Listen to a reading of this piece (reading by Tim Foley):
And the liberals shriek about Donald Trump while the sky rains blackened skeletons
And the capitalists surf on collapse like raptors on an updraft
And we scurry back and forth between toil and distraction with pythons around our stomachs and mollusks in our mouths
And we search achingly for our pilfered hearts inside bottles of pills and TED Talks
And the amputated limbs of Ukrainian men and Palestinian children are draped about the fast food restaurants like Christmas tinsel
And the billionaires turn the oceans into plastic so they can pay strangers to pretend to love them
And men with rusty nail teeth push needles into babies to open up markets in the global south
And the talking heads tell us the news but won’t tell us why the flesh is melting from their faces as they die of radiation poisoning
And we cackle at parties and act like everything isn’t covered in oil and the bones of birds and fish
And we beat back the revolution within ourselves with a chair and a whip for no other reason than because that’s how we were raised
And the rotting corpse of the middle eastern woman in the corner is beginning to make you uncomfortable
And the floorboards creak as something green and ancient moves below them
And the platypus with mirror eyes is gazing at you from the dawn of the universe
And your consciousness is consumed with the words “THERE ARE FATHOMS OF PEACE BENEATH THE WARS, AND A VAST WISDOM WINKS FROM BEHIND THE MADNESS”
And you come at long last to stillness
And you turn and face the world, palms open.
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Caitlin Johnstone has her own voice, her own genius. What draws me to her work is her gift for going into shadow and coming out with poetry. She channels the collective unconscious. She is a seer and what she sees in this age is both light and shadow, horror and beauty. She also places herself at psychic risk, difficult, almost toxic risk; she gets into the right kind of trouble. She carries the projection of truth-sayers. She is a modern day shaman. All shamans in their development go through some terrible ordeal which uniquely prepares them to serve their people, and enables them to venture between worlds, to travel between disparate realms. Not easy as many of us can attest to. We easily get unsettled, disoriented, confronted by insecurities when we open fully to the suffering and cruelty of the world. We titrate our pain and the pathos of existence, whereas some among us, like her, mainline it, and it maims her, but she relentlessly transmutes it into grace, she comes out of it with gifts for her community, often dark gifts, art and poetry and crushing, poignant, unflinching narrative reporting. She walks the edge of sanity which for her means awake but for most people, living unconsciously from fear, means convention, conformity and being comfortably numb. I would guess that part of what keeps her going is seeing her gifts land, noticing eyes beginning to open. And they are, they are. Gratefulness...
Wow - mind blowing , thought provoking, truth that cuts to the core- Thank you 🙏