God’s Wife

The following came from a long time email friend of mine. She lives in Oklahoma and I, in Western Canada and we’ve never met, but over the years she has sent much wisdom my way. This is one of those, and thank you, Ellie.  [Sha’Tara]

  Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia once talked about a contest he was asked to judge.  The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child.  Apart from the winner, there were 4 others that were special:
  
1.  A four-year-old child, whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. When seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old Gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there.    When his mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy just said, ‘Nothing, I just helped him cry.’
 
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 2.  Teacher Debbie Moon’s first graders were discussing a picture of a family. One little boy in the picture had different hair color than the other members. One of her students suggested that he was adopted.    

A little girl said, ‘I know all about adoption, I was adopted.’
 
 ‘What does it mean to be adopted?’, asked another child.
 
 ‘It means’, said the girl, ‘that you grew in your mommy’s heart instead of her tummy!’
 
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 3.      On my way home one day, I stopped to watch a Little League baseball game that was being played in a park near my home.  I sat down behind the bench on the first-base line and inquired from one of the boys what the score was.    

‘We’re behind 14 to nothing,’ he answered with a smile.
 
  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I have to say you don’t look very discouraged.’
 
  ‘Discouraged?’, the boy asked with a puzzled look on his face… ‘Why should we be discouraged? We haven’t been up to bat yet.’
 
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 4. Whenever I’m disappointed with my spot in life, I stop and think about little Jamie Scott.
 
Jamie was trying out for a part in the school play.   His mother told me that he’d set his heart on being in it, though she feared he would not be chosen..
 
On the day the parts were awarded, I went with her to collect him after school. Jamie rushed up to her, eyes shining with pride and excitement..  ‘Guess what, Mom,’ he shouted, and then said those words that will remain a lesson to me….’I’ve been chosen to clap and cheer.’
 
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5.   An eye witness account from New York City: on a cold day in December, some years ago,a young boy about 10-years-old was standing before a shoe store on the sidewalk, peering intently through the window. He was barefoot and shivering from the cold.
 
A lady approached the young boy and said,  ‘My, but you’re in such deep thought staring in that window!’
 
‘I was asking God to give me a pair of shoes,’ was the boy’s reply.
 
The lady took him by the hand, went into the store, and asked the clerk to get half a dozen pairs of socks for the boy. She then asked if he could give her a basin of water and a towel. He brought them to her.
 
She took the little fellow to the back part of the store and, removing her gloves, knelt down, washed his feet, and dried them. By this time, the clerk had returned with the socks. She placed a pair upon the boy’s feet, then bought him a pair of shoes..
 
 She gave him the remaining pairs of socks, patted him on the head and said, ‘No doubt, you will be more comfortable now.’
 
As she turned to go, the astonished kid caught her by the hand, and looking up into her face, with tears in his eyes, asked her.   ‘Are you God’s wife?’
 
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SEND TO ALL WHO LOVE AND CARE FOR CHILDREN.

Only You can do this

[thoughts from    ~burning woman~    ]

What are you thinking about, he asked, perhaps not totally sarcastically.

Off the cuff, I replied: “Peut-être que ça ne dit rien a personne d’autre mais pour moi, ç’a dit tout car je suis mon propre petit univers.”

He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind and was rattling a mindless reply in pig Latin. Of course, my fault, I’d never told him I could speak French. I hadn’t wanted him to hold that against me along with all my other faults he liked to enumerate time and again. I’d gotten used to it but lately I had begun to feel an itch when he started up. The itch was and is, growing. I took off my ring the other day and left it off all day. I felt something like freedom; an exhilaration and a further sense of daring. Could I live without it – him? Since then I’ve re-watched two movies, two stories that are favourites of mine: “Shirley Valentine” and “The Book of Eve.” Why not me?

Well, that’s a strange introduction for what I have to say but it does set the tone. You see, “he” is not an actual man, and I am not actually married – not now, though I have been three times the loser in that game – so just call it a parable. “He” is the world, i.e., the System, the Establishment. The slave owner, slave driver, boss, whorehouse owner, pimp, prison warden, judge and executioner. I am property, sometimes lucrative, sometimes entertaining, seductive, rebellious, victim, always slave. Though “his” methods for securing my presence, conformity and subjugation have varied, the intent has remained the same throughout the millennia. The point is that in “his” world I have no voice unless and until “he” chooses to acknowledge something I said. That only happens when it is to “his” advantage as when it bolsters “his” flagging ego. Or, as some of “us” have often stated, I could “grow balls” and act like a man, think tough, talk tough, act tough. I did try that on occasion and it didn’t go too well. Too much like cross-dressing for a man: only the few can actually pass the test, and what is left of the real ‘me’ afterwards? Where am I when I can no longer pass?

I’ve been feeling alienated lately and that feeling is intensifying. In my mind I hear a constant truism: I do not belong here. Don’t I know it. Just about everything about this world, the natural and the man-made causes discomfort, aggravates, irritates, grinds, disappoints, saddens and sorrows me. I am, as a self aware person, moving away from all the things that make earth the place that it is. So please don’t get me wrong, it’s not just what man does, it’s what this world is. It is primarily a harsh, cruel, unforgiving place. No matter how many examples of kindness among people; of supportive bonding and pairing between different animal species, sometimes even crossing the line between natural predator and prey, it remains that these cause us to wonder and reflect, not because such expressions of acceptance are the modus operandi of this world but because they are rare exceptions. I can “admire” exceptions like those as much as anyone else but there is no forgetting, ever, that exceptions prove the rule, and the rule is always the opposite of the exception. Exceptions do not lead to freedom!

Leaving the animal ‘kingdom’ alone (it is what it is and until a new nature is woven over this dying one there is nothing I can do about it) I focus mostly on Earthians. They are, primarily, a short-sighted, jealous, cruel and vindictive species. They possess little or no empathy and their pride causes them to whitewash, or boast of, their gross indecencies in interrelationships. In this respect I put war near the top of the collective pleasure felt by committing mass murder – for make no mistake: all wars are the grossest of crimes, after misogyny. There are no “just” wars. There is no justification for war – ever – period. Try to understand how utterly depraved one has to be; how mentally deranged and sick, just to entertain the thought of war, never mind to plan for it; to use it as entertainment in books, movies, games; to participate in it.

Back to that French sentence above. What I said was, ‘Maybe it means nothing to anyone else but to me it’s everything because I am my own little universe.’ Honestly, if I hadn’t discovered the ability to both, shrink and expand myself into my own universe I would have become lost long ago. I don’t have to imagine what it’s like living a life that isn’t mine, trying to make one reality co-exist with another completely opposite reality because that has been my life. There is what “they” wanted me to be and what “they” wanted of me, and there is the me that exists only for me, within me, surrounded by my self-made protective wall behind which the alien me retreats and hides.

I realize I have often, particularly in my early years, been guilty of projecting the false, blue pill Matrix slave me. I so wanted to fit in and it was actually quite easy until it began to eat away at my mind and destroy the real me. I had to make a break from that particular “dark side of the Force” reality and reconnect to my self, the compassionate being who had had no chance at guiding or teaching until I acknowledged myself as different than, and separated myself from, Earth’s natural and social reality.

How quickly then did the blue pill supports come tumbling down and how soon there was hardly anything left of those times with their jealous thoughts, their hate, their aggressiveness and insufferable pride.

“How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” Indeed, and how rapidly I grew beautiful feet because I brought good news, even if the System and those attached to it could not accept what I had to share with Earth as good news.

Let’s do a reminder of that good news. I call it living the compassionate life. That does not require any elaboration because compassion is self-explanatory to anyone who decides to live by it. There is no law, no method, no system, no religion or philosophy that can contain and explain compassion, it requires none of that. So is it any wonder that idea is not good news to any system that insists it must be in control of all ideas or concepts proposed to become the modus operandi of a world? The compassionate being already knows right from wrong from the get-go; s/he does not need intermediaries to explain how to proceed on this path. Any wonder any system would reject it outright? Why, it would make even governments obsolete, never mind God, and the plethora of religions and “charitable” organizations. No more law makers; no more lawyers, for where would there be contention?

I can go further: no more violence because, obviously, the compassionate being cannot do violence to another, choosing rather to suffer the loss in herself. Yes, choosing, from self empowerment, from certainty. No whining, no running to the police or the courts for redress, finding such within herself until the world is completely changed and there is no more violence. Yes, she could be killed but she’ll only come back and continue.

That is the under-girding vision that sustains the compassionate person. It is not pie-in-the-sky as some would think because she has already reached that place within herself, within her own little universe. Now all she does is water the surrounding areas with her compassion and watch as some of it actually succeeds in extinguishing the fires of violence.

Tell me you possess something better. Tell me there are other ways now being used that have never failed before and therefore remain legitimate. You won’t find any, but you will tell me that compassion as already failed because it was preached by the Buddha and others and went nowhere. I will reply, yes, it was preached, and yes, some went there, some died as a result, others were frightened or power-hungry and chose to create institutions in attempts to corner their concept of compassion. It became a religion… but it was no longer compassion. Compassion cannot be so easily entrapped. It was a fake claim. Collectives cannot be compassionate, only individuals can. Join two compassionate individuals together in a collective purporting to do compassion and they are no longer compassionate beings. That needs to be understood before the idea is rejected.

“Only you can prevent forest fires” says Smokey Bear. In the same vein, “Only you, as an individual, can be compassionate.”

After listening to Lakme, the Flower Duet

[thoughts from ~burning woman~ ]

I like beautiful music and although I prefer music over song, either can be from any era, just as long as it is beautiful to my ears and it moves me. So I was listening to Lakme, part I, The Flower Duet (in this case performed by Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca – See YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf42IP__ipw)

…And I was thinking, again, about Earth and about “Man” as Earth’s current lord and master. I was thinking of a line by Carl Sagan in “Contact”: ‘You are capable of such beauty, and such horror.” (Quoting from memory but the gist is here)

Whenever I engage myself, mind-wise, on Earthian matters, I get confused as to how I should approach it. Is it “you” and me as the cosmic observer, or should I include myself in among the observed? How do I decide this? First, I must be sure it isn’t a matter of hubris; that if my observation runs into negative judgment, that if I remove myself it isn’t in any way because I think I’m superior to the rest of Earthianity, but because I no longer think, speak or act as most of “you” do. This process, this judgment, must be impeccable on my part.

I believe it is, therefore I am going to be the observer and use the “you” though certainly in the generic sense. I do not know “you” as individuals, therefore it will be according to your conscience whether you “fit in” or can truthfully remain outside the picture. For you, today, I will once again take up the role of the Trojan prophetess Cassandra and say things you will not find acceptable.

You are capable of great beauty… certainly, and the piece of music I mention above proves it even by itself. You don’t have to be able to write, play or sing such, you just have to be able to listen to it and have the capacity to let it enter you and fill you and for the three or four minutes it takes, let it displace all other thoughts, feelings and emotions. Simple, really.

The problem however is that too often it seems impossible to let go. The “immediate” presses upon the mind and demands full attention. That immediate could be anything from the most pleasurable to the greatest pain or loss. The mind-heart refuses to let go of its current obsession driven by anticipation or the immediacy of physical or mental pain.

Earth is not a place conducive to an overall sense of peace, comfort and wholesome satisfaction. Even in the most remote corners, surrounded by nothing but nature, unless one is blind, the reality of the turmoil taking place in the skies, the seas, the trees, the soil, impinges on one’s awareness: predators, everywhere. You see, your world’s natural motive force is based on predatorship or perhaps I should coin a word here: predatorism, because in fact that is the concept that rules Earth. Some are born to kill, many, many more are born to be killed, eaten or absorbed into the natural fabric, their lives cut down long before they can complete their natural cycle. Even your great mountains are worn away by waters and passing winds.

I realize that most of you do not engage your world this way. You do not sense this, though you may be vaguely aware of it, and you generally shrug it off, or use it as an excuse for indulging in what Sagan called, “great horror.” You call it the food chain, and that’s that, as if somehow that explains it away. As if that same nature you want to wax poetic about can also be the brutal barbaric entity that supports your convenient food chain. As if there is no unacceptable dichotomy here, no problem.

That’s the problem, you see, the fact that you don’t see a problem with how nature works. You don’t see a problem because you don’t realize the direct relationship with your own social failures: your wars, genocides, social injustices of every possible kind juxtaposed with those of the world you happen to be temporarily using as a base because… you have no choice: you can’t get away, and if you could, you would have no clue where to go. Some of you feel that your species is a failure, but how many see your world’s “procession” as an equally and connected abysmal failure?

I feel both, the horror that is the working natural system of this world, and the greater horror that is an intelligent, sentient, self aware (ISSA) species calling itself “mankind” that refuses to question the modus operandi of its natural world; refuses to question its own modus operandi; refuses the simple expedient of connecting the dots in order to realize why things are as they are and why no lasting (real) solution to man’s social problems has ever come forth. The only times some significant change has ever happened was through the exercise of violence. That true statement should make any rational being stop and take note: why must it require violence to make significant change within the social structure, and why is it that any and all such changes have failed and are in the process of failing right now?

To me that would be the “why?” question of all the “why?” questions. Why do you always fail? Look, even now, while shooting off on all kinds of tangents based on IT and AI, you are helplessly realizing that this technology is quite likely going to supplant you, perhaps destroy you as ISSA beings. Barely has the technology begun that already you know without a doubt that some way or another it is going to bite you in the ass, and that severely so.

You see? There is no win-win here, not under the current hegemony; the current “force” or “power” that operates this planet. You, people of earth, are not that force or that power, but its slave species. There, I’ve said it, and but for rare exceptions, that is not something you will find acceptable, therefore you will find it necessary to reject the thought outright. If you did not, guess what? You would be forced to look into this in depth and who knows where that would lead? To confront your real nemesis?

No. I can easily tell you where it would lead: back to organized religion. Without self empowerment; without the power to cancel out all input and replace it all with your own thoughts, your own self-made ISSA reasoning, the forces or powers I speak of, will seem to smile in your brain. They will prod you along, with fine words or goads, down the chute into a ready-made religion that will, of course, explain it all. You will then accept the “new” ideas this “new” religion programs into your mind and who knows? It could explain how the AI is a divine power, or it could just as easily make you believe that the time has come to launch a “revolution” against science and technology and you will go off to destroy all vestiges of science and technology, mindlessly following the dictates of a few madmen who will tell you they are “making the Earth great again.”

Either way, you see, you’re not your own person: you are an actor, a puppet, a robot because you are not in control of your own mind. So you will go along (or you will be of those who will violently oppose the barbarians) and indulge in much, much more horror and under your feet, in the seas, in the trees and in the air, predators will continue to kill and eat, and billions of lifeforms will die premature deaths in attempts to sate the hunger of an insatiable system – as Costello would say, “Same as you!”

Quote: “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” (Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt)

I never knew Him

a short story, by Sha’Tara

I wanted to know him, but I never did.  He worked for my parents at the house on the Estate.  That’s where I spent my time when I wasn’t in school, or college.  Year after year.  I grew up, he got older. 

I was raised by wolves, you know what that means.  So he was my life.  And now, they’re all gone.  The wolves finally ate each other and their prey died, possibly of boredom. 

He cared for them, though he cared for me the more.  But he was so careful around me, careful to always have somebody else with us, near us, a witness, so that should something untoward happen the wolves wouldn’t blame him, and eat him.  I never blamed him for being careful; for protecting himself.  And so, I never got to know him.  He was just there.  And then like that, and suddenly, he wasn’t. 

I won’t try to explain in words what it means for a twenty-two year old pretend woman to be left adrift and alone after swimming her entire life with sharks and being forced to hunt with wolves.  I didn’t like either roles but I did not pretend hard enough, meaningfully enough, that I was an exception, an actual human being.  Perhaps being alone now, completely out of the limelight, rich, and with only one uncle as would-be guardian – he’s barely aware of my existence – I can finally become what I was born to be.  Hello? Can anyone tell me what that is? Listen to my harsh, sarcastic laughter!

In the back of my mind, there is an image, or perhaps it’s a mirage. 

A blue-green sea casts its waves upon a dun shade sandy shore.  Palm trees move in the afternoon breeze blowing all along that shore.  Sometimes I see a colourfully dressed woman with a young boy walking on the sand.  The boy bends over frequently to pick up things.  Once I watched him from the house’s balcony.  He was picking up starfish and flinging them back into the waves.  The woman, probably his mother, or guardian, walked on ahead slowly, oblivious of the stranded starfish.  It reminded me then of a story you’ve all heard; a story that haunts me today. 

It’s about a little girl frantically running up and down a beach after a storm, picking up starfish and flinging them out to sea.  A man, watching her, came to her and said, “There are so many stranded, you can only save a few.  What difference can it possibly make?”  To which the wise girl replied, as she flung another into the waves, “It makes a difference to that one.”

It’s easy to forget that lesson.  I’m twenty-two and what do I know of life?  I know how to use money to get what I want.  But do I know what I want?  That’s the problem: I don’t, not really.  Sometimes, I think bitterly, if I were a Barbie doll, I could buy myself friends, maybe even a boy friend.  But I’m much, much less than a popular doll.  I’m a rich no-one with fangs; one who knows how to snarl and chase prey in the shallows.

It is summer now and even in summer, there are storms.  Sometimes the waves are cavernously deep and as they approach the shallows, rise in high combers, their wild palomino-maned surf crashing and thundering all along the shoreline.  On such occasions I like to run down there and stand just out of reach of the surf as it crashes, runs up the beach, then slithers back for another attack. 

Then with heart beating, I walk down, barefoot and bare-legged into the pushing and pulling roiling waters.  Of course I’m looking for answers.  And in those brief moments I get to put my loneliness on pause.  When I see a starfish on the shore I pick it up and throw it back in the waters, hoping it will not be washed up again.  Yes, hoping.  Then I think about my life, beyond its hellish peacefulness and dulling emptiness.  And how it keeps getting washed up on the shore and is as helpless as the starfish to do anything about it. Who would pick me up out of sympathy perhaps, and cast me in my element?

I asked him once about loneliness.  He’d noticed it in me and I know it made him sad that a young girl could be so alone in the world.  I asked how he could live there, in that… that house, alone year after year.  He’d explain that he didn’t just stay there.  He had family and friends among the fishermen in the village.  I wanted to go with him to meet his friends, or to make my own friends in the village but the wolves forbade it.  They’re not our kind of people, said my mother, baring her fangs.  You could be kidnapped for ransom, said my father, turning and blocking the exit.  The house is safe, and there’s enough space on the estate for you to wander through without danger.  We’ll get you a horse, and a trainer.  I didn’t want a horse and the trainer would be another short-lived diversion.

Do you have any idea how lonely it is to be property? To be an estate slave with no purpose whatsoever but to fill a void in someone else’s life? A convenience, a trophy, even if never first prize, being of wrong gender? Let me give you a piece of advice before you throw yourself off a cliff, or the fake battlements.

If you ever feel truly alone you want to go down to the sea shore when the wind tears up the clouds as they whip over the half moon, say around midnight, and you want to sit on a wet rock to just listen to the waves crashing in, one after another, and between each one, listen to the water hissing back down into the roiling darkness.  That is the sound, and the feeling, of the heartbeat of the lonely; the truly lonely.  That is the heartbreaking echo of utter loneliness. Only then will you know, for an inescapable fact that your fate is sealed; alive or dead, it’s all the same and it will not change.

If only I could give my life a purpose.  Join the throngs of others going on about their business of struggle, survival and periodic pleasures.  Using my own wits instead of my cursed inheritance of family money.  Using my own hands to create, or just make, something.  Maybe sit down beside a homeless woman and try to feel what she feels. What if my hands could actually hold someone without crushing them? My lips kiss another and my fangs remaining retracted?

These are my thoughts today.  You see, it was his funeral yesterday and I’m just now beginning to realize how truly lost-lonely I am.  I would like to do something outrageous right now, but my mother said, they’re not our kind, and my father, it’s too dangerous.  And the only person I ever trusted, ever loved, was buried yesterday.  I couldn’t even attend his funeral, I was afraid.

A Very Long Walk

[a short story by Sha’Tara]

It was another cool, crisp and clear late Autumn afternoon, the kind Krista loved to go walking in. She followed the riding trail down to the edge of the Maskua river as it meandered through the low lying lands of this agricultural community. As she walked she noticed the oaks and maples had less leaves on them and the colours were reluctantly fading. Denuded tops allowed lopsided windows into a pale, clear, blue sky.

Many thoughts flowed through her mind. She knew she had it good as her home-based business only required a few hours a day to keep going and she enjoyed it. The two children, Toby, now thirteen, was in Middle school and Trina was finishing her high school. Both children were quiet as a rule and caused her little problems. Both were somewhat introverted and had few close friends, something she did not mind at all.

Her thoughts turned to her husband Dan on his last year of duty in Afghanistan. One short moment of trepidation, then she reasserted herself. He would be coming back, of that she was certain. She had vowed to herself never to dwell on the possibility that he could become a casualty of war. ‘Not in my reality’ she said often with total conviction. ‘Do you still love him?’ a small, nasty little inner voice taunted. ‘With all my heart and soul’ she replied truthfully. Krista, though still very attractive and not without admirers and opportunities, was the completely faithful partner. She would never stray.

She carefully skirted the muddy pools that remained in the trail all winter in the shadier spots and kept walking. She heard crows cawing but not using the excited voices when discovering a sleepy great horned owl or a red-tailed hawk. She heard ducks and geese on the river but could not sight the stream yet. There was much brush where she passed and one more little rise before she could see the meandering river reflecting the blue sky from shore to shore.

She saw a page from a note book crumpled and stuck in some blackberry brambles. She thought of reaching for it but decided against it. ‘Whatever is written on there, none of my business,’ she said to herself and kept walking. You could say she was observant but not overly curious.

She saw something else in another tangle, a grey and blue baseball cap. ‘That’s a team cap from Trina’s high school! Must have flown off a rider’s head or been brushed off by a low-lying branch and the owner chose not to come back for it. Oh well… her or his loss. Maybe they’ll come back for it later.’

She had topped the rise then and saw the river. She stopped to admire it – her favourite place in the entire walk. She had had many a good mother to daughter talk with Trina on this spot. The current was sluggish now and reflections of dark spruce and bare poplars cast mesmerizing shadows in the waters of the far bank. She moved her head slowly to the movements of the inverted tree dance trying to find a tune in her head to go with it.

Something unusual brought her to look closer to her side of the river. There was a piece of cloth floating down there, of blue and white coloration. It looked like it was caught on a branch. This time her curiosity was aroused and she worked her way to the edge of the water for a better look.

That’s when she realized she wasn’t looking at a piece of cloth but at the body of a drowned person. She saw long hair floating off from the submerged head and a white hand bobbing in and out from the surface. She gave a gasp, but instead of screaming as she wanted to do, she plunged into the stream and waded in the freezing water that came to her breasts by the time she reached the body of a young woman.

She tugged and pulled and finally untangled the body and dragged it to the shore, turning it over to look into its face…

“Oh God, Trina! What have you done? I told you he wasn’t worth it! You promised me it was over.”