stress

Deal with it. Great resource: http://missinghumanmanual.com/?tag=robert-sapolsky

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Had interesting conversation last week. Really more of a grilling. E.g., -- What's wrong with making a profit? the stranger kept repeating. I'd mentioned this bit about fracking, from which one can extrapolate what's wrong when it's wrong: that it's not a "free market" or even true "profit" when the Job Creators aren't paying the true cost of production, selling a local resource overseas which they've taken from the public by stealth, rape and permanent pillage of land and water here. In fact, it has the logic system of a cancer. But he seemed more intent on protecting his premise that "human nature" is violence, and "Nature" bound in blood. "Red tooth and claw" he liked to repeat. The past century, all history is violence and war, he says, human nature saved only by the gentling force of "Civilization."

So then -- "civilization" came falling on violent-natured man, fell from sky, was found under rock? Brought by angels and magic djinns? Or could it not also be "human nature"? What's in your frontal cortex? Hm?

Lioness chases wildebeest, kills and drags it back to her cubs. Then all settle down beside the lake, sated. But no, she doesn't take out her rifle and shoot the whole damn herd. And accidents happen. No, we don't live forever; no creatures do. Should we blame a god for this? Blame nature? What has blame to do with it? "All things flow." Minor chords enrich the piece. Torque: Imbalance is simply needed to make the gradients necessary for movement. For life. Even for time. Nothing happens without it.

Life is Mystery.  Are you game? Will you make yourself, body, heart, soul from it?

What I know is that I celebrate all the wars we didn't have. Like peace and civilization, wars don't "happen" to us either. I posit that it was good food, clean air, balance, and love that carried me and you here. An absence of violence. Brought about by? Thank you, ancestors. Thank you for your efforts to cooperate.

And now? Please don't let us be cut off at the knees. The Mad Men of winner-take-all, like the robber-barons of any gilt-age, have silenced our thinking with ---> anything that works, just silence the human brain and all it has learned on its long journey through nature. Which is this: symbiosis is the principle of what endures. All else is like a cancer, a seed-eating flash-in-the-pan that will ultimately burn itself out, taking all it touches with it.

The environment shapes us all at every moment, even down to our genes. In cultures that live behind glass -- windshields, TV, computer screens -- who do we become? How do we communicate, touch, know one another? The anonymity of the more-equal sunders the life-sustaining web of planetary life. To lose true community, to be cut into factions, we lose the harmonic relationships where we (above all, children) experience the wisdom of thoughtful balance, the sacred sphere of learning one another and thus self, understanding that even in our diversity, we are our oneness.

(also published here)

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Once again:

If you put your hands on this oar with me, they will never harm another, and they will come to find they hold everything you want. If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer lift anything to your mouth that might wound your precious land that sacred earth that is your body. If you put your soul against this oar with me, the power that made the universe will enter your sinew from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm that lives in us. Exuberant is existence, time a husk. When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space; love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give. Why lay yourself on the torturer's rack of the past and the future? The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities will find no rest. Be kind to yourself, dear ­ to our innocent follies. Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance... ~ Rumi ~