Dialogue

“Communication has been ailing in the human race for a long time and Dialogue is concerned with that. But the primary purpose of Dialogue is not to communicate. It is much deeper. It addresses the blocks in communication, not merely to understand them, but to meet them directly. It is aimed at seeing resistances to communication. In Dialogue we are ready to raise topics serious enough to cause trouble. But while we are talking we are interested in being aware of what’s going on inside us and between us.

The word ‘dialogue’ has many meanings and we are giving it a particular meaning. In this Dialogue we are not trying to make our points prevail or, if we are, we need to look at that. Our challenge is to see when each of us is trying to prevail, because if anybody prevails it means the dialogue has failed.” David Bohm

Dialogue?
Dialogue? (Photo by j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved)

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Wilder Works

I find myself at this shoreline, drenched and still in a wash of life tides. So many little storms and awful swells tossed me around in a night long, almost endless. In those storms and swells were faces I’ve never known personally and those I cherish dearly daily, often kissing, celebrating life. And some faces I’ve never seen or touched but love. I kept grasping for the best wreckage to cling to, the “right” perspective to trust, knowing truth calls out somewhere in the love-support our hearts can illuminate. But with every grope in the direction of what looked to be secure and safe purchase, the waters welled up and slammed back down, turning these lovely safety vests into monsters plunging me under murky depths.

And then I let go, floating to a wild surface, holding to some faith in love, finding myself afloat while gentler tides swelled from within, sending me to foreign shores. But home. Home longed for but not known before all these little storms releasing.

While resting on this shore, I remember what was learned in my tossing, how the worst enemy out there is within. And the ugliest apathy claims some beating hearts and sleeping minds because it’s all they can do to cope.  But, regardless of all these injuries, cripplings, wobbling feeble feet, mysteries of goodness divine thrive, sometimes found in wicked shadows. The long-tossing night of endless effort reveals no bad guys or good guys, no heroes or foes, just this washing flood of human artistry sometimes flotsam, jetsam surreal.

All these crashing tides found me not some profound and releasing truth but a freedom in surrendering to the artistry of love’s wilder works and savagespeaking songs singing out loud, sometimes screaming our lives a human collage of vivid soul. Those seas tell me there’s no sense to be made but love-sense and the sometimes nonsense of sharing discoveries as we accept the mutability of the known and the true. Only love redeems our loss and not always in ways we can measure, but as we let go and float, we’re soaked in a wonder no hands can hold…no grief can drown… and no tide can destroy.

j. ruth kelly, 2013, all rights reserved
j. ruth kelly, 2013, all rights reserved

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Radical Empathy

Walk a mile or two… remove yourself from your so-very-right perspective and ask yourself why you support what you support…

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When Does It Begin To Matter?

These times simmer us all along a story of eventual boiling, critical massness, whether we acknowledge the kitchen exists, or the stove, or the fire underneath the pot or the pot or…

We can say it doesn’t matter, that we can’t make a difference by raising our voice but how else have we made changes without shedding blood? And don’t we want to avoid that one in particular? Would we rather send troops to corrupt wars, pat them on the back with a grin, say our prayers repeatedly, send out all the best energy and hope it all works out well enough or could we maybe consider speaking the truth to established “time-honored” realities gone stagnant and toxic? Especially when those traditions quickly boot their once-revered boots, now seasoned veterans, into a purgatory of loss, of benefits soured and help non-existent. Why would anyone perpetuate such? Could we maybe ask ourselves why we see no point in voicing our opinions but have no problem supporting the send-off of troops? What perversion of truth are we embodying when we embrace such twisted contradictions of love? We can’t make a difference with our voices united in opposition to corruption but somehow we can make a difference sending young folk to their confusion if not their deaths?

And while we’re at the love shore: Why are we so in love with our dramas, our many ministrations for the injured and the cornered more than we are in love with preventing the injuries, the agonies, the worries about loved ones entrenched in “time-honored” dead end ventures? While we should never abandon our love for the wounded, it’s a vastly wicked farce of love to embrace futility of voice while clinging fiercely to our weapons of warfare and all the seeming heroics inevitable. We bind soldier to soldier on fields meant only for greed, their scuffle to keep each other alive somehow proving one man or woman can get another’s back in the sands of murky foreign purpose. We tell ourselves it justifies the futility of it all as we grin and play the romantic charade game of hide the truth. Can we not encourage our youth to occupy our own soil here in these anorexic lands where we starve out soulfulness minute by minute everyday? Not in some distant land where our presence creates enemies and problems so much more horrific than any we could have interrupted.

It’s like some sick roundy round with value, with preciousness itself. It’s like we don’t want it. We’d rather injure it, send it abroad into suicidal zones of alleged honor, duty and freedom before doing the most effective thing we can do to protect what we love, to further love itself. See, if we are real warriors, we speak the truth to centuries of corruption. We stand our ground, refusing violence. We question the powers that be and we do it endlessly until the reign of corruption ends, occupying truth, insisting on a fierce love that refuses the same old delusions and capitulations to overwhelming corruption.

When will it begin to matter? Until it does, we pose. We pose notions of care, of concern, of sincerity itself when we refuse to believe our voices can turn a tide in love, for love, as love.  How is it that our hands wielding weapons have more power than our voices sending out energy, uncovering truth, discovering purpose that embraces what matters, birthing and nurturing love? It is not so. Don’t believe there’s no point because if you believe there’s no point in a voice raised, then your belief in everything else is nowhere, nothing. Not one part of the human expression, not one movement of the body is without purpose and the fact that all the world is mostly ignorant of this truth is why we are where we are today, on the stove, working our way up to an ugly boil, refusing love itself. So, when? When does it begin to matter? And when do people realize what once stood on the edge of lands noble, possibly occupying honorable purpose, what once defended freedom is now a machine killing innocence? And no ancient semi-heroic history will redeem what is now. Only what we choose now, only when we embrace how much it matters now, only then will we stand a chance of avoiding devastating loss.

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Mindless Americanism

Pass the pills, the great gobs of prescriptive denial, send us all along our paths surreal as we nod and grin, complicit…

Lay it all out before us, the blithely boring buffet of “heroism” won in the distant lands of those “lesser” creatures where terror matinees feature imminent threats to our alleged freedom…

As we all skip gaily bleating off the cliff, grinning our laws of attraction, never wondering why such corruption billows and balloons us all puffed up in songs and hymns and spiritual songs and…

Something so sleepy, so myopic and sludge slothful coursing through our veins as we snort this righteous indignation at any not white, not here first (wait…), not Bible-beating cleanly-seeming…

Importing bootstrap molasses for asses pounding their pulpits reducing compassion for the downtrodden, trampling any and all deemed weak, abnormal, suspicious-looking, not born with silver spoon inserted in the wide wide mouth…

Tune in and turn on the off of any soulfulness, we’re all done with frank and real, raw and feel, we got game for heaping high miles of blame on any who dare expose our truths…

Sit at our table where we’ll rally the professionals, injecting poison and gathering mutant unearthly harvest for the gaping masses of superior mindless compliance, gulping down the greed master’s meal…

See, we don’t feel, think or otherwise manage more than a cursory blank stare in the winking twinkle of this twilight of our delusion…

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Enough Free People? No.

“After we protested and went to jail and then went to court and was—had a guilty verdict, right? That week, the president came to New York and said, ‘Edward Koch was one of the great mayors in the last 50 years,’ and then said, ‘Michael Bloomberg was a terrific mayor.’ Now, this is the same person saying we’ve got to care for black boys, and black boys are being intimidated, harassed, humiliated, 1,800 a day. It’s just not a matter of pretty words, Mr. President. You’ve got to follow through in action. You see, you can’t use the words to hide and conceal your mendacity, hypocrisy and the support of criminality—or enactment of criminality when it comes to drones, you see.

And the sad thing is, Sister Amy, is that we just don’t have enough free people, let alone free black people. Black people, we settled for so little, so we get a little symbolic gesture, we get a little identification, and like on MSNBC, which is part of the Obama plantation, they start breakdancing again: ‘Oh, isn’t it so wonderful? He’s really one of us. We can now wave the flag again. We can now support our mindless Americanism,’ in the language of my dear brother Maulana Karenga, intellectual that he is. No. We ought to be over against injustice, no matter what, across the board, and be vigilant about it. I don’t care what color the president or the governor or the mayor is.” — Cornel West in an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now

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Wasi’chu, We Are

…to this day, we violate.

And putting it into Manifest Perspective, we have Woody Harrelson…

http://youtu.be/HXrm6RUTkZk

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Obama’s Violence of Choice

President Obama declared his reaction to the Zimmerman verdict today, quoted in CNN, as saying:

“The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy. Not just for his family, or for any one community, but for America. I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son. And as we do, we should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities. We should ask ourselves if we’re doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence that claims too many lives across this country on a daily basis. We should ask ourselves, as individuals and as a society, how we can prevent future tragedies like this. As citizens, that’s a job for all of us. That’s the way to honor Trayvon Martin.”

We are, in fact, a nation, not of laws, but of people who create laws, flawed and otherwise, laws based on the value of the people, the value of life itself. Ideally, our laws protect value and restore a measure of justice. We can stand with the parents who are asking for calm reflection, noting that such reflection requires a proclivity for truth and an awareness of the lessons love would teach us in these confusing times.

We can, on this day, note that in the state of Florida one man, not African-American, has walked away free of the charges against him, charges in agreement with value, with life. He walks free ‘though he killed another. And while he walks in freedom, another is enslaved, imprisoned by a system, for the “crime” of firing a warning shot, a shot that did not kill or harm another life. Marissa Alexander shot down by the violence of choice, by the flaws in a system so surreally corrupt, we cannot know what we stand for any longer, as a nation, if we look to the “nation of laws, and a jury.”

Much like the indiscriminate work of drones honing in on the allegedly guilty in lands far from our own soil, Obama’s violence of choice rings a discordant vibe in our world as he asks us to choose calm, to honor Trayvon Martin, “to stem the tide of gun violence.” The exacting accuracy of our guns do not serve a President who would rather sit and push the button every week, sending innocent children to their deaths as he rests in the executive shelter of “collateral damage,” children and innocents banished from life itself by a nation not consulting her own people or the laws of their own making.

And so we see what Obama means by calm reflection. He asks that we not reflect too passionately on the value of life itself, that instead we remember we are a nation of laws which we dare not break, especially if we are African-American. We should, indeed, “ask ourselves how we can prevent tragedies like this,” as we sit complicit in our silence while he sends hundreds to their death, well beyond our borders…

without regard for the value of life,

without regard for justice,

without including the people of the U.S. in these choices we have seemingly no choice but to accept.

Good people of the United States, Obama’s violence of choice is drone-warfare, not gun-violence. He asks we partake in a violence of twisted logic, choosing one form of brutalization over another. See, we must lay down our arms, our awareness of truth and surrender our minds to his greater, elitist view of what is truly valuable. We are, after all, a nation of laws, not humans bleeding the same color, not humans on a planet roiling in the aftermath of a bully-nation’s actions. We are at the mercy of Obama’s violence of choice, but thankfully, thus far, apparently not on the receiving end.

So, let us calmly reflect with passion on our value, on the value of every person on this planet we inhabit. Let us reflect on the duplicity of the powers that be and ask ourselves how we can prevent the further rape of justice, and the intimidation our system exacts with rapid-fire insistence in these trying times.

How can we embody a fierce and fearless love, a love refusing the obfuscation of value in the name of law itself?

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Waking Up on the 4th of July

Sitting down to coffee and a glance at my friends near and far online, I see so many posts about our grand nation, the heritage, our freedom. My face contorts into a scowl, disgusted. Then my angel side kicks in, smacking me for my intensity, “Come now, child. There’s a greater Divine force at work here and people mean well.” But I find the inner roar much louder, smacking back at what I sense as a spiritual tide of people begging for angels to whisk us all up into great clouds of denial and “om om” bliss-ninny nonsense anesthetizing us against truth and hard work, the kind requiring sweat and brains and risk-taking. That tide washes us all in a sleep surreal as we consume our store-bought comfort at a discount price, clueless of what it takes to make a nation great.

We should be screaming in the streets right now. The loss, the bleeding out, the carnage posing “security” and the untouchable corruption in our government would send our forefathers into a valid rampage.

I’ve found it difficult to speak of it, pondering the “heritage” of a nation whose highlights include stamping out indigenous peoples and enslaving others in order to eventually form a more perfect union. Our great heritage? A perfect union?

But William Rivers Pitt brings me back to a truth worth grasping regardless of it all:

“The idea behind and beneath ‘We the People’ is worth fighting for. The idea that made the ability to speak your mind the law of the land, the idea that says you are an integral, absolutely necessary part of this nation despite your race or sex or religion, the idea that royalty (whether it be derived from lineage or wealth) shall not rule here, are all ideas not to be abandoned, no matter how difficult it is to keep that faith in the face of all the gruesome offenses committed against your will.” (Related Link Here)

We’ve lost a grip on the Voting Rights Act as we progress in other areas and slip even further behind while Texas rallies a revolution against the womb … in the name of life and a kid is imprisoned with a $500,000 bond set. Why? A Facebook post wherein he unwittingly joked in poor taste. It put some folks in an uproar. So, he’s in jail for making people uncomfortable with his words – they were truly unfortunate, the words of a teen. But to imprison someone for his words? We call that tyranny. And that’s just Texas. I live in North. Carolina. where local governments emulate the worst of our “heritage” and smile as they set off the fireworks, wave their patriotic ideals and their flags with sick notions of “freedom” passing legislature to oppress.

With a mixture of rage and disgust, I have greeted this day, wavering somewhat in my conviction of what is salvageable of our nation. But the truth need not be clouded by the noxious fumes of the sleeping masses. As a child, I believed in the U.S. and for all the best reasons. I just didn’t realize it. The idea of “We the People” was the rallying inspirational force for me then and it need not die, regardless of how sullied our heritage or how human our sleep. But it is past time we awaken, hone our critical thinking and recognize the need to keep the eyes wide open and the heart ready to speak truth to power gone grossly off course.

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