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Tag: evolution

Let Loose Your Weapons: a dirge

Published on December 14, 2012

Let loose your weapons, guns and swords!
Forget your sovereign gods and lords!
The old ways must be left behind
for us to learn how to survive.

Forget rigid philosophy
that separates your me from thee,
those ancient and quite useless lies
that we think help us to survive.

Let droop your flags, your ill-placed pride!
Bring those loud cannon back inside!
The fanfare and the hoop-and-cry
are not what help us to survive.

Forget the blame, it matters not;
The time is past for vengeful plots.
Destroy your poisons, sheathe your knives,
if we would learn how to survive.

Let flow your tears! May they wash clean
those hearts that harbor the obscene,
destructive hate that will deprive
us of the longing to survive.

Forget no more! Awake from sleep!
Release compassion from the deep,
dark prison where barely alive
it waits to help us to survive.

Bury now these dead and gone,
who made no evil, did no wrong
by any yardstick we’d contrive
to prove we deserve to survive.

Let us away! There is no time
to waste debating this foul crime.
Let us denounce it, and then strive
to learn together to survive.

14 DEC 2012

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How to Save the World

Published on February 5, 2008

One of the blogs I read pretty regularly is Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World. Occasionally, something he writes strikes a particularly resonant chord with me — like his February 4th gem A Miniature Truth: Becoming Authentically Yourself.

I’ll admit, some of these things I’ve thought and compiled myself over the years. But to see these 9 ideas strung together, in fact, dependent on each other in such a way that in order to accept one as truth, you really have to accept them all, for better or worse, in order to truly understand the implications of each, is a step I’d never taken until reading Dave’s post. In summary, these truths are:

1. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun.

2. Things are the way they are for a reason; if you have any hope to change something, first understand what the reason is.

3. Life’s meaning, and an understanding of what needs to be done, emerges, most often, from conversation in community with people you love.

4. Community is born of necessity.

5. To get people to change, first Let Yourself Change, to become a model that shows people personally, one-to-one, a better way to live.

6. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

7. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

8. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

9. Our civilization is in its final century.

For more detail, please refer to Dave’s blog 🙂

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Ayn Rand

Published on September 19, 2006

So you would change the world
and make the roughest edges plain,
extend your level down the field,
widen and pave each lane,

erase what makes a difference
between one soul and the next,
reward in equal measure
with the coin of self-respect,

enforce equality across the board,
no matter what,
regardless of the steps it took
to get each to that spot.

Forget that it’s adversity
that defines who we are,
our flaws as individuals,
the perfect surface marred

that makes a talent marvelous,
a special gift unique,
a voice worth recognizing
in the mob from which it speaks.

The world is not an easy place;
it is not meant to be.
A price is paid for every breath,
for every liberty,

for each kind of convenience,
for the smallest bit of joy,
for every gift you choose to squander
or by luck, employ.

To change the world,
to make it so that each has equal share
when some work harder
than the rest seems blatantly unfair;

that’s like imagining auditions
to find out who’s best
that don’t require participation
or some kind of test.

I wonder how you pick
a winning singer on a show
where everybody thinks they’re great
because someone said so;

despite the fact they have no rhythm,
sense of key or pitch,
and will not listen to advice
but instead only bitch

that those who judge are blind,
or worse, malevolently cruel,
and cannot see that every lump of coal
contains a jewel.

Which isn’t so. Only a few,
that persevere in time,
and overcome the pressure make it
to the finish line.

Would you lay out your hard earned cash
for coal and gem the same?
That’s not the change that this world needs.
It’s already half lame.

19 SEP 2006

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Peace is a Verb

Published on August 11, 2006

No passive meal, no rare stuff bird,
true peace is not a noun, but verb;
inaction, apathy and doubt
that whisper are not her. She shouts

from rooftops, making foul war shake
in fear at her approach. Mistake
not mewling whiners for her knights,
but rather find those awake nights

who seek to change first, in themselves,
the hurt and violence that dwells
inside us all, and is expressed
in hatred’s cruel unhappiness.

Peace is no victim, she just waits
while we excuse or blame on fate
why we act not who know the course
that will alone deter blind force:

to cease rewarding strength and might
for its own sake, calling it right
that those who kill and those who die
are somehow not just you and I.

11 AUG 2006

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A Million Years

Published on August 3, 2006

Just like we’ve done for a million years,
we strike out blindly in the dark in fear.
Some use rocks or bombs, that’s their choice;
me, I use music, my words, my voice.

We each know nothing, but take on faith
that truth comes from an honest face;
and when that message becomes a lie,
we use our darkness to hide disgrace.

Just like we were living in those caves:
we fear and worship the ones’ who’re brave
enough to venture out in the mist,
who tell us monsters just don’t exist.

But we know better; it couldn’t be
that we alone keep us from being free.
So there be monsters, alive and well;
on one side, Heaven, the other, Hell.

Just like we started. Doesn’t it seem
a million years, a million dreams
would make some difference, help us to grow
beyond our fear of “I don’t know.”?

The truth is simple: there’s nothing more
than what we make it, and that’s for sure.
What work we’re given is to survive
Another million, ’til we arrive.

03 AUG 2006

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If you would make a difference

Published on June 15, 2005

So many look around the globe
and say, “How can I start
to help in what small way I can,
and find work with a heart?”

They look to spread their peace abroad,
and be more well received
than in their hometown neighborhoods,
if that can be believed.

If crime and hate and poverty
among the richly blessed
cannot be fought effectively,
what hope for all the rest?

If prisons, projects, trailerparks
and graveyards are the way
we bandage up our culture’s wounds,
what right have we to say

that our approach, our medicines,
our governments, our laws
are useful or appropriate
to correct others’ flaws?

If you would make a difference,
first, examine your own heart;
once your own house is in order,
then work down the block can start.

15 JUN 2005

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The Roots Must Lead

Published on May 8, 2005

The roots must lead us further down;
it does no good to taste the fruit
unless we first have knelt in shadows
there among the rotting leaves.

The kneeling first, and then the crawl
along the coursing, mottled bark
that starts to thicken as the trunk
breaks through the soil that gives it life.

Among the worms that churn the muck,
the beetles and the stinging ants:
there where the humus is still moist
and cakes to concrete on our hands

we find the source, the Mother core,
like buried treasure from the deep,
between the fingers of the oak
splayed like a hand clutching the earth.

The grass between your toes, so soft,
gives only hints and subtle clues;
to find the Mother’s hidden love
cast off by culture’s mad distain

requires the digging, dirty knees,
and scratches drawing your own blood;
a desperate scrabble down and down
past patriarchy’s well-kept sod.

Her love is buried, long-forgot;
and proving ourselves worthy, work.
If you would make your half a whole,
man, woman, child: dig deep.

08 MAY 2005

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