1 Five wars ago
Five or so wars ago I almost lost you
To a great war, my father.
(That would be my soul talking)
Five wars from now
I might be gone,
We all might, but who’s counting?
(Who’s even listening?)
2 A hundred wars ago
A hundred wars ago, god said,
“This can’t go on, this is crazy.”
Every hundred wars
He says that.
But a hundred thousand wars ago
He wasn’t alone.
Nature was also asking.
Nature was grumbling.
The underwater mountains grew angry.
The sea sent up waves of protest
That reached almost to the heavens.
Barnacles began to grow on god’s toes.
God said, “Don’t look at me I’m just the
Grounds Keeper.”
Mountains said, “Yeah, right!
What happened?
This used to be a nice neighborhood!”
(Mountains have no short-term memory.)
3 God said
God said: “In the beginning
There was no war.
An alien showed up and planted his seed.
I didn’t think it was a good idea,
But he had a big ship.
And he was all-powerful.
He said, ‘Do you want a piece of me?’
I said (god said), ‘I don’t want no trouble.’
But he (the alien) read my thoughts which were: ‘How many planets
Has this a**hole fathered?’
The alien said, ‘Legion’.
(The alien said:) ‘Humans are here to stay. Make the best of it.
Take credit if you want.
I don’t give a sh*t.
I have no feelings, no conscience, no plan.’
And then (continued god) he disappeared.
But he left his calling card
Floating on my prize creation, the sea.
It simply said “War Inc.”
4 God was quiet
God was quiet.
The mountains were quiet for a thousand wars,
And then they said
“Oh”, and then they were silent again.
They have been silent ever since.
…………..
I’m making a funny story up but the point I am trying to make is . . . Something must have happened way-back-when, to the world that made it not safe. Something broke or cracked or went haywire with “the plan”. I’m not a religious person, otherwise, if I was a Christian, I think I would have been a monk. No, I know I would have! Because I would have had to commune, to the best of my ability, with God, and ask what the hell (He, She, It), had or has in mind. Let me cut to the chase. I realize there are religious explanations for why evil is a constant contender for the soul of “Man”. But religions are great stories told by human beings. The human beings who told the stories are / were extraordinary human beings, but if religions can be written down, then they morph into stories, and whatever Spirit inspired them is no longer in them.
No, I am not religious, but I am spiritual, which means I try to stay with Spirit, and the way I do that is, for example, to focus on the life or the being of a “tree”, or the living-spirit of a place, or of the “ocean”. If you get lost in the story, or the language, imagining that language is “the thing itself” then you are objectifying the beingness of everything, essentially “killing” it by denying its beingness. Humans have not always done this! They haven’t always been anti-creative, or “killers” of the Dream time.
My brother sent me an article about who the Neanderthals were. Neaderthals disappeared 40-50,000 years ago, but they didn’t disappear without a trace. Apparently Homo sapiens absorbed Neanderthals, who were a different species of human. Neanderthals were, for a time, sharing the planet with Homo sapiens. They were very different. In fact, to my way of thinking, they were more human than Homo sapiens. They were more creative and more individualistic in their approach to living . . . this was reflected in how they crafted tools (and other objects). Here is what I gleaned from this article before I include the link:
This article suggests that the Neanderthals (who disappeared 40 – 50,000 years ago) but, whose DNA was absorbed into the DNA pool of Homo sapiens) were primarily creative. Homo sapiens (we) were more competitive and efficient than the Neanderthals, by nature, not “evil” so much as, well, what the name suggests – “the same”, all the same, whereas the Neanderthals valued individuality and individual expression. The article also suggests. . .at least to me, that our (Homo sapiens) proclivity to value sameness is what makes us project sameness on the world and Nature, which explains why we see everything as a type instead of seeing everything as unique, and, by extension, therefore “alive”. This article offers an objective lens through which we might peer into our original nature — and it’s not pretty!
So, I hope you enjoy my little story about how an alien introduced the seed of war into Creation, and tempted god to take credit for his handiwork. The alien just wanted to father war-like worlds because he was a sociopathic asshole.
Gary Lindorff - Nine Waves 