Even the Divine Ones Cannot Fathom This

Yes. Thank You for these words.

There has been a War On Youth being waged for quite a while.

I am thrilled to read this story of the Divine Ones in utter awe and bafflement of this child at play in their world. I am deeply moved that we are finally beginning to have the courage to face our own child and make amends, even more so to know these men in the Native American Church are singing their songs to the children of the world and have been doing so all the while.

The heading of your comment, Rome,

"only parents can fathom!",

hit me in the gut and inspired me to write a response.

There is something in the widely accepted sentiment of glorifying parenthood that rings false.  We tend to idealize the child so as to keep our own childhood at a safe distance.  Rather than turning inward and reconnecting with our own child, we tend to instead poop them out en masse, and then slap each other on the backs and give other parents that “knowing smile”.  Parenthood in many ways has been revered and staunchly protected as a kind of commodity or sacred novelty that one aspires to attain to in one's life in order to gain access to a special Adult Club where one is bestowed with Golden Knowledge.  It implies that a human being who never decides to actually have or raise children is automatically excluded from this community of awareness and beauty.  I am doomed, never to be permitted into these gates unless I drop trow or adopt.  It takes a village to raise a child (something we’re not doing a very good job of right now).  It must be acknowledged that every citizen of this village has a very important role in the raising of this child even if they themselves don’t have children.  This is ALL of our birthright!  

The title of this article is "Even the Divine One's Can't Fathom"...  And, counter to your heading Rome, in my experience, parents in this culture do not fathom shit when it comes to their children.  Most parents do not even choose to acknowledge the true life of their child.  

As an artist, I've been working closely with children for some time now.   They impart to me truly divine lessons, sometimes taking years to unfold, and sometimes coming down on my head like a lightning hammer, carelessly dropped from heaven.  

I'm so thankful and, like the Divine Ones am in awe and cannot fathom.  

That I cannot fathom and that I acknowledge this truth, is a key aspect to, not becoming as a child like Jesus Christ said, but embracing my Child, allowing my Child to live its own life, so that my Adult may then fully live its own life. 

It will not serve us to become as children.  As I see it we've been behaving like perfectly spoiled children for quite sometime now.   The Divine Ones, in many ways and in many different mythologies also behave as spoiled children.  

When the Gods act up we get the brunt of the blows, and when we act up, or don't in many cases, our children get the worst of it.  

I work at a Level 14 facility for children and families. These young people don't fit into The System and have been ostracized and abused by it. Some have been heavily traumatized, some are aggressive and hyper-defiant. Some of them have learning disorders, or are crack babies, or all of the above.   The jargon they use in this work environment uses the idea of solid object - I must be a solid object, a solid ego for them to "push against" so to speak, as their egos are not fully developed and perhaps are fragmented, retarded, etc.    

These children's egos are our own as well. A microcosm of the whole.

As much as we all want that solid object to be there, as much as we want to FINALLY be in that inner sanctum of Those Who Can Fathom, it is AND it is not there for ALL of us.   Particle/Wave.  It is and it is not.

This is a gift.   We cannot fathom.    We are terrified, wounded, and neglected children and we cannot fathom.

In this age of irony it’s all too easy for us to keep our vulnerable and wounded being in the basement while we obsessively cram ourselves in the tower of knowledge and information, in the pursuit of power, stepping on one another’s faces as we race to the top of the ladder  –  and Jacob’s ladder to the corporate ladder, it’s really one and the same when we negate these most vital and primal parts of our Self. We’re all certainly so very careful to surround ourselves with those whom validate this way of being.

To be in awareness, to acknowledge this War on Youth is to acknowledge the War of Self, in going through it's deaththroes/birthpains of becoming a healthy ego.  Let's not allow or even entertain these ideas of the Adult being so self-important further delude or distract us from the work we must do if we are to find our whole selves.    And if we must indeed grow from adolescence and be initiated into an Adult world, we can start by taking care of our children.  Whether or not we're making babies, the work is still "to bring a soul into this world".

There is a shadow to the child and if we're truly interested in healing we must stop idealizing children and acknowledge this shadow.   Children can be terrible, tyrannical, clumsy, manipulative...  Hey, they're people, and like people they sometimes can just be total assholes.   Again, like the Gods.   

I look to the Marquis De Sade and Bill Hicks in helping to bring some balance and perspective to the situation. Their humors embody a very pointed and much-needed kind of hatred and loathing for The Child. Yet they value life, beauty, and truth deeply. Both of them were closer to the actual realization of being an Adult and both of them played with the ferocity and fearlessness of what many of us have yet only experienced in the memory of our childhoods, if we had/have much of one.

We can take our cue from these two beasts of men to then go ahead and insist on resurrecting our childhoods here and now, honoring both shadow and light, allowing these locked up qualities out of their basements and into the yard where they get to play, to dream.  These mythologies, these planets, these words, are all parts of the same whole; the same village, the story of the universe. The dream we are ALL dreaming.

"In fact, don't all beings share in it?" rings true.

In graduating from Dell’ Arte International School of Physical Theatre, 2002, I was witness to a very important moment in the commencement ceremony.  Daniel Stein, then the School Director and Corporeal Mime teacher was to give a speech to the class and our families, and in the minutes before he began as we milled into the old theatre taking our seats, a child, a baby girl was playing with all of the balloons on stage with a very preferable kind of abandon.  Daniel stopped before he started, turned to us and said,

“We all have something very profound to learn from this child. Most of us take ourselves very seriously and our work, not so much… She doesn’t take herself as seriously at all, but her work, as you can see, is of the utmost importance!”

Carl Jung went through this very painful process of realizing that all that was ever really happening was a kind child's play, a moving and shuffling about of wooden blocks, a bouncing of balls, a game of Snakes and Ladders…  When we have the courage to finally allow ourselves this arrival however, we will have arrived and in a way already have arrieved at the Gates of Heaven, ushering our whole selves into an Infinity of Play and Freedom.

 On that note, who wants to open up a Ice Castle Themed Lazer Show Roller Skating rink in North Idaho with me?  All ages, all night!

Thanks for the article and the invitation to teepee Robert, and for the heading Rome.  Very moving.

Thank You to the Native American Church and all the few peoples in the world for loving and praying as much as you do every day and every night.

BLACK AS HELL

STRONG AS DEATH

SWEET AS LOVE.

-Turkish Proverb