Lebanon, Lake Lure and Things
Hello Companions on this wondrous and suffering planet:
We teeter on the edge of vision and crises. There is so much international violence, that a long view, let’s say from another people in another solar system, would necessarily determine with alarm that we are a rogue civilization of unprecedented danger to everything, to the universe itself. We have read about such times thanks to novelists like George Orwell, but I always wondered how it would be to live in such while desperately seeking ways out. Now I know. Unexpected what puts one over the edge: These last days, the view of the insane bombing of Lebanon with our weapons, partnered with what has been leashed against Gaza and the Palestinians in the West Bank, with our weapons, the unending war against innocent children, women and men, the aged, the youth, with our weapons, the future with our weapons, including whatever the strikes in Iran and the violent ping pong already evoked, all, did I say this, with our weapons.
Alongside these, the images of the fury which we have created called Helene, (and other current hurricanes, floods, extreme wild fires) in our war against the Earth and the natural world, a climate catastrophe, or is it climate collapse, fueled largely by fossil fuel use, fueled to a great extent by a world-wide crazed lifestyle we impose and won’t give up ourselves.
Today is Rosh Hashanah. It begins the High Holy Days for the Jewish people: The Days of Atonement. Atonement, yes. Will we ever be able to make amends to heal these gross injuries, all the deaths, the children under the rubble?
A dear friend, Illana Berger, wrote the following to me today, “Dearest Deena, happy new year to you. It’s difficult to call in a sweet year with so much difficulty, tragedy, catastrophe in our day today and especially for nonhuman beings on this earth.
There is something else I want to share with you – I am organizing a gathering with Mandaza on Sunday the 13th from 10 to 12.”
I wrote back, “My intention is to spend today (and tomorrow) pondering something I ask every day, but now, with an entirely different focus as a greater war and so many tragic possibilities are looming in the Middle East, a conflagration that cannot be contained, and should not be contained as we are also responsible: How do we meet this time? This is the most serious subject of the 19 Ways this year which begins on Saturday. It is always the question, but I feel the spiritual demand to ask this and listen and change and act differently. (Listening called me to write this when I desired to sit outside with an iced cup of coffee, listening and contemplating.)”
Thinking of the many times I spent with Mandaza Kandemwa at his home in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and also in the US, since we met in 1997 and observed the way he lives his life within his family and among the people and entirely with the spirts. So, I went on to write to Illana that Mandaza’s great gift – in addition to transmitting the way of Daré – is who he is, and how he is, and how he lives every minute and every day in active yet quiet devotion.
He didn’t start off this way. He had been head of Education for the national police force, a very Western position. But, as he puts it, the spirits became heavy upon him and his life changed entirely.
For the last three months, I have been focused at the computer, writing a novel which I have referred to here before, Broken Lambs. Perhaps I finished a first draft yesterday which gives me the gift of two days to dedicate entirely to discerning, if I can, something of what is required of us, so we can run interference, do an intervention with a culture run amuck.
Sometimes, as a writer, one learns from the story as it appears on the page and from one’s characters. There are three characters in the novel, an environmental attorney, a Vietnam vet and a Ram. The inter-connection between the three of them, two humans and one more-than-human, is what makes real transformation possible. As the story develops, the humans find it increasingly difficult to live inside a Western environment, recognizing that the structures we create and live within determine the quality and content of our lives. They shape us. The Ram, of course, has no interest in the conditions that humans can offer him and his people.
What I perceived being with Mandaza is that his devotion is entirely unselfconscious and unlike the devotion I perceive among EuroAmericans, no matter how dedicated we are, his is not involved or concerned with things. THINGS. Things run and determine our lives. If we could give up things, or the ways we engage with them, their manufacture, purchase, and committed use, we would be able to diminish to a great extent, to the extent necessary for survival of our species and all species, the use of fossil fuels which is killing us — and so much more.
It is not a matter simply of saying one won’t drive this or that, or do this or that, or give up this item or that item. It is weaning ourselves from a pernicious cultural dependence on money, increase, profit, development, manufacture, and buying and selling and buying and selling things (also grievously, in addition to buying and selling things, buying and selling people, energy, land, animals, futures and the future.)
I don’t know if you will perceive the nature of the life that Mandaza lives from hearing him speak. We can say anything without its reality being conveyed as it is really lived. But when listening and trusting the veracity of what we hear, we can actively imagine detaching from this corrupt violent and commercial culture and what it would mean, and how it could be enacted, to live according to the spirits and the natural world.
Look at the image of Lake Lure. Then what we are doing to Lebanon. These are mirrors. Nothing more need be said.
My heart is broken under the rubble of an apartment house. The dead are in the rubble too. What does it feel like to be crushed by your own home?
On another note: I have been freely offering my writing to the community for about 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022 and earlier for many years on WordPress (and will continue to do so). My intention was and continues to be to provide support, understanding, vision, and the wisdom, as I receive it from the spirits, in all the ways I am able. If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and / or recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated and make it easier to meet this summons which I cannot deny. (It helps the work circulate if you leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)
To discern how we need to shift " so we can run interference, do an intervention with a culture run amuck." Thank you for that and for the essential questions and images.
P. S. Congratulations on your first draft! I cannot wait to read Broken Lambs.