Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty-one, Migration; Chapter Four, Mountains

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 151, Thursday

May 31st, 2018

Chapter Four: Mountains

They gathered the herds and flocks to themselves, each tribe discovering a new way of life with its own animal.

Shepherds, and cowherds, and goatherds, every tribe developed its own way of being with the animals they tended.

They domesticated the wolf, and walked beside the bear as an equal.

They lived with them, led them to water, protected them against all of the dangers of the wild. Their animals became sacred to them, totems of spiritual power.

They gave milk and meat, hides and wool, the totem animal gave everything to the tribes, and the tribes learned to see themselves as extended in the herd.

They lived as symbiotes together.

They led the herds up into the mountains, they scaled the lofty peaks, looking for new pastures, and passes, and crossings to other worlds.

They found themselves in the highest places, they found the sacred in the thin air at the top of the world.

They strode across the icy glaciers, and built fires in the snow. They learned in the collective experience that there was no place on Earth that they could not go.

Only the sky was their limit, and they dreamed of sprouting wings. They dreamed of flying from the mountain tops, of reaching out to the touch the sun and stars.

They remembered the sojourn of their forbears.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty-one, Migration; Chapter Three, Hills

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 150, Wednesday

May 30th, 2018

Chapter Three: Hills

Families banded together in migrating tribes, they left the shelter of their caves in the forests, their clearings besides the fountain springs in the valleys and glens, their places of refuge and safe harbor.

They wandered the open plains, and crossed the broad savannahs, invaded the wide deserts, and took to the greening fields.

They climbed to the tops of hills, drawn closer to the stars from which they came, and they counted them.

They piled stones atop one another, fitting them neatly together, building their homes with a wide view of their surroundings.

The humans were looking upward, and outward in search of memories, recalling unconsciously the sojourn of their ancient ancestors.

They rested on the hill-tops, beneath the stars and sun, at the feet of mountains, beside their waterfalls and streams.

As they listened to the sound of the wind through the rocks, and through the grasses, the rhythm of their music changed, and the stories they told took on a new character.

They were safe on the hilltops beneath the open skies.

The tribes organized themselves in new ways, in vertical hierarchies, in accordance with the physical structure of their encampments.

Their migrations took them from hill top to hill top, hunting and gathering the riches of the fields to themselves.  

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Searching

Look forward in time

Calculated perceptions

Draw me to the truth

            There is no truth

Solemnity, I

You, searching for an answer

Trouble following

            There are no answers

Questing for the grail

Joyful purpose, thine and mine

Me and thee, as one

            The grail is empty

Forwards contending

Shaping every moment, new

Under the deep-blue

            There is nothing new

Dancing in the dark

Spinning in the folds of space

Reach across the void

            Confined        

We clock each movement

The winding continuum

Looking backward, time

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty-one, Migration; Chapter Two, Plains

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 149, Tuesday

May 29th, 2018

Chapter Two: Plains

When the sky had cleared, the azure deep had returned. When the paths of the stars were once again visible at night, the families and tribes left the security of the forests, foregoing the great green canopies that had been their shelter.

They looked across the desserts and plains, looked over the tall grasses and steep dunes, exposing themselves beneath the open sky.

They came to worship the sky in its brilliant-blue, its angry-gray. The sky was open to their imagination, wide and oppressing. Its clouds gave them relief from the burning sun and covered them like a blanket in the cold night. It brought the rain, which meant life, and it brought the judgement of the lightning bolt.

There were dangers lurking everywhere in the open spaces. The plains were a place of constant threat, from great beasts and other tribes.

But there was also freedom, of movement, and the joy of wandering, which was something that called to them, it pushed them with an existential imperative.

Survival required constant vigilance, a discipline that was not as great as the life they had lived in the comfort of the forests, and the woodland caves.

They marked their journey with the stars and navigated from place to place by following the brightest beacons shining in the Milky Way

They migrated with the herds and flocks, following them, hunting them, gathering the grains and sweet grasses of the field to add to their feasts.

In the face of every danger they were free, they were a people without care. They clung together for safety, and separated from one another to pursue their own paths, only to return in their migrations to the appointed meeting places, at determined times following the seasons and the movements of the moon and planets.

It was a time of abundance, the tribes were growing, becoming stronger, relearning their ancient ways.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Memorial Day

Memorial Day is a day set aside for reflection. It is a day meant for us to honor our fallen dead.

The meaning of Memorial Day has changed a great deal since it was founded. At its inception, it was meant to honor African American soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War, both  our soldiers who were born-free, as well as those who were former slaves, men and women, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who gave everything they had, to keep the union whole.

Memorial Day was created to honor those who died for an America which they only dreamed could exist. They died for these United States, for a vision of it, but they got something different, they got this reality, an America that is still in a state of becoming.

Those men and women died for us, for good or ill, they died for us.

We have yet to repay them, we have yet to fulfill their hopes for the America they dreamt of; America, daughter of liberty, America the true, arbiter of justice.

Now, we honor our dead on this day; our soldiers and sailors and airmen, our police and firefighters; we honor them.

We honor all of our citizens who spent their lives, who gave their days to public service; we honor our doctors and nurses and teachers, the good works of our ordinary citizens, of our friends and neighbors, we honor everyone’s sacrifices; known and unknown, and those yet to come.

This year we must honor teachers, in Santa Fe, Texas; in Parkland, Florida; and elsewhere, who stood in the way of gunfire to protect their students and paid for it with their lives.

We must honor them, and their sacrifice, they died upholding our most cherished values, in recognition of the fact that we are one people, that we are descended from many nations, and that we each come into the world with the absolute right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that all other rights are subordinate to these. 

On this day of all days, do not make the mistake of thinking that it is our service women and men who keep us free. It has been at least sixty years since America faced an “existential” threat from a foreign power.

We do not face such a threat right now; not from Iran, not from North Korea, not from Russia, not from anywhere.

The real threat we face is from ourselves, from our ignorance, and from our fear.

It is we, and we alone who can protect us from ourselves.

Our own apathy, prejudice, and hatred, these are the most dangerous forces aligned against us, against our freedom. They are more deadly than any other worldly power.

To honor our fallen dead, you must do your part to keep us free. You must participate in our democracy.

Vote, stay informed, organize, build alliances, and collaborate.

Our collective failure as citizens of the Unites States has allowed a criminal, autocratic, demagogue to hold power in the White House, allowed the Supreme Court to state that corporations are to be treated as people, and money regarded as free speech, while those same justices have told ordinary American’s that their right to free speech does not include the right to be heard, and that our right to vote does not include the guarantee that our votes will be counted.

This rank cynicism is more dangerous to our freedom than any rag tag group of militants half way around the world, more dangerous than immigrants looking for a better life on our side of our border, as my own forebears did when they came here a little over a hundred years ago.

Honor our fallen dead. Not with cards and flowers and barbeques (but do those things because they are good), honor them by standing up to racism and bigotry, to religious zealotry and corporate greed, to scientific ignorance and xenophobia, to corruption in our public officials, in our highest offices, and to the notion that the right to keep and bear arms does not include our responsibility to regulate them.

Honor them by participating in our public discourse. Do not lose heart, and do not give up.

We must rebuild America, reform our institutions, for the sake of Americans and our future generations. We must take responsibility for your own freedom.

Honor the fallen, in this way.

Jay P. Botten, Veteran, U.S.N., Hospital Corps, 1990 – 1994

Given 1^st 2015.05.25

Revised 2016.05.3, Revised 2017.05.29

Revised 2017.05.28

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty-one, Migration; Chapter One, Forest

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page per Day

Day 148, Monday

May 28th, 2018

Chapter One: Forest

Families gathered together in sheltered spaces, a clearing in the trees.

They formed bands, small groups that clung to one another for safety.

They established camps close to the springs that fed the clear streams providing them with the clean water they needed for life, and nourishment.

They built their fires, burning bright, smoking fish, birds, and rabbits. The fed off of any other type of meat that could be taken down with the shafts of their javelins and atlatls, their spears and stones and arrows.

They had returned to the primordial life.

The built small shelters in and around the trees.

They only moved when they had depleted the resources in the area that surrounded them.

Everything was temporary.

When they had burned all of the fuel, eaten all of the nuts and berries, the wild onions and mushrooms, and cleared the region of the living beings they feasted on, then they would move.

Through their story telling the developed the ethos that the migratory life was the path that nature had intended. It was the life of the natural man, it was peaceful and well ordered, and provided the tribal-bands with everything they needed from season to season. 

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

A Homily – Matthew 28:16-20 ©

The Gospel According to Matthew – 2018.05.27

The Great Commission

This passage is commonly known as the “Great Commission,” it purports to grant authority the group of disciples that survived Jesus’ arrest and execution.

It is a piece of propaganda. The event itself never happened. But the Writers of Matthews Gospel, writing over one hundred years after Jesus was killed, they thought it was necessary to write their authority to speak and act in Jesus’ name (exclusively) into the sacred text.

The message itself is reasonable, it articulates the basic mission of the church, to turn all people of all nations into followers of the way, seekers of justice, servants of truth, people who care for the stranger, the widow and the orphan.

Nevertheless it is predicated on a fabricated narrative, and this is a problem.

Go and make disciples of all nations

The eleven disciples set out for Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had arranged to meet them. When they saw him they fell down before him, though some hesitated. Jesus came up and spoke to them. He said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.

Most Holy Trinity

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Seven, Nation

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 147, Sunday

May 27th, 2018

Chapter Seven: Nation

Common language, common custom, rituals and religion all conspired to tie people together, just as ligaments connect bone and muscles in the joints of the body. Shared experiences are the connective tissue of human culture.

There are extrinsic and intrinsic movements with the ritual framework. Well executed rituals engage all of the senses.

The best rituals go beyond the physical structure of the world, and join the participant to the inner sanctum of their memories, recalling the ancestral rhythms that move them.

When a ritual is serving its purpose it points the individual to a place beyond themselves, and crates in that person the sense that they are being pulled, or drawn, or called in that direction.

Proper ritual juxtaposes the past and the future, it holds the ancestral memory in tension with future expectation.

When the rites are well executed it creates a space in which the whole community is moved into contact with the cynergenic field. They enter the nous sphere, and they become one.

These are the essential building blocks of group identity and with their perfection came the ability pull all the disparate parts of human culture together.

Nations were formed out of states, building on the foundations of security and prosperity for the people.

The old allegiances of family, tribe, and clan were shifting ever-outward, away from people, into the world of ideas.

The fundamental buildings blocks of human identity were changing. Their National identity transcended their sense of themselves as a member of a family, and even as an individual.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Fear, Anger, Hate, and Violence - Part III

Editorial, The Week in Review – Analysis, Commentary, Opinion

05.26.2018

There is hatred all around the world the world. We come to hate those we fear, who make us angry. Hatred is not a justification for violence, fear provides that, and anger provides the impetus.

Hatred allows the violence we perpetrate against one another to feel good. Violence satisfies the hateful heart. The hateful are addicted to it.

Human being are not naturally hateful. We are not born with hate in our hearts. We learn it. We are coaxed into it, manipulated toward it with greater and lesser degrees of willingness.

When hatred becomes a part of a person’s identity, their way of seeing themselves, it is exceedingly difficult to move that person away from it. They cannot see their way to free themselves from hating, anymore than they are able to see another face in the mirror. Hate becomes part of them and they cannot give it up without engendering the sense that they are losing themselves.

When we are called to the altar of hate, and our political leaders are ringing this bell, every hour of every day, the words they use to describe the object of their hatred, are words that dehumanize, impersonalize, demean and degrade.

The objects of their wrath, are no longer described as people; they are animals, things, alien and demons, they are terrorists and criminals. They are presented as being unworthy of the protections we afford our equals, the protections we demand for those we love; due process, liberty, even life itself.

People of good conscience have a duty to challenge these messages, to shed a light on the vile way in which hate and the architects of hate try to undermine our civil society.

Stand up, and stand in the way of it.

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Six, State

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 146, Saturday

May 26th, 2018

Chapter Six: State

The cities gathered towns and villages to themselves, expanding and absorbing them, pulling their people away from their homes, relocating them in the urban centers. Cities did this just as clans and tribes had done with families and kin in past ages.

The bonds that formed were weaker than family bonds. Individually they were weak and flimsy, but like the spokes of wheel, together they supported a structure of great strength, capable of extraordinary movement, Like the spokes of a wheel, both radiating from the center and supporting the outer frame.

In the urban core social power concentrated in the hands of the few, the elite and the strong, the wealthy...the cunning.

The poor and the newly arrived, if they were free citizens they needed representation.

The majority of those living in the urban centers were enslaved, either owned as private property, or they were they property of the state, its institutions and its temples, they belonged ot the war machine.

The free people needed sponsorship, the poor enjoined relationships with the rich, they became clients to their patrons, and these new bonds became formalized into extra-familial systems of societal structure.

This was a new version of a family, famiglia only loosely related to blood ties. Inter marriage and progeny strengthened these bonds, but they were not required.

These were the ancient bonds of vassalage.

They were bonds of the imagination, and bonds of determination. They were bonds of circumstance, and will, not happenstance or hereditary accident. They were forged by choices.

The cities became states, and in the cauldrons of statehood the relationships between all things and beings were redefined and refined.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Five, City

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 145, Friday

May 25th, 2018

Chapter Five: City

Encampments became villages, and villages became towns. The human communities were growing, coming into greater contact with one another, realigning themselves both through necessity and by choice.

Towns grew into cities while people migrated into the urban centers for trade, and work. Individuals pulled away from their families, from their clans and tribes, and pulled into new relationships with merchants, and farmers, and herders of new and different breeds of animals.

They clung together in ever greater numbers, both for protection, and opportunity. Learning from each other news ways of life, the rituals and practices that each group had developed around their totem animals, their symbiotes.

They farmed, they built granaries and the foundations of the city flowed from there, from wellsprings and ziggurats.

The granaries became temples, where the people prayed for and received their daily allotment of feed. Where they stored the fruit of their labor up against times of conflict, drought, disease and famine.

The temples became towers, ziggurats, great platforms that touched the sky, and from which the sages plotted the movement of stars across the heavens. These became the seat of priestly royalty, and the place from which laws flowed, that bound human beings to their place. 

Families dispersed, becoming ever less important.

The division of labor ensued.

What became paramount were the relationship the individual had to neighbors and teachers, to systems of patronage and clientage. The individual had the potential to become both everything and nothing, a god-like figure or a slave, to be named in the annals, recalled and remembered, or to be utterly forgotten. To achieve immortality through the songs and sagas of the people, or to become dust and nothing at all.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Four, Tribe

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 144, Thursday

May 24th, 2018

Chapter Four: Tribe

There was safety in the tribe, and the ability to test one’s self through competition with peers.

There was jealousy, yes, and envy. There were customs and taboos that were well established, intending to prevent such things from having a deleterious impact on the life of the group, on its cohesion

There were shared customs, and stories, and rituals in the tribe, things that shaped both the structure of the tribe, and its future. The narratives they spun taught all of its members the means by which they could advance, redress wrongs, recover from injury, hold fast to their position.

The tribal life was essentially democratic, the members of the tribe could come and go as they pleased. There were no laws binding them to their place, there was only duty, obligation, the expectation of those who depended on you.

It was only when the migrations ended, and the tribes became fixed into villages and hamlets, that the notion that people could be treated like property advanced and class sytems became entrenched.

During the time of migrations, men and women were essentially equal, neither was the property of the other, the concept of ownership was alien and everyone had a say in the destiny of the group.

The tribe might be governed by a chief, there could be a de facto leader, especially in times of conflict. That person was more often than not merely the voice of the people, the arbiter, the mediator, the negotiator, and a judge.

In place of the single leader, more often than not, a council of elders held sway over the life of the tribe. The tribe did what it could to give every person a voice, to be inclusive. Everyone was a part of the whole.

Then there were the others.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Three, Village

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 143, Wednesday

May 23rd, 2018

Chapter Three: Village

Hierarchies emerge in village life, just as they do everywhere in the animal world.

Human beings are animals after all, and in their need to establish social structures they are no different from the wolf, or the lion, or the ram.

The competition for leadership was intense. In the animal world it could be dangerous, even deadly, it was largely physical, and the strongest usually won.

Among humans the intensity was no less, but it was often more deadly, and physical strength was not the most significant indicator of primacy.

Social hierarchies formed in villages; around the well, at the markets, in the places of worship and religious life, and most importantly, in the seat judgment.

The center is everything, with social rank flowing out from it in concentric rings.

A person was either in or out of the village, either in or out of the center, with movement and access regulated between the spheres.

The beginning of cohesion around village life was the beginning of the disintegration of families, clans, and tribes.

The social order was undergoing change, metamorphosis, redefining allegiances.

These developments were not uniform, it did not happen in all places at once. It happened in key places; at the confluence of rivers, along the shores of the great inland lakes, in the desert oasis, at any place where the movements of migratory tribes would bring them together.

The villages were rising.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Nymphs

Visions of beauty

Moving, in this quiet place

This dry-dusty room

            Dreamlike

The daughters of Zeus

Musing, inhale their perfume

Breathe, in the spirit

Timeless

           

She, just within touch

Curving, my hand at her rib

Feel that missing part

Complete

Enter the pure land

Flowering, the verdant field

Wet, sweet as honey

            Being   

           

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Two, Kin

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 142, Tuesday

May 22st, 2018

Chapter Two: Kin

As families become clans the bonds of loyalty are fixed in the body, constructed by chemicals and enzymes, by proteins and amino acids, by the songs and rhythms unique to each group, and through which they reinforce the knowledge of their history, their ancestral memories, passing them on from one generation to the next.

These are bonds that we do not see, and we never question.

Rituals are developed to lift up and remember the common ancestors, whose great deeds, or terrible failures were such that the clans wrote songs about them, and passed them on to their children, and their children’s children.

Every person reared within the group learned to see themselves as a continuation of the clan’s broader narrative. They saw their own deeds as a reflection of the deeds of their ancestors.

They imagined their departed dead as living beside them, all around them, and they were not wrong.

The departed spoke to them through the ancestral memory, and the pattern of their consciousness remained with the clans and tribes, with the individual families, bound to the planet in the electromagnetic field called the nous-sphere.

The ritual remembering, the songs they sang, the drums the beat, these reinforced this connection and strengthened it, keeping it vital through that period when the groupings of human beings were still small enough that every person could trace their connection to the other by blood line.

They were migrating, and wandering, and navigating by the stars. They marked their narratives by the movement of the constellations, and projected their own stories into the heavens. They were together, and they were one.

Every individual saw themselves as a part of the tribe, and saw the fullness of the tribe as manifested in them. The clan was the clearest representation of the structure of human unity. It had a sufficient critical mass to draw the individual outside of themselves, and yet it was not large enough for the individual to feel lost within it. The clan was the family writ large, it was intimate, and still offered the safety of numbers.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter One, Family

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 141, Monday

May 21st, 2018

Chapter One: Family

The care of a loving family is like the wet, clinging mesh of a spider’s web. Humans are trapped in it, suspended, enwrapped. The majority of people who have ever lived, never lived a day apart from these sticky-bonds.

Familial obligations are invisible. We are bound by them through our emotions; by fear and love, hate, pride, anger, hope, jealousy, the feelings that bind us to our parents and our siblings, to our clans like the ligaments that join bones to muscles.

We are conditioned by rituals; by the stories we tell, the drums we play, by music, and language, by the seasons we live, and the hours of the day. We are raised in the patterns that play themselves out, in small cycles and in great.

Everything we are comes from the family, everything we do redounds to the family name,the name of our clan, our tribe, our village, our state.

Our identities are completely enmeshed with the identity of the group we are raised in. Only the most profound betrayal can break the patterns we are raised to live by, and even then, those who break free from their familial identity, or through no choice of their own are cast out from it, they leave and recreate the same structures in places with new people.

The individual can be raised up, lifted high, made strong by their family and tribe.

They can also be shunted, marginalized, and cast aside.

Families have a tendency to cannibalize their strength, in times of great need they will go so far as to eat their own, or set up the strongest and most beautiful as holy victims for the gods they worship.

#Emergence #SuperShortFiction #365SciFi #OnePagePerDay

Like it, Follow it, Share it!