the eskimos have no word for war

Trying to explain it to them

Leaves one feeling ridiculous and obscene.

Their houses, like white bowls,

Sit on a prairie of ancient snowfalls

Caught beyond thaw or the swift changes

Of night and day.

They listen politely, and stride away.

With spears and sleds and barking dogs

To hunt for food. The women wait

Chewing on skins or singing songs,

Knowing that they have hours to spend,

That the luck of the hunter is often late.

Later, by fires and boiling bones

In streaming kettles, they welcome me,

Far kin, pale brother,

To share what they have in a hungry time

In a difficult land. While I talk on

Of the southern kingdoms, cannon, armies,

Shifting alliances, airplanes, power,

They chew their bones, and smile at one another.

- Mary Oliver

to have no word for a thing that is real

does not mean it is not real

but it shows your order of things

your personal communal order of what is real

between the men you eat with, know,

and share with.

you have no word for war.

perhaps that means you have no communities

within earshot that deeply richly believe different

things, and therefore fear the difference

or desire your river and land and coast

I do not know, but there are things I wish were

still a mystery to me. though..

i am a culprit.

I am a culprit of skimming.

scowering books, words, feeds, crowds...

collecting information. storing it

in a vast vault

of

half understo-

thoug-

To simplify the truth for children requires a deep understanding of truth. C.S. Lewis understood this.

"Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."

"Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy."

- J.K. Rowling

What if I give an answer to the problem of the world?

OP: Mountains: where the world seems out of reach. But maybe thats where the preacher learns to teach. Twitter can't grow on trees, technology alone is a disease. But maybe hopes of the individual being able to harness this new electronic breeze will allow us to live out what the beauracracy buries. The purity of believing in the importance and power of our own words, our own blogs, our own tweets... but as your friend, honest and open, I think youth gains wisdom, and transforms... but I like the past just as much as the future I think.

justification vs. the reality that 95% of people don't live within a community such as IC... our youth will grow different. I believe that. prophecy brother. only time will tell, and were a thousand conversations from that day. exchange. exchange.

JJ: The electric change coursing through youth, the 1001010101 in our skin, is not an enemy, any more than the written word, the shaping tongue of speech. It is a tool that self and gluttony indulge, and shallow conquering poison... But the change is being woven in, strewn seed on fertile soil of men longing for a different world, and some communities engaging the world the different worlds will see the retreating water before the wave. To call it as it may be, to prophesy, is to open yourself up to fail. But why live if not to see and try and claim and fail or win and change the living to what it has always wanted to be. Exchange is why I long for Chicago streets.

I longwantneed to hear your thoughts, your unpacked ponderings, on the explosion of words I gave you the other day. This philosophical endeavor, the daring suicide of actually positing an answer to the worlds problems, is my suicide calling. Walk with me brother, if not to your own death, to inform mine.

...I do not know what is next. but to take life seriously, that is why we wake.

is it a period or an ellipsis

I was impeded by a problem I never knew I had: my hidden but stubbornly entrenched skepticism about the existence of the spiritual realm. Like most postmodern Westerners, I grew up in a culture permeated with empiricist notions about reality. Philosopher Charles Taylor writes that often we consciously hold one set of values and assumptions but unconsciously live by another. . . . My hidden skepticism provided me with a hundred handy doubts right when I most needed them. Maybe all this disruption could be blamed on menopause after all. Maybe it was strictly a psychological event—the ego overcompensating for an inferiority complex? People delude themselves all the time, don’t they?

- Paula Huston

i find a strong cornerstone lean in the direction of purpose. meaning in living, sovereignty and plan. that reality does not trouble me. I do not fight to believe it. depend on omnipotence and scoff at the feeble manmind. i see no problem with the temporality of man, his belief that his choices echo in eternity, and in believing they do they do, his responsibility to Love, His whisper woo out of the world's machine. i see all of this in comfort and credit my nature.

but i plead forgive me in my unbelief, not my mental ascent, but my living daily unbelief that a shadow just-over-my-shoulder battle of spirit is waging, evil devil hook horned battle for my soul with silver wielding angels, the spirit waging.

i struggle for this. reach for it. and it rots the urgency of my prayer.

Deliberate time together.

Last night, an impromptu society was created.

to be deliberate

and write together and write

4 of us.

we gave ourselves an assignment. 30 minutes to write about personal revolution. Then we have to read our brainflowspilling to one another. Here is what we wrote:

FIRST:

change

a cup filled not just with quarters

but ideas

the chip-toothed smile and unkempt beard

of the forgotten romanticism found in

the death-breath words of a scot-stained

street corner half-drunk half-prophet

the opposite of your binary bile:

ones and zeroes that murder tangible tangibility

destroy rebuild repeat

the mantra of a society solely concerned with cautionary procession

"cash, coin & modernization" give way to the following

for the past 6 months

I've toyed with the concept of

packing my bags

and moving to mid-nineteenth century

America

digital give way to analog

show me the hand-filled soil of your soul

not some god-dammed "about me" section

[and let me say that I hate that last line

because lately all I've been referring to in my writings is pop-culture]

but give me the hearts found

in

the squeaky floor of a church

collapsing because

there is weight in

love

touch

and wanting to be immersed in the sights smells sounds and textures

involved in the creation of the book

i just saw, smelled, heard and felt

in the used book store

there's revolution in regression

my heart is an acetate

with one or two good plays

before it turns to shit

and side A

is almost over...

SECOND:

4 years now, and i won't go back.

not because I can't.

but because i'm afraid it's true.

that if i saw it for what it really is

i would be just as afraid as she is daily,

wondering "why am i here?"

And today, i can't admit that fear.

well...i could, but I wont.

Because every choice, decision, step I have made

has countered the hysteria that is always sitting safely

between my spleen and my dreams

I work against that fear

on paper.

Ending wars, raising up revolutionaries

(what happens when revolutions get tired of themselves? Hysteria_

and sometimes that's what it feels like.

My voice taught itself to stop equipping

but that doesn't mean it doesn't when no one is listening

And that's the worst part of all.

What happens when we stop listening?

Nothing happens & no one moves.

[most days i wish for Rocking chairs and farmland & solitude what does that make me?]

THIRD:

By the day I stand from crawling novelty, I welcome the suited-salesmen into my crib.

By my dropping voice, I have amassed an empire of plastic, wires, and miniature idols of the future sale: tiny trucks, tiny guns, tiny women in felt clothes.

By my 16th year, I am the pin-up dream, the drooling banquet of consumption hunger in cunning control of the father figure mother told her mortgage holder, an added chain to the already imprisoned aging children thrown into a bag of wrinkles, running river liars, and comfort high-hedge whisperers.

By my waking years

the run-slows-to-walk-stop-and-look at my feet for the first time. I have already bought my weight in blood, the gentle stream slow sloping guided tour to lethal leisure mockingbird murder I gasp at the first light, the hinted ache 'this is not right' and find in my hand a hammer made of flesh and culture jammer and gas and fire and fear and ancient warnings hard to hear and climb the temple stairs to turn over tables and chairs

gas the drapes and light the base and promise promise make a promise to something.

FOURTH:

Song bird sing Aubade

Change searching

you say different

with what army? warning. through

a great unbalance

song bird sing . . .

for what the eyes have seen

divided

a place in displacement

song bird sing

lost looking for place

to get lost

song bird sing

for now the cries.

Me against the machine

The purpose is the marble block

to chip and blow and bend the joints

and waste and waste the flesh in crash

against the stone to change its cash

to bartered bone and worthy points.

the black stone square is old as man

with Babel once and twice and more

to build and burn the forest floor

the black stone square is old as man

from choice and current up stream crawl

we scrape or drill the

blast the base and cut the

stop me before I name the thing

that is in me

that is this society

this alter of eyes

I will claw until my fingers go

and keep it simple as I go.

as I go up the river

to the stream.