~burning woman~ and the Great Evils

I’ve been doing this for a while now.  It’s called “blogging” and that has many descriptions but for me it means sharing “stuff” with others, and learning from the stuff they share on their own pages.  So I maintain a “blog” on which I post personal thoughts, ideas, pictures, stories and sometimes I’ll re-blog someone else’s article because I feel it deserves to get more “publicity” so to speak, or it contains ideas that help us understand ourselves and the world we live in. 

I guess that makes me a blogger.  So I blog to learn and to share.  But I have an agenda here.  I’m not looking for “stats” in numbers of “followers” or “likes” – though these indicate that what I am sharing provides some appeal to certain individuals and that’s great, but my long-term purpose in blogging is finding a way to create conversations around the really tough issues, subjects, ideas. 

I’m not here to discuss “religion, politics, global warming, misogyny… or anything else” for that matter.  Of course these topics will be engaged.  News, statistics, opinions, articles and rants will come into play.  That’s our background: expressing what we see as “wrong” and talking about solutions to such wrongs, and sometimes even talking about positive developments and how they make us feel good, or make us feel that we are finally accomplishing something “humane” somewhere in the world.  There’s an endless game going on and we like to see the “home” team score once in a while, though the home team always remains the underdog.   

But for me, that’s just the opening salvo.  I don’t want solutions, I want answers.  I’ve been building this blog under the title  ~burning woman~  which has raised a few eyebrows though for most I suppose it’s just one of those titles people make up to stand out from the crowd. 

~burning woman~ is the author of this blog.  She is me: the perennially denied, powerless, oppressed member of – get this – 50% of the human population of planet earth.  Any normal person would stop in absolute shock right there and think, how is it possible that 50% of the adult population of this world has little or no social power, legal status, physical safety and gets no recognition for playing a role without which society and civilization would not be possible! 

This isn’t a feminist blog.  I just want to point out that misogyny is one of the few truly great evils that gnaw at the roots of society.  Misogyny lies athwart the path of mankind’s evolution and blocks it completely.  As long as such an evil is countenanced among “men” that is how long all other evils will continue to plague man and destroy his civilizations, one after the other. 

~burning woman~  is a reminder that the greatest pollution on this world is the stench that comes from her permanently burning dying flesh.  No part of this world is free of that poison.  But she is also a reminder that she is, in herself, very much aware of this terrible condition – and how could she not be?  It’s her living flesh that is being burned in the public square for all “male” gawkers to jeer at.  The 19 year old Joan of Arc, and millions upon millions of others burned on the altars of the patriarchy and although the methods have slightly changed, the same thing goes on day after day and it’s business as usual.

This blog is meant to expose the great evils that plague the human race of earth and to seek answers by asking the troubling “WHY” question.  Why misogyny?  Can any sane Earthian give just one good reason why men should hate, fear, oppress, disempower, rape, torture and kill women?  And their children?  One single good reason that could explain – and justify – it all? 

Here’s another great evil, and make no mistake, it’s completely tied to the previous evil: predation.  Can anyone give one good reason why earth must exist under such a life-destroying concept?  There is no doubt that man is a violent predator and that he revels in this role.  We see it in sports, in hunting and fishing, in extraction of natural resources from the planet, in enslaving certain groups and races to serve elites, and certainly in man’s endless and spreading wars.  Man is so addicted to being a predator that even knowing he has far surpassed his limits to growth, he continues his business as usual as if nothing mattered but the kill.  But in this case, the evil runs even deeper, down into the roots of the planet itself, running amok among all of it’s life-forms.

There are those who believe in karma.  In the “Chrisrael” holy book it’s reaping what you sow.  Man is so utterly alien and unnatural that even when faced with his own extinction from his predatory mindset, he will not turn.  It’s as if he cannot break his programming.

So, this blog is about questioning the programming.  It’s about looking over history – official or not; accepted or not; real or fictitious (for who can sort it out and keep a straight face about it?) and looking for answers to the great evils that plague the species and are about to plunge it into quasi-oblivion.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not concerned or worried about man’s quasi extinction in the near future – I have been shown this to take place before the next 500 years – that to me isn’t the problem since it is inevitable.  My problem is, I’ve begun to develop a sense of empathy and to be an empath on a world driven by fear, hate, predation and misogyny is, put bluntly, unbearable.  I “sense” the level of horror, terror, agony; the screams of those now being crushed and the billions about to be crushed, by the man-made engines of destruction.  In my heart I join in the screams and want no part of this coming world, and often I want no part of this one, even now.

But if I’m going to remain a part of it for a while yet, I need to engage my mind looking for answers to the “WHY?” question.  And I’m hoping to do this on this blog, bit by bit with probably more false leads and wrong tangents that can be imagined.  Those answers are well hidden and man’s “masters” fear their discoveries and the development of fail-safe antidotes.

I may have written this before, but it bears repeating, for comparison.  I often queried the Teachers about the state of planet earth and the Earthian mindset about the oh, so casual killing if innocents.  There is a world they call “Altaria” which by way of avoiding giving it a location they say exists in what they call “the Nexus” – the non-space-place they say, that exists between all universes.  Altaria is what some would probably call a fifth dimensional world.  El Issa, one of the Teachers, said to me: “If a single child died of preventable causes on our world, the entire world would come to a horrified stand-still and slip into universal mourning.  Nothing would happen on the world: no teaching, no business, no sleeping or eating or even talking until as one body the people had worked out the reason for this unthinkable anomaly and resolved it.  Now compare that to your world where some 40,000 children and their mothers die of completely preventable causes, i.e., deliberately condemned to death… each and every day.  This crime is of such unthinkable proportion that your Earthian mind cannot even engage it.  You live within this murderous horror day after day and you believe that by living in denial of it you can give yourself a “normal” life.  You cannot, you never will, until you put an end to this.  And before you question me on the possible: yes, you can.  We know because we had the very same problem and we ended it.  We stopped it.  That’s what you need to do: you need to stop.” 

You know this is the case, but do you know WHY men oppress women?  You know this is the case, but do you know WHY predation is a ruling force on your world?

 

 

 

Quest for Balance – an essay

Possibly the hardest “lesson” I’ve had to learn, and continue to learn, is the understanding (wisdom?) of balance in life.  Each day seems to bring out this fact: everything is on a quest for some sort of balance. 

 I asked my teachers why finding the balance between extremes was so much a part of my life.  They reminded me that even if I give little credibility to astrology, I chose to be born in the house of Libra.  And I chose the path of transgendering in my search for healing.  Well, what can I say? 

 

Where to start?  I know I’ve touched on the subjects of chaos and order before, but from a position of choice between one or the other, never from an empowered perspective that recognizes the necessity of both and how they can be “spun” together to make a working whole.

 

Perhaps I need to re-iterate my lessons on Earthian humanity.  E-humans are, by nature, beings filled with chaos.  They find little, if any, order in their short and confused lives.  The reason for this state is known to me, but the history behind it would fill volumes.  I just accept this statement as true based on historical records and current global and personal experience.  Chaos rules Earth and its humans.

 

How have humans gone about creating or finding order to control their chaos?  Through belief “systems”.  Through organized collectives of various kinds.  By belonging to groups.  By making laws.  Order, they reasoned, would come from imposition upon the chaotic.  Religions would bring people together to pray to a common deity and to seek forgiveness for their chaotic behaviour.  It wouldn’t necessarily change them inside, but they could see a semblance of order in their outward behaviour towards those they associate with.  Their laws would force them into some reluctant cooperation.  Families would provide security and support.  Nations would provide some unity of force for aggression, defense or favorable trade in resources.  Heroes and popular types would provide a basis for pride; for a sense of superiority over other groups.  (Not surprisingly they were the first rulers and originators of bureaucratic institutions.)

 

On the surface, organizations do provide order in the chaos of undisciplined individual behavior.  However, points out one of my teachers, each collective is but a Pandora’s box full of chaos, controlled and confined negative energy which the owners of the “box” are often tempted to let loose.  The anarchy of war: a prime example. 

 

There are other problems with collectives as holding chaos with enforced order.  Analogy: a cardboard box full of apples.  Each apple contains some rot in it – chaos.  They cannot be removed from the box or the box would become empty and useless (powerless).  So there they remain, and the rot must, of necessity, increase.  The resultant mush softens and destroys the walls of the cardboard box, the ordered holding, and it oozes out.  When two such piles of mush touch each other, you often end up with flare ups of civil or religious wars (the worst examples of the evil of war). 

 

Another example of chaos being leashed but not controlled is in today’s mega corporations and government bureaucracies – huge collective entities that consume human life-energy while putting on a front of serving, pleasing, giving.  Education, health, social welfare, food, clothing, housing, transportation — all of it serving the elites who own the boxes… 

 

Well, I’ve said these things before.  But what about balance, then?

 

What is balance?  It is not helpless acceptance of evil, quite the opposite.  But the balanced individual approaches the problem from a totally different perspective than the one who relies on institutions for empowerment.  Institutional empowerment will always pit forces of chaos against forces of order (for example in times of revolutionary social change) or order against chaos (as during great reactionary movements, such as the First World has seen in the last 50 years: the retrenchment of the old forces of Plutocracy and Meritocracy leading to the hoped-for establishment of some nebulous but definitely fascist “New World Order.”

 

Personal empowerment dissolves the collective hold within itself.  It does not eradicate it and it does not seek to replace it with “light” or replace its known evils with good.  For that, refer to the above.  Doesn’t work.  What it does is learn through various steps of surrender how to allow in equal measures of opposing forces, building itself with both. 

 

It applies what it learns through trial and error, reasoning out the results of these efforts, using logic, common sense and intuition together.  Sensing what makes “sense” by using more than the usual physical senses, then trying out this awareness in the “real” world on a daily basis.  Personal empowerment is the power to capture chaos within one’s order field, thus providing one’s energy field an immunity of sorts.  As external chaotic forces push their way in they are snared and masterfully “twined” within one’s total energy field.  Neither fire nor ice can now destroy that field. 

 

Personally, this has been a slow and grinding business that continues unabated and will continue.  I see no reason for it to end, though the processes of “allowance” will change with each dimensional leap, of course. 

 

So, my physical/mental make-up is a personal world of chaos.  But the “Force” or Spirit that feeds this necessary chaotic mess is pure order.  This offers me a whole new world to exist in: a world of balance.  That is the world I must create, moment by moment.  That is the world my dreams have time and again, demonstrated as logical and harmonious.  That is the world all systems, particularly belief systems, fear above all things and have vowed to prevent on this world.

 

The “master” of energy, be it a mage, wizard, witch, druid, shaman – necessarily a living being, thus necessarily made up of chaos and order – achieves a balance of light and darkness; of living and dying, of good and evil.  No, you will not find this being exercising evil against other life to prove its mastery of it.  The beauty of balance is, one can order chaos to one’s will and vice-versa.  The trick (well, OK, it’s much more than a trick) is to “twist” or “spin” one within the other, to strengthen one by linking it purposefully and carefully with the other.  Such a successful twisting becomes a successful life.  It makes me think of DNA when I envision this.  Or the fusing of dissimilar metals to achieve strength and flexibility. 

 

Understanding of life on this principle is what is required to move inter-dimensionally.  This is the place where no negative “good” or “evil” is created.  For it must be understood that due to great forces of balance beyond our control (at least beyond mine at the moment) anytime anyone “forces” what is considered “good” somewhere, someone else, something else, will balance this with an equal force of “evil”.  This simply because all life is an endless quest for balance, or so it appears to me at this time.

Some New Pictures from the Hope and Fraser Rivers – July 24th and 26th

Many years ago, a client who then owned a small second hand store here in Chilliwack gave me a used Powershot (Canon) camera for some work I’d done she was thankful for beyond what I charged.  The camera served me well for many years but finally broke down a couple of months ago.  I sadly had it recycled and decided it was time to upgrade to a new Powershot.  A model SX 720 HS – a pretty impressive little camera for the non-professional.  Now I get to take pretty decent pictures of wildlife and macro shots of plants, flowers and insects.

The following pictures are some results of my efforts in learning how to manipulate this little computer.  It’s got a 40X  optical zoom lens, plus very good digitally enhanced zoom up to 160X.  Enjoy.    (PS: if any of these pictures interest you and you want to use them for whatever purpose, please feel free to do so – all permission granted… 🙂 )

Blue Heron on the Hope River

Daytime moon

Blue Heron on an arm of the Fraser River about 100X zoom shot

Water plaintain(?) – Hope River

Female Mallard enjoying the sun

Fraser River back waters starting their summer drop

Pearly everlastings – Fraser river banks

Thistles – Fraser River

Some colourful Fraser river gravel bar rocks and a piece of driftwood

Yeah! The gulls are returning again. Flight of California gulls returning to their winter feeding grounds on the River

The Fraser river in full regalia and summer glory!

Two smiling young mallards swimming along but ever watchful

Blue damselfly on a blade of grass – Hope river shallows

Skittish solitary or spotted sandpiper on the Hope river

Immature rufous hummingbird on a honeysuckle branch

Red dragonfly – I wanted to emphasize the beauty of her wings

A spider web in an Alberta spruce: this spider’s on crack!

A Western crow on a distant snag giving me the eye

The red barn – on the little Hope river

 

Some “Advanced” Thoughts on Dreams [thoughts from ~burning woman~ ]

    

“Naturally” we become aware of dreams from sleep.  “Naturally” we dream while asleep.  And “naturally” most people can’t make any sense of their dreams, so they discount them as trash.  Why waste time trying to analyze trash?

I’ll say this: most people make lousy investigators – they can’t be bothered with the missing pieces; don’t want to have to fill those in.  Should we try to understand our dreams?  Should we “investigate” what they could mean? 

Let’s start with a statement about dreams:  We dream all the time, 24/7, and we don’t dream “dreams” as in plural, we dream one dream, endless, seamless, an expanded parallel life to our physical life.  Sadly we’ve been carefully programmed not to think that way.  We’ve been told to forget our dreams, they mean nothing.  At best we’ve been told that we dream “dreams” in the plural sense, each dream basically a stand-alone image that pops into our minds from memories, recent experiences, trauma, etc.  We need to “overcome” our dreams. 

Imagine that you are given a very large book, say a couple thousand page manuscript, to read.  Now imagine that your reading is constantly interrupted, that you continue to read but nothing registers for a while, then it begins to register again.  Pieces of the book remain, large parts simply do not compute – no memory of those.  You only grasp certain sections of what you read.  Say you begin to notice the story at page 50.  Then nothing remembered from page 80 to page 170.  Then you remember to page 220, then nothing until page 290, and so on.  With this sort of thing happening you’re missing vital elements of the story and quickly lose interest in the whole thing.  You think, what’s the point?  Meaningless garbage, you hear yourself saying and of course it is. 

So you don’t know why your dreams, which is really just one continuous story paralleling and providing alternatives and “what if’s” to your physical experiences, don’t make sense.  You don’t know, and sadly don’t much care, that when you’re occupied running in your Matrix designed hamster wheel your real life’s full story is being blocked from your mind.  You “don’t get it” and you discount it.  You discount a major part of who you are and simply don’t know it. 

Let me recall a part of my dream I had years ago that only recently began to make sense.  Briefly, I was on a street “somewhere” (anywhere) in the USA (I used to go there a lot) and there were some people shouting and throwing up barricades.  I was given a piece of wood as a weapon and was told to guard a part of the street.  Soon a motorcycle cop came down the street.  He was holding a gun and looking to shoot someone.  He saw me and came at me.  I ducked his shot, waited until he got close enough then lunged at him with my piece of 2×4, knocking him off his bike and killing him.  I was shocked at the results then realized (always in the dream) that the situation had given me little choice: him or me… or us.  He was the enemy and had made no bones about it.  I remember stripping him of his armour, taking his gun and bullets.  I remember the bike being destroyed and thrown on the barricade.  The dream sequence had flowed through time and brought in a piece of the future, when society would find itself being confronted by it’s “protectors” as the enemy; as people killers.  And society (me in the dream) decided to resist in like fashion – having been given no other choice. 

There are those benighted individuals out there who still insist that America is not a police state, despite the mounting evidence.  OK, so the line is still somewhat fluid, but that fluidity is fast disappearing.  So many individual rights have already been lost outright, or are being denied; so many people in jail for no good reason; so much corruption at the top that needs defending when people have had enough and start pushing for “the Bastille” that cops, homeland security rent-a-thugs, FBI, national guard and military will blend together in Power-protecting falanges and blood will flow in the streets.  Anyone can see this coming since the System will NOT allow common sense individuals to gain power and restore proper order in the land. 

This is what the dream does: it flows through the artificial veil of time allowing the aware dreamer to see how things happened in the past, how they will happen in the future thus allowing the dreamer to make changes; to adjust certain beliefs and routines that soon will no longer work.  This is what the Matrix fears most of all: that people should wake up to their false reality and learn to rely on their personal awareness to make daily choices; that they would lose their remaining faith in the System.   

Many people I’ve met who, having viewed the “Matrix” movies, will say they took the red pill already.  Makes me laugh when I listen to their explanations of the System, how they support this view against that one, vote for this donkey rather than that pig, watch organized sports, believe that there’s some sort of innate value to Olympic games, will say that one corporation isn’t as bad as it’s being touted, continue to watch TV and absorb fake news… yeah, some red pill.  It was a blue pill with red colouring on it.  That’s how they found themselves supporting Bernie Sanders (Mr. B S himself) thinking that would be a revolution.  Any sane individual would know that any “up there” politician in a thoroughly corrupt System could only get there by corrupting him/herself.  It’s the only ALLOWED path to power.  Sanders didn’t have superhuman power, therefore he had to toe the line. 

The dream exists outside the control of the Matrix.  The dream is self-empowerment.  Individual power, not people power.  The dream is me, and I make the dream happen.  I make it search the cosmos for large answers to small events.  The dream overrides all objections of faith, hope, love, morality, even planetary concerns.  It’s larger than all of that because… I am larger than all of that.  And after what the world knows as “me” dies, the dream continues, and I continue along with it.  I am the only one who can stop it. 

 

Take my Hand, Daddy! a short story by Sha’Tara

By way of intro to this short story, first I wish to say “thank you” for all the likes on the other stories, essays, etc. as they tumbled into this place.

I’ve been very busy lately on a volunteer job in the interior of B.C. (Canada), a place called “Rock Creek” where a wild fire roared through a year ago and burned down several homes.  So I went with my friend Vic Janzen, who is with “Mennonite Disaster Services” to help complete a house the organization had taken on in conjunction with “Habitat for Humanity.”  “We” (that is, MDS) supplied the labour and Habitat supplied the materials along with whatever the uninsured home owners could provide.  So the house was built, and this is what it looked like when we left yesterday.  A very pretty, basic, utilitarian house any family would be happy to live in.  If you look closely you can see the scorched dead pines all around the property.  (The pile of bags is insulation to be blown into the attic later.) 

Rock Creek MDS and Habitat house.

And now, the short story: 

Take my Hand, Daddy!           [a short story ~ by Sha’Tara]

Imagine a winter afternoon of this northern hemisphere, by a small town nestled almost silent among dark, brooding mountains.  The sun slips behind a mountain top and a shadow covers the waters of a wide river rippled by a bitter east wind.  A couple of golden eyes land and begin their usual systematic team hunt, diving, surfacing, diving.  These little ducks know their world well, choosing areas near enough to shore to take advantage of gentler, swirling currents, allowing them to dive faster and capture their prey, small fish also using the constantly reforming whirlpools to find food.

The edge of the river is forming ice now, not deep nor wide, but the bite of winter frost is not only in the air: it penetrates into the dark, fast moving waters.  The shore at this place, now cut through by the harsh shadow of a mountain, is made up of round rocks, large at the edge of the water, an edge normally under water – but this is winter solstice and the river is at its ebb.  Further up the shore the rocks change to large round gravel, then up the banks, into smaller, looser gravel.  Remnants of a recent snow fall tuck themselves behind and between the stones and form a dirty white blanket full of tears and holes among frost-burned grasses along the higher banks.  Such a stage leaves no room for doubt as to the time of year being dramatized.

There is a small parking area here where I sometimes stop to eat my lunch, read, or just observe the passing of a time-slice and whatever event it may contain.  I like the quiet of the place and on this day, the weather being bitterly cold with high clouds keeping the air moist, few people care to stay around.  A couple of cars drive in but there is nothing exciting or colorful enough to keep anyone’s attention for long and the damp cold drives them away again.  The pair of ducks, the male a ball of sharp black and white patterns, the female of a uniform brown, are a bit perturbed by the few onlookers and choose to be safe, moving their theater of operations farther away from the shoreline.  

The sun has almost crossed the mountain top and the shadow slides across the river, revealing a lighter shade of water as the incessant chop refracts the slanted, weak, gold-tinged middle-afternoon sunlight.  Far to the east however, no clouds have yet appeared and the sun has unlimited vistas to illuminate.  The higher mountains throw off the glory-glow of their snow-covered spires to grace a clear icy-blue sky.  

There is a wide gravelly path that leads from the parking area down to the river’s edge. While it remains in the gray shadow cast by the mountains, a very large man wearing a black woolen toque, a heavy dark-red mackinaw jacket and faded jeans tucked into unlaced brown work boots begins to descend along the center of the path.  To his right walks a tiny girl child, wearing what looks like dark blue cord pants tucked into white boots.  She has on a pink parka and a pair of pink mittens with small pompoms attached dangling from the coat’s sleeves.  As the couple begins to walk over the loose gravel, the child gingerly extends her short arms to maintain balance.  The heavy-set man, hands pushed deep into the folds of his mackinaw, seems totally unaware of his tiny companion, lost, it seems, in his own thoughts.

The little girl struggles to follow him, obviously with great effort.  Finally, barely able to stand, she extends her left arm to the large man, the reddened fingers of her hand splayed to express her need for help. 

In my mind, the image freezes there, as if someone had pressed the pause button on the TV’s remote. 

The man ignores the child, the child holds out her hand, confident that the man will be moved to help her.  In that slice of time, I sense a re-enactment of billions of such events over history.  I feel the energies involved; the times when they worked and when they did not.  The abandoned, and the re-united.  The dead losers and the restored winners.  I see mankind’s drama endlessly moving up and down, like the tides.  I feel my own helplessness, kicked out of the drama to find my place among the spectators of which we are too many.  

Does the man stop to take the child’s hand?  Does he pick her up in his arms to carry her to an easier place where she can walk without help?  Does he realize it is too cold to be walking there, at that time of day, with a child, and does he return to wherever they came from?  

All I heard in my mind was the child’s extended arm saying: “Take my hand, daddy!”