Prisoners came by this morning and chopped up the plants growing in the ditch in front of the house. A week or so ago the town went through and cut down the plants along most of the roads in the area. Here's how it goes. Spring arrives and melts back all the snow. The sun comes out and warms the flesh of the Goddess, our Mother earth. She receives this warmth, this love and becomes healthy and filled with life and love. Seeds sprout, plants flourish, flowers open up. Before long the roadways are lined with day lillies, chicory, sunflowers, clover.... a riot of color and life. Then the town comes through and cuts down all the plants, leaving a swath of dried, dead plants. Ragweed grows up between the dead stalks. It grows about four inches, just the height of the mowers' blades and then make little blooms, dispersing huge amounts of pollen. The pollen gets tossed up in the wake of passing cars and everybody gets red swollen eyes and stuffy nose. So instead of streets lined in yellows, blues, reds and whites we get barren shoulders of brown and red itchy eyes. No one can explain to me why this is an improvement worthy of my tax dollars.

For those who refuse to believe that Life is change, that things change and become different than their parents, I refer you to those ragweeds and the dandelions. Ragweed grows up to the height of the blades on the mowers the town and state use to destroy the life along the roadsides. There is no reason for the plant to stop there, it's a good healthy plant growing in reasonably good soil, but if it grows higher the mowers get it and it will be injured. So it stops at four inches. This is why when you drive along the local highways you will see a faint yellow haze from all the pollen.... which, by the way, most people are allergic to. Now there's the dandelions. We brought them here from Britain as a salad plant. Rich in vitamins, easy to grow, useful in many ways: salads, cooked, dandelion wine. In the warmer climate of North America the plant jumped the garden, as do most garden plants when moved to warmer climes...or when the climate changes....Now you have fields of wonderful yellow flowers, rich tasty leaves filled with valuable minerals and vits. So we spray it all with Round-up and other noxious chemicals, making it useless to every living thing. We mow it down to create a false environment, an ethnic cleansed yard, a monoculture, vulnerable and weak. So the plant, which can grow to a couple of feet high, now produces flowers at ground level. The seeds can be ripened on cut stalks lying on the ground and scattered by the mower. We evolve these plants ourselves and spend millions a year to continue the changeover from a tall useful plant to a short, useless plant. We spend millions every year dealing with the increased pollen from our new ragweeds, in medicine and gasoline and mowers. I have many friends who spend hundreds of dollars on new lawn tractors. I have neighbors who ride a lawn tractor around in circles for hours in their little lawns, chopping weeds and flowers and herbs, medicines, food.... replacing it all with a puny, weak grass which produces a dull green yard and lots more pollen. Instead of a mix of pollen-free clover, plantains, dandelions, ground ivy we get dead brown roads and dull green lawns. This is evolution under management, like what happens in our schools.

Every great mind was a mind in isolation, free of the crowd mentality. We teach this. We show how Einstein was a poor student, unwilling to follow the school line of thought. He got a second rate job and instead of sitting with the boys talking about soccer and sex he thought about Life and the Universe. Hawking sits in his chair, isolated in his dis-ease, speaking by proxy and thinking not about soccer, sex and "Survivor"...although he might..... Edison was nearly deaf, a maverick and a loony who slept hardly at all and tried many times to make something work, without thinking about the black skin of his assistant, just about the work. Yet in our schools we teach team work. We teach children to repeat facts without questions, to rely on the knowledge of others and the facts of the moment. We teach them lies and when they find out that the lies were lies we teach them that sometimes we lie to make a point, or to prepare for a greater truth. Like teaching the long way to do a math problem rather than a quick way to solve the same problem. We memorize false facts about our history and if some poor kid should raise his hand and ask, for instance, why we teach Jefferson thought democracy was great when he wrote that it was dangerous and should be avoided because the masses were uneducated and silly. Then he screwed his slave, chatted with his wife and sold his children. The kid is sent to the office for being a mind in isolation.

What would it be like if we nurtured these minds and this kind of thinking? If the kid being teased for being weak was given extra classes and opportunities would he then not bring an assault weapon to school and murder the teasers? What if instead of young men being told to "Kill them!" as they entered the football field, what if they were taught aikido, yoga, herbalism, reikei, philosophy, debate, dialogue and compromise? When if when that young weak man was attacked by the football players he was able to twist them down onto the ground, without pain, and force them to rethink their attitudes and assumptions? What if black kids were allowed to give speeches about the founding father's support for genocide and slavery? What if instead of apologizing for past repression we took the money we spend on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and rebuilt the inner cities and trolley systems and built windplants on the corners and roofs of the big cities? What if we considered aggressive thoughts to be a kind of mental illness? If people who wanted to join the police in order to "get the bad guys" were weeded out and given therapy so they joined the "force" to mediate and assist in neighborhood disputes? What if we made sure everyone had a home and enough food to eat and then took the excess resources and healed the world?

Ethnic cleansing is in our culture and it always has been, in much the way that a gene for a disease is in so many people. Something triggers it and people die. That we so easily kill the things around us, the flowers, the herbs, the natural medicines, shows that we have been indocrinated into this form of thinking. The lone mind, in isolation, in a basement corner, typing into his blog suggesting ways to make things healthier is the aberration. Even he must think hard not to flinch when, walking down the city streets, he sees a young black man approaching. Even he must force his eyes away from the breasts of the young woman bending down to pick up her child. To think about what you do is to introduce a higher form of life into the equation, a more expanded kind of consciousness. So, when you weed or chop or kill, you think about what and who you kill. You honor their deaths and think about the life you have changed. The seeds of the dandelion ripen in the sun and fly away. Maybe they fly away because the mother plant has told them that "Here there are men with their blades and chemicals." Maybe they are flying away to a better place, with stories in their isolated minds about a time when they were cultivated and cared for and grew tall and bright in the sun.

I thought awhile back that this next election would be "fixed" like the last one. I figured that if things were hard to do one way a backup plan could be used, maybe even suspending the election due to terrorist threats. Yesterday they announced that some unspecified but credible threat had been detected that may target gatherings like conventions or even polling places. So it might not be safe to vote, ya know. Might be more prudent to stay home, to wait and see. Can't change horses in mid-stream and changing Commanders-in-Chief in the middle of a war would be insane, even dangerous. So I'm thinking we will see four more years of the same group thinking that has killed so many tens of thousands of people. The Other White Meat has chosen his running mate. I wonder, do they run, do they mate? He says we should "Stay the course" which seems to me that he has the same handlers as the Burning Bush.

Trickster loves to fool around, to teach the masses that things change and that group thinking leads to poor thinking. The Trickster is the ultimate mind in isolation, the Shaman God. In all those myths through all those centuries, the solitary mind tries to change things by extraordinary means. If it ever worked it eventually failed, because people like to think in masses, like dandelions. Eventually we learn to keep our heads down, to bloom down low and send out our seed even after our own deaths. We teach our children that things change and they must be willing to change and travel far sometimes in order to grow and prosper. Then Trickster comes through with a busload of prisoners, free thinkers and thieves and mows down all life along the way, except the deaths are not forever and Life can only be changed, so in the end the Great Trick of the Trickster is that he is helping us change and promoting Life.