7th Moon: There Really is a Serious Problem

Housekeeping

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The more you actually engage with the work, share it, investigate it, the more it becomes something other than a decoration worn around the wrist of a fickle debutante collecting foreign treasures. More than makeup on a shadow. More than puppets for the master.

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Internal Conduct Becomes External Vibe

External Vibe Becomes Internal Feeling

The basic feedback loop is mind-numbingly simple, so we usually think “that can’t be what’s happening.”

But if i were to unpack it a scooch more, i would begin with these things i recently wrote:

1. You know that feeling of intense shame and self-hatred you feel when you overeat or binge on ice cream or get drunk again etc etc? That experience is multiplied exponentially across 8 billion people and the effects of that yo-yo of addiction are all the crises we see today.

   There is no difference between the narcissistic person that exploits others and the feelings of entitlement and victimhood that are discharged inwardly as self-abuse, self-hatred, neurosis or indulgence. None at all. Neither are victimless crimes. All harm harms self and other.

   One can argue that nature is naturing, eating itself via human self-annihilation, and that makes a bit of sense.

   What’s truer is that nature is a reflective process, and our conduct IS our environment.
   

2. The monkeys scream at their reflections in Ghost Lake. The sun sets slow through a thick sky, thick with smoke thick with burning. A humid veil prevents escape, dampness clings to dampness, where is the source? What is to blame? A bird or a bell cries out. It can’t be heard.

It may seem manageable and controllable when the explanation puts some distance between things, between us and the problem. Between the subject and the object. We just bite down and push through. For some of us that tactic appears to work, for others the ACME anvil drops on them from some lunatic place. The survivors shamble on, momentarily relieved at their apparent fortunes. …Until the sinkhole, the bear-trap, the bear.

Life appearing as some kind of macabre obstacle course, blood and guts around every corner. Some make it out, or so they say. Who runs the show? Who refills the ammunition? Who sanitizes the field in between rounds of slaughter?

In the 7th moon of the lunar year, we encounter the monkey, metal element native at the ass-end of summer when the sun is beginning to set and fun time is over. The 6th moon was the goat moon, earth elemental marking the turning point of the year, the pivot from ascending yang to ascending yin. This period of time, 6th through 7th moon is sticky, hot, pernicious. It is the yang that was once bright and dry and full of strength/hope, mixing with the dull and wet beginnings of autumn, the fluctuating winds, literally The Fall.