Quelling the Nightmare of reality

So, I’m at a truck stop. The booth next to me is spewing Fox axioms. I feel a volcano start to sputter inside. I close my eyes and try to turn repulsion into compassion. They are defending their worldview just as I am. I stand up, and they scan me. I become awkwardly aware of my purple stretch pants, hand-knitted, ratty sweater, and my hemp necklace.  I want to say my truth without putting them down, because I know as soon as I demean them, they won’t listen and maybe start a fight. But my mind goes blank. I just smile and go to pay my bill. Who wants to start something in a truck stop? Not me.  

As I pay my bill, of course I come up with something good to say. Something snappy and harsh. But then I remembered something Jane Goodall said.  “We can only change people through the heart and not through the head with information. When people feel how their viewpoint hurts the Earth or other people, they may consider a change.”

 Next time I’ll come up with a good quip.

 At night, the overheard conversation keeps me from sleeping. I know I’m just deepening the division by condemning their glittered misogyny and circus politics as sheer ignorance.  Lying in bed, staring into the dark, not sleeping, I wondered if there was a way to heal my mindset instead of adding to the feeling of division. Can I understand or see this mayhem in a different way that will make it more tolerable? Can I choose not to hate? Because hating the haters is doing nothing besides keeping me up.

It’s the plethora of injustice that really gets to me. I’m so tired of disappointment in humanity. Hating the haters is burning me out. I’m sure you've all found some kind of coping mechanism. We all are seeking one - ignoring, ranting, moving, or isolating. Late that night, an idea came to me. Not an easy or convenient idea, but it’s... something.So, I’m at a truck stop. The booth next to me is spewing Fox axioms. I feel a volcano start to sputter inside. I close my eyes and try to turn repulsion into compassion. They are defending their worldview just as I am. I stand up, and they scan me. I become awkwardly aware of my purple stretch pants, hand-knitted, ratty sweater and my hemp necklace.  I want to say my truth without putting them down, because I know as soon as I demean them, they won’t listen and maybe start a fight. But my mind goes blank. I just smile and go to pay my bill. Who wants to start something in a truck stop? Not me.  

As I pay my bill, of course I come up with something good to say. Something snappy and harsh. But then I remembered something Jane Goodall said.  “We can only change people through the heart and not through the head with information. When people feel how their viewpoint hurts the Earth or other people, they may consider a change.”

 Next time I’ll come up with a good quip.

 At night the overheard conversation makes me not sleep at night. I know I’m just deepening the division by condemning their glittered misogyny and circus politics as sheer ignorance.  Lying in bed, staring into the dark, not sleeping, I wondered if there was a way to heal my mindset instead of adding to the feeling of division. Can I understand or see this mayhem in a different way that will make it more tolerable? Do I have the ability to choose not to hate? Because hating the haters is doing nothing besides keeping me up.

It’s the plethora of injustice that really gets to me. I’m so tired of disappointment in humanity. Hating the haters is burning me out. I’m sure all of you have found some kind of coping mechanism. We all are seeking one - ignoring, ranting, moving, or isolating. Late that night, an idea came to me. Not easy or convenient idea but it’s... something.

This word came to me - Integration. I blinked into the darkness. I couldn’t even visualize what this would look like.

Not the hippie integration with different cultures, skin color, sexual orientation, and able-bodied, but integration of the far right with the far left.  Electric art cars and Ford trucks? Drumming to country music?  Guatemala shorts and Old Navy Shirts? Quinoa with ribs at a BBQ? Can it be done?  

I just don’t think cheap beer and LSD are a good mix.

The uptight, clean-shaven, gun-loving, wholesomely fake profile gives me the heebie-jeebies; I wonder if I could relax and be more accepting. Is it possible to not react to things that tick me off, like prisons, rape, collapsing social services, greed, and war? I wonder if the people supporting the right think about these things, or if they're overlooking them for a greater cause.

I let myself drift off into the minds of those who are backing this regime.

I think they see a return to a more wholesome time. (Stay with me here). The religious white suburbanite sees diversity as a threat to their way of life. They live in white communities, their children are straight, they go to church, and everything is amiable and wholesome with baseball caps, Coca-Cola, hamburgers, and church. There are no complications, no questioning of the systems. Life is simple. The husband heads a nuclear family; mom takes care of the kids, and parents go to work while the kids go to school. Challenging situations like interracial or women-led government, equality for all, or transgender bathrooms make them go off the wall. They fear it viscerally, because it challenges all their assumptions of normalcy. Men are men, boys will be boys, women know their place, and dogs sleep in the doghouse.

As their children are exposed to things that are not “American Values” (not referring to democracy or equality but that sense of white Christian normalcy), they feel the need to wave the American flag frantically. That is why they have attached the American Flag to their mission, overlooking that it means separation of church and state and democracy. To them, it means white, straight, Christian, blue-collar working families.  It is their America, and all these people wanting to be seen and heard who are not in line with this white Christian image are destroying the American Value System.

Jobs are for white people. White men rule the government. Jesus Christ is our savior and keeps us in the moral lane, else people get crazy ideas like dying their hair blue, piercing their face, changing the norm of sexuality or supporting minorities and women in the white house.  This is unacceptable to a large part of rural, suburban white America. They do not want to see weird Americans on TV, so they are fighting it. Yet they can’t stop their children from straying. This takes the fun out of fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism arises when people see society reject their belief systems, so they clamp down harder. Christian majority is slowly dribbling away in the Western nations, overtaken by a secular pop culture. This is painful for people who live and breathe a religious worldview.

As a spiritual person, I don’t take kindly to shallow secular pop culture either, feeling like it lacks real perspective, deeper wisdom and does not address the spiritual needs of humanity. Ironically, the very thing the right adheres to is a segment of pop culture dominated by capitalist. McDonalds and Ford is all American and so is the Dollar Store. (Oh, ahh maybe that’s Chinese? But you know… it’s mostly American).  Like the founder of McDonalds said, “God, work, family and McDonalds.” Can’t be said any better than that.

Jesus is now entwined with capitalism. It’s the – don’t tell me what to do- mind set of the Top 500 used against the government but also by the religious right about prayer in schools.

I’m working here to see the 30% not as haters or ignorant but as people trying to hold on to their values. I want to see them as intelligent and passionate people who have a right to be, or else we will always be fighting, and I won’t sleep for the rest of my life. Even if I ram my liberal values down their throats (which I really want to do), they will be resentful. I’m guessing this is where the violence is coming from.  

This is the reality - we cannot get rid of people. There will always be people we don’t agree with. Many of us have just written off our right-wing friends and relatives, but I’m seeing now that this is not a wise move. Even in the hippy world, there are right-leaning racists and sexists. Just look at Harley-Davidson clubs and rural white hippies. They might wear leather or tie-dye and give the middle finger to the establishment, but they don’t have minority and women’s rights on their mind.

And just as much as I want to leave this America of racist, sexist bigotry - the religious right feels the same way when we have black or female leaders, or a whole generation changing their gender orientation, or social programs that have been deemed terrible by the Coca-Cola capitalist.  Except Midwestern working people don’t fly to Europe or drive to Mexico, but instead, hole up in their self-reflecting rural communities.

How can we integrate? Well, for one, I don’t think we will - completely.

Things are changing fast, and there is little patience for slow integration. People want to be seen, heard, and accepted now. Not like the women’s or black movement that took over a 100 years. The media, however, makes change happen fast because the media loves shock value, so they give the mic to anyone who is going to do something shocking – both left and right. Hence, we have a president who is a master of this on the conservative side. He thinks up shocking stuff all the time, overshadowing transgender entertainers, ethnic spokespeople, and liberal waves of color and diversity.

It is moving too fast for real integration because integration requires a slower time frame, one that has people changing their minds over multiple exposures. In some ways, we are having the clumsy shift not through understanding and time but through shame and desperate need, because the egomaniac leader of our country is creating so much strife and economic strain that people are dropping away out of desperation.

So as people fall into the fray with doubt, their connections with their ideology crack. They become socially fake, pretending to adhere to ideologies that they internally question. These are the people that might consider opening to change, only if they are accepted as they are. Not converted to liberal values but accepted with their simple conservative values.

To make the America we want to live in, it’s going to take effort to touch the hearts of people, to stop othering each other.  Every person has a place where we can relate. We both like our worlds to be friendly and comprehensible. We both want our country to reflect our values. We both want safe communities that reflect our values. So here is the commonality and the divide.

Can we hear people with compassion while not getting caught up in the rhetoric and emotionally triggered? I’ve tried. It’s hard. Almost traumatizing. I hold back the impulse to retch out a long tirade. Instead, I ask questions and stay interested in what they have to say. Sometimes I offer another perspective and hope they can hear something different, for a magic exchange and a subconscious shift. Trying to break down the othering of anybody, even with people who don’t want integration, is a messy paradox.

The least I can do is try. This vision of integration, patience, and tolerance becomes my beacon of light in these dark times and through the long dark nights. Even if it doesn’t heal this nation, it reduces my anxiety and allows me to snuggle my pillow, close my eyes, and dream of hippies dancing in an equitable world.

New Profile

I'm Suzanne. I've been promoting and researching cooperative games for about 15 years. Initially, I was attracted to them because they show people how to work together in common cause. Cooperative games were designed by peace educators in 1951 and were popular in the 70s, but then faded. Today, they’re increasing in popularity and we've had projects in schools to show kids how to play cooperate games.

When we play, we learn. We learn through play. It is a fun way to learn cooperative skills and motivation by playing the games. It turns out that when you play cooperative games instead of competitive games they actually promote and invoke the pro social part of our nature; kindness, helping, generosity, trust, and common purpose that goes with cooperation.

Whereas the competitive games which is mirrored in the larger society promote the ‘us versus them’ mind-set and working against each other. The social effects of competition really breaks us down and make us dislike one of one another because they promote working against each other. In this modern capitalist society, the whole story about the value of competition is overblown. There’s a myth of how it is necessary. But in today's world, we actually need to learn more about how to work together and care about each other. When it's necessary to oppose we can do that. I engage in civic action, but I do it with a cooperative heart, which saves me from the hostile mindset that I'm trying to avoid.

Now people are playing cooperative games again without knowing the whole social history of them because they're fun. Today, we have so many environmental and social issues that it requires people to engage in collective action. I'm trying to keep alive the social history and the social purpose of cooperative games because they can really help us in moments of division.

Hippy think tank tackles the AI world order

I stepped into a tripped-out conversation at a yard sale - these two guys talkin’ some deep AI reality sh*t. They were rapid fire throwing out all sorts of facts and figures, most of it I didn’t even know what they were referring to, but I caught enough of it on my memos to reconstruct their points. What they were saying was really fascinating, but what struck me was the young hip are firecracker smart. They are aware and thinking about stuff. Like the older hip, they, too, are looking at reality and questioning what’s really going on.  Today’s hip have to be even smarter because the world we live in is moving fast with issues the human race has never dealt with before.

OK, we're talking about neurodivergent people, MPC culture, or people that are not aware, and of the deeper underlying way that AI is manipulating the psychology of humanity.  

AI language models, or Large Language Models (LLMs), are artificial intelligence systems designed to understand, process, and generate human-like text. By analyzing massive datasets, it learns language patterns to perform tasks such as answering questions, translating languages, and writing creative content. This LLM is initiating certain responses and creating a norm that is bland, unimaginative, and creating a kind of feedback loop of mimicked interaction.

So, one dude says - Alex Karo, CEO of Palantir, talks about his dyslexia. He explained that his neurodivergence gives him some difficulty in doing things the way other people do them. He had to find a way of getting the job done differently from other people. In doing so, he had to build a toolkit, a novel tool set at a young age. That neuroplasticity and ability to incorporate that extra abstraction layer gave him novel value in the AI world. His non-conformist thinking process allows him to learn and insert non-linear thinking to circumvent the feedback loop of AI production.  

Other dude says - They did a study on genius people with super high-level IQ's and found that some of these children were registering with these massive level IQs after running through the education system, but they didn't portray the same level of genius qualities because true genius is adaptability and creativity. It's not the normal metrics that you’d think about. There's logic and human psychology, but we're talking about neuroplasticity, the individual’s ability to create abstractions of the current culture and think of things in a different way, versus where the average person is locked into the simulation.

This lack of neuroplasticity is becoming apparent in the paradox of Christian organized religion that predicts an end state. If your future lacks freedom and can be predicted, then, like any closed state system, you can predict all actions. There is no freedom of choice.  If you're truly free, you can't ascribe to any religion that predicts end times or end state to it because the closer you get to the end state, the less free you are to make choices until your choices are narrowed to nothing. I've met evangelical Christians who discussed rebuilding the third temple as something that has to be done to have Jesus’s return. That's the perfect example of how people are being locked into a powerless situation. American politics and the temple community are merging, with their theological views asserting that their end times require this to be done, regardless of political or theological disputes. So again, it's an example of the predictability of human thinking, that our nature becomes predictable due to our faith in the end times, and removes any sort of agency from our choices.

 So, as the scope of conformity is enforced, there is a removal of the middle management and arbitration of services into automation. All those jobs disappear. There'll be a narrower and narrower culture of the middle class. In the service class, you're going to see a smaller scope of jobs, as even now we are mostly talking to AI simulations when we call for technical help.  And as programming becomes more generated by AI, we will be viewing very little original material from that echo chamber.

The idea that once AI has absorbed all the non-profitable arbitrage and middle management, and removed all the humanistic creating and interaction processes, the only people left as creators will be your skitzo artists and neurodivergent people. So, the neurodivergent person may be the only valuable person in a post-AI content to humanity. They will be the only ones who differ from a normal, predictable person.

In the age where AI can generate music that's almost impossible to distinguish between a human and a non-human, the value of the organic and the imperfections becomes novel. The mistakes and the mess-ups become more interesting because what is valuable to people is to hear something that can feel like it was from a human. We want to hear the mistakes and want to hear the imperfections. It is the Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley is a Japanese concept of robotics and prosthesis, that when they started to create synthetic life or body parts that are perfectly close in all reasonable ways but lacked the little imperfections of humanity, it's repulsive to humans. We see it as being inorganic and gross.  There needs to be the organic elements, or it forces the perceiver to feel the otherness of the thing they interact with, and that's going to be the problem with mankind's interactions with the synthetic world. There's a mass rejection of this AI and the promoters are already aware of it.

The AI investments are a financing bubble for washing the OPEC money through the Saudis back into production. There's a lot going on with the AI bubble. The money games with NVIDIA, which makes the GPUs, and all these data centers, where investors are buying large land chunks that they use only a tiny bit of. There's a lot more investment and valuation than is ever going to be earned on the products because China is really in the lead. The new DeepSeek model from China performs relatively well and ranks in the top three for STEM, while running on fewer resources. Generally, the Chinese have built some pretty good bit compressing, and you're getting more bang for your buck because it’s open source. So, I don't really see us winning any AI arms race on account of there's so much openness in the world market, and America is closed with tariffs.

I think for Investors it’s more about surveillance and not actually content. The last three generations of AI models we’ve been getting haven't really been upgrades. I think they've just been tuning the guardrail layers of the models to sort the people who use it based on different ideas they hold. In fact, I believe they are using AI interaction to elicit responses from the user. AI is used to synthesize human interactions to try to emotionally get you to reveal ideological beliefs, and I believe much of AI is weaponized. They've merged a lot of our content with Palantir.  Palantir Technologies is an American software company specializing in big data integration, analytics, and artificial intelligence, founded in 2003 with CIA backing. It processes massive, fragmented datasets to synthesize personality types. Essentially, AI personalities are being used to get through your trust layer. We are complacent in the belief that we have a friend inside this device we're sharing our thoughts with.

The world is in this race for AI. We think China is building it fast, so the U.S. feels we have to speed it up and fast-track the process. But I think that the only possible opportunity we have is to slow down and to develop an aligned AI. An analogy is if everyone is driving fast, heading off a cliff, it doesn't matter if they're driving faster than you are. If we can be the ones driving to an actual destination, even if we’re driving more slowly, we will arrive somewhere intentional. The only possible safety for humanity is to have an aligned AI to defend us from these types of unaligned AI.

So, as Large Language models are able to develop the abilities of the average person, like average art creation, average content, and average responses, the neurodivergent part of humanity will be the only ones of value. The more imaginative and original a person is, the more they can generate organic, novel content or even operate outside the AI matrix. Everyone else will be negligible consumers. The ability to be more abstract and less predictable will be the only human value in an AI-run world.

Here is some real human music -

The Broken Heart of America

First of all, thank you for coming back to read. If you are tuning into Hippy in the Woods, you’ve noticed I’ve been lagging on posting. No lie here – I’ve been depressed, overwhelmed, and maxed out on bad news. I succumbed to the downer. Couldn’t write. Everything came out crappy. No one needs more crappy writing – there’s plenty of that.

But finally, the light came, and I had a moment of clarity. So here it is -

We think were so smart. We have lots of technology, power, scientists, and schools. Yet, how are we so stupid?

It is because we are thinking just with our brains. We are like huge heads with limp hearts and fat guts. We are completely out of proportion. Our instincts are zilch, and our hearts are dried-up raisins in the blazing corporate capitalist sun.

Human beings have neural centers not just in the brain but in other parts of the body. Our guts have neurons that give us feelings of safety and connection to nature. Our heart possesses neural centers that communicate feelings of well-being and love, helping the brain stay balanced. Even though the heart intelligence has fewer neurons than the brain, if the heart is broken, we go crazy.

Not just metaphorically. It is the root of almost all neurosis. See all those crazy people on the street -it’s because no one loves them. They have gone insane. See all those political shysters – it’s because they have had only conditional love and denied real love as children. They don’t know how to love, so they are crazy too.

We are born to love and care, but things happen that damage our hearts, and when we operate from this damaged place, we do crazy things; we hurt people, plants, animals, and the planet. We stop caring. Maybe we turn to greed, trying to fill the emptiness, or we turn to righteousness to cover up the shame, or we get used to the heart pain and stab ourselves again and again with negative self-talk. The list of heart ailments goes on, but whatever the ailment is, it has become so commonplace in American Culture that it’s transparent. We are a nation of damaged hearts. So much so that we elect government representatives who reflect our inability to care.

We’d rather have guns to kill each other than healthcare. That says a lot about the level of heart this country has.   

That’s why our country is being run by idiots. They have brains enough to manipulate, dominate, and extrapolate, but no heart intelligence to exonerate, proliferate, or cooperate.

How do we find the heart of America? Well, it’s tricky because we can’t call on our history because it’s full of heartless deeds. Perhaps it will be found in acknowledging that truth, and dismantling our egotistical, self-centered red, white, and blue A-hole ugliness, and allowing ourselves to be humans on a planet of other humans.

I love my country, but I think we should start seeing other people.   

It is harder to be gentle. You have to be strong to listen. And to care… man, that is almost superhuman. Your heart has to be soooooo big that you can take the pain and transmute it to love. That’s real alchemy, real magic.

Touch is the language of love. They did a study of how many times a couple touch each other during lunch. Latino couples touched each other on average of 10 times, American’s once, and Brits - not at all. If they included hippies, they’d see it go off the charts with hugs.

Consider your heart. What shape is it in? Do you love yourself? Not like an ego maniac, but sincerely and deeply. Are you holding your inner world close as if you are hugging a child? And do you speak to yourself gently, kindly, lovingly, nurturing yourself through this hard and demanding life?

If not, then there is work to do, because if you can’t nurture yourself, you may not be able to help this broken world.

A couple of good resources for exploring your mind and heart -

Gay Hendricks - Learning to Love Yourself. (It’s harder than you think.)

Carolyn Elliot - Existential Kink (Bringing our shadow to the light.)

And perhaps work on letting go of being so smart. We don’t have to be the snappiest talker. Being whole with a heart, gut, and head requires a pause, a check-in. Maybe let being ‘good’ or your ‘best self’ drop away, and instead seek out a weird wholeness, a funkier fabulousness, or a nurturing natural nimbleness.

Perhaps this is outlandish, but I’ve noticed that most people have hippy hearts. The hippie movement is no longer reliant tie-dye, marijuana, and crystal pendants ; hippie ideals are now part of the broader population. It is more commonplace to hold the ideals of peace, socialism, and healthy living than ever before.

Healing and growth is our human journey, our reason to live. It will not be through arguing points that we unite, but through the heart that we will go beyond a rigid American mindset. So, from the micro to the macro, it is our work to heal the hearts of America.

And for myself, well, my heart heals then breaks again. The better I get at healing my heart with love, the easier it is to take a chance to love in the face of adversity.

Armageddon consciousness

In Robin Wall Kimmer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, she describes an Indigenous creation story in which a woman falls from the sky into the ocean. The iconic woman works with all the animals to build land and Earth. Kimmer’s comment about this story is that it creates a different relationship to the Earth than a culture in which an image of the primordial beginnings is about lust, damnation, and the exodus from the garden.

That is the problem with the beginning. Now, let’s look at the end. What kind of society are we creating if the story we hold is of complete Earth annihilation in order to bring back God? A story where the chosen believers survive the wreckage while all the non-believers are wiped out. What kind of hopes, dreams, and actions does this story create in the world we live in today?

 The Military-Industrial Complex, one that Eisenhower himself warned the people about, is a toxic mix of might, right, and end-times fixation. Right now, with the war in Iran, the Military Leaders are unabashedly spouting that this is the Judgement Day, and they are excited to be bringing about world catastrophe. This is the holy war to end all wars and probably humanity. This pep talk is not going over so well with the troops.

It is reminiscent of when the US and Russia were in the Cuban Missile Crisis. We came sooooo close to starting a world war with nuclear bombs that it is amazing we are still alive. The top advisors of the military were very gun-ho for world annihilation, claiming that it was time for Armageddon, and tried to push the situation and the bomb button.

It was a few key people that averted that devastation. One was a Russian Officer on a submarine that convinced his captain not to launch their nuclear missiles when they lost contact with Russia. The other was John F. Kennedy and his brother. Kennedy paid for going against the Military Advisors. If they couldn’t have their holy war, then at least they could blow his brains out.

This crusade against the Muslims has been going on since… oh, like the Middle Ages. It’s pathetic that we can’t just leave these people alone. Ironically like Jesus was a Jew, Mohammad was a Christian. It’s all the same idea with different books and rules. It would be great if we could stop fighting about who’s right and just be glad that people are praying – hopefully for life and a future.

Now, here it is the Islamic holy month of fasting and we start bombing them. Couldn’t we at least wait till tomorrow when their fast is over?

My real point is wondering if we can let go of Armageddon. Can we reject or remake that story line? When I was hanging out with my religious family I asked about Armageddon. They spoke about how it would clean up everything (aka most people die) and everyone (left) would be happy. Right there I knew it was a fantasy – I mean clean up? Happy? Has the world ever had a clean time where people weren’t fighting? And everyone is happy? I mean, we have plenty of food, washing machines, cars, and health care, yet we still we aren’t happy. It’s a fantasy.

According to historian Yuval Noah Harari in his bestseller Sapiens- A Brief History of Mankind. Most people before modern times died violent deaths, and actually, with all our wars and misery, we are in the most peaceful time in history, even with our bourgeoning world population.

Then I asked my devout relatives, Ok what about after that? What happens after Armageddon? This stumped them. There was no after that.  Jesus would float around making everyone happy forever, and that was it.

Well, the thing about time is that until the sun blows up, there is more time - a heck of a lot of time if we don’t start a nuclear war. Even with global warming, people will change, and time will go on. Because time is infinite, change is the nature of reality. There is no stopping point for perfection. At some point, we must forgo wishing for the Jesus clean-up crew and be content to have a life and civilization that our grandkids can frolic and fight in. If we can let go of the idea that there will be an ideal time when everyone believes the same thing and everything is perfect, we will be able to see our lives and our future more clearly.  

This video exemplifies how big IT all is. Why are we fighting? So petty.

History-

the Great Revealer

I’ve been watching Oliver Stone’s History of the United States, and man, it's a wild ride, almost too much. It makes what is happening today look like a cartoon, a farce, a comedy.

Mr. T getting up in front of Congress and saying the age ol’ -you’re with us or against us. Hand that man a cowboy hat! Aren’t we over that cliché dysfunctional persuasion? People are smarter than that, or let’s say a majority.  

Looking back at history, it’s been such a pandemonium of derangement, a chipping away of the decency America mistakenly thinks it has. You just have to watch Ollie’s History, the whole 10-part series, and then not sleep for a week from the horror of it all.

But the whole sorted past, playing before your eyes, also creates a lightness about today’s debacle, like hey, miracles of miracles, humanity is still alive.  

Here is the link. It’s been taken off Netflix because it’s too dangerous to know your history. But you can’t hide anything today. That’s one of the reasons that this T-hitler isn’t going to last. Somebody somewhere will have the truth posted. You just have to find it. And kids are curious, so I have hope that the next generation is not going for any more of this scam. I’m counting on savvy but spaced-out next gen. If they could only learn history.

Here it is – preserved by a site in Canada-

Hippy Slop Philosophy

We use the best organic, wholesome foods, but when we put them all together, it’s a goopy, soupy slop. And if you haven’t cultivated a taste for healthy wholesome slop, it is unpalatable. But for those who have expanded their palate to include a little dirt mixed with greens and bone broth, it is quite good. Better yet, we feel good after consuming it.

Here is the hippy slop philosophy - if we learn to appreciate the wholeness of bad and good mixed together, we feel healthier for it.

Americans are strivers for perfection in ourselves, our relationships, our lives, our country, and the world. Yet, if you haven’t noticed, we always fall short. It is a law of nature. Let’s call it the life slop. Nothing is ever completely right. There may be times it feels close to right, but there are always strings of funk that trip us up. Damn it.

If we can relax and accept that no matter what, the world, our lives, and ourselves will always have an element of badness, then we can explore the wealth of complexity that is life. Look at the forest, it’s beautiful with down trees, clogged streams, mud, and mold. That’s life. That’s also being human.

In ourselves, we have an outer self in which we show to the world, a mask of our values, but under that is a grumpy and disheveled feeling of inadequacy and frustration. Believe it or not, this is our true selves - an ethereal spirit coming into a physical body that is confined by this demanding reality grows layers of grumpy frustration like decomposing leaves.

The irony is that we continue to fight the slop. We want a clean and pristine self, life, family, and world where everything is as we wish it to be. We want to fix it. But even when we get it all perfect, it becomes sterile and unsatisfying. That’s why most rich people are unhappy -because they have everything and yet they still feel empty. Repressing our dark side makes us flat, shallow, and dull.

It’s when we let the chaos of our misery, sadness, and frustration break apart our mask that we begin to color our lives with creativity, wholeness, and tears or sorrow and joy.

My point about America is that we are so bummed out about how it is right now, and there is a lot to be worried about, however the pendulum will swing, and then straight people will be irate about the Liberals.

As one conservative talk show host said, “There will be no real elections, you won’t be able to tell a girl from a boy, and the dogs and cats will be fighting in the streets.” (I’m not sure how he forecasted the dog and cat thing, but whatever.)

So, we will never be totally happy, unified people. If our well-being is contingent on whether our values are manifest in our world, we will always be adrift in disappointment and sorrow because it’s going to be a clash of values in the life slop.

Giving ourselves permission to be messy, let our living rooms be messy, accept our imperfect family and our f*ked country and this world of crap and beauty is how we will find freedom right now. If we get used to life slop, even embrace the slop, we will fare much better as we move forward into an even messier and more complicated future.

Bus of the Month

simple yet fun