zen archery

useful links to better writers

My capacity to write a useful essay has been atrophying in recent months - and frankly, years. It is not just that I’ve been consumed with regenerating my torn up shoulder for months now. I don’t think it can be pinned to any proximate causes, actually. And I don’t think it is just me. We are all in the soup.

I am greatly impressed that there are a few writers and speakers still able to formulate coherent thoughts about our humanity, be it our internal or external conditions.

Angell Deer writes as eloquently about what it means to reindigenize ourselves as I ever could. He is on a parallel pathto mine, but I think further along, with this experiential project involving immersion in the living wisdom of nature and ceremony.

Sam Husseini writes puropsefully and passionately about real politics without ever becoming trite. While I fancy myself a quiet activist, he is not only far further along in making a difference in the world with his activism. He is able to glean meaning from the journey in real time AND suggest effective actions to his readers. Along perhaps with Vanessa Beeley, he is the only reporter I fully trust now.

Paul Cudenec manages to bridge the gap between these worlds, endlessly active in local and global politics while also extolling the importance of Earth-honoring ways. I used to think he was a bit heavy-handed in his assessment of the Zio-mafia, but the last couple years have shown that is entirely on me.

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One issue for me seems to be that I no longer trust the English language to express anything useful. Somehow the above authors - and in many conversations, Native people - still are able to make English make sense. For me, it feels like a hopelessly forked tongue, wherein meanings constantly split into indeterminacy. Perhaps this came about through its place at the cultural forefront of humanity’s doomed experiment in objectifying phenomena.

Look at the covid crap, an obvious conspiracy of global proportions. Sudden experts in terrain theory flame germ theory defenders, with a virulence rivalling the years-long attack on our sovereignty and very existence. Normies yawn and nothing changes in the world.

Neither side is ever willing to consider the experience of Native peoples, centuries of holistic healing practice, or farmers. No one ever gets to the root of things, which is that all these words are but mental maps of the real terrain of life, which is forever complex and dynamic beyond objective pronouncements. All viewpoints, even germ theory, will thus connect somewhat to reality. Few ever hit the bullseye though, which is always paradoxical and moving.

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Yet I grow impatient with my zen archery approach to life. Where has real opportunity ever arisen for powerful right action? Thirteen years ago I came to these flatlands to learn from Cliff Kindy and his thirty years of activism. He has had some significant impacts in his living experiment traveling to conflict zones to generate conditions for miracles to arise. I helped edit his book Resurrection Peacemaking recounting some of his above-ground adventures.

My stay at Cliff’s farm led to my joining an action that fall, which may have been the most important thing I’ve done in my life. But that was years ago now, before the covid takedown, before the Trump idiocracy, before the Gaza genocide. Local food sovereignty and parallel society deveopment is all I’ve been able to get going. And my latest attempt to travel to West Asia got derailed by a trip instead to the ICU and four months of rehab (so far) thanks to a distracted driver.

It is yet another wake up call that I could worry less about attacks on my person amid protective actions. Those scars and disabilities would at least have meaning. Getting blindsided on the way home from work by an idiot pulling a trailer? The only meaning I can see is that there may be enough of a legal settlement to begin activism in earnest, no longer hamstrung by poverty at every turn. Whether my shoulder will heal enough to farm again, or play violin, or at least teach qigong I am not sure.

Zen archery appears out of the question.