How do I share with you these feelings?
Oh, feeling state.
Oh, dream travel.
Where am I located?
A book of my previous acquaintance was recently brought again to my attention. I had not thought about it in many years.
The book is called Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly; A Catalog of Possibilities.
As I began to look at the table of contents... the prodigious list of life affirming topics...
...I began to experience the welling up of grief...
...and celebration...
...the simultaneous activation of profound love and care...
...and precision of warriorship; rising to the needs of my community body; waking in my somatic vehicle, ready to take action.
And all around and about me, the sense of weeping.
What are these feelings?
How shall I process them?
What do I want to tell you about them?
My experience and the experience of my colleagues has been that we were engaged with communities that valued living close to the earth.
Making things with our hands.
Building the meeting of our needs in enjoyable, illuminating crafts... projects with moving pieces... experiencing the beautiful, relational, neural growth that comes with sharing meaningful goals with one another and working to achieve them.
Not only in the abstract, but directly in a community environment.
An environment where we are tending the community body.
Where we are recognizing the purpose and power of sharing our lives together.
And then, my experience... and my colleagues' experience...
...was that...
...as successful as we were in navigating this beautiful landscape I'm describing...
...we came to be targeted by predatory influences that saw us as an opportunity for commoditization and extraction.
So that the world around us and in our bodies — our individual bodies, our family bodies, our community bodies — descended into a violent hellscape of chaos that we are only now beginning to story-tell our way out of.
The ways that my family and community bodies have been struck down from the life-affirming collaborative activities we prioritized previously...
...have resulted in a circumstance of severely compounded, long-term neurological injury and many other injuries of physical bodies...
...that has radically changed which of these life-affirming activities we can even reach.
The way this has occurred has facilitated so much unexpected invisibility; so much misunderstood disablement;... that even just communicating about what has happened becomes a ponderous and uncertain thing.
Where the invisibility has been eased in without us realizing; eviscerating all that was easy, except perhaps the ease by which influences predatory have taken advantage of that hellscape chaos so that they could have their preferred practical and economic resourcing.
Financial, yes, and also — the life force of the bodies who, instead of being in contact with one another, instead of fomenting gorgeous thriving with one another, now find themselves sucked dry of the sacred energies that make us all alive.
How could this be occurring?
What exactly is happening?
Many do not know, cannot recognize.
I and my colleagues, fortunate to have found ways to exchange information, to compare notes, and to document these strange, confrontive situations... we see the complex intersections in intricate detail…
…much like Kevin Kelly documented these beautiful solutions in Cool Tools.
Except we are moving through the experiences of such extreme traumatization... having tried to communicate what it is that happened...
…and encountering over and over and over, endlessly, for many, many years...
...the blocks to our necessary conversations.
The trauma trigger activations that have been installed in family and community bodies to prevent those conversations from occurring.
Because what a survivor of violence says to you cannot possibly be true.
They must be mistaken, or crazy, or lying... or seeking to manipulate you.
And so how do we come to terms with the origins of the information economy? Those who recognized the natural strength and vitality in sharing with one another? Songs and stories... experiencings... the nutrients of being directly engaged in contact with the living world? Homesteading? Raising strong, vibrant families?
Caring for children?
Listening to and respecting children?
Caring for our elders? Listening to, learning from, and respecting them profoundly for what they have come to know over the course of lives lived longer than ours?
What are the lessons we've come to know so well... that others do not yet know at all?
And how can we share with one another most fruitfully?
How do we learn from one another's most challenging experiences?
Do we receive communications that are most expressly important to the life of the community body?
Or do we stop them from being received?
Kevin Kelly's book is such a celebration of nutritive information.
And yet, my communities... the communities that celebrated these things... were stopped from such life-affirming activities. They still occur in pockets; but it is not what it was.
Many of us have had our lives and work decimated by the commoditizing predatory influences we seek to describe and pray that someone will hear and understand us.
I'm very grateful to Kevin Kelly for publishing this book.
I am grateful to the colleague who brought it again to my attention after so many years of wilderness traveling.
What do I do with this part of the story?
What next page am I writing?
Soon, somehow, we must come to terms with what has happened.
It requires us to open our hearts to those who speak very different languages.
It requires us to open our hearts to release fear, and let ease the threat response that has been acculturated in us to distrust one another, to imagine ill of one another... when we cannot know one another based on snapshots or hearsay.
We must know one another in attuned, presencing relationship; the continuing forward of learning one another's much more unique languages than we realized previously, especially in brains where verbal centers have been so extensively affected by traumatic experiencing.
Can we know one another again?
Can we come into the world we were building then?
Can our loving efforts build and build around us? Growing food. The Earth offering us her medicine. The medicine of our relationships with one another — so potent.
We shall not set it aside.
We shall not permit fear to deter us.
Our vocational recovery depends on this.
The lives of our family and community bodies depend on this.
How successfully can we now meet this challenge?
Jewel Cool Tools, Pooled Ghouls, & New New Rules