I. Choosing What to Believe
Figure 2. Annuals in pots on the front porch steps: New Guinea impatiens (fuchsia) and some other plant that I rescued from Lowe’s $1 “because it’s root-bound” stand.
“There is no safety in a battleground. You can look down on it in safety from above and not be touched. But from within it you can find no safety. Not one tree left still standing will shelter you.” A Course in Miracles, Chapter 23: The War Against Yourself, Section III. Salvation Without Compromise.
Once, at age 16, sitting in the morning service at the Morning Star Baptist Church, I listened to the minister give an emotionally arousing sermon on Jesus’ sacrifice. The sermon intertwined this idea of sacrifice with God’s loving intent in offering up his son to the Roman Empire.
Actually, the occupying military did nothing more than adhere to their job description—to maintain the cultural and economic superiority of the Romans and to squelch any ideas of a Palestinian uprising. The soldiers obeyed Caesar and Pilate and honored any decision that was in alignment with their purpose, like that of the Sanhedrin. Their paychecks depended on it.
Anyway, I often witnessed the Holy Spirit take hold of African American bodies, almost always women, shaking them, bringing them to tears, I supposed, as they empathized, finding oneness with the pains of nails driven in hands, a crown of thorns pressed against the forehead, the brutalization of a son of Jewish Essenes, a renegade of sorts, but definitely an extreme radical.
Actually Palestine, or the Middle East, cannot boast of having given birth to any figure to rival the likes of Jeshua ben Joseph (the son of Joseph): his ideas, his teaching method, the crafting and formulation of parables, healing lepers, reforming whores, resurrecting the dead. He overturned the tables of gold coins belonging to those ancient versions of Wall Street financial executives. He operated off-grid. They called him “J-Underground.” At least, this is what I have read.
I didn’t know much about this other Jesus Christ, this J-Underground, when I would leave church after two hours of non-stop, adrenaline pumping song and praise, crowd-funding, and institutional first Sunday communion: Welsh’s grape juice, a representation of Jesus’ blood, and the partaking of a glutenous saltine cracker, a dry, salty substitute for his flesh. Walking home I would remind myself of why I hadn’t believed one word of that sermon. I figured there wasn’t a hell or a heaven, so the guilt that I felt from disbelief did little, well mostly nothing, to motivate me to continue hanging out at church.
II. A Different Choice
Figure 3. I started this spinach from seed and allowed it to remain in the container. It’s sweet and tender, and it continues to produce leaves if I harvest it above the roots.
“When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.” From Black Lives Matter
This is the story of the state of African Americans, in the United States. It’s a separation story, the story of the powerful and powerless, those marginalized, those who are consistently and systematically denied the realization of the American Dream.
But the separation story must have its component parts: the victim and the victimizer, the innocent and the guilty, the oppressed and oppressor, slave and enslaver. All that we as Black folk are saying is that we want to be treated equally by and under this system, not knowing, consciously, what this system is or that our treatment is in line with the constitution of the separation story.
We are victims of white supremacy, but then we are in complicity with the white supremacist. We join the military to venture into Iraq and Afghanistan, to Somalia or anywhere where there are people of color, we fall short of creating the desired broad-based conversation around state violence. If anything we express a “specialness” that distances us from other people of color, and victims, around the world. We can’t participate in any state sanctioned violence and simultaneously complain about being victims of it. It’s either/or under the separation.
When we examine, for example, our desire and demands for reconciliation and reparations from the injustice wrought by enslavement and legalized segregation, Jim Crow, we must also consider the invasion of Turtle Island and the deliberate genocide of the Indigenous of North America which has yet to be apologized for. When we advocate that a carving of Martin Luther King Jr. be placed along the “others” on the body of Six Grandfathers (Mt. Rushmore), we should know that these carvings represent acts of “desacralization,” crimes against the Earth for the Lakota Sioux, the original inhabitants of the Black Hills. A broad-based discussion must be inclusive of their feelings.
Figure 4. Front sidewalk bed with hostas (green) and heuchera plum pudding–a trusty perennial.
Then there’s Thanksgiving Day, brought to us by the systematic disempowerment and continued repression of the Indigenous and the continued degeneration of the land. Certainly we can enjoy the turkey and stuffing, the yams and the collard greens, but we cannot continue to feign ignorance on how it came to be, concluding that it is a day off from work or “just” a day for families to gather and express gratitude. It’s far, far more than that:
In 2015, “Thanksgiving shopping only [italics mines] generated $1.8 billion, just a drop in the bucket compared to Black Friday’s $10.4 billion.”
Figure 5. Purple Basil.
Finally, the separation system cannot operate if everyone has equal access to power. No system is needed for that! Our political struggle to make a system do what it was not designed to do is our operating at the same consciousness that we’ve operated on since our forced arrival here. We are weary and we are disappointed, mainly from looking everywhere for solutions except for the one place where it can be found: within.
Black Lives Matter. Indeed they do, and so much more the choices that Black lives make.
“The Way of Transformation, then, is not the gaining of power; it is the release from all illusion. It is the willingness to release the grip that you have had on the shadows that your mind has made up as a substitute for the Truth of your only Reality. The process of The Way of Transformation is that process by which you begin to use the mind quite deliberately, in a different way.” From The Way of Mastery, Book II, The Way of Transformation: The Release Of All Illusion.
III. Violence and Gun Control
“You must change your mind, not your behaviour, and this is a matter of willingness. You do not need guidance except at the mind level. Correction belongs only at the level where change is possible. Change does not mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work.” From A Course in Miracles, Chapter 2. The Separation and the Atonement, IV. Fear and Conflict.
In the U.S. there are roughly 270 to 310 million guns, about 1 gun for every person in the U.S., including the kids. (Pew Research Center). The gun and manufacturing industry hauls in about $13.5 billion in revenue, with a profit of roughly $1.5 billion. Overall economic impact from the firearms and ammunition industry is $42.9 billion. “Jobs” related to the firearm industry as of 2015 is approximately 263,233 (NewsMax Finance, http://www.newsmax.com/Finance/StreetTalk/gun-stocks-shooting-profits/2015/12/03/id/704450/).
The U.S. military budget for 2015 accounted for 58% of the federal budget: $598.5 billion. The U.S. military is the second largest in the world (China’s People’s Liberation Army is number one), and has troops in every part of the world. The number of Americans employed by the U.S. military? Staggering.
Figure 6. Front sidewalk bed.
The United States’ image as the number one world power is based on its military might, used to protect its insatiable and, as we are coming to know now, unsustainable greed. There is no mass shooting that could take place that could potentially persuade us to dismantle the military, or bring a halt to the firearms and ammunition industry. A population with access to arms in defense of their families, illusory “private property” and a constitution that ensures it all, is integral to the maintenance of the separation story.
The arguments for gun control only fall on deaf ears, and the arguments to look beyond gun control to the “beliefs” that create the need for arms is an equal waste of our energy. The case of the truth has never been and will never be argued in the courtroom of illusion (A Course of Love).
The separation story teaches that force, battle and war is power. A Course in Miracles teaches that these are all signs of fear and the soul’s cry for help.
Figure 7. Japanese eggplants. I have noted that purple is thriving in the garden. Must be the garden spirits’ tribute to Prince.
“When speaking of the many issues facing your world in this time, we are speaking of situations that would seem to be extreme and to call for extreme measures. The only extreme measure called for now is the same extreme measure that I called for during my life. It is the call to embrace your power.” From The Dialogues of A Course of Love: Day 10, Power.
IV. A New Direction
Figure 8. This is a Uganda key hole garden. The hole in the center where the basket is is a mulch bin. So the nutrients from the bin go straight into the soil to nourish the herbs. No separate bin is necessary.
“The power you must come to rely upon is the power of your own self to create and express the cause and effect that is the power of Love.” From The Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 10, Power.
Figure 9. Container grown Swiss Chard.
With four more weeks to the fall equinox, the beginning of shorter days and longer nights, I’m expressing gratitude for the garden season’s successes, taking note of all that didn’t go so well in the light of my reading of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. Midway through the book, I became disenchanted. The difference between my garden and a true permaculture one is like the difference between night and day. It explains why I didn’t have much success with my tomatoes this year; why I only ate five cucumbers, and picked 5 tough, stringy okra.
Chard, kale, spinach, herbs, mint, all performed well though. I have enough greens and green beans to take me half way through the winter.
I ventured out this year and purchased two dwarf apple trees and a dwarf peach tree. They’re all doing well, but I’m a little concerned if they’re actually dwarfs. I’ve already had an experience with a dwarf fig which is about as dwarfed as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Figure 10. Dwarf fig, 4 years old. That back wall is about 10 ft.
Maybe it was 2 cold spells in May, but I had to ask a supplier for replacements of a blueberry and blackberry bush. I replanted them next to the fig tree, but I realized after 3 days that it wasn’t a wise decision. Growing tomato on the same side of the yard as the fig tree wasn’t a great idea either. They didn’t get as many hours of sun as they needed, and what few tomatoes that did appear were quickly carted off by the squirrels.
I admit and accept that I am a novice vegetable gardener. The strength of my green thumb is best observed with perennials. If it were not for the effects of GMO’s on our food supply, I would stick to annuals, perennials, and focus on culinary and medicinal herbs. I’d buy my fruit and veggies from a local, organic farm. I would limit my time in the garden to the evenings, when the sun isn’t so hot.
V. And All the Rest
About the Christian church, my intent in sharing my experience in the church is not meant to offend anyone. I want to apologize if what I have said comes across as sacrilegious, or as sacripolitical (a word that I just created). The only difference between me at 16 and me at 61 is that I am not an arrogant, smart-mouthed teenager as my mother used to say. I thought then that I could pass judgment on a people and an institution that saw our ancestors through enslavement, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement.
In many ways the Christian church was and remains a beacon of hope for the African American community, even in the midst of systemic white racism, police brutality, generational poverty and all the rest.
Now at 61, however, I am fairly well-versed in the teachings of Jesus Christ from my study of A Course in Miracles, A Course of Love and The Way of Mastery. I have remained, as I was then, uninterested in the dominant narrative. I do not accept the separation story of what the world is, who we are and why we are here. And I unabashedly and unapologetically continue to see the Christian Church as the footstool of nation states and antithetical to the truth as taught and expressed by Jesus, the Christed One.
Finally, and unlike at 16, I have no solutions for how we can live in peace under the separation; but I would offer that problem solving is a function of the separation. It might serve us well to discover “the way” to live on this planet that does not create any problems to solve.
“Let me assure you of what you already know, that everything about my life was purposeful. That challenge was meant then, and continues to mean now, a call to a new choice. It asks that you challenge your worldview in a most thorough manner.” From The Dialogues of A Course of Love, Day 4: The New Temptations.
Figure 12. Front side garden, sunset.
