we are the molecules through which the Big Story speaks to itself through the agency of synchronicity…..
all messengers – all con-versing…All turning together….
Call and response – hello, what’s your story? and how can I/We help?
*)When we craft our dedications….
(and can continue to hone…till tis a sentence one can say easily, before sleep….)
internal Saturn….
then we are like the Bard Owl , “who can hear every one of the 40 heartbeats in this room…Then engages upper feathers to be like a satellite array, to focus on one particular heartbeat…..”
So, of the 10,000 stories we can hear… we focus on – one…
This is the story we choose to animate….
(Kierkegaard says, “purity of heart is to will one thing…”) (That’s one story)
As be the Dedication of “the Dawn of Everything”….To remember that we humans have always had creative agency , as individuals, and community – to change the story…
RAPID CITY, S.D. – At 80 years old, Leonard Peltier is approaching what may be his last attempt at freedom.
On June 10, (Jupiter will be at 3+ Gemini —“Holly and Mistletoe – druidic life force”…..exactly trining Leonard’s Neptune – 3+ Libra – his vision, and ours to animate “Native People gathered around a campfire…)Leonard’s the Anishinaabe elder will participate in what may be his final parole hearing. Peltier is currently serving two consecutive life sentences after being convicted of killing two FBI agents in 1975 at the Jumping Bull Ranch in South Dakota.
Peltier is asking for the public to spread the word about his parole hearing, said Dawn Lawson, secretary of the Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee.
Leonard Peltier (Photo courtesy of the Leonard Peltier Ad Hoc Committee)
“For a long time, people have been dying in that prison and the (Federal Bureau of Prisons) is out of control,” Lawson said. “They’re (U.S. Penitentiary Coleman 1) currently on indefinite lockdown, not because anybody has done anything, just because they can. They (prisoners) are living in their own filth. Leonard is making an appeal to his people to please get anybody’s attention…
Meanwhile – So wonderful as dark pertinent metaphor …..just tossing in here, as one of the funniest guest outrageous one season series…ever….
BrainDead is a comic-thriller set in the world of Washington, D.C., politics that follows Laurel, a young, fresh-faced Hill staffer who discovers two things: the government has stopped working, and bugs are eating the brains of Congress members and Hill staffers.
“Again and again in the “covenant” language He never says: “I will give you, ethnic Israelites, the land of Israel.” Rather He says something far more radical – far more subversive — far more Godlike in my view. He says: IF you visit those imprisoned…act mercifully to the widow and the orphan…welcome the stranger in your midst…tend the sick…do justice and love mercy ….and perform various other tasks…THEN YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE AND THIS LAND WILL BE YOUR LAND.
So “my people” is not ethnic — it is transactional. We are God’s people not by birth but by a way of behaving, that is ethical, kind and just. And we STOP being “God’s people” when we are not ethical, kind and just. And ANYONE who is ethical, kind and just is, according to God in Genesis, “God’s people.”
21:05:28 From Eryn Alloway : Yes! Cuba is a great example of hope beyond oil based capitalism
21:14:53 From Eryn Alloway : Berta Cáceres
21:15:56 From Eryn Alloway : “Berta Didn’t Die, She Multiplied!’”
21:16:02 From Dena Lebowitz : Reacted to ““Berta Didn’t Die, S…” with 💙
21:16:50 From Richard~Badgerrrrrr : Reacted to ““Berta Didn’t Die, S…” with 💙
21:18:25 From Mirya : Mirya – mother made up spelling, named after They Call the Wind Mariah, lol
21:21:35 From Eryn Alloway : Reacted to “Mirya – mother made …” with ♥️
21:22:23 From Caroline Casey : Reacted to ““Berta Didn’t Die, S…” with ❤️
21:25:11 From Ann Landesberg : doesn’t it seem as if Western Culture is based on forgetting?
21:28:35 From Rebecca Lowe : Cave of dreams, bears
21:30:18 From Mirya : Yes Powwow Highway
21:32:11 From Donna Sachs : I am asking myself: How am I listening to all of this?
21:32:53 From Donna Sachs : Especially given my current state of mind.
21:33:17 From Donna Sachs : Images floating through like a Paul Klee painting.
21:33:34 From Donna Sachs : Reading Joyce.
21:33:56 From Donna Sachs : Being in the painted caves in France.
21:35:37 From Donna Sachs : My brain is no longer normal given this Long Covid, but I am going where it takes me. And where you are taking me.
21:38:29 From Ann Landesberg : I enjoy playing with the idea of being reincarnated into the same life Groundhog Day style until I figure it out. Also who says incarnation is linear ? Might we not just as easily be reincarnated into earlier times? Again maybe bringing insight to fertilize evolution?
21:41:44 From Eryn Alloway : Yes I had a very interesting past life reading where the reader mentioned I had come back to one live again and again to try to get it right … very interesting to think about non-linear re-incarnation … time and space totally irrelevant to these larger realms
21:42:37 From Eryn Alloway : And the reference Caroline was making earlier … Kabir, translated by Robert Bly
From The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir by Robert Bly.
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think… and think… while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
(And it continues, I’ll include this in our notes)
21:45:30 From Richard~Badgerrrrrr : Who says it Is linear ?
21:49:17 From Richard~Badgerrrrrr : Reacted to “Yes I had a very int…” with 👏
21:49:33 From Eryn Alloway : Reacted to “Who says it Is linea…” with 🙌🏼
21:55:11 From eddy nix-driftless books and music : Palimpsest
21:56:04 From Eryn Alloway : Reacted to “Palimpsest” with ✨
22:02:59 From Caroline Casey : Reacted to “Palimpsest” with ❤️
Vine Victor Deloria Jr. was an author, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights
John Trudell was an indigenous rights activist and poet
Bradley Roland Will was an independent journalist, killed in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006
Rachel Aliene Corrie was an American nonviolence activist, killed in Gaza in 2003 by Israeli soldiers
Berta Cáceres – Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores (4 March 1971 – 3 March 2016) was a Honduran (Lenca – “People of The Jaguar”) environmental activist & indigenous leader. The chant that rose up after her death was “Berta Didn’t Die, She Multiplied!” 30min film:https://vimeo.com/243485649
– Qabbalist visioning
circa 9:16pm
“the occipital… that’s the doorway, that’s the portal whereby images enter the world through visioning.
… experiment with moving the desirable image to the back of the head…”
– Cave of Forgotten Dreams
2010 documentary film by Werner Herzog about the Chauvet Cave in Southern France, which contains some of the oldest human-painted images yet discovered—some of them were crafted around 32,000 years ago.
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive. Jump into experience while you are alive! Think… and think… while you are alive. What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
If you do not break your ropes while you’re alive do you think that ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten — that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the guest that does all the work. Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
pg 315 Imaginary Cities: Eurasia’s first urbanites – in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, Ukraine and China – and how they built cities without kings
p 328 ON ‘MEGA-SITES’, AND HOW ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDINGS IN UKRAINE ARE OVERTURNING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM ON THE ORIGINS OF CITIES
The remote history of the countries around the Black Sea is awash with gold. At least, any casual visitor to the major museums of Sofia, Kiev or Tbilisi could be forgiven for leaving with this impression. Ever since the days of Herodotus, outsiders to the region have come home full of lurid tales about the lavish funerals of warrior-kings, and the mass slaughter of horses and retainers that accompanied them. Over 1,000 years later, in the tenth century , the traveller Ibn Fadlan was telling almost identical stories to impress and titillate his Arab readers.
As a result, in these lands the term ‘prehistory’ (or sometimes ‘proto- history’) has always evoked the legacy of aristocratic tribes and lavish tombs crammed with treasure. Such tombs are, certainly, there to be found. On the region’s western flank, in Bulgaria, they begin with the gold-soaked cemetery of Varna, oddly placed in what regional archaeologists refer to as the Copper Age, corresponding to the fifth millennium . To the east, in southernmost Russia, a tradition of extravagant funeral rites began shortly after, associated with burial mounds known as kurgans, which do indeed mark the resting places of warrior princes of one sort or another.
But it turns out this wasn’t the whole story. In fact, magnificent warrior tombs might not even be the most interesting aspect of the region’s prehistory. There were also cities. Archaeologists in Ukraine and Moldova got their first inkling of them in the 1970s, when they began to detect the existence of human settlements older and much larger than anything they had previously encountered.22 Further research showed that these settlements, often referred to as ‘mega-sites’ – with their modern names of Taljanky, Maidenetske, Nebelivka and so on – dated to the early and middle centuries of the fourth millennium , which meant that some existed even before the earliest known cities in Mesopotamia. They were also larger in area.
Yet, even now, in scholarly discussions about the origins of urbanism, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up. Indeed, the very use of the term ‘mega-site’ is a kind of euphemism, signalling to a wider audience that these should not be thought of as proper cities but as something more like villages that for some reason had expanded inordinately in size. Some archaeologists even refer to them outright as ‘overgrown villages’. How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into the charmed circle of urban origins? Why has anyone with even a passing interest in the origin of cities heard of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro, but almost no one of Taljanky?
The answer is largely political. Some of it concerns simple geopolitics: much of the initial work of discovery was carried out by Eastern Bloc scholars during the Cold War, which not only slowed down the reception of their findings in Western academic circles but tended to tinge any news of surprising discoveries with at least a tiny bit of scepticism. Even more, perhaps, it had to do with the internal political life of the prehistoric settlements themselves. That is, according to conventional views of politics, there didn’t seem to be any. No evidence was unearthed of centralized government or administration – or indeed, any form of ruling class. In other words, these enormous settlements had all the hallmarks of what evolutionists would call a ‘simple’, not a ‘complex’ society.
It’s hard here not to recall Ursula Le Guin’s famous short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, about the imaginary city of Omelas, a city which also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as ‘simple’, but in fact these citizens of Omelas were ‘not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.’ The trouble is just that ‘we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.’
Le Guin has a point. Obviously, we have no idea how relatively happy the inhabitants of Ukrainian mega-sites like Maidenetske or Nebelivka were, compared to the lords who constructed kurgan burials, or even the retainers ritually sacrificed at their funerals; or the bonded labourers who provided wheat and barley to the inhabitants of later Greek colonies along the Black Sea coast (though we can guess), and as anyone who has read the story knows, Omelas had some problems too. But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications – that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty – are somehow less complex than those who have not?
Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?
The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 , that is, for something in the order of eight centuries, which is considerably longer than most subsequent urban traditions. Why were they there at all? Like the cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus valley, they appear to have been born of ecological opportunism in the middle phase of the Holocene. Not floodplain dynamics, in this case, but processes of soil formation on the flatlands north of the Black Sea. These black earths (Russian: chernozem) are legendary for their fertility; for the empires of later antiquity, they made the lands between the Southern Bug and Dniepr Rivers a breadbasket (which is why Greek city-states established colonies in the region and enslaved or made serfs of the local populations to begin with: ancient Athens was largely fed by Black Sea grain).
By 4500 , chernozem was widely distributed between the Carpathian and the Ural Mountains, where a mosaic landscape of open prairie and woodland emerged capable of supporting dense human habitation.23 The Neolithic people who settled there had travelled east from the lower reaches of the Danube, passing through the Carpathian Mountains. We do not know why, but we do know that – throughout their peregrinations in river valleys and mountain passes – they retained a cohesive social identity. Their villages, often small in scale, shared similar cultural practices, reflected in the forms taken by their dwellings, female figurines and ways of making and serving food. The archaeological name given to this particular ‘design for life’ is the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture, after the sites where it was first recorded.24
So the Ukrainian and Moldovan mega-sites did not come out of thin air. They were the physical realization of an extended community that already existed long before its constituent units coalesced into large settlements. Some tens of these settlements have now been documented. The biggest currently known – Taljanky – extends over an area of 300 hectares, outspanning the earliest phases of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. It presents no evidence of central administration or communal storage facilities. Nor have any government buildings, fortifications or monumental architecture been found. There is no acropolis or civic centre; no equivalent to Uruk’s raised public district called Eanna (‘House of Heaven’) or the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro.
What we do find are houses; well over 1,000 in the case of Taljanky. Rectangular houses, sixteen or so feet wide and twice as long, built of wattle and daub on timber frames, with stone foundations. With their attached gardens, these houses form such neat circular patterns that from a bird’s-eye view, any mega-site resembles the inside of a tree trunk: great rings, with concentric spaces between. The innermost ring frames a big gap in the middle of the settlement, where early excavators at first expected to find something dramatic, whether magnificent buildings or grand burials. But in every known case, the central area is simply empty; guesses for its function range from popular assemblies to ceremonies or the seasonal penning of animals – or possibly all three.25 In consequence, the standard archaeological plan of a Ukrainian mega-site is all flesh, no core.
Just as surprising as their scale is the distribution of these massive Nebelivka: a prehistoric ‘mega-site’ in the Ukrainian forest-steppe settlements, which are all quite close to each other, at most six to nine miles apart.26 Their total population – estimated in the many thousands per mega- site, and probably well over 10,000 in some cases – would therefore have had to draw resources from a common hinterland. Yet their ecological footprint appears to have been surprisingly light.27 There are a number of possible explanations. Some have suggested the mega-sites were only occupied part of the year, even for just a season,28 making them urban-scale versions of the kind of temporary aggregation sites we discussed in Chapter Three. This is difficult to reconcile with the substantial nature of their houses (consider the effort expended in felling trees, laying foundations, making good walls etc.). More probably, the mega-sites were much like most other cities, neither permanently inhabited nor strictly seasonal, but somewhere in between.29
Pre-Council Themes
Whoa, At the mid-point of our journey Be Wilder to Solstice Sovereignty… (If we count the Beltaine beginning)
Emerging from the solo wandering in the wilderness….
Back to the Council Round Table….
At the exact moon Pluto conjunction in Aquarius!
Truly Trickster be our booking agent….
At the wild storm degree…..
Trining Jupiter, having newly entered Gemini…
Much to say about much to say…
Trines are like greased lightning—good to have a dedication!
Jupiter seconds that thought by exactly quintiling Saturn….
We shall give voice to all…Everything talking…
To the query of Mirya Dorau (in our incipient Facebook page) Re the bed time visualizing practice…..
Yes, bless your inadvertently patient heart…. Let’s truly honor this practice… tonight, especially with our manifesto of dedicated devotion, distilled into one sentence….
Our Saturn Vow, Dedication, Desire Then we then distill that into an image….
************************************
Pluto retrograde – re-searching Community history…
Our nearest exit may be behind us…
Sean will be presenting Indigenous contribution to democracy… From “The Dawn of Everything” As well as
Sean adds:
“Graber and Wenbrow speak of how in early cities people organized neighborhood by neighborhood to create autonomous systems and structures to accomplish the work that needed to be done. In Oaxaca in 2006 when the people drove the police and the rest of the government out of the capitol city, they took this same approach — each neighborhood organized its own health clinics, its own schools, its own trash pickup, its own road repair, its own radio station, and its own defense. Earlier, the Zapatistas in Chiapas had taken the same approach. In both cases they were drawing on indigenous cultural memory. In many ways this is also reflected in Hakim Bey’s theory of the Temporary Autonomous Zone.”
I aspire to bring forth from same text – the ancient Community way back in Ukraine..
And for trickster Liberating High Jinx:
Yes, tfg was not well received there… They were having none of it… If tfg met himself – he wouldn’t put up with himself for a minute… Let’s visualize that- that all tyrannical ding-battery meet its self, and not put up with it.. matter and anti-matter…handles our tyranny problem (and the combustion creates green energy…former tyrant gas)
