The rules that programmed
an entire century: form follows function.
We planned cities, tone-deaf buildings,
urban social engineering, so soul-crushing
it finally had to be leveled.

Monster homes
plopped on the seashore,
boxes upon boxes, right to the property line,
curve of the shore against the straight-lime imagination
of the developers.

Post-modern architecture was a correction.
The ground turned liquid under our feet.
Everything meant anything so it meant
nothing.

Now we’re in a new era.
We do not have a name for it yet.
It is a winner-take-all race to find a new aesthetic.
We need a new story (a myth)
to make sense of this time.
We’re groping for a new sensuality,
a new form of feeling, a spiritual purpose.
Or
we zombie walk into another dark age.

Nothing is going to happen
unless I change,
unless we all do.
The “nut” of this new enlightenment
is action.
Become an active change agent.
Find a new rhythm.

Stand in front of a mirror
and take off all of my clothes.
Stare at myself for five minutes,
stand there until the brain fog lifts.

This is an exercise in muga*, self-forgetting.
Forget who I used to be.
Forget what my culture demands that I be.
No tribe, not Left, not Right, not anything.

Just a human being caught naked
in the flux of life.
Ready
for what
comes next.

-excerpt Adbusters Magazine, #169, Vol. 31, No. 5

Everything is fine here at Starbucks on 3rd and State Street in Geneva. The December 22nd is unseasonably warm, 22 degrees above average according to a meteorologist. Gaza is still under siege, no food and no water as the bombs and artillery continue to pulverize neighborhoods.  There have never been so many of our species, estimated 8,045,311,447 by mid 2023. Most of us aspire to a “first world” life-style. The war in Ukraine continues in the bitter winter cold. Ammunition runs low as the West’s financial support for material drys up. God help them.

These are a few of the conditions around the world indicative of a code-red moment.

Have a Merry Christmas.  Really!

*Muga is a Zen Buddhist term meaning no mind/no ego.  No thought obstructs, gets in the way.