Colibri Animato

for the Feast of St. Francis

3 October 2021
     - my 60^th birthday

There is a language we share:
the air that together we breathe,
beneath the open sky!

Who could have known that would be enough
to bridge such an enormous gap?

But even the diary from one year ago
does attest:

“Rounding the corner,
and there you are!

-- We share this life,
though one is fractional
to the other

-- We share this home;
though our dwellings differ,
we are only liminally separate
-- In truth, we are together."

Of another shared aspect,
--that of torpor--
our intersectional relationship
reaches the overarching conclusion:

Choose life!

For, suspended animation is merely life incremental,

slowed to the blessing of the molto adagio,
where the dream that animates us bids us all to live

to each newly dawning day,
slowing each passing moment of awareness
so that we may all be the moment together, and in time.

For how long, my friend,
shall we bless one another’s company,
in the newly dawning om of day?

You greet me by landing on the tomato cage,

despite that fruit being no longer in due season.

Only in the most foreshortened sense of being
can my three-score years coincide with your own

-- yet will I delight in your special greeting,
in the beauteous now that we have,
in the blessing to have been truly seen
and to also have truly seen,
in the mutuality of seeing and acknowledging,
of knowing,
and of caring,
and seeking to live cooperative within that notice--

yea, let this, what we have, be our deepening moment
for as long as providence may bless us both
with such patience and perspicacity,
with such sacred and familial union,

as is that rounding of the corner,
to be with you,
        where you are with me
and we are joyously
together.

© 2021 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.com

 

To Be or Not To Be ... Anthropocentric

Are we for or against ourselves? 

Perhaps the better question is: If we are for us, when will we start acting like it?

If the questions above seem outrageous, out there, or confusing, let me pause for a moment to offer some brief foundation on which to pin these questions.

I was born in 1961, in Berkeley, CA, a city known for radicalism and protest, then and now. My parents took us on marches. We belonged to the Co-Op. We participated in early ecological efforts. (If anyone can now remember the 1971 oil spill on San Francisco Bay, my mother took my sister and me on AC Transit to San Francisco, so we could all help in the rescue of birds and beach cleanup. This was a very low-tech process at the time. I remember lots of hay being spread about, to absorb the oil. While the beaches and bay were eventually cleaned, despite the efforts of hundreds of people, many birds perished.) We had family friends who had opted out and gone “off grid” by retreating to communes. My parents were more on the side of opting in.

Being a child of the television era, I was acutely aware of the news. Among my very earliest memories is of watching the funeral of JFK on our small, black and white Motorola portable TV. Time inched forward through strikes, assassinations, War, famine in India and Ethiopia. I knew that a war had been declared, by our President, on poverty in our nation. I knew that the Peace Corps, Red Cross and other groups were actively working to help people in other nations stricken by illness and famine. I knew there was war against illiteracy. Unrest was all around. Sometimes, I did not feel safe, but I always felt that most people were working to make the world a better place for everyone. That is a little about my background and those events that informed my understanding of the world.

Today, I look back and see that the Progressive ideas, which had their roots in three and more generations before my birth, have largely failed. We can look at the history that has been written since and find a few overarching reasons for these failures: Military Industrial Complex and rampant, unregulated Capitalism. Progressivism and citizen activism have been undermined by those moneyed interests that prefer maintaining hegemony over influence and power to partaking of an equal share in human rights and justice.

War to bolster hegemony and claim on resources has cost more lives and more money than could ever be imagined. Unrelenting capitalism has enslaved entire populaces to create and exchange worthless junk, designed for rapid failure, that quickly becomes refuse, littering our world with toxicity that threatens to endanger the health and safety of all living beings.

What few people seem to realize, here in 2018, is that the world economies are no longer tied to nations, but to corporations that wield enough wealth and power to actively avoid the attempts of any governmental body that would control them. My proof of this lies in the movement toward privatization of the security sector, and to some extent in the numerous recent wars/conflicts that seem to have been unilateral manipulations by certain governments, but which have profited corporations engaged in “rebuilding efforts”.

It is apparent to me that nationalities and governments no longer hold the keys to human destiny, and this is why terror organizations and nefarious cyber disruptors are currently so successful.

It is also apparent to me that no one at the top is interested in civilization or social wellbeing.

What shocking things to say!

If only humans could be accused of being anthropocentric! But, alas, we cannot.

If we were truly anthropocentric, we would realize that anthropocentrism is a state that must be cultivated. The principal flaw of capitalism is that it can only survive when people buy. But if the world is populated by a few haves, the rest being have-nots, ultimately means that that having is an endgame. If the captains of capitalism don’t get to work cultivating larger groups of haves (people who will be capable of buying because they have knowledge, jobs and health, affordable housing, adequate access to food and water), the “free-for-all” marketplace will die, along with great swaths of the world’s population.

After that, all that is left is warlord military might à la Mad Max. And then, you capitalists, watch out!

The solution, to my mind, lies in a benevolent anthropocentrism, one that buys into a central notion that to keep the world going, you need smart, cultured, engaged, and empathetic people of all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, genders and cultural affiliations; caring people. Such people know that the earth and all life must be stewarded, and that this cannot be accomplished by stealing, cheating, lying or bullying, but by cooperation toward a common good for everyone and everything. We need to demilitarize the populace. We need to find the root causes of violence, isolation, depression, misanthropy; we need to weed them out by healing, hybridizing and nurturing wellbeing, by loving. We need to dismantle predatory thinking and practices, and replacing them with innovation that breeds life and purpose. We need to cultivate citizenship and personal responsibility that is manifest in every action built from the bottom up, and (as business consultants never tire in speaking of) resonated in the tone from the top.

Evolution, that is I am talking about, folks. We need to evolve. We desperately need to become something we clearly right now are not. We need to become truly human and anthropocentric in the sense that being good to the world around us is the path toward both meeting all our basic needs and providing spiritual fulfillment.

It is a simple idea, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “costing not less than everything.”

Or, as Voltaire has his eponymous hero ultimately declare, “repondit Candide, ‘Oui, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”

Truly Human

This is something like a prayer, to see if a simple strand of words can be a catalyst to unity and dedication.

Violence, on the rise,—
            tasked to criticize,
            ostracize,
            criminalize,
            and victimize
—solves nothing.

Life is a blender,
            in which we surrender
            to learn, to render
            and engender
            hearts to be more tender
—inclined toward cooperation,
if not affection.

If we are to carry forward life,
there is a need to end strife;
we need to make a progression
away from mindless aggression.

This calls for us to reframe
            and retrain,
            even entrain
            and entertain
an understanding what civilization means,
            and retain it.

In order to survive,
            we must realize,
            and prioritize,
            modernize
            and acclimatize,
            fraternize
            and solemnize
A truly compassionate bond,
that we may recover,
            or even discover,
what are the needs
and what it means
to be truly human.

Shall we go, I say,
into the darkness? Nay!
In despair for us, I pray:
Let us resolve
to evolve!

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Working Well With Others

My children are working on a collaborative construction project, in their respective classes. The class is divided up into working groups of students, each of whom has been assigned one or several roles in the assignment: to design and construct a load-bearing bridge with toothpicks. The assignment sounds like a lot of fun, and a chance to work with a real-life construction project on a small scale and with a hypothetical budget. Once the projects are complete, there will be a contest between the classes, for best- and greatest-load-bearing design.

My daughter was complaining to me that the child on her team who is supposed to be engaged in management and oversight, in addition to make sure that the “job site” is clean and “safe” has been shirking these responsibilities. Normally, my daughter would just shrug and make sure things were handled, but in this case, two other team members have been out. So, in essence, my daughter feels she has been carrying the project, and she told me it seemed unfair.

She said that she had tried to communicate to the person in question, only to be put off or growled at.

I had to laugh.

How frequently do we find, in our lives, in our lives, that gate keepers, managers, people entrusted with the work of oversight and management seldom live up to their job descriptions or pay?

How often do we try to keep it all going, on our own?

How much stress does this add to our daily lives?

Does this affect our love of work?

Cooperative effort requires team players. Teachers in our schools work hard to teach our children to work together in problem solving. What do we adults model? Do we model best practices in the areas of cooperation? Or will it be marked on our life report card: “doesn’t work well with others?”

I suggested that my daughter speak to a higher authority about her grievances, namely to her teacher. I even advised seeking arbitration.

“Well, I don’t want her to get in trouble; then she’ll really get mad at me.”

I then suggested that I would make some small signs, to put into the hands of some action figures. The plan would be post the action figures around “the job site,” as if there was a strike picket line. The signs would proclaim:

                  “MANAGEMENT UNFAIR TO LABOR!”

My daughter was appalled. “Oh, MOM! That is not going to stop her!”

I said, well, perhaps not, but it would bring public attention to a situation that really comes up in the world of work. Such events can even delay or shut down projects.

“You just want to embarrass me!”

“No, I want to embarrass her into doing what she is supposed to do,” I replied.

“Ah, mom.”  She dismissed this entire notion as being ridiculous.

“If you don’t talk to your teacher tomorrow, the action figures hit the picket line on Friday!”

“Mom, you have no respect for me!”

“I have every respect for you, and your best interests at heart—you are a laborer and you are being oppressed by management!”

“Hmph,” she said, “well, maybe you should have a little less respect for me…”

The Think System

Ideas float like motes of dust

through the sun charged ether,
of conscious and unconscious being,
waiting to be caught in a web
of substantial thought.

Fog lies thick
on the ground
of our doings,
sometimes hiding from view
what should be clear
and in the open,
measurable.

The world turns
on a scientific principal
that can neither be diverted
nor controlled,
but all other doings rely
on cooperative interaction
between two or more
ordered points
within a vector.

The magnitude
of the motion,
and whether it is
bound or free,
depends upon
what the carrier
is doing.

How shall you
carry the world forward?

Shall you force,
torque,
displace,
accelerate,
move
or abstain?

How shall your
motions be measured
from the initial point
to your terminus?

Shall you be
an angle,
a product,
an orientation,
a contravariant,
a semi-norm
a cross
or a null?

And when
it is all over,
and measured,
will any of it
have been worth
the exercise?

A web
of substantial thought
awaits all ordered points
that wish to engage in
consciously cooperative
interaction.  

© 2011 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen
image: http://www.vectorjungle.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/vector-art-equations-graphs.jpg

Tower of Babel

Creation hangs on one word alone.

S’truth, one was the word, and
of one accord was the song,
by which the tower was begun.

But each ascending storey
found diversion and division.

The word splintered from one
into a world of words;
the people from friends
into nameless ranks of strangers.

At every turn, every new height
the plans and styles change;
right hand knows not left,
nor wants to.

The Witness had only to watch,
with heaviness of heart,
as the great structure
began its collapse from within.

unraveling into flames,
consternation and war.

From that time forward,
diversity has yet to discover
its sacred power to build.

No human tower shall ever reach God,
until the daughters of woman,
and the sons of man
remember that

Creation hangs on one word alone.

© 2010 by Elisabeth Eliassen

Kindness and Cooperation: Lessons in Daily Living

We so often hear that "boys will be boys", particularly if the phrase is being offered as an excuse for episodes of bad behavior. Girls can also be mean. And so can parents be mean, as well as people of an adult age who do not have children. How much mean-spiritedness are we modeling for our children and youth? If we see our child behave badly, do we step in and say something, or hang back, because it is too much trouble?

We hear so much in the news about bullying, and there have lately been many tragic consequences. We wonder at the decline in civilized behavior, and we comment on how "those other people" should behave (whomever "they" are).

But, here is a news flash, people: we are all "them".

Kindness is a blessing, but generally not a natural gift to most people, although I have met some people who are, I think, naturally kind in every encounter. Meeting the embodiment of kindness and generosity is edifying and humbling for me.  Hopefully this is true for everyone, but perhaps not; many merely take someone else's kindness for granted. Some people meet kindness and generosity believing that is a form of weakness, and feel free (or obliged) to take advantage; little do they realize that they are the losers in such an exchange.

In a world of kindness, there is no pecking order, no top-down authority; all are equal and respected in the eyes of the observer. A world of kindness requires a specific type of engagement with the world: mutual attentiveness between any two people. Martin Buber characterized this beautifully in his book I and Thou:

The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, not can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the Thou; and as I become the I, I say Thou. All real living is meeting.

What he means, of course, is that real living requires that two or more engage in an activity; it takes two to tango. If one can acknowledge another, meeting that person as an equal and actively engaging in relationship, even if that relationship is only a simple transaction at the grocery store, or cars merging on the freeway, or a game at the park, that meeting is where life happens. Transcendence occurs in every action between individuals who engage to solve a problem.

In the same vein, Aldous Huxley says of love:

There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

You could easily substitute the words "live" for "love" and "living" for "loving".

What is suggested is a type of ongoing education. Goodness and compassion may not be natural, but they can be learned and taught. Teaching goodness and compassion is every bit an attentive action as that meeting that Buber describes and that love that Huxley wrote about. And it requires more than yelling across the park "hey, quit picking on that kid!"

If we want to teach our children well, we cannot avert our eyes and mouth worn phrases like "boys will be boys"--that is inattention at its most self-contained and in complete disregard for "what needs to be done."

If we want to teach kindness, we must recognize and be humbled by our own capacity for meanness. If we can do that, the next step is to engage with our children honestly about meanness and its consequences, about the inattention that leads to disregard or objectification, and likewise about attention leading to mutual engagement and problem solving.

That mutual learning experience is where life really happens; it elevates the everyday world and lifts people up.

But life is all about choices; living life attentively, with kindness and compassion, is a choice, like any other. People are not the isolated beings they like to think they are; we cannot live for ourselves alone. We live in a world that faces destruction if we do not fit ourselves into the picture that is so much bigger than ourselves, and turn our attention to solving the problems we have created from a position of selfishness. An integral world demands mutual integrity; every day introduces the opportunity for a new lesson.

Integral life must be thought of as a continuing journey in the practice of kindness and cooperation.

May we learn from our mistakes and teach our children well.