Tag Archives: restorative justice

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Norwick’s Head Poobah

I was interviewing the Head Poobah
of our Norwick Public Utility CoOperative
and asked him
Where did the 22 percent goal come from
for acquiring renewable energy?
As compared to 78 percent from nonrenewable
and guaranteed increasingly costly electricity sources
like burned-out oil and gas and coal,
with their concomitant stinky smokestacks.

“As I recall
when we needed a number
for our report on future numbers,
that was a number
we had nearly achieved
so we found this number
a realistic one to report now
about our future goal,
now basically attained.”

Is that how you derive all your health and safety goals
for our future health and safety?

“Without having thought about it,
and retaining the right to change my Head Poobah mind,
I guess that would be about right
22 percent of the time.”

I was hoping for 100 percent,
or as close to it
as your mind might derive
through deeper and wider contemplation,
not to mention higher.

“As concerns my health and safety
and truth-telling goals,
although I cannot say 100 percent for sure,
I believe I am currently at about 78 percent
nonrenewable responses
about suboptimizing choices
for future health and safety.”

Do you recall
if anyone asked
what a 100 percent green energy goal
might look like in Norwick?

“No,
I’m sure I would remember
something so unimaginable.”

And why is a 100 percent ecological healthy and economic safety goal
so unimaginable to our Head Poobah?

“That would really require
cooperative ownership
of using only greener renewable energy
and incorporating that focal point
over all our
cooperative v BusinessAsUsual competitive
goal setting
and WinLose budgeting
and strategic planning
for achieving super-saturating
WinWin health and safety goals
for the entire Norwick CoOperative Utility.”

But,
isn’t that what one would cooperatively expect
if one were handsomely paid
to become Head Poobah
of something called
Norwick CoOperative Efficacy, Incorporated?

“No, no.
I am at least 78 percent certain you have that nonrenewably wrong,
we are the Norwick Public Utility Corporation.”

Oh, I see.
How silly of me,
confusing efficacy with utility
and public ownership with cooperative
ummmm…
ownership.

“Not a problem.
When you’ve been in the public and personal sector businesses as long as I have,
you don’t realistically expect to hit 100 percent
on health and safety and truth-remembering.”

That’s extremely disconcerting.

“Good news for you.
Disaster sells more papers.”

Yes,
but paper still comes from trees
cooperating with clean air and water
and just-right solar rays
to avoid future climates of public,
and personal,
nonutilitarian pathologies
at least 78 percent of local Head Poobah times
and spaces
and incorporating places.

OK,
I didn’t actually say that last part out loud,
but I was most self-righteously thinking it.

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7 Reasons to Not Talk Gun Control

Today we have a list of seven best reasons
not to even think about talking gun control
after an automatic rifle out of control
critical event,
one for each day of the week.

Monday:
The automated guns might hear us,
and continue automatically firing themselves
into more innocent bystanders
despite the lack of any specific humane intent.

Tuesday:
We will not need to hear the full boring list
of restraining illustrations and constraining anecdotes
about how local solutions
continue failing to deliver needed global non-violence resolutions.

Wednesday’s Child:
We will not have to consider the remote possibility
that global non-violence,
rather than automated ballistic “shoot first” associations
and public and private sector incorporations,
is what international political leaders might reasonably also list
as appropriately adopting sane international WinWin relationships.

Thursday’s Continuing MalAdaptive Child:
The remaining non-gun owners
might not hear the insanity of supporting gun silencers
as a conspiracy to make even more money
selling further violence
than trying to more humbly sell peace.

Fried Out Day:
The remaining gun owners,
within this public sector silence,
buy more time to refuel,
resupply,
propogate,
become fertile and multiply automated death
and dismemberment technologies,
in a world that is already suffering from overpopulation anyhow,
despite all those evil abortions,
and growing hurricanes and floods and tsunamis
and polar melts
and air pollution
and water pollution, etc.
Maybe if enough of us start aiming at each other,
we can shoot our way out of this overpopulation problem.
God knows,
we have been trying long enough
through Ballistic Business As Usual.

Saturday’s Sabbath:
Business As Usual is perhaps the best reason not to even talk about military industrializing civilian controls
after an isolated automatic rifle out of civic and civil control
uncritically
unanalyzed event.

Full Sunday:
There is less money to be made from knives,
and poisons,
and fake piety of
God bless you
in face of historic over-investment in violent rifles
to take out your kid;
the one God blessed you with
until death came
from living in a nation-state
where the simplicity of one gun-one bullet,
in case of emergencies,
could never be enough
for Second Amendment Advocates
of their First Amendment Rights
to speak and act violence or non-violence,
without responsibility or accountability
for which is which.

 

 

 

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Slice and Dicey EcoFeminists

We could invite many ways
to slice and dice the prism
EcoFeminist.

I first ran into this label
when spoken by a sexual advocate
in the early 70s
at the University of Michigan,
from the mouth of a transgendering ecofeminist
who felt more matriotic about land and people and plants
than patriotic about a nation and state
whose laws,
and the paternalistic parents of those laws,
declare s/he had no right to exist,
certainly not propogate.
No right to love
whom s/he loved
in her proud
and loyal
and honorable
and grateful ecofeminist way.

I can more dimly hear ecofeminist
as an ecologist
who happens to also be a feminist,
but this lacks sufficient resonance and resolution for me.

I can hear ecofeminist
as feminist
who also happens to know about her/his natural environment
and yet this planet inspires feelings of fertile interdependence
as healthy
and would better expire laws of nature
devoid of wealthy co-relationship,
wherein human nature
stands godlike patriarchal and supremely above
our agribusinesses of generic commodified nature
to declare humane wealth
measured only by this quarter’s productivity
intended to leave all fields and forests and oceans barren
before moving on
to our next hostile ecopolitical takeover.

To me,
fully articulating my ecofeminist heart and mind
cannot separate this scientist of Earth’s biosystems
from our fertile-loving nurturance of health,
our most abundant echoing and regenerating cross-trained selves.

EcoFeminists
fade and fail when personal health outcomes
are depoliticized from national and international lands and oceans,
as well as removed from local and bioregional wealth production,
without co-balancing healthy educational consumption.

Feminist ecologists
abundantly cooperatize, optimize,
when personal health ownership reflects our land and water,
fire and wind wealth of ecosystemic
economic
co-investing balance.

EcoFeminists
are radical cooperativists,
singers and dancers and self-entertainers,
planters as harvesters,
birthers before butcherers,
listeners before performers,
speakers
doers
seekers
learners and educators,
parents and mentors,
because this is who we were all born to become
to-gathering ecofeminists.

Our schools,
from preK through post-doctorate,
technical conservation through liberal arts and entertainment,
real estate through real organic wealth,
would each and all do a better job together
of nurturing and growing
and provisioning and providing ecofeminist leaders
if educational curricula
were more permaculturally designed
with ecofeminist divas in the rooms
and in the fields,
and on the seas and rivers,
and not so over infested with unnatural lawyers
who believe our vocations
are to settle for Win some secular health
by losing some sacred wealth,
to teach us why we must not healthy do
as we would most wealthily,
holistically,
cooperatively,
sacredly prefer.

I want to think and feel as a grateful ecofeminist of grace
at school
and church
and mosque
and voting booth
for whom health and wealth
smell and feel and talk together
like Yin reweaving Yang
in co-ecofeminist solidarity,
deep learning regenerations
of (0)Sum
WinWin producing YangSpace
as also consuming Yin PrismedTime.
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Neither ecofeminist educators
nor prisms
could wisely argue
about which lens is most correctly primal
or (0)-prime best.

Healthiest is cooperatively wealthiest
with us all holonic,
Yang sending as Yin receiving
simultaneously WinWin.

Which is the Greatest God of All?
disputes do not emerge from prisms,
rather prisons and schools
and bad faith communities
and fake news communications
of retributive WinLose monopolies
devolving toward LoseLose anti-systemic theories
and nihilistic hypotheses
filling in
until our return to restorative mercies and joys
conjoining EcoFeminist Gaian Principles and Procedures
toward more polyculturing prismatic outcomes
of deep
and rich
and wide nutrition,
health optimizing wealth,
planting seeds of wisdom as we have always eco-harvested.

 

 

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Same Ol’ Song and Dance

As I look back across my more musical times
of rhythmic reflections,
ceremonies and commemorations
of each dawn and dusk eremitic liturgies,
if that is not an oxymoron
of sound and sight,
song and dance,
tragically sad, yet also bilaterally bound with happier chance
of liturgical comedies
reflected upon together.

And as we look out through all our co-diva taoist days
like pages of leaves we have co-written,
we grow one primordial Tipping Point,
that we are each both tragic
and most abundantly comedic
when held together
through mutually revolutionary
Bodhisattva Warrior eco/ego-identity.

And,
with our ends held together,
what matters most
to and for and of all of us,
is when we have fed tragic
and where we have bled comedic
into the transparently naked (0)Remainder WinWin Othernest
as soon as therapeutically possible.

When was the last time
you turned to whomever, always present,
sitting next to your Leftsaid,
with at least one exclamation point,

That was totally Yang-awesome!

It might have been at the end of a song
heard for the first time
in a particularly deep and rich,
and possibly a bit also high,
way.

Or maybe during a dance
that was totally radical,
perfect to each beat
each lyrical swell and ebb
filled with athletic grace
of freakishly limber space
and centered
like a linear 4D pivot
we each potentially arcingly are
as we become this music’s dancing story,
beautifully
exquisitely reincarnating
us down
into your stage of life’s most recent crippling bow,
with tragic-comedy final statement,
tragedy of each end
with comedy of wonder
for each protagonist opera
in which our only antagonist
was perfect meeting of lyrically rhythmicizing here
with timeless now’s completely committed integrity
of ego/eco-consciousness
reweaving

Personal tragedy of missed integrity closes
to further comedies of dissonant clumsiness,
stumbles of feet and hands and mind
and pens
about dancing through life and death ourselves
as totally awesome
tragic-comedic ecopolitical choreography
with public sector lyrics
for what started out as a deeply personal
intimate
vulnerable liturgicalizing matriarchal-wombed life.

Or maybe Wow!
was when you were leaving church,
and mosque
and temple
and synagogue
and generic everyday BusinessAsUsual faith family,
smiling about
how to better dance
our mutual resonant opportunities,
to feed the juice
and starve the monoculturing weeds.

Wow! Totally awesome
love,
grace,
synergy,
creolization
Thanks for singing and dancing
and taking us to church
with you,
where we each belong
multiculturally YangHere with YinNow
bilateral balancing
and limber spiraling
together.

I awaken
to both the parent of special ecopolitical needs
and ecological opportunities,
but also the part-time Taoist hermit diva,
totally co-investing in WinWin liturgical planning,
each multiculturing day
within dawnspace harmonic singing Yang
through Yin dualdark
co-arising lyrics
with Bodhisattva EcoFeminist Warriors,
First Native International Cooperative Networks
each ego-anonymous
collegially remembering co-protagonists
of Earth’s tragic-comedic multiculturing sad despair
with silent democratic
solidarity
liturgically ecological matriotic
YangSong with WinWin dance,
here and also now
(0)Soul rhythms
of long slow stealthy blues as also green
balancing creolic outgoing choreography.

Antagonizing local people about their malingering protagonist rights,
their song as dance resources,
and their musically harmonic knowledge,
does not patriotically rest unchallenged.

Forest struggles
continue resisting buying and selling and renting of protagonist
song and dance forests,
including stories internal to India,
yet not in Asia alone.

Forest resacralizations resist secularizing diminishment
of forests for tragic exploitation
by patriarchalYang commodifying not (0)-interest profits,
and dipolar co-gravitating transubstantiation
from liturgically abundant ecological resources
for tragic song and comedic dance
back into a bad faith commodifying community.

Villagers sang and danced our tragic removal
demotion of rich ecoforests to mere positive productions
from notnot negatively dwindling reserves
asserting ego/eco-justice rights
to satisfy our basic
continuing together tragic-comedic needs.

Feeding critical tragedy for underdog lyrics
while bleeding sad danced systematic allegiances
against monocultural demands for fake-patriotistic choreographed events,
non-violent protests
were crushed by One Nation Don’t Mean First Nation,
cause I wasn’t born yesterday
or the day before that,
or before doing a really great job
of making more money
for some really good people
who just got caught up in the right place
in my best time
Trump,
among the USA evangelical faithful;
as crushed by British colonialism,
among Central Asian Bodhisattva ReForesters
and Eastern American First Nation PreForesters.

In the Himalayan mountain bioregion
the Chipko women’s movement
began liturgically embracing living MotherTrees
as their protectors,
their own source
of food
and fuel
and fiber
and fertile habitat.

The Onandaga First Nation School
reimagined how children might non-violently speak and move
their dawn hugged liturgies to remember alleged thanksgivings
for MotherTrees,
their hugs
hugging ours in music and danced liturgies
of Earth-allegiance gratitude,
basic positive cooperative
matriarchal song and dance
with Tipping Points
of taoist divas
dipolar co-arising
(0)-soul long slower bluesy terms
of jazz rhythmic
creolizing
song as dancing attitude.

As I look back across more musical times
of rhythmic reflection,
allegiance ceremonies and gratitude commemorations
of each dawn and dusk danced liturgy,
I look forward too.

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Beloved Sacred Communities

Prisons fester further desecrating guilt by association
as churches
and synagogues
and temples
and mosques
foster sacred innocence through re-association,
communion of the wanna-be saints
and Bodhisattva suffering warriors
for EarthRights Peace and Justice.

When our faith communities
feel like monoculturing monotheistic prisons
of fundamentalism,
then our non-elite prisons
begin to sound more like gospel protests
against further guilt containment
through hypocritical disassociation
with the great unwashed sinners
and economic cheaters,
and politically competing liars,
and lack of polypathic lovers.

Ecology is about oikos,
home,
habitats of and for progress
noticed in two appositional directions;
progressive enrichment of nature-spirit systems
and regressive decomposition,
loss,
guilt,
failure,
heading toward death unless balance can be restored
to help our systems
become more cooperatively resilient,
from prison through cathedral
through capitols of nation-state investments.

If decomposing guilt
can grow through imprisoned associations
then no ecological surprise
that regenerative innocence of Bodhisattva Saints
can grow through polypathic
polyphonic
polycultural
poli-economically balancing
positive nature-spirit good faith communities.

If we removed more not-funda mentalistic bad faith
from GoodNews communities,
then perhaps we would become clearer
about how we each and all live love between guilt
and innocence,
associated with fellow prisoners
and hardy integrity of mutual trust investors.

Prophets of prison habitats
as our own defensive nation-states
grow in violence
and enslaving racism
and addictive sexism
are tragic comedians,
self-fulfilling and perpetuating
hate and fear futurists
predicting necessary further bad descending climates
of evil ecopolitical faith
and further Business As MightMakesRight Usual
guilt by disassociation from ecological wisdom.

Mentors of good faith communities,
polypathic and polycultural health outcome predictors,
investors,
are, sadly,
about as likely to be found on death row
as in the back row of kneelers and prayer rugs.

Our loss of faith in a resilient nature-spirit future
is also our gain in bad faith resolves
to continue disassociating
from impending climates of violence
and supremacist nationalistic racism
and monoculturing sexism

Imprisoning separations
inviting regenerativity of GoodNews,
sacred ecological reweavings
re-integrations

Suffering and guilt and grief
inviting healing of cooperative ecotherapies
from death row to front pew,
EarthTribe patriotic health
of good faith solidarity.

An anti-ecological denialist notion of systemic ego-identity
derives from over-active disassociations
from our native nature-spirit imprisoning wombs
inviting rebirth
into Left with Right
Ego with EcoConsciousness
of prisons opening revolving doors toward good faith
and fundamentalism’s bad faith closed doors
against EarthTribe PolyPathic Solidarity.

To be present to our own imprisoning pain
is to grow toward communities of habitual polyculturing outcomes,
cooperative economic investment
in political solidarity,
mutual trust among all Sacred EarthTribes,
living in profoundly sacred animated forests
and oceans
and deserts
and full through new moon stardust skies.

Beloved EcoPolitical Communities,
where half sacred cooperatives Yang-full
also see and hear and feel
notnot half degenerating Yin-emptying
flow of nondual co-arising
double-binding WinWin
wu-wei
Tipping Points toward TaoTime.

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Ms. Liska

When I was a FreshPerson in a new higher school,
our English Literature class was delighted
to meet a new to our rural area Ms. Liska,
who was a beautiful teacher
both outside
and in,
and so we all loved her,
and knew she loved us as well,
although sometimes not happy with one or another
due to smart-ass behavior.

One day,
for reasons we could not imagine at the time,
nor would I remember in this rhyme
of metaphysical reasons for living
and dying,
Ms. Liska
asked if any of us had heard of Marcus Aurelius.

Whom I happened to be reading at the time.
So I was, as I recall,
surprised to see only my hand up
because I had probably just volunteered
to display my FreshPerson ignorance.

She did in fact go there
and ask just whom I thought Aurelius was,
which seemed to me
to be
a Roman Emperor
who was also a published Stoic philosopher.

And so it seemed to Ms. Liska as well
so why not dig the Stoic grinding ax some deeper?
And what is Stoicism?

Now definitions
are not my strength,
I’m more of a delineating guy.
So I thought a Roman Stoic
might be like a British Churchill,
keeping a stiff upper lip
having looked at all our deadly facts
and blundering on anyway
with this mysterious life of stoicism.

Of course Ms. Liska
would not allow stoicism to rear its obstinate head
within its own stubborn definition
so she kindly invited me to try again,
not because I was wrong,
she quickly added,
but because I could become even more right.

Marcus Aurelius reminds us
if life is indeed a bed of roses
then we should expect some deadly thorns
along life’s thunderous way.

He invites us to embrace our birthday
by remembering
this celebration is paid back
with an ultimate death day,
as what grows up must also fade down
and back.
It’s a package deal.
Accepting this package as gift
in its life and death polarities
is a stoic thing to do,
and a delusional thing
not to do,
a Greek act of hubris;
not very Roman patriotic,
not stoically realistic.

Ms. Liska found this better
than my stoic thorns
along life’s bed of dying roses way.
But,
then we skipped along to something else
and I never did have my time
to ask her what she thought
about similarities and differences
between who has authority to induce life
and whom might, then,
find responsibility for deducting my life,
any life,
humanely compassionate
or more stoically otherwise,
like a hungry Roman Emperor
or voracious bear.

For it seemed to me
quite transparently true
that in accepting my right to live
and do the best I could
to stoically tolerate
everybody else’s own acceptance of their right to live
and do the stoic best we can
with life’s inevitable ups and downs,
then we must agree with our inherited justice system,
and to live within a just war view of stoic death
is also an unjustified view of my authority to live responsibly.

I was no more authoritative
and remain no less responsible
for causing my own stoic life to begin
than to end my own life,
much less anyone else’s,
or to delegate authority
to some tired State
to do this for me.

I think Marcus Aurelius
was more stoically comfortable
with society’s right
to invite
each person who has taken a life
to become responsible enough
to consider choosing their own death
within a wider ecological context
of restorative justice.

But, just, fair, equitable restoration of a life
irresponsibly taken
does not in any way,
not even a stoic way,
suggest society’s collective right
to irresponsibly take yet another life
now lived across a threshold
of authority
beyond which we cannot responsibly live
cooperatively together.

In choosing to kill,
in choosing to sanction acts of deadly violence,
in choosing to maim and harm,
in choosing deadly and imprisoning revenge,
we stoically choose our own death day
with no more or less authority and responsibility
than for our own birthday,
and each day that follows
between life’s roses
and deadly shaming blaming thorns,
between integrity
and separations
devoid of restorative justice opportunity,
further WinWins
for each and all EarthTribe.

It is difficult to teach how to stoically fall on one’s own responsible sword
when raised in a military-industriously violent society
determined to competitively invest millions of dollars
in deadening revenge
rather than enlivening sacred invitations
to more stoic restorative justice,
celebrating life feeds life birthdays
and eulogizing death breeds death days
lost in mythic pasts
when we first sacrificed virgin children
to a drought-inducing
Vengeance is Mine
SunGod,
even before Holy Roman Empires.

Justice as revenge
assumes our competitive choices
are between brands of death,
while restorative justice,
more stoically balanced,
presumes if we did not first, more primally,
have cooperative choices between brands of life,
then branding and marketing justified death
would remain an ecological and historical moot point
of LoseLose vengeful nihilism.

And so I continued in my smart-ass ways,
wondering what Ms. Liska would think
about balancing our right to life
with fight against condoning death
except where stoically chosen.

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Restoring Earth Justice

Permacultural project proposals,
for those who live where forests once prevailed,
could become sacred reforesting projects
employing secular eco-political democratic development
principles and procedures and Honorable Harvest policies
inclusive of Sacred MotherTrees.

Who: Maybe your local interfaith cooperative network.

When: Ongoing,
permaculturally developed with design standards
for polycultural health-trend outcome optimization,
WealthAbundance, SecularLeft (0)Soul NurturanceRight,
SacredElder HealthyWealth

Where: Mother Earth
within Milky MidWay Universe,
Open (0)-Core BiLateral Systemic
roots of TaoTime’s expansion/contraction.

Why: To rebuild to original polyculturing Mother EarthTribe
double-winged temporal boundaries,
appositional dipolar
and co-arising
4D RealTime
bilaterally ana-eco-logical
(0)Sum WinWin BiNomial Balance.

How: Beginning with those constituencies with most to lose,
which is usually those who have lost most everything already
LeftBrain dominantly valued:
prisoners
parolees
sex offenders
AA-NA steppers
homeless marchers
addicted sleepers
and start expanding what brings daily small transitional happiness
to therapeutically key normal nutritional events
as opportunities toward health.

What might still motivate disenfranchised brothers and sisters
and extending matriarchal-patriarchal cousins
to sing
or dance
or beat a drum
or write
or simply tell our stories
of what we have learned so far?
About internal climates of health
and exterior landscapes of fear and anger,
dualdark shamed and blamed mismanagement,
where love and trust and cooperative multicultural strengths
would more honorably prevail
integrity instead.

Let’s not fear,
those who gather here
on this Earth
in this time,
to keep in touch with how we’re growing,
and where we remain stuck,
through positive and supportive-but-not-so-much-please
Therapeutic Comments
along our cooperative polypaths,
on-line
and off,
here now
with past regenerators paid forward
and vulnerable future generations
increasingly challenged to find
descending WinWin options,
economic-Left and ecologically healthy-Right
sacred restorative Earth justice.

A difference between daily through seasonal secular ritual
and diurnal regenerative sacred liturgy
is beauty,
harmony,
integrity;
these three as one,
both secularLeft and sacredRight.

Permacultural project proposals,
for those who live where forests once prevailed,
could become sacred reforesting projects
inclusive of Sacred MotherTree Networks,
WorldWithoutWalls Webs.

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