Tag Archives: love

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Integrity’s Boundaries

What if we were song,
sacred litany?

What if,
What if we were dance,
gracefilled choreography?

What if we were energy,
therapeutic information?
Naked trees
joining navels
from native mother to nurture mother
down through speciating generations
up for regeneration.

What if?
What if we became tireless time,
reorganizing space?
Irreplaceable climates
within humid organic history.

I am not your place
and sadly not mine
with authority to displace
or responsibility to replace.
I am not my face.

We are designed to fall apart,
even with unlikely careful wear.
So what?
No excuse to surrender
to daily worn out deaths.
Well excused to rise this day
ready for each dusk
without anticipation
for love or lust
rain or dust
win or bust.
It’s just us
wearing down the best we can.

What if,
What if we were each a song
resonating one per measure,
beating Earth’s shortest line dance?

What if we were timeless energy,
resonating freestyle consciousness?

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The Best Way To Go

When I was a new seminarian
I had a favorite parish priest mentor
who told me the best way to die
is while having an orgasm.

I wasn’t sure if I could ask
why he was so exclamatory sure
of his nakedly compromising position.
I did not really know him all that well,
although he seemed to be a swell up kind of Father.

Perhaps I looked a bit nervous
because he hastened to reassure me
the reason he is enamored of orgasms,
of diastatic experience,
is because they transcend our language boundaries
between Eros and Agape.

Orgasms are ecstatic climatic events,
warm full-bodied memories
of mindbody interdependence,
of holistic cooperative ecopolitics within
every organ and cell,
muscle and happy little ego-subsystem
groaning out this profoundly universal Yes!
with both LeftBrain audio-visual Eros
and RightBrain universally interdependent
neural-sensory climate of Agape.

I didn’t know what to say to this bicameral-sexual therapy.
But, if this is an option for how to die,
it does sound like the only good one I have ever heard.

So I said that.
And then my mentor suggested I go home
and practice
living that same way.

Note: To Fr. Gary Kennedy, who is not on the Catholic Church’s Great Wall of Shame, yet also not on the Church’s Great Wall of Patriarchal Wisdom, where he might more ecstatically reside. With warm gratitude.

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Good Journeys

I have heard many moms repeat
“You never stop being a parent.”

Sadly, I don’t see or hear that quite so much from the dads,
although I know of remarkably nurturing exceptions.

I thought of this as my impossibly young,
yet oldest son,
nearly twenty-two,
stopped by for an early birthday present, cash,
before heading out in his car
with a fellow rap artist friend
on their way from this Atlantic coast
to that San Francisco Bay.

D.B. never drove away to college,
or flew off on a great summer excursion,
or even went off to a technical school,
nor the military.

He did try to make Job Corp fit.
But, two suicides
and one stabbing on his dorm floor
and he decided not to return
after Holiday vacation that year.

He has been the last driver of not just one,
but two, of my totaled cars.
The second crash he walked away from
was when a drunk young white male
hit him head on
in the middle of a gorgeous New England sun-bright June
afternoon
as he was coming home from his first,
and last,
out of home employment
busing tables in a casino diner.

D.B. was approaching the end of his three month probation period
when they let him go,
primarily for his ADHD challenges
with getting to work on time
with all the pieces of his uniform
clean and intact.
But, he also had trouble showing up
ready to set aside the dramas of his personal-political life,
which often feels like a race
and age
and gender profiled
and marginal
and commodified life.
It was hard to stay focused;
to be there when he was there.

Tomorrow D.B. and his friend since high school days
will see a slice of these continental States
from coast to coast and back again
for the first time.

I am ravenously happy for him.
I wish I could have given him wings,
some outrageous pile of cash.
My heart stops
when I notice how he is so vulnerable
exposed
raw
too often despairing and perhaps even terrified
more about himself
than intimidated by a hostile world closing him out.

Closing ranks
on all the ways his particular black life will not matter
in Earth’s vast history.
Not significant enough to be sure if it could become possible,
or even safe,
to love himself,
to allow himself a long and warm regard,
as I embrace him.

I don’t know if I could finish being a child
without becoming an everyday
relentlessly caring and nurturing parent.
I can think of nothing so binding both feet to Earth
yet so free flying impossible to control.

For many reasons,
whether despite or because of my single gay male identity,
I chose the second class Mommy Track
instead of going for the Ph.D.
And not just the Mommy Track;
I adopted only the older broken kids
who would never safely drive or hold a job,
or would never talk or walk,
or would never thoroughly clean off her own poop,
or sleep through the nightmare night,
or would not feel safe outside our home,
stalking the boundaries of life while high school friends head on and out
to colleges and new friends
while he struggles to tolerate two classes each semester
at a nearby community college.

It feels good to know I am needed
but frightening to realize I cannot retire from this parenting profession
except through my own growing incapacity.

These four charges of mine
remind me we are each such a precious gift
for each other.
I have never regretted my more generous choices
rather than less magnanimous.
Not necessarily because the return on investment has always been better for my kids,
but because those were the moments standing out most clearly
in my column for Fully Living,
rather than continuing to draw out a stingy half-life,
under invested in our shared future regenerators.

I hope D.B. and friend have the time of their young lives
as I have had mine,
and even better,
even better.

It is so much easier,
and comforting,
to have old and happy memories
when we have had both young and generously happy times,
seasons,
reasons to smile
and greet each fleeting dawn.

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Limiting Abundant Liturgies

If dawn invites grace-filling abundance,
what dual horizon limits sunset?

Awake each morning
with or without alarm.
What promise waits
to unfold this liturgical dance
across our day’s embracing stage?

Thought of sunset,
even this next one.
Too soon arrived?
Or will dark never arrive
to say goodnight?
Farewell,
aloha dawn and sunset
framing today’s fancy form-exhausting dance.

Which background music
does creolizing jazz suggest today?
To glance our best step shine
and slide together.

What songs we sing
with smiles and frowns.
What arias we start
with full-heart passion,
compassion,
co-passion!

Today feels like
We Shall Overcome Ourselves
together,
rhythm and gospel blues once again
to rediscover sunset
fading toward nightmares
to recomemorate
remember,
yet also dreams of dawns
filling perfect light
erasing each dark corner climate
while tempered shining full-octaved from within
as without,
breath in and out,
dancing dawns to evensong
sung sunsets.

Will we sing this day’s sun down
at least as full-creole voiced
as yesterday and night?
Across this Earth
where sun is always setting
and this new day
wakes full-voiced dawning.

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Untimely Silence

Most folks I loved
died when I was in my thirties.
Not just people,
but our San Francisco bohemian mecca lifestyle,
our 365 days and nights celebration
turned into an epidemic of waiting
and watching
and mourning our losses,
wondering about possibilities of survival.

What could remain for us,
for me,
for this place?
What could become my purpose
our purpose
for any lonely future of diaspora survivors?

My closest friend,
a happily married matriarch
with two adolescent children,
died of breast cancer
when I was in my early forties.

Perhaps this was my final straw.
I have not reconstructed any friendships since.

This reminds me of my maternal grandfather,
who lived into his eighties
but as his quantity of years continued
his quality of celebrated convivial life shrank
through loss of two wives
and all their friends,
his generation of neighbors,
and then his hearing.

He told me
not long before he passed
he was not sure
if his loss of hearing was a curse
or a blessing,
prohibiting him from cultivating renewing friendships
only to be lost yet again.

My own hearing is not perfect
yet I seem unwilling to listen
for any more friends,
loved ones I could no better afford to lose
than those already gone.

Yet still I wonder
about therapeutic reasons for my survival.
As fertile celebrations fade to dusty memory,
my capacity to comprehend why I still breathe,
yet my generation of intentional families has long passed,
shrunk to incomprehensible mystery
as did my revered grandfather’s hearing.

The best I can hear,
through this epidemic distance,
I rescued by adoption
then by love
four hurt children
no one else wanted,
and each continues teaching me how to love hims and her,
when I listen well,
in their distinctive needy ways and broken means.

Yet even here
with these final four
I night sweat in guilty worry
about how they could best thrive
when I can, at last,
no longer hear them,
nor they me.

Most folks I loved
died when I was young,
leaving me to wonder
severed prospects for survival.

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Patriotism as AntiOtherism

Paul Tillich wrote
“nationalism hates and must always hate Judaism and prophetic Christianity.”

When he spoke of nationalistic patriotism
he was thinking of fascism,
as the logical conclusion
of those more loyal to a specific supremacist space and time
than faithful to our more inclusively holonic creolization history
of a bicamerally regenerative species.

Nationalism too quickly devolves into idolatry of WinLose zero-sum gamesmanship,
elitist triumphalism as narrow-minded Chosen People
rather than WinWin nonzero-sum co-redemptive economists
of mutual messiahship.

Tillich’s ‘prophetic’ Judeo-Christian
would find U.S. nationalistic ‘evangelical’ Christians
unredemptively anti-prophetic;
merely fundamentalist EitherWinOrLose puppets of rabid capitalism
and, in more viral triumphalistic cultish forms,
also explicitly anti-Semitic
and anti-all-other-religions
and anti-historical-cultural evolution of traditional norms and values,
so anti-anything other than missionary position heterosexual expression.

Rabid ‘evangelistic’ Christianity
is anything but co-redemptively prophetic.
A messianic Christian evangelist
spreads WinWin good gospel news
through cooperative teaching and listening
and collaborative mentoring
about how we can grow this regenerative species
toward mutual transubstantiating holiness
which seems to have to do with transliterative enculturation skills
and nothing at all to do with lip service
to an “Our Shit Don’t Stink” triumphalistic creed.

When non-prophetic ‘evangelical’ Christians
examined Donald Trump’s intentions
as U.S. Presidential potential,
and declared his intentions for the patriotic elite as “pure,”
that meant purely capitalist WinLose nationalism;
saying nothing about the prophetic Judaism
of the all-inclusive loving Gospels.
Christians, Jews, and perhaps especially Islamic-terrified,
must comprehend
and resist
and declaim any notion that Republican Nationalist WeWin-SoYouLose ecopolitics
is anything less than anti-Messianic WeWin-OnlyIf YouAlsoWin,
which is co-redemptive,
global,
ecologically healthy,
ecopolitics.

The democratization of globalizing love
is a huge history of spiritual experience,
communication for regeneration,
regeneration for ecological reconnecting,
again and again and again
Earth’s health with anthrocentric ‘pure’ and ‘loyal’ wealth.

To call the cult of fundamentalist WinLose nationalistic patriotism
“evangelistic Christianity”
is idolatrous elitism
taking out a promising contract against healthy human nature
to hit absolute zero bulls-eye bottom-line
LoseLose absence of syncretic supremacy,
promise to anti-prophetically gloat about absent-mindedly fiddling
while Earth burns;
declaring our vast anti-all-others absence of hope
for continuing climates of regenerative health
in the face of degenerating climate pathologies.

If you are familiar with the Wharton School,
as is Donald Trump
and his considerable too-glutonous billionaire CEO companions,
then you would probably know
you can slap a lipstick index
on a chauvinistic pig
of an elitist Winner-Take-All national economy,
but it will not really look, or work, any better,
and certainly won’t taste any healthier
or purer
or more loyal,
or even tangentially patriotic,
in historic prophetic hindsight.

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Civilizing Savages

I stumbled over Paul Tillich’s translation
of the MessiahMentor’s Other Great Commission.

The Great Commission we learned in Sunday School
was to go out and convert the barbarians
and savages to Christianity.

Yet this Other Great Commission feels like a necessary prerequisite,
like requiring Statistics 1
before wandering on into the further abstractions of trending probabilities
and improbabilities
that savages could become barbarians
and barbarians become civilizations
of savage-barbarians
as uncovered in Statistics 2.

Tillich’s version of St Matthew (5:48) reads
“You must be all-inclusive as your heavenly Father is all-inclusive.”

Jesus has been exegeting perfect love
as favorably contrasted against not-so-perfect love,
and the conclusion summarizes with
YHWH as the perfection of all-inclusive love,
so this is also our civilizing humaning-divining destiny,
this perfect all-inclusiveness,
which would seem to necessarily include
the nature worshipping savages
and the MightMakesRight barbarians
within us all.

But, what I wonder,
from my presumably partially redemptive civilized perspective,
is how could becoming all-inclusive perfection of love
be anything less than taught by God the LogosHeavenly Father
and mentored by Goddess the MythosEarthly Mother?
These two faces of one co-arising nondual all-inclusive love
of the hunters and gatherers,
the MightMakesRight Patriarchal
and the Cooperative Matriarchal barbarians,
and the strong-masculine/nurturing-regenerative-flow
civilizing as creolizing LeftYang bodyminds
and RightYin mindbodies.

To perceive oneself as one of the holy civilized
rather than barbaric unwashed
seems to deny the endemic creolization,
adaptation,
adoption,
co-opting,
extracting from what was before
that is the matriarchal-cooperative nutritional stuff
of a nurturing emergent co-acclimating civilization.

To comprehend myself as patriarchal/matriarchal civilizing
speaks first to becoming all-inclusive mentor of love,
including all the YangNature and YinSpirit
of my barbaric heritage,
remembering adolescent hormonal waves of supremacy v intimacy,
and embracing my own TerribleTwos savagery;
I must eat when I am hunger,
drink when I am thirst,
sleep when I become tired of all Other.

This perfection of all-inclusive bicameral love
emerges the first clue how to share good co-redemptive news
to be found within every holonic tradition,
every ergodic rhythmed transition
of which we are each a necessary,
but never autonomously sufficient, part,
in our savage through bicamerally civil maturation,
mutual-creolizing acclimation.

Ergodic: like holonic, only dynamically inclusive,
as holonic is statically exclusive of partiality.
A process (progress, evolution)
in which every sequence
(stage, regenerative frame, co-acclimating development)
and/or sizable sample
is equally representative of the whole
(as in all-inclusive holiness).
A creolizing progress toward 100% Yang probability
that any dynamic state (stage, regenerating frame) will recur
AND
zero-sum LoseLose improbabiity
that any regenerative-creolizing-acclimating state
will never recur; Yin-entropy-virginity-emptiness.

Perfectly all-inclusive love
like YHWH’s
as MotherEarth’s
is ergodic-holy-holonic acclimation,
from RightElder brain stem savage EitherYang/OrYin,
Out/Or-In,
identity formation,
through barbaric LeftBrain Both/And RightBrain co-emergence
of adolescent coming of nature-spirit competitive age,
and too occasionally more civilizing cooperations
with EitherBoth/OrAnd mutual balancing acclimations,
on toward more all-inclusive Left/Right co-arising nonduality
of perfect WinWin love,
within as without,
Yin dialectic bilaterally ergodic (matriarchal-cooperative)
as Yang deductive holonic,
uniting savage barbaric civilizations of cooperativity
with universal divine inspirations,
creolizing acclimations
becoming even better ecopolitical news
about both private and public health trends and probabilities.

From this view,
it seems curious that Pope Francis
would look back through vast histories of spiritual experience
and find memories of God’s priestly invisible hand
and mind and regenerative bodies within married men,
but not married women,
especially within that long permacultural history
of motherhood nurturing perfect all-inclusive love,
from savage infants through two year olds,
through barbaric hormone-drenched adolescents,
on through maturing-civilizing-acclimating adult children
of all genders and gender preferences.

What could be more priestly stewardship,
and yet also prophetic promise,
than giving blood-baptism’s birth
and ergodically nurturing healthy continuous support
through all our holy all-inclusive diversity stages
within WinLeft-WinRight
bicameral nondual co-arising,
and civil-cooperative,
BothBarbarian/AndSavage
becoming all-inclusive love?

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Alternative Facts with Feelings

I guess it never was
The way I thought it was
I say this only just because
You never came to love
I guess it wasn’t so
Guess that’s how the story goes
You didn’t dig my flow
You didn’t dig my flow
Maxwell, Welcome, Urban Hang Suite

I heard it was true,
though anonymous sources rightfully become suspect,
that Central Americans
increasingly feel that the U.S.
is a long punishing and hostile wilderness journey
on their way to more Promising Lands of Canada.

I heard it is true,
Americans, as a nearly whole,
WayNorth and South and InBetween,
enjoy better access to health and safety,
especially for those without even a one-car garage,
more wealth of nutritional freedoms
and justices of equivalent creolization exchange,
than they, at least some, often younger,
would hope to find in these devolving DisUniting States,
investing in mutual WinLose Assured Destruction
and disinvesting away from
Mutual WinWin Health-Wealth Delivery Optimization.

I heard it was true,
that if all the U.S. homeless and hungry and not feeling quite so swell
were to occupy and cooperatively take over
all the U.S. owned and administered and share-holder molested operations
in Mexico,
to convert all those farms and fossil-fueled energetic businesses
to cooperative ownership and health-wealth optimal governance,
that Mexico would have an immigration solution,
and the U.S. would have a lack-of-immigration problem.

I heard it was true,
though it seems unlikely, I know,
that mid-eastern terrorists
are second generation supremacist fundamentalists,
and their militarized and terrified parents
were first generation oil-revolution fundamentalists,
believing Allah may have brought deserts and drought
and internecine feeding upon each tribal other,
but Allah has redeemed all with His gift
of seemingly boundless, in that pre-millennial time, oil-drenched riches,
fundamentally divine WinLose stuff
of competitive survivalist human unnatural life
verses the losing remainder of natural life.

I heard it was true
that if all those experienced with reversing desertification,
all Earth’s permaculture designers and ecotherapists
and cooperative incarnation incubators and midwives,
were to conjoin all the desperate young mid-eastern adults
to reverse their pathological climate trends
from producing deserts and drought, and mayhem,
to reproducing plants and people
producing and consuming fields of grass and grains
and slow-flowing rivers,
cedar forests
and fertile food from healthier soils
devoid of ballistic landmines,
and planting solar panels and spiraling towers and wind turbines
shading and capturing vast sun’s radiant perfections,
then nightmares of terror
could become daydreams of planting
and fulfilling multicultural harvests.

I heard it was true,
but whether yes or no
I could not honestly say,
that if U.S. residents
were more mindful of what riches and potentials other nations
and cultures already have to share,
of how climate pathologies cry out for climate health,
and if we disinvested from fear-mongered anxiety,
verging on paranoia,
about what other nations and cultures would deprive us of,
for lack of their own potential riches,
then this U.S. terrorist and immigration problem,
and perhaps European issues of similar WinLose ilk,
might become Earth’s creolizing cooperative ownership,
and Self-with-Other management, unmitigated resolution,
producing more multiculturally optimal health-wealth solutions
for all Earth’s eco-polyculturing Tribes.

“I guess it never was
The way I thought it was
I say this only just because
You never came to love…”

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Christian v NotChosen

Life does not necessarily mature into timeless love,
just as yeast is not the entire evolutionary journey for bread,
and the Way may be part of, but not the entirety of,
the Beloved Community.

It is so interesting, for a nondualist at least,
that a profoundly radical Jewish teacher
would say He is the yeast
while We are the embodied bread;
He is the Way,
yet We are the Kingdoms and QueenEarth Shabbats at hand.

Then the men turn it around,
get it all dualistically, cause-effect backwards,
while the women probably knew this Messianic mentor
as bootstrapping our evolutionary fulfilling birthing process
of incoming and oncoming and ongoing cooperative co-messianism.

The patriarchs,
with theo-means not-ecological words in hand,
were too invested in their post-revolutionary need to distance themselves
from the then-powerful elitist threat of Judaic cultural power,
at least by comparison with their post-revolutionary
dualist-fundamentalist Either/Or departure
into before-Christ/after-Christ messianism-already-fulfilled
by the One
who taught himself as the intentional mentoring leaven,
and not the entire cooperative organic co-salvific loaf;
as the only Way He could speak of and for,
but not our entire EarthTribe Garden
of cooperative ecotherapeutic
co-redemptive messianism at hand.

Too bad the wives and mothers,
the nondualist gatherers and not so much the dualist hunters,
didn’t have the education,
or perhaps even the verbal communication skills,
to write down their creolizing nondualist fulfillment narratives
of cooperative nurture,
to recall and cast a nondualist Messiah
who did not come to kill YHWH’s Chosen People,
or His own culture,
the regenerative history flowing through his humane-divining
mindbody,
but to leaven with these Elders,
those who had no ecopolitical Win/Lose self-centered elitist hypocrisies
like the Pharisees and Sadduccees,
those who were not over-invested in the competitive change of Caesar’s coin
from useful for cooperative consuming health
into iconic-only value for producing disembodied hoards of wealth,
and to leaven within us
as one continuously multiculturing
multigenerational
nondualistic-BothJewish/AndChristian
organic creolizing mindbody
of regenerative intention
and vast ecopolitically radical compassion;
like yeast evolving divinely humane bread.

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Revolutions within Earth’s Evolution

Here we have a list of antonyms.
I hope terms on the left dipolar co-define
those on the right,
and vice versa.

Form                                   Function
Yang Strength                   Yin Flow
LeftBrain                            RightBrain
Interdependent                 Empty-Zero (Buddhism)
WinWin                               WinLose
Nature                                  Nurture
PowerOver                          FlowPowerWith
Compete                              Cooperate
Thrivalist-Progress            Survivalist-Conserve
Secular information          Sacred energy
Economic health                Ecological wealth
Ego                                        Eco-Environment-Other
Languaged Thought           Sentient Feelings
CerebralCortex                    BrainStem
Revolutions of Health        Evolutions of LongTerm Wealth

ReGenerative WinWin       DeGenerative Win-short-term/Lose-long-term
Yang/Yin Balance                Yin/Yin notnot ecological WinWin
PolyPathic                              Poli-BiNomial Tipping Points
toward health and safety, when conjoined,
toward pathology and risk, when left unwoven.

This bipolarity
rather quickly breaks down, flexes out,
into co-arising nondual dipolarity.
Complexity between matriarchal cooperative WinWin
and patriarchal competitive WinLose
evolves density of co-arising nondualities,
reiterative dialogue between ego-languaged LeftBrain
and ecoconscious aptic WinWin long-term normative,
yet also ego-survivalist synaptic WinLose short-term RightBrain,
feeling ego-discontinuous with the remainder of Earth’s natures.

The goal of ecopolitical evolution, then,
is to grow WinWin, both short- and long-term continuous,
through further extending dialogue
between the larger ego-eco staging cerebral cortex
and the smaller ego-centric brain stem dipolarities
of aptic-empathic co-trust (+,+)
and synaptic (-,-) antipathic feelings of mistrusting flee and fright.

Our BrainStem thrivalist-cooperative WinWin,
yet also competitive-survivalist WinLose,
is universally syntaxed by RNA/DNA affective confluence
OVER dissonance.

The separation of LeftBrain cooperative health and safety outcomes,
from RightBrain domestically matriarchal comparative wealth of sharing opportunities,
by minimizing unnecessary competitive risk-taking,
is our universally multicultural
trigonometric work of integrative holonic thalamus,
our reiterative-dialogueing Holonic Spirit
between creolizing God/Dess of CerebralCortex
and democratizing notice and invitation
of BrainStem’s primordial fractal syntax
favoring aptic-regenerative-cooperative ecopolitics.

As competitive WinLose patriotism is to nationalistic ego-enculturation,
so cooperative WinWin matriotism is to EarthTribal ego-familial enculturation
of cerebral bicameral cortex identities,
as we collectively deep learn and reweave
that Earth is not only our eventual tomb
but also, historically and culturally
and ecopolitically speaking,
Mother Earth is our species’ eco-conscious nurturing womb
of multiculturing-creolizing phylogenic and ontogenic maturation.

Or, as Gregory Bateson would map it,
our sacred ecological re-acclimation revolutions
to and with and for and of Earth’s cooperative WinWin
climate health and safety.

Our expanding Left-Right mutually nurturing cortex hemispheres
grow cerebrally impatient with Old School
nationalistic WinLose compete to invest
and then to disinvest
in and through and past and around each other.
We are too interdependently communicating now
to long tolerate nation-state elitism
over our deep encultured Earth loyalties.

Our pride of place and home and family
rests in full-octave flow abundance
with recycling revolutions of Earth’s synergetic health.

To protect this,
to cooperate with each other species,
WinLose lines on nation-state political maps mean nothing,
while densely overlapping regenerative economic boundaries
for further cooperative evolving WinWin Commons Ownership
and self-other regenerate governance
becomes everything any one healthy EarthTribe cerebral ego
could ever hope to love with.

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