[thoughts from      ~burning woman~      by Sha'Tara]

June 2010 and longest day of the year.  Summer solstice.  Sol sistere… when the sun stands still.  I'm amazed, sitting here this late at night, at the panoply of feelings chasing each other through my body.  It's as if all "the longest days" somehow were making themselves felt at the same time.  Pushing and pulling of desires and dreams.  Most that never came about or were just peripherally touched upon.  Well, they're still here despite all the years that have ponderously and challengingly clocked by.  I can suddenly remember so many of those long days.  I can smell them too, and hear them.  I see their colors in the very early morning skies and in their reluctant sunsets.

It was a gray day here today.  No rain and not one splash of sun—just plain gray.  There was a drama in the back yard: the female from our pair of robins came in with a broken leg.  It was a sad sight, as such things are, but something else caught my attention and made me question my feelings.  The robin hopped on one leg, using her wings for balance, as she hunted for food.  She dug up a big earthworm and I watched it squirm powerfully as she deftly cut it in pieces with her bill before eating it.  Until that moment I had feelings for the bird, but none for the worm.  Now, why is that?  Why so inconsistent with our feelings; so out of control with our emotions?  Is the bird's plight somehow more valid than that of the worm?  How do we come to make these value judgments?

I've often had the "insight" that we exist in a malformed environment; that there is something terribly wrong with Earth.  It seems to me that the "problems of Earth" are not man-made.  Earthians haven't been around that long and it is only now, with their science and technology, that they are having some negative effects upon the environment.  And are those effects really as impacting as some maintain?  We've been exposed to all sorts of scares and prognostications of Armageddon type horror but except for the fluorocarbons eating up the ozone layer—that was ostensibly measurable—or was it another one of those cons? —and now the BP oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—and the jury is still out on that one—what do we know for certain about man's impact upon nature?  How much of what we are experiencing in terms of climate change is man-made or the consequences of natural cyclical changes within the planet?  We simply haven't been around long enough, nor do we have the necessary scientific data to verify.  So we bounce between the doomsayers' pronouncements; the System's guarantees that all's as well as can be and will continue to be well and the New Agey "prophecies" which are simply a series of new twists on a Second Coming. 

But even among those who don't buy into any of that there is still a sense of unease.  Doubt.  While a large segment of the Earthian population can only afford to focus on survival and a much smaller segment carries on as if a life on Earth was supposed to be nothing but an endless party, there remains those who wonder.  Those who sense that something isn't right and who refuse to take the easy way out through some form of instant baptism in religious formulae. 

So I'll put it simply and bluntly: there is something terribly wrong with this planet, and "man" is benightedly infected by that planetary impropriety.  In a previous note I wrote that people are stupid, insanely so.  And I listed some of the things people do to their world, and to each other that backed that statement.  What did not come up was "why" they are the way they are, and why their greatest teachers and philosophers; their greatest religions whose gods are said to be love and whose founders exemplified the greatest compassion, did nothing to change man's dereliction of duty regarding, say, the *golden rule—a rule innately known to all.

My guess is, even if, following her "changes" the planet matured and solved her many relationship problems, I sense it would take hundreds of generations before Earthians were willing to accept the facts of Earth's new awareness and able to adapt to such ways.  The people of Earth themselves exist in violent contradiction.  They are gregarious, yet use their groups to oppress other groups instead of naturally joining with them in what I'd like to call a natural order of peace.  They know they can never actually own or control any part of their world, their lives being so short and quite meaningless in any case, yet they fight wars over territories and resources; over religious and political laws and taboos, such warring often spanning millennia of suppressed hatred and fear. 

Wars, of course, are fought by psychopaths, and it does not matter what reasoning they use.  But that condition is not so strange if we consider how the nature of the planet reinforces this "fight or flight " mindset within a predatory operating system.  When it comes to quantifying predation, I call it evil.  In every case. 

My question on this longest of days is this: what (or who) gives us the unalienable right to kill what we don't like, what we fear, what we want to devour or what gives us pleasure in pursuing to its death?      

*Golden rule:  There is a modern definition of the golden rule that may well replace the old one, and it fits in with the way our social structure is shaping down.  It goes thus:  "He who has the gold, rules."