A Belated Happy Thanksgiving

I meant to stick this up on Socialistwanker for thanksgiving but technical difficulties...

Anyway this is my sort of "left" if we are talking "left" from an American friend of mine in London.


Happy Thanksgiving today to all my friends who are not with me in the flesh...
This is just an update...

Being an American in exile having not lived in my country of birth for such a long time.. and not really keeping up with the American holidays, I took the decision to actually celebrate this Thanksgiving tradition tonight...for the first time in many years. I will even indulge in turkey, I decided.

I have not eaten the bird, nor any of his close cousins, for ten or more years but today I am living in the loving light of non-duality; That the God/the gods don't really care what I eat for lunch, they created tofu and turkey with the same thought. (As you will read below, it is an irony for the vegetarians that they are probably better off ethically to eat the bird instead of the bean anyway, as it turns out)..

Also, I had am auspicious invitation to join in Thanksgiving turkey dinner from a friend, Loki, who just appeared in England last week. Loki is as wild as in character as they come... He has traveled more than anyone I know. Thousands of miles all over the face of the Earth. He's lived in China and at the foot of Mt. Kailash in Tibet for a while, and he once rode a wild horse all the way from Tierre del Fuego to Mexico, only to barbecue it and eat it upon completion of his journey. .. He definitely plays with your preconcepts of what is 'good' and 'bad'.... so I thought I would break the turkey wish-bone with him tonight. A sayer of sooths and a caster of runes, he Loki is here to stir the pot, and I always bump into him unexpectedly, without appointment, at various points on the planet .

..India, Brasil, Costa Rica, America...and always at major crossroads in my life. He always gives me a very good and prophetic reading of the rune stones which he carries with him everywhere .

The name 'Loki' is from the Norse pantheon of gods. Loki is the god of mischief, the Coyote trickster, connected with fire and magic, and can assume many different shapes.

... Horse, Falcon, Fly.

This Loki I know lives up to his namesake...in fact he has changed name and form many times.. once called Flo, then Wolfsey.. but always the same infectious laughter, and he increasingly resembles a Sith from the Star Wars trilogy, or a wizard from the Lord of the Rings.

Face paint, black hooded cloak, and carrying a tall staff with a skull&crossbones flag.

We went together, Loki and I, with some Tibetan friends of mine, to meet with the Dalai Lama a few nights ago - at the Hilton Hotel at Heathrow airport. It was a very impromptu, last minute invitation and a rather exclusive gathering, only a handful of people and all Tibetan except us. I am not a follower of the Dalai Lama in the strictest sense, I don't have a photo of him on my wall, but I was in the right place at the right time.. and I suppose having Loki in my company might have had something to do with the gods cutting the deck in this way.

The Tibetans had a lot of reverence for Loki as he has lived at Mount Kailiash and had the appearance of a Bon Po shaman from old old Tibet. What was more funny was how Loki and I had been discussing the Dalai Lama throughout the day... how Loki and I are both born the same year, 1971, in Chinese this being the Year of the Pig.. and the D.Lama is also a Pig.

Loki and I had been discussing our Pig-like attributes - somewhat messy, but friendly with everyone. As well we discussed the Dalai Lama and the fact that George Bush had been speaking in defence of his Holiness to the Chinese government that very same day, as had been reported in the newspapers.

I felt a sense of warmth towards George Bush that he had been taking a stand for freedom of expression in a country where such freedom is little tolerated. For Thanksgiving Bush was in the news cavorting with Mongolian tribal chieftains, drinking horse's milk and sitting in a yurt making the wise observation that Mongolia is just like Texas:-

'Huge skies, vast horizons.. and was settled by men on horseback just like where I come from'.

... If only he would spend some time in the Amazon, and perhaps bring awareness to what is going on there. . and perhaps call up the Chinese on this. I went to a premiere of a new Greenpeace film about the destruction of the Amazon last week and as was confirmed to me, most of it is being slashed and burned to grow soy beans.

China's insatiable demand for proteins as well as oil is turning Brazil into the takeaway for the workforce of the world. .. and all the trees of the Amazon are being reduced to ashes to make room for more crops at a rate of 12 football fields per MINUTE, or a forest the size of Israel being destroyed every 12 months.

Some of the trunks of these great ancient trees are so huge that their embers glow on and off for more than two years after they have been slashed and burned. You just can't see the wood for the beans anymore. .. and even if Dubya were to be told by the voice of God to stop his Texan chainsaw massacre on the environment at this point, we would still have to persuade China whose reach is now covering the world.

China is losing a lot of its arable land to cities, factories and roads.. and must now import millions of kilocalories to fuel its growing appetite. .. not to mention lakes of oil.

Most of the protein is coming in the form of soya beans from the Amazon, used to fatten the pigs, poultry and fish for the dinner tables of the worlds most populous country.

What this deforestation of the Amazon spells for global warming is ecological madness. At this rate it seems that we are all as good as microwaved chop-suey...

or will we be poached? .... Would you like fries with that ??

and it did not escape me that as we left the Greenpeace film we were each given a little handy bag with a DVD copy of the film, plus a pair of silk lavender scented eye blindfolds (for wearing at night)..as a takeaway present..

Time to focus our gaze inward, perhaps ?? To see what it is that is witness to all of this but canot be touched by all of this...and begin to live our lives from this place on. Maybe then and only then the world will begin to heal....


I once had a Chinese fortune cookie that said 'Worry is preposterous' ..

...so I guess it better to live in the 'wonder' rather than the ' worry' about the future....wonder is worry without the anxiety. Better to function well in our own little way and just keep wondering..and live in the light of non-closure.

Who knows? Maybe we will all wake up at the critical moment, like the lowly and slovenly and rather stupid caterpillar ..which is very short-sighted and cannot see the bigger sky for the bigger picture... and this caterpillar just crawls around and keeps eating and eating to no end, consuming to the point of killing itself through over-eating (much like the majority of human species on the planet today)...

So it eats itself to death. It begins to be attacked by the same sort of juices that earlier in life it had used to digest its food...But within the caterpillar are certain cells called 'imaginal' cells which have remained asleep but then at the point of the caterpillar's death they awaken and flash on like lights, and begin linking up with each other...so at the point of finality when it seems the caterpillar (or the Earth, as the case may be) is reaching final death, a quantum shift occurs where the caterpillar suddenly becomes a butterfly...like a phoenix rising from the ashes of its former self...

Maybe an increasing number of people, imaginal cells, will start to link up till a critical mass, threshold, is reached .. and then the shift will happen and it will appear that the what we think we are, what is 'human' , bears no resemblance to what we really are...and the Earth was just a cocoon for this...an opportunity for us to awake to our true identity...

The Devil arrives but then the Angel arrives a moment after.

Like the Dalai Lama, we are all in exile somehow....
but somehow always at home in the wonder and unpredictablity of it all....

Give thanks for today ... and stay optmistic...

love, light & tofurkey...


*** chad