Reminders

Sacred Reminders

Recently I began receiving ten or more unwanted spam calls per day. They were irritating! I needed peace of mind, because they were interrupting my flow, and I was getting mad. I tend to want to fight back.

There are various strategies I have employed with them, since my phone company and congressperson have, so far, failed to fix the problem. 

One way is to waste their time by playing along and keeping them on the phone a long time. There are even apps you can get with robots that will do it for you. “Huh? I can’t hear you...just a sec....wait, I’ll be right back... could you repeat that?” Does not work for robo calls, however.

Then there is shaming. “psychiatric helpline, what is your problem? Why are you trying to make a living by bothering other people? Are you some kind of sadist creep?”

How about silly? (Breathing into phone) in high pitched voice: “um, mommy is sweeping. (More breathing) Do you want to pway?”

Or threatening. “Cybercrime hotline. You block em, we stalk em! Would you like us to trace a call for you?”

You can take your own voice out of the equation, and let your radio or tv answer, till they figure out it’s not a live person and hang up.

Unfortunately, all of these take a lot of energy. Whew! Maybe I need to meditate more. They say the best thing to do is just to not answer.

But suddenly I hear gunfire in my neighborhood. And I know what to do. There are many places out in the country where it is legal to just shoot off your guns, whenever you like, any time of the day or night. When I first moved here, from the city, I was shocked! 

But it was fine when I figured out how to handle it. Now, whenever I hear gunfire, I imagine it is Shiva, destroyer of illusions, doing his work. Making the world a better place. Hey, it works for me.

Years ago, before there were apps and cell phones, I looked for some kind of randomly occurring reminder to stop whatever I was doing, take a deep breath, and center. There were watches with multiple alarms, but you had to preset them, so not really random. Finally I got a random meditation alarm app. Maybe alarm is not the word. Reminder. But I just never use it. Maybe it is too contrived.

Now I have a random reminder that is working in more than one way. When I get my daily ten or more spam calls, it cues me to take a moment and meditate. No more irritation, just a lovely real time call from the universe. I changed my ringer to a pleasant meditative chime, and I just let it ring. All good.

Unitics Treasure

Unitics Treasure Found Hidden in Plain Sight on the Interweb

Not long ago, a treasure chest, filled with gold, precious jewels, ancient artifacts, and worth a pretty good sum of money, was found somewhere in the rugged west of North America.

It had been hidden years earlier by a collector of such items, who had then advertised of its existence online. You got to keep it for yourself if you discovered it. He gave cryptic hints of where he had buried it in the form of a poem. He had said that everything you would need to know to find it was contained the the poem.

But when the when the treasure box was found, the finder chose to remain anonymous, and the hider as well as the watchers of the story were left unsatisfied. Perhaps this is a fitting end to the story, illustrating the difference between a physical treasure and a spiritual treasure.

One wonders if he felt guilty for ending the fun of the hunt. Maybe he was afraid someone would come and take the treasure away from him. Or maybe he was ashamed because he perhaps got hints from the stories of those who actually died looking for it.

Like that treasure chest, I too have hidden a gift for people to find, and it is hidden in plain sight on the cloud. It is the book I have written called Unitics. 

You will find within, pearls of ancient wisdom, Golden nuggets of truth, and the modern crypto currency of our evolutionary spirit. You will find a newly minted coin with politics on one side, and Unitics on the other. 

Unlike a physical treasure, this one can be found and enjoyed by an undetermined number of readers, as many as find it. Unlike a material treasure, you can share it, give it away, and still have it. You get to keep the treasure, and no one can take it away from you. This is the difference between a worldly and a spiritual treasure.

It is a short read, filled with full color pictures on nearly every page.

To read Unitics, the pdf, the entire book, for free, click on this:

Unitics

The Beginning of Sex and Gender

“Nowadays, we are assigning gender even before birth. We have become socially conditioned to participate in the gendering of children at the earliest possible moment - whenever a sonogram can identify its genitalia. Gender-reveal parties have become a trendy way to celebrate the child’s fate, steering them down a life of masculine or feminine ideals before ever meeting them.” -George Matthew Johnson

My friend Saturn became a grandmother four years ago. But she just found out that she has a granddaughter. 

Oh, she’s been playing with all four of the grandchildren regularly since their births, and there has never been any question that three of them were born male and one was born female, as far as their sex at birth goes. But the parents want to respect the choice of each child of what, if any, gender they want to identify with.

When asked at age two if they were a boy or a girl, the two year old female child replied, “probably a girl”. Saturn did not ask very often. Once a year or so. The second time, at age three, the answer was also casually noncommittal.

So everyone around “them” learns to use the pronouns they/them. It is an education for all. People start to become aware of how deep seated their thinking, and concomitant projecting, of sex and gender is. Friends of the family begin to say stereotypical things to them like “oh what a pretty outfit you have on today” as soon as they figure out which set of genitals is actually in the diapers. 

The box we put people into very early in life is very set and strong. Even family members often slip up, catch themselves, correct their pronouns, and notice their internal assumptions. It is a real consciousness raiser.

“Bodies are not only biological phenomena but also complex social creations onto which meanings have been variously composed and imposed according to time and space.” -Katrina Karkazis, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience

Some extended relatives freak out. They warn that the children will grow up confused. They will not be able to “fit in”!

But soon it begins to dawn on everyone that if a child can not fit in, maybe it is because the problem is with the sexist society. So, some choose to extend their new habit of calling the children by the gender neutral pronouns to calling everyone by them. We begin to realize that to have a well adjusted child, we will have to adjust the world to fit the children, not the other way around. To force a child to adjust to a sick society is simply child abuse.

I consider all of these issues and conclude that henceforth I shall refer to all as they/them unless I have a specific contextual reason to do otherwise, much like the policy that news organizations have on not mentioning the race of a person in a news report.

Why are we so obsessed with children’s sex? Why do we need to refer to every persons’ genitals every time we speak of them? If that is such an important identifier, why don’t we also say, call them, for instance, the “short, fat, pink, brown haired, male” person? Or the “dark skinned, bald, skinny, wheelchair bound male” person? What is so important about the knowledge of, and constant reference to, just the gender?

Other languages gender everything. Studies have shown that this does in fact change the way we think about those arbitrarily gendered things. In some languages the sun or moon is male or female, and in others, it is vice versa. We say in English, the “mother” Earth. Why does the Earth have to be a mother? Is it not more like a tiny male sperm in a solar system dominated by a huge mother ovum sun?

“Let's stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.” -Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

At the age of four, Saturn’s granddaughter finally announces she is, in fact, a girl. 

Saturn is overjoyed. In the meantime, since the birth of grandchild number one, three more grandchildren have arrived, all with male physical reproductive apparatus. They are being dressed and reared with free choice as well. 

But their parents are acutely aware that their own feelings about this include the knowledge of the different cultural status and prospects of boys and men. It can be postponed, but not ignored. They notice they have different impulses around the issue than they did with the female child. The cultural biases are deeply grooved, not only into the culture, but also our own unconscious feelings and attitudes.

“Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.” -Pierre Bourdieu

Yesterday, the four year old granddaughter says brightly of their sibling: “We use they/them for (her one year old male sibling). When they get old enough, they will tell us what they want to be called. They might want to be a girl, or a boy, or neither one.”

“The last dragon was apparently still too young to have made up its mind which sex it wanted to be; it didn't have any horns at all.” 

― Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons

Children and Change

Shulamith Firestone, the great feminist visionary, wrote in 1970 that the fully liberated world would be safe for children to be in, pretty much everywhere. Segregation would end and all ages would once again be together, even as they were long ago, when humans lived in small tribes. Children would be free to roam around and choose whatever they wanted to do. They would be fully integrated into every sector of society, not secluded into special zones.

This would require, of course, making the whole world kid friendly. It is an interesting notion I have often pondered, but rarely have I seen such a test case as the current mass quarantine, in which families are cooped up together for the first time, in little mini tribes.

Important meetings, of important grownups, on video, saying important things to one another are being randomly interrupted all day now, by cats, dogs, and kids. I smile when I hear them on live radio broadcasts, thinking, ah ha, it is just a tiny sample of the  ouR-evolution.

While the grown ups chafe under the pressure of confinement and limitation, the kids are enjoying lots of extra attention from their significant others. Very young ones do not miss the wider world, and pets everywhere are very happy their people are always around. And many fathers are getting to know their offspring better, and even doing more chores around the house. 

It is more natural to learn in mixed age groups. We have been wired to do this for thousands of years. When allowed to run free, kids tend to form kid led play groups with kids learning from slightly older kids, who are practicing and imitating the skills they see other tribe members doing. They naturally and effortlessly teach each other.

School is also disrupted at this moment, due to the quarantine. So it is a good time to question the school model itself. Are kids really being deprived of their place on the track of grades and steps they “should” be achieving at each level? Or are they learning to cook, navigate the internet, even entertain themselves, perhaps? Are they becoming more truly their individual selves, finding out what they like to do, what interests them?

Even as the grown ups figure out how to do more of their regular jobs from home, children have not stopped learning, they are just doing it differently.

Of course there is a negative side. Firestone observed “childhood is hell”.  My friend Saturn remembers growing up in the 1960s, feeling more fortunate than her friends because her father had died, while many of her friends were forced to live with fathers who were violent and abusive, and mothers who felt trapped in their marriages because they felt they could not support their families alone.

Undoubtedly, at this very moment, many children miss school right now, because their home environment is hellish. Some may only be able to eat full meals every day at school, or are trapped in abusive or materially deprived home situations.

But it is scary, and it does hurt, to rip the bandaid off. Especially when the fundamental wound is not healed. But that is no reason not try to begin to heal. Just as the mass media of our past few decades is giving way to individually tailored information, so children are benefiting from individually tailored education.

I don’t know if we will make it through this transition. All this choice could easily lead to worse stratification and the shattering of our shared common values, leading to more inequalities and isolating many children into pockets of intolerance, ignorance, and prejudice. And more hell.

But the assembly line factory model of education is obsolete. Can we make this transition into ever greater freedom and self actualization, or will we slump back into strife and repression? Can we expand the concept of guaranteed education for all children, to guaranteed conditions for all to thrive, as we are technically capable of now?

This would be a good moment to consider it.

“Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list” - Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Coming Apart, Coming Back Together

In this age, it sometimes seems everything is coming apart. The signs are everywhere. Lately as the whole planet has experienced a quarantine lock down, everyone tries to stay apart so we don’t exacerbate the epidemic. It is an effort and a mindful discipline to practice this new distancing from others. The effort comes with lessons, and new ways of being polite. Nod to the ones who make space for you to pass, but maybe you don’t say thank you out loud; it might spread germs. Perfecting the eye smile while masked.

We are all in this together, and we are also each having our own unique experience, depending on where we were when the music stopped. There is time, a time out from business as usual, to step back and reassess how things were, and what should change. It is truly a moment when everything is up for revision and re-envisioning.

Glaring inequalities are coming up and being exposed to the light of everyone’s attention, personified by triggering events witnessed by all in this new age of social media and global information connectedness. In our time apart we can see how differently people are suffering the disruption we are all conducting together and separately.

It is a moment of crisis, and opportunity, as the saying goes. All systems are under scrutiny in the harsh light of this moment. As we slowly begin to come back together, we know we don’t even want it to be the same again.

"Close scrutiny will show that most 'crisis situations' are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are." Maxwell Maltz

Hunting for a Better Way to Live

“If cats could talk, they wouldn’t” - Nan Porter

I am writing this in a moment in ourstory when an unprecedented proportion of the humans from Earth are confined and restricted to some extent beyond their usual circuits of movement. As we suffer this, or anything, we feel more compassionate toward others, so say the experts.

“One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home.” –Pam Brown

Animals are people too. My kitty is confined to the interior of our large communal house, even though he is sometimes curious about what else might be out there. What is out there would like to kill him. Foxes, coyotes, bears, and cougars roam just outside the door. Then there are all of the diseases and parasites he avoids by not going out, some of which are a danger to us other animals. Also, he is a danger to the birds who live there. Indoor cats, on average, live twice as long, and I can say, quite happily.

He is like a naive child, oblivious to the perils I know too well, having lost several pet chickens to the local predator community. A young child may want to run into the street, but no sane parent would let them. So, like a loving parent, I meet his needs to socialize, play, and pretend stalk, and feed him food that is as close as I can get to harmless to others. So, he is a veganish cat. We get him food that is organically grown, non GMO, all plant based, taurine fortified and so on, formulated just for the dietary needs of cats. 

(We have this. Housecats as well as pet foods are somewhat human-contrived.) 

I say veganish, because after all, there is no pure vegan anything. The food travels on roads that have cut through wildlife habitat. Getting and burning the fuel needed for delivery degrades the climate and pollutes the air, water and soil. The packaging, the truck, even growing the plant food, all cost the environment as well. Though to be fair, all of these functions can be done way more sustainably if we change out to more ecofriendly ways of doing things. Ways we already know.

All of our cats have been veganish, since 1995, when plant based cat food first became available. All have made it to at least age eighteen, and always in good health. Two of them were age nine when they started on vegan cat food, and the interesting thing is, their personalities also transformed with their diet. They stopped hunting! These were suburban cats who had been mouse and bird hunters, and they just lost interest in hunting. They stayed on the deck or just by the house and didn’t roam far. 

Only after stopping the so called obligate carnivores diet, one cat first began to be interested in always sampling a little of whatever food I was eating, and, oddly, also liked to occasionally dig in ant hives and lick them up as they came pouring out.

The other one, who could effortlessly pull a bird right out of the air before, now ate her vegan food out on the deck, then sat back and enjoyed sharing it with her own fan club of bird friends every day, who came just inches away to partake as she passively watched. In the days before she died, the enlightened gaze she wore literally gave darshan, the special blessings of an Awakened One, to all who saw her.

My present young pet is very nice, but he is no saint. He gets very excited when he sees birds out the window, and his jaw quivers, leaving little doubt about what he would like to do. And he can, and does, bring down and eat any house fly that happens into the house. But he gets just as excited when I bring out the cat toys.

Like my kitty, and like all of the humans who might dream of going and doing things they can’t do now, we are all confined to some sphere anyway, all the time. My cat sees the window bird; a monogamous happy partner appreciates seeing an attractive person walk by; a teen sees a fast sports vehicle that they can’t have go by; a person considers a big pile of cookies, but decides, nice, but not today. A young athlete dreams of someday scaling Everest, but finds it works for them to just do some elevation hikes now and then. A kid says they will fly to the moon when they grow up, but gets into studying astronomy instead, and decides that too much pollution is made in actual moon trips. I personally would love to fly, but I am waiting for a far more advanced mode of doing it than our present day crude, dirty, noisy, rude, intrusive and dangerous flying technologies. Perhaps it will not come in my lifetime, which is OK.

I think we are all evolving. There is a famous case of the pet lion in the 1940s, who became a vegetarian on her own, and refused to touch meat for the rest of her life, even when they tried to sneak it into her food. There are millions of vegetarians in the world who still hunt, but now they do it in clothing stores, or online shopping, or with cameras, or by adding the names of bird species to their life list.  

I think the whole predator and prey psychology is evolving. Those who project their own struggles onto their pets use words like “obligate carnivore”. They think their pets need to go kill something, because they are not all that far removed from this urge themselves. But hardly anyone kills people anymore; the murder rate has been falling for centuries. And literature, culture, and movies provide a format for those urges to be considered and reconsidered without harming anyone.

May the same soon come to pass with the completely unnecessary and cruel murder, enslavement, and torture of animals. May it soon be regarded as we do murder and slavery, as a thing of the past. No one with a beloved pet would want to treat them that way, yet they blithely trot off to the supermarket to buy a can of death to put in their pet’s food dish. A can of chopped animal bodies, stolen from the child of some mother animal that loved them. It is exactly the same as chopping up your pet and eating them.

Thieves have the habit of always looking over their shoulder and worrying that someone will steal from them. It is like that with the meat eating syndrome of denial, guilt, blame, and defensiveness, and the psychological need to project, and conveniently ignore. There is another way. One can deal with it honestly. 

And it hurts to give out hurt. What sane person would ever want to needlessly inflict harm on others? Yet our system is doing just that, inexorably, every day.

You can choose to shift, to evolve, to respond consciously to a natural preprogrammed evolutionary urge, but with an action that fulfills your need in a more elegant, tantric, and harm reduced way. It even feels good to do good. Usually you will find it is even more satisfying!

“Animals are my friends … and I don’t eat my friends.” –George Bernard Shaw

Omni’s Colorbook

My newest book is out today, albeit only on this link, so excited for you to get a sneak preview! 

I have been working on this one for years. Everything I know about color, from this colorist artist:)

Understanding color in art, lifestyle, philosophy, and psychology.

A fun little book of Omni’s art, and thoughts and meandering commentary on color in art and life. This 173 page book is full of colorful illustrations on every page, color insights, and useful tips for using color in your life, art, and mind. You will learn things about color perception and yourself, as waves of color wash over you, with a chapter on each color and more.

To read the Omni’s Colorbook on your device in its entirety for free, 

CLICK HERE: