I cant run no more with that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up
A thundercloud
Theyre going to hear from me
Leonard Cohen
Looking into the darkness the world comes spinning in to view. This one planet among planets circling a star. That we are in relationship with these objects is unfathomable. We could easily move through life with nary a thought of them.
Looking into the darkness of our backyard, ringed with trees for privacy. Whatever that means nowadays with eyes in the sky all night long that look down on us, naked and vulnerable. These eyes more real to us than planets.
Looking into that darkness, I see Türkiye and I hear voices in languages I dont know. I spy layers upon layers of conflict inside that faraway land, ancient soil, nourished by blood, the courier of human spirit. I saw the AccuWeather app go down after a funny looking spiral spun outwardly and oddly from the tip of a radar tower there in the middle of their country. The earth quaked but not from any epicentre.
How is it that God so terrible and wise makes magic for us to use so terribly without wisdom?
All things being connected, is there a clue in my own biased and bothering story? A lifetime of bothering and finally it makes so much sense theres nothing left to do but lay it down. Just one more telling before I do and in that spinning look for making sense of a world of gods playing stupid with our lives.
I was a runaway at fifteen years old. A few months gone, out of the goodness of her heart, someones mother ratted on me. I was sent back. The autocrats there, claiming to be parents, thought it would be a good lesson if they took me to the police station, had me interrogated, photographed and fingerprinted, just like any criminal booking you could have seen on the tele at that time.
Though I was not charged with any crime, the imagery, the interrogation, the black ink on my fingertips, and the photo, all added up to my being a little criminal. I did not give any satisfaction to anyone looking for a shamed face. That was a long time ago and yet the impact of that experience on my young self has lasted a lifetime. I was an adolescent with boobtubing neurons linking that experience to cop shows and illicit activities. What I did not show outwardly, I concluded on the inside. There was something objectionable, something antisocial, something hinky that could not be integrated into normal society and it was in me.
Down under any worldly accomplishments since then, despite all my highest intentions to contribute something meaningful to this world, deep down below the surface of my lofty ideals, there has lived a little criminal. Finally, she wants her crime solved.
Can this pop out into the larger cult? Is it the unconscious reach for a paradise lost that drinks the blood of newborns? Is it the fear of death in a life that circles back to be born again and to feed on the next generation of criminals? Whoa. I cant go that far out. Those are instinctual criminals. Professionals.
I can ratchet it back to a psychopathic criminal like the backcountry motorhead guru. He was accessible to me. He is still available to someone with money and the kind of awareness that is easily hypnotized. In his words, someone who is open and soft.
Someone who is open and soft, is easily suggestible. Someone who is open and soft and also has a little criminal hiding out on the inside is easily manipulated. All he had to suggest was something everyday simple that could be made bad according to his unattainable modelling of perfection. I called him the King of Not. Not that, not that, not that. One day one of his wives rolled her eyes at something she heard. He said, You cant do that, not that. She clammed up immediately. The next day it was a teaching. Eye rolling was cause for finger shaking from fellow devotees. No disapproval allowed, said their disapproving wags.
In the cult beyond the cult, the wags are disallowing people who have good questions and inconvenient information that we really need to hear.
The cult was such a familiar environment to me, the pressure to perform, the passive aggressive manipulations, the unending disapproval peppered with meaningless love bombs that keep a person barely alive. It was the perfect place to finally sort out my little criminal. It created an exact replica of the environment I grew up in, only with a much larger family. I have been drawn into similar places before, familiar places that hark back to my original offence that was no offence at all. It began way before meeting the egocentric powermongering guru. He is the only real criminal I have known, and I have known criminals.
I called them outlaws. I enjoyed their company, feeling at ease in ways I didnt otherwise experience. Maybe I didnt need my inner hide out when I was with them. Sometimes I knew what they did was illegal and sometimes I only learned later. It was the type I was attracted to. They were strong, no nonsense, and very perceptive of human nature. I did not do business with them in anyway, but hanging out with them felt more right than wrong to me. They seemed more sensitive to the world around us than did the academics and artists I knew. They had unusual talents and ways of moving through society that were very particular. I felt sympathy for them. They grew marihuana and manufactured LSD. They werent killers or rapists. They were providing what had been suppressed by a government afraid of losing control of the masses. Thats history.
I also saw their foibles, the ways they could shirk responsibility in offhand ways, or cover up an inadequacy they couldnt afford to have, or the ways they twisted the truth so it wasnt exactly a lie but sure wasnt true. I saw the way they would hide out, like me.
Someone said he recognized the guru was a sexual predator because he had done the same. I know him by my own bad smells, he said, hearing that the guru has been preying on women since his youth and hes an old man now. Someone else described seeing him moving like a serpent that twists and turns to land a lip lock on to his prey using his sexuality to suppress them. I cannot say that I identify with any of the predators injurious behaviours but I do recognize a criminal when their mask slips.
I dont think he was even aware of it when it happened. That his face wasnt quite so smooth. He couldnt see it. That his eyes werent so big and blue. No they were not, they went black. All in one single instant he looked like what he was.
Hes a liar I said, and turned him off, once and for all. It must have been a star crossed day where everything I knew inside my hideout, and from the outlaws I have known, all came to a single point of realization. He is a liar. It was suddenly so clear.
He will have his chance to disprove that. It will be a big mountain of depravity for the King of Not to command from. Whichever way that business goes nobody knows. If only we could be done with criminals, an impossibility in todays world with ever quickening thunderclouds being summoned.
If there is a little criminal still at bay within me now, after so much evidence to the contrary, I can let her be. She can be there with no need of deciphering any unsolved crime. There was no crime. There was trauma so quickly suppressed it could only be made known by acting itself out in many different ways, an internalized trauma that resonated with the energetics of a criminal. It vibrated at a high frequency for a long time, living in his culture of calamity. Finally it has stopped.
A larger culture of catastrophe and disaster continues to vibrate. A world of trauma making itself known. I would not have seen the liar when I did if someone had not called him to task. I saw his deception then. Someone simply said it like it was and the responsibility for the harm done landed right where it belonged. His absolute and inept response was shattering.
We need more whistleblowers. We need people who are in the thick of it to be able to speak. If you see something and you know its causing damage, please say it. What is this life for but to care for one another in all the remarkable ways we find to do so?
None of us gets away with anything, ever, no matter how small. That sounds horrifying, given what most of us have done and thought. And it can take a lot of self-love to acknowledge and be responsible for that stuff. All that negativity can be dropped because it is just stuff. It has absolutely nothing to do with who we are, and in the long run, it doesn't matter much.
We have work to do here and a short amount of time in which to accomplish it. Then we will be gone.
My father died in March 2020, just short of 100 years. He dropped in two weeks ago as I was making dinner and said, "Evolve as fast as you can. It's important." He came again the next evening, same time, and said the same thing, except he changed the last word. "Evolve as fast as you can. It's coming."
I suggest we all get right with where we come from. Christ has always been in my life. That is who I listen to and get my marching orders from. I'm on it.
Well said.