and life to come, but pushed by this angry, not very subtle Oklahoman enemy of the Bishop I proceeded, against my better judgement, to do exactly that.
The hundred nodding heads of young Indian novice priests, who recognized in what I'd said their own spiritual dilemmas, of wanting as Indians to love some part of their people's traditional ritual and faith, but having had it demonized or trivialized by the church who called their beliefs childish, upon hearing the Tzutujil version of the same, explained in terms of its splendor and spiritual depth, allowed little hairs of Indian pride and doubt about the Christians to be planted in their hearts, all of which now terrified the priests.
Buba, though seeming by then to be more of an embarrassing liability than an ally to the other curate's cause, was so wound up by the hatred he felt toward me personally and the ground he'd lost on my account that he now jumped to his feet and forgetting to speak in Spanish so everyone could understand, blurted out accusatorily in English while shaking his mutton-fisted arms my direction, "Then tell us, smart buy, if this manifestation of Satan, that you call 'the clear white child' is so glorious a thing, why is he known far and wide as 'Big Jew'?  Wasn't it the Jews that killed our Jesus?  Huh?"
Unaware that Pachito understood and spoke English as beautifully as he spoke his native Spanish, along with Latin, Greek, Italian and Cakchiquel, and I now listened as he very carefully translated what the American Buba priest had inquired into Spanish for the crowd, his eyes bugged out, eyebrows wrinkled up to his sweating, bald head, staring in horror at the Bishop, whose rising blood pressure was already in heaven and whose fist thumped his jittering thighs.
Padre froze with the rest, his arms folded looking straight down at the plastic desk, while I on the other hand responded before anyone could stop the session or interrupt, starting before the last words of Pachito's translation had dropped from the air.
"When the Spaniards came they were divided between clergy and civil colonial bureaucracy.  While different religious orders were assigned to different districts, here int he southern highlands the Franciscans won the appointment.
"After fifty years of force bullying, proselytizing, saying mass and instigating their cults of saints and cofradias, this more human-sounding Mayan Jesus, 'Clear White Youth,' was still just as difficult for the Franciscians to eradicate as he has been for all of you.
"When the Tzutujil people were increasingly punished and further harried for their veneration of this more visible of their many deties, they started calling him Saint Simon Judas Tadeos, considering him to be Jesus' older brother, which was further confused over time by the Spanish priests with Judas Iscariot, the one who sold your God's son to his persecutors.
"By the time of the Catholic Holy See, the Dominican Inquisition feared by all people far and wide, sent their anemic, sadistic officers to what is now known as Guatemala, they had as their prime directive to rid the Earth of all heretics, Protestants and heathens, all of which were known collectively as Jews.
"The Inquisition could not legally try Indians in their courts for heresy for the greater faith they showed for the 'Clear White Youth,' or San Simon, as his newer manifestation was called.
"This was because in the human ranking system of Europe, the Indians were ranked as a subhuman caste with a status equal to the beasts, which Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike saw as not having a soul and therefore exploitable as dead matter.
"Of course, everybody knew they were people, but they weren't legally people.  To make them into people legally, so the Inquisition could have domain over them all, the Holy See set about proving that Mayans were actually one of the lost tribes of ancient Jews, from the time of Gog and Magog,  before the Jews had a temple, much before they'd lost their temple and adopted Rabbinical Judaism.  If they could convincingly show that Mayans were genetic Jews, then the Inquisition could have them.
"So, like the council and Pilate that judged and sentenced Jesus, the Inquisition, just like you seem to be doing here, tried and sentenced the Mayan Jesus, proclaiming the 'Clean White Youth' to be the 'Gran Judio,' so they could eradicate their God for being a Jew and crucify the Mayans for being Jewish, forgetting of course that the Romans who later became the Roman Catholics crucified their Jesus who died not a Christian but an Aramaic-speaking Jewish Rabbi."
Then finishing up like I thought a lawyer might, I added in conclusion:
"If this council has been called to determine the purity of faith of the prospective priest Gaspar Culan by trying and passing judgement yet once again on another people's God, then I say that even if he had been worshiping what is holy at the foot of the Grand Jew, or the 'Clear White Youth,' or conversely if he was only accompanying his relatives who were, no matter how you cut it, you have all ended up looking a whole lot like a tribunal of jealous, unforgiving people trying Jesus all over again, instead of practicing trying to be like him.  In that light I submit that Gaspar Culan has as good a faith as anyone else in this carpeted room."
Though i was hungry and could have eaten, the dinner was late, for every single cook, monk, novice priest, student, delivery boy and visiting Indian parent had forgotten what they were doing and had converged into the crowd mesmerized by the argument, which at this point was immediately and emphatically halted by the Bishop, whose hierarchical cronies called for a huddle which all the priests jumped up to join, whispering like a football team after their last down who was going to have to punt, throughout which Gaspar and I uninvited, patiently waited.
When the knot of priests unfurled, Pachito loudly announced with his little bell and clipboard in his hand that Padre was exonerated and back in the graces of the Church and that two more days spent discussing what was obvious to everyone would be a waste of precious time away from their parishes and all our work.  Which meant to be, best of all, that tomorrow we could all go back home to our families in Atitlan.
In the months that followed more than sixty percent of the Mayan seminary students would have renounced their ambitions to pursue a catholic priesthood.  What had happened to them all, only they themselves could tell, but not a few of those young men ended up as left-wing guerrillas.

Heavier than Air

Heavier than Air

for Fritz Haber

He tautened, tightened and synched

the air, ratcheted in nitrogen and

found in the space the slow drop of ammonium

nitrate, the fuel that would keep a billion modern people from starving.

His glass of fine wine was lifted among

the highest societies a poor German Jew

from the country could pull himself up to,

but he yearned for higher air than the liquid

that shook life from the earth

to feed his generation of plants.

_________________________He longed for Goddom.

He rallied and lead a field of soldiers, squaring

off in the first big war of the modern

age. While Klimt painted the lovers softly, adoring eachother

in gold and maroon, Fritz Haber gave the order for the chlorine gas,

a similar invention to ammonium nitrate, to be let

loose slowly over the field at Ypres. It was early spring.

There must have been birds singing as the dawn broke.

Fog mixed with fog and heavier than air, gas

dropped into the trenches where men were lifted out of

their skins to the sensation of drowning on dry land, drowning

in their own lungs, heaving, convulsing, retching, tearing at their skin

falling back to the earth to feed the field with their blue bodies.

When he arrived home, his wife, a scientist surrounded

by men, said what he did was wrong. I don't know

what else she said before he left the next morning

to command troops and gas, before she walked into the garden

behind their house, before she rested a pistol to her chest, the

cold iron on the shallow part of her breast, before she aimed

straight for her own heart and fired, before he heard the sound,

found her body and took his pistol back, before he left her there

to get the train, before his young son wandered alone

in the garden, wondering what had happened to his mother,

his son who would years later walk down that same hedgerow

as his mother and end his candle with his own two fingers.

And after Fritz Haber tried and failed

to ransack gold from the saltwater of tides

to pay his part of the colossal debt of the Fatherland

he went toe-to-toe with the Nazi laws of

1934 and resigned rather than sack his

Jewish contemporaries, some of whom were no doubt

present the first time a pesticide was synthesized,

a pesticide easily lethal to humans. The chemists conspicuously

added a smell so farmers could avoid the toxic gas

but a later, more dedicated group of chemists

removed the smell, and updated the recipe name to Xyclon-B.

from The Serpent and the Rainbow ~Wade Davis

Have been studying up on zombies lately, owing to derrick jensen, and this led to a friend recommending The Serpent and the Rainbow, which has been exciting so far in its mix of anthropology and ethnobotany.  Following is when the lead character is close to a group ritual in Haiti.  I feel like scientists get a bit of a bad rap in this one, but i like the examination of the scientific belief system as a whole that ensues.  

~

I woke twice more before dawn, first to a cobalt sky and moonbeams lapping the bushes, heavy with moisture. In the moonlight the roots of the mapou were white, motionless, and seemingly cold. By the next time the stars had faded and light cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. A gray cloud crossed over its path, and when it was gone so was the planet. I stared and stared until I couldn't even see the sky. But it was hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn't have been. Astronomers know the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. And but a few hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilization navigated by it, following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered why.

Though we frequently speak of the potential of the brain, in practice our mental capacity seems to be limited. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for reasons that have always intrigued anthropologiests different peoples develop it in different ways, and distinctions, in effect, amount to unconscious cultural choices. There is a small isolated group of seminomadic Indians in the northwest Amazon whose technology is so rudimentary that until quite recently they used stone axes. Yet these same people possess a knowledge of the tropical forest that puts almost any biologist to shame. As children they learn to recognize such complex phenomena as floral pollination and fruit dispersal, to understand and accurately predict animal behavior, to anticipate the fruiting cycles of hundreds of forest trees. As adults their awareness is refined to an uncanny degree; at forty paces, for example, their hunters can smell animal urine and distinguish on the basis of scent alone which out of dozens of possible species left it. Such sensitivity is not an innate attribute of these people, any more than technological prowess is something inevitably and uniquely ours. Both are consequences of adaptive choices that resulted in the development of highly specialized but different mental skills, at the obvious expense of others. Within a culture, change also means choice. In our society, for example, we now think nothing about driving at high speeds down expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious sensory responses and decisions which, to say the least, would have intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity, we have forfeited other skills like the ability to see Venus, to smell animals, to hear the weather change.

Perhaps our biggest choice came four centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. This was not something ancestors aimed for. It was a result of historical circumstances that produced a particular way of thinking that was not necessarily better than what had come before, only different. Every society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for unity; a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of course, science. What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of traditional and, as it often turns out, nonliterate cultures is the tendency of the latter to seek the shortest possible means to achieve total understanding of their world. The voudoun society, for example, spins a web of belief that is all-inclusive, that generates an illusion of total comprehension. No matter how an outsider might view it, for the individual member of that society the illusion holds, not because of coercive force, but simply because for him there is no other way. And what's more, the belief system works; it gives meaning to the universe.

Scientific thinking is quite the opposite. We explicitly deny such comprehensive visions, and instead deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding according to the rules of our logic. We set things apart from each other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms. For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coinci9dence, and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless but which conveniently leave the issue open. For the voudounist, each detail in that progression of events would have a total, immediate, and satisfactory explanation within the parameters of his belief system.

For us to doubt the conclusions of the vodounist is expected, but it is nevertheless presumptuous. For one, their system works, at least for them. What's more, for most of us the basis for accepting the models and theories of our scientists is no more solid or objective than that of the vodounist who accepts the metaphysical theology of the houngan (voudoun healer). Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and like the peasant we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition., Yet we scientists work under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow we shall be able to divide the universe into enough infinitesimally small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful conclusions about the totality. Perhaps most dangerously, we assume that in doing this, in making this kind of choice, we sacrifice nothing. But we do. I can no longer see Venus.

Zombies - from Dreams by Derrick Jensen

part 2 of a series of excerpts from Derrick Jensen's Dreams.

Zombies

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. 
~Hannah Arendt

What are zombies?
My early knowledge of zombies primarily came from movies like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie.  These encounters seemed to affect me little more than to make me afraid to walk through thickets at night (although i kept telling myself that these movies were set on tropical islands, and that with the exception of late-night statements from such unreliable sources as my older siblings there were no confirmed sightings of zombies in Colorado).  But later I came to see these movies as tales of white supremacy, conquest, empire, Christianity, civilization and slavery.  Lately I've been reading a very interesting collection of essays called Sacred Possession: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Carribean.  In the essay Voudoun, or the Voice of the Gods, Joan Dayan writes, "Born out of the experience of slavery and the sea passage from Africa to the New World, the zombi tells the story of colonization:  the reduction of human into thing for the ends of capital.  For the Haitian no fate is to be more feared.  In a contemporary Carribean of development American style, the zombi phenomenon obviously goes beyond the machination of the local boco.  As [Rene] Depestre puts it, 'This fantastic process of reification and assimilation means the total loss of my identity, the psychological annihilation of my being, my zombification.'  And Laennec Hurbon explains how the zombi stories produce and capitalize on an internalization of slavery and passivity, making the victims of an oppressive economic and social system the cause: 'the phantasm of the zombi...does nothing but attest to the fulfillment of a system that moves the victim to internalize his condition.'  Rene Depestre also stated, "It is not by chance that there exists in Haiti the myth of the zombi, that is, of the living dead, the man whose mind and soul have been stolen and who has been left only the ability to work.  The history of colonization is the process of man's general zombification."
...
In the last few days I've been thinking about this particular evolution of portrayal of zombies and zombification, and although there have been an extraordinary number of academic studies portraying zombies through every type of lens from Marxism to Christianity to anarchism to pop culture to consumerism, ..., I think the pattern I'm seeing, from passive victim to ravenous monster, is real.  As one analysis puts it, and I quote this at length because it feels so right, 'Modern zombies, as portrayed in books, films, games and haunted attractions are quite different from both voodoo zombies and those of folklore.  modern zombies are typically depicted in popular culture as mindless, unfeeling monsters with a hunger for human brains and flesh, a prototype established in the seminal 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.  Typically, these creatures can sustain damage far beyond that of a normal, living human.  Generally these can only be killed by a wound to the head, such as a headshot, or can pass whatever syndrome that causes their condition onto others.
"Usually, zombies are not depicted as thralls to masters, as in the film White Zombie, or the spirit-cult myths.  Rather, modern zombies are depicted in mobs and waves, seeking either flesh to eat or people to kill or infect, and are typically rendered to exhibit signs of physical decomposition such as rotting flesh, discolored eyes, and open wounds, and moving with a slow, shambling gait.  They are generally incapable of communication and show no signs of personality or rationality, though George Romero's zombies appear capable of learning and very basic levels of speech as seen in the films Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead
"Modern zombies are closely tied to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, the collapse of civilization caused by a vast plague of undead.  The ideas are now so strongly linked that zombies are rarely depicted within any other context."
...Remember the primary difference between indigenous and Western ways of being is that indigenous peoples perceive the universe as composed of beings with whom we should enter into relationships, and civilized people perceive the universe as composed of objects to exploit, as dumb matter.

from The Toe Bone & Tooth - Martin Prechtel

the first of what i hope are many selections from the fantastic work of Martin Prechtel.  these two principally
concerning elements and their use, from The Toe Bone & Tooth

--

These particular Gods, the sovereigns of the wild mountains and untouched ravines, truly hated steel.  They hated the steel of plows and axes, the steel of saws and machetes, the steel of hooks, nails, rifles and swords.  They hated the steel of horseshoes and wagon tires, and would come to hate anything that steel could make, cut, carve or contain.  When it came to metal, gold was good enough and silver they could abide, copper was a favorite and about lead they would negotiate, but to the Gods steel was the tooth in the jaws of a consuming monster called comfort to which humans were addicted.  Steel had a soul that was a natural coward and demanded blood and it was the earth it cut.  Because the Gods saw the problems of their grandson as having come from steel and for some other reasons, not all of them clear, Gaspar was to them an ally now.  After several meetings of all the Gods and Spirits of the Mountain, Gaspar was shown to a hall where young extravagantly attired Rain Gods sat waiting for the day when they would armor up in hail and windstorms, hoping to rush forth to wound the annual troops of dryness, whose clear blood was rain, and whom they fought to pierce with their thundering arrows, lightning spears and jade axes.

--

"No, you see, I'm Gustavos Rodas and I go barefoot," holding up his callused feet to show me, "because I hate to see animals killed, eaten or made to suffer.  I don't eat the flesh of any animal and I don't use their leather, even for shoes.  I don't use plastics because it comes from petroleum, which comes from ancient animals as well.  Using gasoline or diesel to me is the same as wearing leather, using plastic or eating meat.  I don't ride horses, drive mules or pack donkeys either because I hate to see them suffer.  I have caballerias of lands, thousands of cuerdas everywhere which I loan out to all the Indians and Ladinos everywhere, who send me little bits of what they grow or make and that's how I live.
"No, i'm Gustavo Rodas and because I'm Gustavo Rodas I love all the people, even those from the Big Cities and other countries, but I don't like at all what they do to animals by the lives they live and of course those people hate me for not allowing any of those rich babosos to build on the land that crowns the holy water of the river that my family owns, who are themselves descendants from Quiche' kings, not Tecun the general, but from the kings themselves from G'umarcah.
"No, I'm Gustavo Rodas and the rich people, though none of these morosos are as rich as I am, have paid off even my children to betray their father and these things that I believe, who now only want me to sell off all my land to these horrible developers and rich folks who are killing this canyon and the entire lakeshore, illegally, for you know only villagers can own the communal holdings and nobody can legally own within two hundred feet of any shoreline, but they find ways around it.
"No, I'm Gustavo Rodas and the rich people here have fingered me to the police, who they have paid off to harass me into selling and giving in, and to whom I refuse to counterpay to keep them off, the police who are supposedly here to protect us from thieves are thieves in the employ of thieves.
"No, the green bottles and broken glass and Sonya and Momon are only there around my house to keep the cowardly paid-off police from entering my little garden while I'm away, because the police persist on trying to transplant marijuana bushes so they can come by with the Gaurdia de Hacienda and haul me off to seven years in prison, so they can confiscate my holdings and auction off my land.
"No, now you know, I'm Gustavo Rodas and that these dogs only bite people who come over the walls.  The entire world comes through the gates and gets all the roses they might need.  Now answer me this next thing, my friend, there are only two reasons for a man to risk his health to jump a wall bristling with razor glass and rushing in front of angry powerful dogs just to steal three roses he could've gotten by walking through the gate.  The first one is a woman and the second one is a girl.  Which one is she?"