A moment in time

Yesterday, in the sea-side town of Kailua-Kona, in the little space of greenery between the post office and the shopping mall, a group of four homeless people were sitting together in a square, as if around a table or a fire.  They had with them a small feral piglet, spotted black, white, and orange – what we would call in Hawaiian pidgin kalakoa.  The woman in the group was giving the piglet something to eat and it was nosing the ground in the way of pigs.   There was a kind of peacefulness about this little group, especially amid the frenzied holiday rush of shopping, driving, and mailing.  They were, to be sure a bit ragged, sitting there amid the rocks and dirt and brush.  They were struggling, I’m sure, with the hardships, precariousness, and stigma of being homeless. But they were also it seemed to me, at that moment, living more intimately and harmoniously with the landscape and with each other than we “normal,” housed folks.

We were all homeless once upon a time. For millions of years we were wanderers, foraging and hunting as we went. Home was once and for a very long time nothing more permanent than a camp and a campfire. More recently we developed settled encampments and villages, then towns and cities, with all of their appurtenant benefits and luxuries.

It is not OK that there was a 12% rise in homelessness last year in the United States; it is not OK that we don’t have a social safety net that keeps everyone housed, regardless of their employment or mental health status. And yet all too often we fear our fellow citizens who have become unhoused, mostly I think because we are afraid of houselessness – of its vulnerabilities and humiliations. Of its precariousness and powerlessness. That fear gets in the way of looking at homelessness, and at ourselves, the housed and everything that goes into being securely housed, with any degree of clarity.

I am not a homelessness expert, by any stretch of the imagination. I am trying to learn to see the state of homelessness and the people experiencing it. And part of seeing something is to see both the good and the bad, and that moment there by the post office seemed, if not good exactly, something like it – real, timeless, gentle, human and humane.

One way or another most of us are prisoners

It’s a struggle for the new chick to peck its way out of the egg. We postmoderns still seeking truth have the same basic problem to solve, but the eggshell is less visible. Make no mistake though we are each inside the thing, struggling to get out, and find out what is on the other side. And then of course we each have to figure out what do next. The good news is that there are a lot of us.

image: Kornerstone Farms

Anima Monday

Happy New Year everyone!

I have been super remiss in not giving a shout-out to the amazingly talented folks at Anima Monday, which I like to think of as a sister-blog. (I’ve been super distracted, more on that later.)  I’m in love with all of them over there.  Go visit now!

This week they have posted an interview with Emma Restall Orr, whose book, The Wakeful World,  takes animism to the gladiator ring of Western philosophy in the Academy.  Not for the faint of heart, such an endeavor!  And Orr does it admirably, with heart as well as intellectual rigor.

But the contributors to Anima Monday are her equal in their wild, fierce, generous, and humble insights into what it means to live in this world, fully alive, fully present, and in love with life, in all its glory and pain.

Animists of the world unite!  🙂

 

Metamorphic: for all the Wild Ones

For we cannot think like Indians; at most, we can think with them.  – Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics

As far back as I am able to think, to remember, which is a kind of thinking, there are memories of places, of plants and animals, of a kind of light and air, the smell of water on leaves, root and dirt, the strange sight of lava flows reaching the sea, the band of white coral touching blue ocean, of roads leading through orchards, of flowers against the sky, of moss-covered rocks and river pebbles.

I have these myths.  These are my myths.  Continue reading “Metamorphic: for all the Wild Ones”

Nickering

I’ve heard that the Bedouin celebrate the birth of a foal as an event second in importance only to  of emergence of a poet, which seems an admirable way of looking at things to me.  After weeks of anticipation and nervousness, I am celebrating the birth of a tall, black filly with one white foot and a star on her forehead. Continue reading “Nickering”

Welcome to Anima/Soul

It’s a work in progress.
I’m still figuring out how WordPress and this particular web theme works.
But what I’d like is for this to be a place to talk and think together about how we can see ourselves and the world differently. More accurately, better. How we can break down some really out-dated barriers between the human and the not-human, nature and not-nature, the spiritual and the worldly, between you and me. How we can find and nurture commonality (same-ness amid difference) not just among humans, but among human and non-human. How we might assemble the bits and pieces of a way of life with staying power – the shards of pottery, the foot-prints in the dust…
What would you like to see here? What would you like to talk about?

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