Hide. (part 3 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

But I’m here now.

We will peel apart the atom like an apple and discover a seed in its center that is carved somehow with the chicken-scratch autograph of what can only be called God. Though that moment will ruin the word, it will rescue the world, and religion will mean story again.

Every action you commit to in this place creates the brightest light. Burned, pulled into the electrons that energize and power you on. And you will remember, lest ye be remembered, by the lives of all you have eaten, the lives you ran down in the road, the lives you put your hands on without permission. There is life, and consciousness, inside the atom, and therefore memory, and the ability to make decisions.

Push. Pull. Hide. That is what an atom can do. 

Ask yourself. Is that so different from you?

Pull. (part 2 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

All of our mass is here in the proton and neutron. They are together in the nucleus, but distinguished from one another, for example, one is electric, and one is, as far as can be seen, not. The proton pushes, positively charged, like a young dad with bulging arms carrying all the beach toys, neutrons follow his lead and hug his wake and bask his shadow all in tow. But he put his call over the ocean. Heard it answered. A push to pull, a negative to his positive, a farmer for the garden, the electron may very well be the only seed God planted before it slank back into the hammock that rocks above every barrier the beanstalk never broke. Yet.

Am I Jack? Climbing a hairy vine wrists wrapped in red rash, pulling, pushing, hiding when I have to, searching for a slithering piece of snake-like thread that unravels this shape and pulls it apart so completely, such a threat, the giant feels its hammock shift among the swayless trees, in the windless ether of the realm of all-observance, where life was once a dream, but now we’re hushed, because its favorite show is on the tv screen, I scream so that it finally drops both feet and shakes this blanket of blank grass and weeds we’ve been scattered across like a fist full of seeds. I will make the farmer show face and explain itself.

I don’t believe the answer can be found the way one can trace and track the color of a flower to the nutrients in the soil. Because of flaws in the equipment. Because of the limitations of perspective. Our minds weren’t molded to uncover transcendental, universal understanding and Truth. Just survival. That’s all.

To achieve enlightenment we busted apart a telescope and took out the bulbous lens and until now we’ve only been using it to burn ants. 

Push. (part 1 of 3)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Push. Pull. Hide.
I’ve been thinking about atoms again.
I’m thinking that they are alive.
They do things. They push. They pull. They hide.
Just those three things. Almost the same as me.
We fight. Take flight. Or die.
These three fundamental directions are the primary articles of atomic particles.
The invisible specks that make us tick. There is consciousness in the very brick.
So that the thoughts of this old house are like a roaring waterfall of individual droplets,
decisions being made by the foundations. The color of every flower was drunk up
from single cell mouths lapping the boots of Hades clean. Our eyes are the only thing
that makes this confusing. The brain has already drawn the most impossible thing
humans invented.

The straight line.

There can be three temperatures in one bottle of water.
Endless range within the spectrum of existence. But at the base.
When broken down to the source, it’s three. Always a trinity.
Never a traditional binary couple.
The threeway seems to be the preferred union of physics.
And all subsequent interaction, some kind of sex.
Conversation. Groping stars with eyes as light climbs deep inside your mind.
When you see something, the light off it, it touches onto part of you
and your eye converts it into an image the way mitochondria cook bread into sugar,
and it feeds pretty pictures like chocolate covered strawberries to your brain.
The light of every candle you ever lit, every shooting star, lives inside your head.
You’re pregnant with it.

Push. Pull. Hide. Proton. Electron. Neutron. I’ve tried to wrap my mind around it but it is quite like trying to define a term by other terms when all you’ve ever known is one term. It’s like constipation. I imagine it is like birth. Like feeling held hostage by what is inside you, and you know you will surely die if you fail to bring it forth. Why are the hardest pieces to break into pieces so obsessive over one another, why do they relationship so consistently in threes, so violently, hold themselves together by tearing apart their neighbors, or keeping their little triangular shapes but slamming jamming against identicals and forming larger globules and the eventual elemental structures which could in some ways be described as the ancient jagged originators of life. Why?

Not how. We can observe that. By pushing, pulling, and hiding.

The Monopolization of Need

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

It takes the greatest power to give up power. It is the rarest trait witnessed in Mankind. There are those in the world in the grip of lesser power who scoff at the idea that anyone would give it up, they laugh and they deny the existence of those who would refuse to drink from their rim-stained cup. They hate their lives, which they’ve turned into never ending seeks and never ending hides, and their new friends are always their best friends until they find new friends and it never ends that they always end. Haven’t called their mothers in months. But will sit on a barstool and sob to strangers such strange confessions that no one knows what they are listening to, crimes or allegations. 

It is a well-funded, well-dressed, and quite sober seeming lie, nonetheless, money alone has never made anybody happy. Look at the lives of celebrities. Look at the lies of politicians. They hate their lives. Their words will deny, but look in their eyes, it is the terror of someone who has claimed their neighbor and called them their slave. There are conversations that happen in safe rooms where rich people say things that would bring a protest down on their ten acre lawn. We’ll forego the American letter-writing version, and go straight to la révolution française. They will never make it right because that requires confession and repentance. They will desire to quietly have things change and never admit their level of complicity in deciding large factions of us will live in perpetual poverty so that the few of them won’t have to look at their choices on their morning commute.

Fear has no muscle except grip. That’s why it’s easy to let it steer the ship. But it won’t let go when time comes. When that wind and ocean turns and that rudder doesn’t, there is no ship under fear’s control that can stand an instant against it.

They will not give it up. They have the government. But the people have the power. And no one wants to share what is only ours. When slaveowners had their say in the shape of our economy, they left their mark, to say the least. They ultra-defined the top and middle classes, but left the bottom dark and murky. There is no profit, not anything like we see today, without some form of slavery, without someone’s labor going unpaid. By people who can not feed their families or their selves without the work. Who have no free, accessible environment to survive in, only an economy, a few dollars buys something like dinner, two hundred pays the water’s bill. May not get to the rent this month.

I’m not being deep, or philosophical, or idealistic when I state, slavery. Our modern economy is a form of human trafficking. Because of the lack of any option to survive otherwise. If you want to live a full happy human life, outside of your government’s economy, where does that happen? On the land you’re taxed just for having? In a State or National Park where the wildlife has more rights than humans.

Freedom means living freely with no cost other than the effort required to access the resources required to sustain productive, fulfilling life. Food, water, shelter, hopefully from sources that naturally, or with a little assistance, replenish. If that option does not exist, then this is not freedom.

I can’t say it any more plainly. By definition, if the resources required for life (we die without them) cost money and are not available from any other naturally reoccurring source, then we are not free.

This is not a monopoly of a product. The crime I described here is the monopolization of the need.

Fear and Pride as Strengths

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Plants will hold up cups above their heads to catch bees in but bury their roots beneath the soil so that half the rain runs off before it soaks in. Trees will grow up tall and huge and heavy and spread out thick green sails from their oaken masts and dare the wind the topple them: perhaps they push the continent, perhaps it is why we still sail across the Atlantic, why California continues to be nibbled by the Pacific. If a human were a tree it would grow wide and flat close to the earth where no wind could tickle it. If a human were a plant, they’d put their bright colors beneath the ground in fear for anyone finding them. Lift their roots up to the elements so they can feed freely and never learn why their seeds bear no germ.