Bad times are coming. Most will not pay attention until it is too late, having not realized their “too late” had been too late for the Creator - The Great Mother - long before, and in their blindness were living in the too late. One should have a great deal of grace and sympathy towards them. For those poor souls, these times will be the most painful, abrupt, and unraveling. And aren’t those the hardest and most truing lessons? Those which have the ability to completely undo you?
Some will take notice. Some already have. And I see you.
One of my great elders Stephen Jenkinson said something several years ago that hit me in this way. It went something like this:
You and I, by the nature of being alive, accumulate a debt so great that we could never pay back in the course of a lifetime. In ten lifetimes for that matter. He went on to elaborate that this was not some philosophical idea. How ever many years you have been alive has been propped up by the deaths of millions of once-living things. All of the nutrients that sustain your body every day have to come from somewhere. Something. And there are people too. People who died to make logistical room for you to exist and function in your daily life. All of the death and movement that occurred from ancestors you never met to bring you to the time and place you entered this physical world.
And that’s just the tip of it. So from this necessary context, one begins to see what Stephen meant. 100 lifetimes, by the nature of them being lived, would not reduce the debt, rather would only stand to compound it further.
With this impossible proposition in mind, what is the point? What is the solution? How am I or anyone else to live with the weight of such a burden? Some try (and in turn through their efforts often suffer). The Janists are a sect of Buddhism that makes the utmost effort to avoid causing any physical harm to living beings. They will meticulously walk across the grass so as to avoid stepping on ants. They do not generally drive cars for anyone who has taken their vehicle onto a public thoroughfare could be tried in a court of insects as vicious serial killers, some even carrying their rampages out with smiles on their faces and songs of living their best life on blast to drown out the screams of their sea of victims… the key to levity is to not take oneself too seriously all the time.
The Janists take themselves so seriously that they cripple their very existence to pay back a debt which even they will not repay. Plant life is life too. And how many rabbit hutches were plowed over and left in a bloody till for the kale fields that feed the vegetarians and fill the produce sections of our grocery stores?
So I come back to this: What do we do?
I submit that the West has filed bankruptcy on this debt. Moreover, The West isn’t a specific country. You may find a country of origin, but that solves little to what we are currently facing, only providing repeating patterns through time. Same story, new faces. And in that way, in this time, The West isn’t specific to place. It is an ideal that is held by people on mass with varying levels of of unsubstantiated power and authority over someone or something else. Asian countries such as China and Japan do “The West” more effectively and efficiently than us.
So what do we do? Here is a different question, what are we not seeing?
Seven Generations. This is what we fail to see. Not the next fiscal quarter. Not beyond the narrow view of a single human life. Seven generations entail those for whom you will never meet, and by that measure, you feed those who will come after you, as those who came before did. That is why you and I are here. There were people who didn’t know us and never would, yet they had us in mind. Who do we have in mind? What do we have in mind?
What is happening in Gaza right this very moment? And what is happening here? What are our politicians, business leaders, and universities doing? They fund and support apartheid regimes that slaughter entire villages of families, bomb hospitals, and kill journalists (the Israel/Gaza genocide is the deadliest conflict to date for journalists) under Orwellian doublespeak like “Pre-emptive Defense.”
Our institutions of power provide different control tactics for us. They distract, they pay people off. They provide near-impossible carrots that take the forms of fame and wealth, but only for a select few. And much like the Janists they fashion realities to distract themselves and everyone else from the debt we accrue from being alive… from our needs and from our wants, from seeing out our hopes and dreams, and from our foibles. And from our lonely indecisions too. And in that way, we do it to ourselves as well.
And from our ailments. The medical technology business is a multi-billion dollar industry. How far we have come from Hippocrates and the oath men and women of medicine take when they swear to “First, do no harm.” Our Longpersons…. our rivers, lakes and streams run polluted with medical waste that washes up on shores and makes the fish unfit to eat and the water unsafe to drink. Our Indian brothers and sisters warned about this in an Anishinabe teaching called The Seven Fires Prophecy.
And the ground, too, is polluted with the same radioactive chemicals in our waterways as people on chemotherapy, radiation, and a host of other petrochemical-based pharmaceuticals urinate, defecate, live, and eventually die and are buried in the ground. From this extrapolation, you can perhaps begin to see an incentive to pursue cremation to save the earth, and instead of poisoning it. And in this way we choose to deplete it of anything, scorched earth style. And still pollute it from the natural gas and propane used to heat the cremation chamber to 1400-1800 degrees F, hot enough to reduce biological matter to mere crushed calcium, devoid of any DNA.
No, the debt doesn’t get repaid, and the bill still comes due. It always does. The Great Mother will balance these things if humans cannot. If humans choose not.
For the very few of us in the Imperial Center that - for a time - still retain the option… that is to say the choice to remain distracted, we must stop feeling sorry for ourselves. This is yet another distraction. We must from this point forward be obliged by The Seven Generations, lest the score be balanced on our backs, and our children’s, and another species may have their go at it.
Are the OWNERS of this country and others like it so goddamned terrified of my black and brown brothers and sisters coming to leadership? Of sharing this country that was settled on the blood of our indigenous brothers and sisters on the promise of Westward expansion and Manifest Destiny? Ask any Indian, that war to eradicate them is not over. As long as there are people who are married to the land, The Great Mother will continue to speak through them. Our government targets people based upon stereotypes and assumptions foolishly forgetting that irrevocable rascality lies within each of us. But man they sure try to keep folks down when they speak of equanimity, love, and kinship with our fellow man and those other-than-human lifeforms we share this planet with.
Like George Carlin said “Pack your shit folks we’re going away. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of the fleas… a surface tick.”
And our world will continue. “The planet is fine… the people are fucked.”
Be close to the soil, to the ground. Be close to the wild things, who have seen men come and go, their egos, wars, and televangelism.
Something else Steve said that has stayed with me as so many other things fall away. One day, perhaps someone a third your age will walk down your driveway. He will be looking for answers. And he will ask you this: “When you were my age, did you know what was happening?” And some people will. And some people wont.” And if you did, he will want answers. “What did you do?”
With a debt that cannot be repaid, that never could be, what does one do? Something? Nothing? “What did you do?” he will ask. People who are not born yet will be the judge of those decisions, regardless of how you are I feel about the act of casting judgment. And by those actions or inactions we take now, in times that have not yet happened with people who have not been born we will be left to either defend or endure what our life meant and looked like through the knowledge of that debt. To know such a thing is to be stolen from. What is stolen? The ability to remain ignorant, passive, and blindly complacent. And this young person will come find you, if you are lucky.
So what are you doing? You’re doing it now. So am I. This is how I express it. There are other ways, but this is probably the most vocal for me. In that way we are not prognosticating the future, theorizing its possibilities. Everything that happens there is inextricably tied to here. Right now. Right this very instant as you read my words. What is around you now? What comes up in your head? There is no tomorrow, lest we be present with today for the sake of a tomorrow. If we are to be ancestors worth our salt, it happens now. We set the table, and through our offering feed them tomorrow.
Let us prepare our tables today and for those days that remain to us.