Another Tibetan has set himself on fire. That makes 11 in 11 months and 16 since 2009.

So what, the rabid atheists say. Another fool seduced by another foolish religion. Thousands of people die everyday in far more horrific ways. Why should we care? (I cannot tell you how sad that makes me, knowing that anyone could become so casually indifferent to death and suffering.)

Of course, the protest in Tibet is not just about religious freedom. It is about the genocide of a people. It is about wiping a unique culture off the face of the planet and out of the minds of men. Oh, but then, those who have been Bible born and raised would not be shocked by this. It is no different than the Israelite armies, led by Moses, then Joshua, then Judah, marching through the Middle East and killing every man, woman and child that dared to be different from them, putting Genghis Khan to shame and making him seem a slacker. Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers is a proud recounting of a ruthless and bloodthirsty mob and all the societies they wiped from the planet forever. (Have I not said before that The Lord of the Flies was just a retelling of the story of Moses in the desert?)

Why should we care about Tibet? If Tibet were an animal it would be the tiger. (Few left in the wild, most in zoos.) There are Tibetans free to dress and act like Tibetans but they do not live in Tibet. What would we lose, if we allowed Tibet die? It might be a good question to ask BEFORE Tibet disappears under China’s bulldozers.

Actually Kurt Vonnegut explained it the best. In Slaughterhouse Five, the Tralfamadorians explain to Billy Pilgrim that they have five sexes but that humans have many more and that it takes all the sexes to make a baby. Humans don’t realize this because most of the sexual energy exists in other dimensions.

Too ironic?

Perhaps a study of the social dynamic of the Sioux horse culture would be better suited. Even the smallest of bands had a chief and a medicine woman and a shaman along with all the warriors and maidens and wives and wise old men. These leaders were not elected, nor were they self appointed. They were leaders because of all the members of the tribe, these were the ones best suited for the role. Nor were they autocratic and dictatorial. The people, having integrated their spirituality into their everyday life, only came to them in times of need. The leaders and holy people were not a drain on their society because they served a very real and valuable purpose. Like Tibet of the old days, the Sioux encouraged their people to regularly leave their rational, logic mind and explore the universe with the right brain.

The brain is like a house. The frontal cortex is the place where we build walls that keep the rest of the world out. There is no blurring of boundaries. The “I” of us is very clear. But the closer you get to the central core of the brain, the closer you get to the “back door” that is open to the pan-dimensional universe, the more you realize you are hanging bare-arsed and naked in the infinite void for all to see. The right brain seems to be the place we use most when we go “traveling”. It is the place where we connect to the rest of our “self” that we left behind when we crossed the veil into human birth.

All the knowledge of the infinite is available to you if you are willing to find that open door and fall out of your mind.

Vonnegut knew this. The Sioux knew this. Most of the ancient peoples knew this.  Tibet was one of those places where that idea was integrated into everyday life. Maybe because they were so far up into the sky, that much further away from the chaos of the fecundity of  life at sea level, that much closer to the stars, where the air is thinner and life is harder and the pattern of the circle of life was etched ever so much more deeply into every act and motion. Up at the top of the world where the air is thinner and gravity does not drag you down as much, they developed a way of life that acknowledged and celebrated the Patterning of the Oneverse. It was reflected in every aspect of the way they lived, right down to the color and pattern of their clothing. Mao knew this. The first thing he did when his men blitzkrieged their way into Tibet was ban the outward trappings of being a native Tibetan. (A devastating blow, as the Sioux will tell you, having had their children taken from them, long hair cut off, dressed in white man’s clothes and taught in white man’s schools, effectively wiping out a culture by erasing a language. Genocide is not just about body count.)

Why is Tibet important? Because mankind needed them to do what they did best, unnoticed yet important, like Vonnegut’s pan-dimensional sex.

Because, just by waking up and walking through their day, they were keeping the Patterning of the Oneverse alive in the universe.

What do they say about freedom? That you have to fight for it everyday otherwise it will be taken from you. Holding back the chaos is very much like that. It nibbles at the edges of your life, eroding it, day by day, minute by minute, until nothing is left. You keep it at bay with the little things you do every day. Wake up, brush your teeth, wash your face, eat, do the dishes, dust and sweep and mop and do the laundry, water the plants, mow the lawn, weed the flower beds, call your mom, read a bedtime story to your children before you kiss them goodnight. You mark you place in the universe with your intentions and your actions and your wishes. The cancer of the unending nothingness that is chaos cannot break this pattern, not easily anyway.

It has been over fifty years since China walked into Tibet and destroyed the Pattern Keepers. The magic was thousands of years in the making. It would take more than a little bit of genocide to wipe it away. But China has been diligent and everyone else has turned a blind eye to the destruction of something irreplaceable. It is only now, half a century later, that we look around and begin to notice that chaos is winning.

Who will beat back the chaos now?

I used to study kung fu. I wanted to the modern version of an Amazon warrior. Why not, right? I had never thought of myself as limited by my sex. I grew up in an extended family of powerful, self actualized women, in which our mothers and grandmothers refused to stay in the safe little box society had given them, daring to go to college when most men had barely an eighth grade education, daring to travel into the wilds of Montana to become homesteaders and being successful at it against all odds, helping to build a state whose history was replete with women doing a man’s job and doing it well, long before anyone had invented the word suffragette.

Then came the feminist revolution and I watched while the really cool older girls burned their bras and I thought, yeah, the whole gender role thing is a bunch of hooey created by men to keep us subjugated. I figured, and rightly so, that the only limits were the ones I put on myself.

But the kung fu warrior thing just didn’t work out. I got all the way up to brown belt before I surrendered, forced to admit that maybe women aren’t meant to do certain things. Oh, I liked the sparring. I took on guys two feet tall and twice as heavy. I was fearless and when I was on the floor I felt no pain. It was afterward, as I stood in front of the mirror and inspected my bruises and groaned every time I got my hips in one position that I realized I was kidding myself. Women, during their reproductive years, cycle through a wonderful soup of hormones that help her be fertile. These hormones also soften connective tissue and cause extreme bruising from only minor contact. Full contact sports is twice as destructive on a female body as a man’s and can only be recommended for the under thirty crowd who heal faster.

Our bodies limit us in other ways. There is that pesky layer of fat and the internal thermostat that ensures our babies survivie for the nine months they need in the womb. It makes us better marathon runners and long distance hikers but it also makes us suseptible to heat stroke and heat exhaustion long before men succumb to the malady under the same conditions. Oh, you can diet and exercise until even that fat is gone but you loose your menses and get early onset menopause, in which your bones turn brittle like a 90 year old woman virtually overnight.

And that is just the physical differences. The differences in brain function are doubly dramatic. Every living person between the ages of 12 and 45 views the world through a haze of chemically induced delusions that ensure just one thing; that the species survives, thrives and like a virus, expands until it exploits every corner of planet. Women, because of the cycle of hormones, have  a window of sanity once a month where she can look around and check off the stuff on her list under “How am I doing?” Civilization was created for and by this sanity, not, as the men like to tell you, by the power of beer.

The power of logic demands order and those rules of order control our hormone poisoned brains and keep them from devolving humans back into a species as mindlessly violent as the chimp. They are not arbitrary rules but a formalized reiteration of our natural rules of engagement in a human group. We did not start out with the intent of marginalizing either males or females.

The rules of the group consensus gave rise to laws. Laws rose up out of the need to curb the human propensity to kill their brothers, f*ck their sisters, and eat their young in the fits of competitive aggression. Think of the rule of law as a formalized “kill switch” for the natural, aggressive, and extreme proclivities of human sexuality.

Rethink the biblical story of Moses. Here he was, a well educated member of the ruling class, burdened with thousands of freed slaves who had lived under the boots of their masters so long they had forgotten how to behave. They knew how to be slaves but they were absolutely clueless about how to be free men. Things started going all “Lord of the Flies” and Moses had to come up with something quick otherwise they were all going to die out in that desert. So he went up the mountain, cut himself a couple of rocks and chiseled a few basic no-brainer rules into the stone and called them the Ten Commandments. Ta dah! Civilization for Dummies.

Baby steps. That’s the only way to pull yourself out of muck at the bottom of the cesspool or the genetic pool.

Before the world rips their assumptions to threads, all little girls start out thinking that the only difference between girls and boys is the plumbing. We assume that our brains function in the same manner. That we approach problem solving with the same skill sets. We think we can be “just friends” with our male friend while the male friend, his brain the forever optimist, secretly always hopes for more.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I totally believe that children, while their brain is still developing (the under 25 crowd) should role play and allow their natural curiosity to lead them on explorations of every nook and cranny that is opened to them, be they sexual, social, or theological with no long term consequences. Experience is a better teacher than rule following, after all.

But I have become a realist. Experience has made me so.

My generation of women grew up with the very real and the ever present threats of nuclear war and human extinction hanging over our heads. Our fathers and grandfathers had perfected genocide as a natural progression of a very twisted form of sperm competition. It was in this that the modern Feminist movement was germinated and first began to grow.

It was only natural that we, as mothers, would use our children as test rats in our own personal sociology experiments. We tried to inoculate our male children against the viral thinking of war. Our fathers may have been raised on a steady diet of John Wayne movies and cowboy flicks full of guns and swords, where death was a bloodless thing not unlike little boys playing war in the back yard. Not our children. Toys of war were not allowed in our houses. John Wayne was banned to be replaced by the grimmer and more real fair, where people bled when they were hurt and never healed, and far off  and unseen battles destroyed lives, where mothers had to burying their children because men had created a dance of violence so pervasive it included women and children in its destruction. (The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest … )

Then George Lucas created Star Wars and seduced us all with his light sabers and his laser guns and his bloodless deaths. Curse you, George. We gave up, not because Star Wars was necessarily a great magnum opus but because we had already discovered that nurture could not overwrite nature. That our enormous brains and prodigious intelligence was no match for DNA and hormones. How many mothers watched their toddler sons pick up the dolly or the tinker toy and fashion a gun with which to point at his imaginary opponent while uttering the universal words of destruction.  ”Pew pew”, my son said. I knew I had lost.

Having weathered the Feminist Revolution and watched the Equal Rights Amendment die under the heels of men terrified by the very idea of women competeing with them at their own game, and then watched as the whole movement turn into a quasi-lesbian hate fest in which men became our enemies and hard and hateful things were said by women forgetting that their own sons, whom they loved, were sitting in the same room, listening to the words that would emasculate them.

We had fought the war for our own freedom and taken ground from the power brokers. Like old soldiers, we retired from the field of battle, exhausted and forgotten. We waited for our daughters to take up the fight but it was not to be. They were too busy exploring the limits of the new terrain we had freed up for them. This was right and we were content.

There is a new battle cry for gender equality echoing through the youth of today. I am reminded of the slaves that Moses brought out of Egypt. The old rules have been forgotten. All they remember is what the powered elite have told them and they have rightly figured out that most of this was lies. There is no Moses to come down from the mountain to tell them what to do so they are busy trying to chisel out their own rules, new rules, not realizing that it has been done a thousand times before and that as much as the fire of idealism burns in your veins, it cannot overwrite the fire that burns in their loins and sometimes those two forces are in direct opposition.

There can be no such thing as gender equality. It is physically impossible. What we can have, however, is a world in which there are no limits placed upon the minds and bodies of those who would strive towards greatness. Men and women do not want to be equal. We want to be free to be who we are. We don’t want a level playing field. We want our own field. We don’t want to take your ball and try to beat you at your own game. We think your game is dumb and we wish you would stop trying to make us play it.

Further reading:  Here is a brief summary of how the behavior of risk taking in a male brain, while advantageous to a hunter or a warrior, can steer him wrong in modern civilization:  Why women are better (and men are worse) at some things.

Further viewing: Feminism and Male disposability  This is a well thought out treatise about how men are abused and downtrodden by society based on the wrong headed assumption that women invented the laws that keep everyone locked in rigid gender roles.

and under why things are as they are: male sexual aggression disrupts social networks

Since the powers that be want us to all become serfs, perhaps we need to go back to a more primitive and essentially more effective government. City States. No more First Past the Post elections. Use the Alternative method. You would get one vote but it would elect the Alderman of your village or neighborhood. That Alderman, along with all the other Aldermen in your city would elect a Mayor, the Mayors would elect the County Commissioner. Commissioners would elect State Representatives. The Representatives would elect the National Senators and the Senators would elect the President. There would be no term limits because at any point in time the people or the voting body could hold a “vote of no confidence” and demote the person who was perceived as doing their job badly. There would be no campaigning thereby insuring that the most qualified person gets elected because, of course, experienced and effective people garner the most recognition among their peers. On the local level, the elders who volunteer as mediators and organizers, being more civic minded, would most likely be the ones elected as Alderman.

The average guy is relieved of the burden of knowing anything about state or world politics but is encouraged by minor bureaucratic penalties to vote in every local election. (Argentina issues little booklets that get stamped every time you vote. If your booklet is not up to snuff you have a hard time getting passports, driver’s licenses, library cards, etc. ) The only people meeting face to face would be the people in the local town halls. Town hall meetings would be regular and frequent in order to be proactive about issues before they become problems.

There would be no laws but those agreed to by consensus on the village level. If the village has internal  issues that cannot be resolved locally, such as a local thug wanting to become Alderman, they appeal to the other villages around them for support to get rid of the bad guys. This will be the same for county and state governments as well. No prisons are necessary. Villages deal with their scofflaws by putting them to work for the public good just as they would deal with their own unemployed, homeless, and health care. The insane sociopaths are summarily executed after a village wide vote.

There are no standing armies except in times of war but every adult, male or female, is part of the local militia and is a trained soldier who is issued weapons, (along the same lines as Switzerland). If there is a call for soldiers for local emergencies or national disasters or national defense (but the need for national defense would be eliminated once every continent adopts this framework), the county, state or federal governments will call up their citizens after a vote (again not FPTP but Alternative voting.) The villages will be the only ones who will be able to choose who of their citizens will go to war or respond to emergencies. (Scofflaws, by their very nature, make very good soldiers after a little bit of training. A resource that everyone can exploit.)

In an electronic age, there would be no capitol buildings. Voting would take place by conference call and require minimum debate because, of course, the positions in government are unpaid and these people need to get back to their day jobs.

What little taxes collected would go to local infrastructure. For state or federal project, the costs would be divided equally among all the states who would turn around and divide the burden among all the counties until the bill eventually worked its way down to the village level and the village would ask that those who can most afford it, to pay into the fund. Since the average worker would get to keep all his wages, this will not be a problem.

Insurance companies would cease to exist. You would have no need for insurance because your village is your safety net.

Debt would disappear as each village took up the burden of maintaining all their citizens. Land ownership would be limited to the inhabitants of the villages. Uninhabitable and unarable land would become part of the open space held in common ownership by the cities and counties. Multinational corporations would pay for the privilege of doing business in each county, these profits distributed to the people.

The ultimate goal would be that the vast majority of the wealth of the people would stay with the people, so that they might bestow it in a generous spirit on those they loved best. Charity works best when it begins at home.

ah

is it not the stuff of legend

the twisted, malformed child

allowed to live

through a perhaps misplaced sense of compassion

instead of allowing the midwife to take it away and drown it

grows as twisted in the mind as in the body

hating the thing that gave it birth

because of its own self loathing

but being weak, it cannot kill itself so must kill the source instead

Imagine that you are a wolf.

There are two kinds of wolf memories. The everyday kind, like the smell of the alpha bitch wolf telling where she is in her estrus cycle and how healthy she is. The sight of a flight of geese high overhead. The scent of the mule deer on the early morning breeze. The trail marker of the alpha male of the neighboring pack. Everyday memories fade with time. The brain produces a chemical not unlike the active ingredient in marijuana, that erases the old and clears the way for new short-term memories. The scent of the trails are different every day and the receptivity of the alpha female is a story set on replay, running past your mind over and over again.

But there are some memories that should never be forgotten. These are the memories that serve a purpose. They keep you alive. Watching a pack member die, convulsing and frothing at the mouth from eating poison bait. The sound of the steel trap snapping closed, the feel of the rush of adrenaline as you leap away, loosing only a few hairs or the pad on one toe to its cold jaws. The feel of the hoof of the bison as its foot kicks out and barely misses breaking your jaw or a few ribs or a leg, all of which might have been fatal. The empty lost feeling as you realize you were playing instead of paying attention and now you just might die. The crazy euphoria when by luck or fate, you manage not to. The smell of humans and the sound of helicopters and the zing of a ricocheting bullet long before the sound of the report reaches your ears.

Humans have wolf memories, though we try, quite unsuccessful, to build a world that keeps the cold jaws of death at a distance. We all have some sort of memory that has been indelibly laid down in that place in our brain that holds such things, far from that pesky chemical that wants to erase it all. The agony of that first burn when you decided to test to see if Mom was right about the bright flickering flame. The feel of the breeze on the back of your head as you barely avoid getting hit by a car when you are five. The rush of adrenaline when you first experience acrophobia hanging off the side of a building or a tree or a cliff. The panic in your heart when your kid decides to play hide and seek in the department store and you can’t find him for ten excruciating minutes. The sickening crunch of steel as a couple of tons of steel going sixty miles per hour tries to turn you into meat pudding in a can. The gun of the guy who mugged you. The knife of the guy who raped you. Those are First World terrors of First World problems. Like the wolf, these are memories that keep you and your descendants alive and safe.

The Second World has acquired a different set of terrors. The terror in your mothers eyes as she watches her friends disappear one by one, never to return. The real fear you feel when your father tells you to straighten up and not make waves otherwise the secret police might notice you and take you away. The despair when your uncle or your aunt go off to work and never return. The grief when that one teacher who liked to talk about politics stopped showing up at school. The empty placeholders you leave in your lives because the oppressors have left no body to bury and no obvious death to morn. The constant self questioning of a survivor, asking what did they do that I did not? Why was I spared when so many were taken? Doing what it takes to survive no matter how dirty you felt afterwards. Living in a society that survived thirty years of oppression by criminals and thugs yet having no one to prosecute because everyone had blood on their hands by the time it was over. Clinging to the a group, thinking there is safety in numbers long after the goon squads have faded away.

These are the wolf memories that haunt you like ghosts long after the things that caused them have disappeared. You break free and think you have lost them but all it takes is a smell or a sound to bring them back as strong and as powerful as they day you made them. Do you wonder then, that someone has invented a drug to erase them?

Stand still long enough and you will see it. The clues are in the minute details and not in the appearances, for appearances are false in a society sculpted by old fears. You can tell the wounds have not healed. They are just scabbed over. All it takes is a thought or a word or an uncomfortable situation and the scab breaks, to bleed anew. You can see it in the style of dress and haircuts 10 or 15 years out of style, the social norms frozen and rigid, the very act of social evolution stunted by a fear of acting the rebel, a plus in the First World but a deadly flaw in the Second. You can tell things are not going well by the tacit acceptance of corruption and thuggery in their public officials who have more power and more wealth than is healthy for any society. You can tell because they have all the trappings of a First World society but with none of the sense of permanence or the ability to trust in its existence that is implicit in the First World.

You can tell by the hitch in the breath and the distant looks and the worried frowns of the children of that war, now in their thirties, as they try to break free of those old memories and build a better world for their own children but who still cling to the need to be a faceless cog in the invisible machine yet who are jaded enough to believe that the only way to the top is to be a bigger thug than the thugs in power.

Look around. This is what you see. It is the self-induced schizophrenia of an entire country caught in the throes of PTSD trying to purge themselves of wolf memories that have long since ceased to serve a purpose and yet, because we are human, we unconsciously create the world we fear most, so the wolf memories linger, just in case. Just in case.

The Wanderer walked through the gate and looked around in wonder.

Wonder was what he always felt upon leaving the gates; wonder that he was still alive, wonder at the feeling of being born new and clean into an unknown place, wonder at where he had been and where he was going. The crushing weight of infinite time inside the portals stripped him clean of his past and took away his most recent thoughts, making them a vague and distant memory. He wondered, not for the first time, if he had ever had a name. They said there were a thousand lifetimes between one step and the next as you crossed the threshold of a time portal. Perhaps they were right. Or perhaps the energy of the portals merely scrambled your brains and what he felt as the passing of infinite time was merely the symptoms of irreparable brain damage. Either way, it did not matter.

He stood upon the lintel of the gate, the energy of his passage fading behind him and looked around curiously. He was alone in a dimly lit chamber remarkable in its immense size and by its absolute silence. He was surprised by this. Vague though his memories might be, he was fairly certain that the portals were usually outside, built upon isolated hills just high enough and far enough away from human habitation to keep the energy flares, always a remote possibility, from frying the local population. These peoples had chosen, instead, to seal their portal behind thick stone walls.

The Wanderer cocked his head to listen to the world beyond this strange room. Open sky and sunlight was far away, up above his head. The portal seemed to have been buried in stone. For some reason, he found this profoundly disturbing yet he could not remember why that should be. He worried over that thought for a moment and then shook his head to clear it. What he needed to remember would come to him eventually. All truths did, in the end.

The room was not the only surprising part of his current predicament. He was alone. Up until now his experiences led him to expect that the portals would always be guarded by priests either of the religious bent or as members of the scientific cults. No one stood here to tell him where he was or to give him directions to the nearest monastic institute or traveler’s hostel. Confusion kept him rooted to the spot for a double handful of moments while his brain sorted through the drifts of knowledge laying about in his brain, trying to come up with a logical matrix of cause and effect that best suited this current conundrum.

A number of possible scenarios presented themselves for his consideration. That the planet lay dead under a thinning sky topped that list. He waited, hoping he was in error. His eyes grew accustomed to the perpertual gloom of the room, enough to see that the dim glow came from pinpoints of light set in the high ceiling in a pattern meant to mimic the stars set in the heavens. The stone sense above him put a lie to that electrical illusion. Heartened a bit by this small semblance of technology, he waited, hoping against hope that the presence of electricity might also promise the presence of sensors and security cameras or perhaps a robotic mind left to do the task humans found too tedious.

No one came. He sighed forlornly. He had a memory of cities, centuries dead, still powered by their atomic furnaces. Perhaps this was such a place.

When it became apparent that no one was coming to investigate the gate’s activation, the Wanderer stepped off the altar dais and began walking towards the far wall. Time did not exist in this room except for that measured by the even tread of his feet upon the dusty stone floor. He tried counting his steps but the silence fogged his mind. He lost track after five hundred.

Eventually he spotted a set of doors in the pale light. They opened effortlessly at his touch. Beyond were more rooms. He explored for a bit, until, quite to his surprise, he turned a corner and came face to face with an old woman busy sweeping the dust into random piles on the ancient stone floors. She stared at him, puzzled by his presence in her usually deserted domain and, upon being asked, pointed silently towards the doors that would lead him outside. He thanked her but she remained mute, perhaps not understanding his words. He could not tell for certain.  He had spoken in Universal Pandimensional Basic but playing the lost tourist asking direction was universally understood no matter what the language.

The doors led to a hallway, the hallway to an elevator. He pressed the only button and after a moment the doors hissed open. Entering, he studied the control panel. After a bit of ciphering, he pushed the button that most probably represented zero. The elevator took him down a dozen stories before the doors opened to reveal a great atrium through which scores of people scurried, each intent on their own private purpose, it seemed. He watched the frenetic motion of scores of bodies for a moment. The chaos of their motion sorted itself out in his mind. What appeared disconnected and solitary, when viewed as a whole, took on a pattern and a synchronicity that turned their movements into an intricate dance. The dance hinted at the formation of a hive mind.

The Wanderer had encountered the human hive mind on other planes, on other planets. Its development was always a signal of a species in the midst of an evolutionary leap. This transition was never comfortable. It was akin to a worm destroying itself from the inside out inside its chrysalis so that it might reform its baser nature into something far more wondrous. He wondered vaguely where they stood on the painful and inevitable slide into chaos and whether he might be better served turning around and letting the portal take him somewhere else.

He chewed on his lower lip, a worried frown on his brow. The portals were self directing, bringing him where he was needed most. These people needed him but even now, after all this time, he distrusted the mindless, primordial power that made this true.

The elevator beeped impatiently, interrupting his reverie, reminding him that it had places to go that did not involve ferrying bemused Wanderers about as they looked for a purpose to life. The Wanderer stepped out and the elevator gave him one last annoyed beep before it whisked itself away.

The Wanderer abandoned all thoughts of striking up a conversation with the people around him. He had no desire to talk to the hive mind and humans caught up in its matrixes tended towards the irrational. He decided, instead, to continue playing the lost tourist.

It had been such a long time since he had visited someplace just for the sheer joy of being somewhere different that it took him a few moments to remember what that might feel like. Was there a purpose behind the motions of sightseeing? He rummaged through his head until he settled upon what might be the universal theme of tourism. Curiosity. The Wanderer looked around for some small thing that might peak his curiosity.

He was too old and too jaded to care about the architecture or the art work on the walls. But the quality of the light intrigued him. The atrium had the deep green gloom of a forest floor. This confused his senses as he knew for a fact a densely packed and densely populated city grew towards the skies around him. Curiosity led him to follow a stream of people through a series of doors set in a glass wall. Waves of densely packed air played over his body as he stepped through each doorway. The Wanderer smiled, delighted. The doors were a cleverly disguised air lock. The Wanderer counted himself a connoisseur of cleverness. Perhaps this place was not completely hopeless.

Outside, the air was a living thing that engulfed him and settled wetly into his lungs. He coughed softly, the smell and the weight of it robbing him temporarily of his breath. The people around him crossed the building’s stone apron quickly, hands over their noses, as if finding the noisome damp air unpleasant. Long cars, their windows shuttered against the green light, stopped to catch them up, the doors hissing open with a brisk efficiency, the machines’ chilled breath lingering long after the doors closed and the people had gone. Other cars sped by in a blur of steel and industrious intent. Tourist, the Wanderer decided, would not be so hasty. He chose not to enter the cars but instead wandered down the tree-lined walkway.

This city must have truly loved its trees at one time, though the people around him barely looked up to notice their presence and the windows above his head were shuttered and dark, shielded from the inopportune intrusions of the beauty of golden light, blue sky or green tree. The trees grew all the same, albeit unnoticed, planted at regular intervals in small squares of soil cut into the verge of the walkway and along the median that divided the opposite flows of traffic. These were not the stunted and sickly trees of other cities. No. These trees stood tall and lush, towering over him dozens of stories high, their canopies reaching towards the narrow patches of sky, competing for space with the stone and glass high-rises that formed canyon walls around them.

An odd thought bubbled up in his mind. How was it that a rainforest had grown up here, only to have ninety percent of its arboreal giants become stone, he wondered. The Wanderer let this fancy take him further, imagining some troll with an evil eye stomping through the ancient groves, freezing the living, turning wood into stone and leaf into glass with its terrible troll glare.

He laughed out loud as he strode down the avenue filled from cliff face to cliff face with trees. Truth was sometimes more magical than fancy. There was a great river somewhere close by. He could smell it on the wind and feel its water swelling the great sponge of land under this city’s feet. The city was not clean. No city this size ever was. The river and the streets were saturated with the effluvia of the millions of city dwellers and their animal familiars. The ancient pipes meant to carry the waste to some distant treatment plant lay crazed with cracked under the pavement. The trees, opportunistic feeders as were all things that wished to survive and continue existence in the face of unbeatable odds used the city canyons as shelter against the great storms that blew in from the not so distant ocean just as a grove of trees might take shelter from the winds inside the embrace of their kin in a primordial forest. Thus protected, these city born trees sank their toes into the porous gravel under the city’s foundations and drew up the rich nutrients they found there in great thirsty gulps.

The Wanderer, true to his name, wandered as the sun arced slowly across the sky. He could have used a cold drink or a sweet bun but the clerks behind the counters in the shops shooed him away when it became apparent he had none of the local coin. He finally found a cart-man selling stimulating iced teas and another selling bits of spicy sausage encased in crusty buns to queues of street sweepers, delivery men, window washers, and dog walkers. He got what he needed with just a smile and a touch and a look into the deep soul places inside those who would be generous. It was a fair exchange. For the price of a bit of food, he lifted their burden and drove back the shadows in their hearts for a brief moment, giving in a universal currency recognized by all those who lived and worked closest to the earth.

He ate and drank, shaded by the ever present canopy of trees, eating in communion with the day laborers, until his small hungers were satisfied. Then he wandered on. His full belly and the heat of the late afternoon sun made him drowsy. The laborers grew sleepy as well. He could feel them settling all across the city, to doze in out of the way patches of deep shade. It was contagious, this hazy tiredness. Even the workers in the windowless, air conditioned skyscrapers felt it and dozed in front of their flickering screens. He found a sad little patch of grass under a tree with lacy foliage and slept until the sun was low in the sky and the air began to cool.

Sleep led to dreaming, a fools mistake that. Wresting himself from a disturbing dream, he sat up, his heart pounding in his chest. An immense sentience had stalked him in his sleep. He had fled before it but found himself cornered in the tree filled canyons of the city with nowhere to run. It had eaten him whole, that sentience, smothering him with her succulent body, her corpulent breasts pressing against his mouth, cutting off the screams in his throat.

He scrubbed his face roughly with the palms of his hands, trying to erase the feel and the taste of Her from his mind. She rolled restlessly under him even now, whispering lovers endearments into his mind’s ear, entreating him to defend her honor and avenge her defilement. She would have gone on to enumerated her many grievances but he closed his mind to it, having heard them a million times before on a million other planets. She was Maiden, Wife and Mother, this thing, and everything living owed their life to Her and every dead thing embraced Her like a long lost lover as they were absorbed back into Her flesh. He wondered what had offended her sensibilities so much that She had woken from Her dreams of creation to pace the land and harass the living with Her rage.

It was not hard to guess but he let his mind delve into the memories of the city around him anyway, letting his ghoulish curiosity lead him onward. The city held so many secrets, secrets ripe for the picking to any who knew how to find them. Humans might force forgetfulness, to keep their sanity, but the stones remembered.  Night stalkers and rapists the stones wept. Murder, they whispered. Genocide, they moaned.

The Wanderer sighed a tired sigh. Was it part and parcel of a species on the brink of change, that the angst of transition turned humans murderous? Or did self destruction trigger the transformation, like the ill timed contractions of a premature birth? Had the old order, holding tight to their power inside the ossifying body of the old Mother, purge the souls who had been so foolish as to hear the Maiden’s new song that would change them all?

Whatever the source, human genocide wreaked havoc upon the fabric of any world, the killing so pervasive that it left no one behind to say the rites that loosed the hold the dead had upon things and places, no one to say the words that would untie them from their entanglements on this side of the Veil. The dead did not rest easy if they died murdered and unavenged and this place was rife with angry ghosts. He whispered a prayer of singularity and wished them peace, hoping to change the tone of their song and the direction of their focus.

The incantation did not work as well as he hoped. The ghosts sighed, their pain easing. The trees would have none of it. Apparently ghosts were easier to appease than the trees. The Wanderer cocked his head, trying to hear around the moans of the ghosts. The trees would not let him ignore the Maiden’s song. They took it up and added their own harmonies. Theirs was not a song of loss and grief but something far fiercer, having drunk down the rivers of blood this city had fed them over the generations. The Wanderer shuddered and looked up into the canopy above his head, a shiver of fear running down his spine. He had been foolishly mistaken. These were not tame, city bred trees. Oh, no. These were the trees of the primordial forest, having learned the way of the fecundity of life and agony of brutal death, embraced as they were by the towers of man and all his ruthless workings. He tried to close his mind to their rage.

He rose and walked on as the light grew dim, uneasy under the Maiden’s attentions and uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the fierce trees. He longed to climb to the roof of one of the highrises that he might put his nose into the clean wind and listen for the coming storms.

Soon, the office workers descended from their towers to take their mid-workday meal in the shops that lined the streets. He took a sandwich of thin, pink meat and delicate cheese from the offering hands of a woman seated at a sidewalk cafe. He ate as he walked and when he had swallowed the last bite, a stranger handed him a tall glass of beer so cold the humid air made the sides slippery with condensation. He smiled, touching their hands in blessing and walked on.

Yet still people slumbered, behind their closed shades, ignorant of the passing of the light.

The nature of the people populating the street gradually changed as the sun set and the air cooled. The day laborers cast fearful eyes on the dimming sky and scurried to catch the street cars that would take them out of the city. They would not be spending the night in the shadow of the tall buildings and the hungry trees and they would all be gone as the sun touched the horizon, believing in ghosts and the karma of blood debt as they did. He could not blame them, thinking to follow their example himself. The Wanderer turned and retraced his steps back towards the portal.

The portal was always a presence in his mind; a beacon in the darkest of nights. Even in this ghost-ridden city, the sense of its presence was unerring. Night descended like a soft veil upon the city and caught him before he could make good his escape. He could sense the rats stirring cautiously in their warrens. Creatures of the night and travelers in the shadows as they were, they were not the penultimate predator on the nighttime streets. Something far darker woke inside the hollow shells of the stone towers above his head.

Was it fancy or fact, this sudden conviction that for every living soul waking from their day of slumber, dozens of the restless dead woke as well. Was it illusion or real, the sudden belief that not all the apartments above his head had living inhabitants, negating his initial assessment that the city teemed with people. It teemed, but not all of what woke was part of the land of the living.

This was not a healthy line of thinking. The depth and breadth of the illness of this city struck him, all of a sudden, blurring his vision and turning the sidewalk to quicksand under his feet. He staggered, putting out a hand to steady himself. His fingers found old, soot-stained stone and he pressed his face into the bricks of a building whose top ended somewhere in the wispy clouds far above his head. All the while the city whispered awful things, terrible things into his mind.

They did not sleep at night, the people who lived here, in this primordial forest of steel and stone. They worked and played, ate and drank, danced and entertained until the first rays of dawn broke across the sky. Only then did they fall into their beds, to sleep the dreamless sleep of the exhausted. The ghosts were to blame. They owned the darkness, owned the night. One dare not sleep, for sleeping meant dreaming and a hundred murdered souls hung think and heavy in every shadow above every bed, filling the night with their unshriven longings and inserting their pale fingers into the minds of the weak and the unprotected until a sane person could not tell where one’s own thoughts ended and the thoughts of the dead began. It was a city of the possessed.

The Wanderer pressed his teeth together to keep them from chattering. How did one perform an exorcism on an entire city? Could he? Was it even possible? He had called the dead home before but he could not remember if he had ever done so on such a massive scale. He pressed his internal wards against the darkness of the city and stood upright, pushing himself away from the wall to continue on his way. The portal was twenty minutes away. He would give himself that much time to come up with a solution.

The moon rose from behind the walls of the city. Its face was the face of the Maiden. The Wanderer stared at her, thinking this a sign but not sure what it meant. He lost her face behind a lacework of tree branches as he walked. The primordial trees whispered their fierce hunger into the night air; hungry, bloodlust thoughts. He dare not listen to them, but he could not help but hear their song. Did not jaguar hunt from the branches of the forest, the trees whispered?

The Wanderer paused mid stride. Why were the city trees remembering jaguar thoughts? What did the Jaguar god know what he did not? Did Jaguar say the words of unmaking over every animal it ate? It would make being Jaguar very tedious indeed, if that were so.

But surely every living thing recognized their own death when the Jaguar’s teeth closed around their throat? There was no need for ceremony and grave words, for all wild things understood this dance. All things except city bred humans who never saw death, except as a tasty meal on a plate with white linen and silver utensils, having never watched the life pass from a twitching body as the blood drain from slit throats.

When he reached the building that contained the portal he had a vague idea of what needed to be done. He paused near the air lock doors, placed his palm flat against its stone wall and began building the framework of the magic in his mind.

“You are earth,” he whispered to the stone. “Stones are bones of the Mother-Maiden. Steel is Her molten blood, congealed into new forms, yet still unchanged. Wood and plaster is the forest remade and reshaped, but still wild. Remember who you are. You are no different than the trees around you. Remember the Mother. Remember the pattern that pulled you out of the Chaos at the beginning of Time.” He stayed there, holding the image of a great tree in his head, pressing his magic into the stone until he felt it shift under his hand.

The Wanderer opened his eyes and looked up. The wall still looked like a wall, the brick still brick. It was not complete, this magic. All he had done was create a longing in the building, a yearning to become what it once was. It was remembering that it was a wild thing standing tall on the world. He blinked the magic out of his eyes. The moon was looking down on him. He pulled her light down and wove it into his magic.

“The moon is your Wife,” he whispered through his fingers into the stone, “caught up in the branches of your hair.” He imagined the stars in the sky beyond the glare of the city lights. ”The Jaguar is one of many gods who grace your crown like a diadem full of stars. This is your power, endless and infinite. Remember this and tell it to the shadows that cavort about your trunk that they might join with you in dancing the balance of the pattern back into the world.”

The Wanderer patted the warm stone. It was a small thing, this magic. Not a world changing bit of necromancy, no. Just a wee bit of a change, like a virus setting up shop in a single cell inside a human nose. It would sit and brew and eventually break out to infect the other buildings around it. Slow magic was so much kinder and gentler than unmaking the whole city all at once. The humans would not notice, at first. Eventually, they would reclaim the night for their own, perhaps not this generation but maybe in the next. But the night was now Jaguar’s. The ghosts and the shadows would be consumed and the human dreams would become their own at long last.

The Wanderer passed through the glass doors and found the elevator that would take him up to the twelfth floor. After a bit of confusion, he found his way back through the maze of corridors and empty rooms to a pair of great doors with a red warning sign painted crudely by hand across the height and breadth of the carved wooden panels. The Wanderer laughed, amused that he had not seen this on his way out. He reached out to touch the red paint. It glowed briefly, white hot, then turned to ash, drifting away on an invisible wind.

He pulled the doors open and peered into the gloom. The portal glowed softly, beckoning to him across the immense room. Turned on and open, ready for his next jump. Clever gate, it always knew his needs long before he did. It took less than five hundred paces to reach it.

He paused on the lintel, the power of the event horizon crackling softly over his skin, and closed his eyes. With his mind he reached out and took hold of the magic tree he had built out of city stone and moonlight and fed its roots into the same power source that fueled the gates.

“You are infinite,” the Wanderer whispered. “ and endless is your magic.”

The portal whisked him away to the next place while his mind wandered, random thoughts leading one to the next. The sound of his last words echoed around in his head, nagging at him like the angry harridan Maiden. He was not sure if he had been speaking to the magic or the portal or to himself.

He shrugged between one infinite moment and the next. Did it really matter? It was all one and the same thing, wasn’t it.

Rule #4

Become profoundly aware

How do you walk across the killing room floor without getting any of the gore on the hem of your skirts? By being present, in your body, and by being profoundly aware of yourself, the things around you, and the planet under your feet.

Rule #3

Live fierce

What does that mean? Does that mean head off into the hills, buy a bunch of guns and hide in a bunker? No. That means figuring out what you love and what you are willing to die to protect. That means being smart. That means staying alert and light on your toes. That means being self reliant.  That means educating yourself about the current situation, staying informed, staying in touch, staying connected.  That means doing things for yourself like establishing a network of people who have your back and visa-versa. That means cleaning up your own messes. That means acting responsibly. That means living without a safety net. That means paying it forward. That means creating your own system of wealth and abundance outside of the loop of popular currency.

Rule #2

Lies are more destructive than bullets.

Joke: How do you know when a member of the (hunter pack, the killer elite, ruling class, overlords) is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving.

The most important lie they tell, the one they invest almost all their energy in, is the lie that keeps every herd mindlessly quiet as they are being led to the killing floor of the slaughter house and it goes something like this: You deserve this.

Calm down, things are just fine, they say, everything is going according to plan, you would not be here if you were not meant to be here, don’t struggle, this is all your fault you know, you make me hurt you, if you would be a good little (inmate, automaton, cog in the wheel, serf, member of the group) I wouldn’t have to do this to you. This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you.  this is for your own good. You deserve this.

With this lie, abusers can make you go fetch the whip, walk calmly into gas chambers, or sit quietly while the pot comes to a boil.  They can make you give them your livelihood, your house, the lives of your children and your grandchildren, your mind and your heart and even force you to smile while you kill yourself slowly, one cut at a time.

Rule #5

Scream.

If you have followed rules #1-4 but still get picked out of the crowd, there are a few things to remember while they are slapping you around, beating you with batons, or breaking your bones. (sigh. The list is endless. Abuse and torture. There are more names in the English language than any sane species should rightfully be allowed) Screaming loud, hard and full of emotion is really useful and it accomplishes two things.

First, screaming in agony gives the torturers the sexual release they need and want. In the whole S&M roles playing game between master & slave, priest & sinner, guard & inmate, hunter packs & herds, cops & citizens, where pain is an integral part of the interplay between players, it is best to give the abuser what he wants often and early, thereby bringing your sessions to a satisfying conclusion long before permanent damage is inflicted. And they get to go home thinking they have in some way helped you along that path towards … (what? redemption?)

Second, screaming at the top of your lungs oxygenates the blood and gets the endorphins flowing, making it far easier to control the effects of pain and keeping your brain alert to the environment so that you can pick up any hints of change that you need to accommodate.