Mr. and Mrs. Bonobo

Police Brutality

Do you need more evidence that our country is shifting toward fascism? Here is evidence: our police have been claiming increasing rights to use deadly force, to brutalize, terrorize, and humiliate, without justification or provocation.

A few days ago, my son was arrested in New Orleans. He was walking home from a Mardi Gras parade with three other young men and was picked up by police because they had a report "that four white guys were making trouble." Here was a handy group of "white guys," obvious out-of-towners, easy marks. I believe that the police chose this group of young men because they knew they'd get no resistence, there would be no weapons . . . only fear in their eyes and polite protests.

My son was handcuffed, thrown against a car, and brutalized, and kept in jail without being allowed to make a phone call, and without being formally charged. In jail with no one knowing where he was, given little food, sleeping on the gound, no toilet paper, witnessing beatings.

After three days, he was missed by his friends, bail was paid, and he was out and able to call me.

Although New Orleans has a shocking history of police brutality and corruption, reports from cities across the country show increasing levels of police violence against citizens. Young men, especially young black men, are being shot and killed with impunity. Others are being tortured, tormented, and beaten. Why should police be immune from the law?

And my mother's heart cries, "Why my son?" Why any mother's son? When I see violence that is random and cruel, it tears at my faith and makes me wonder why we are here on this earth at all.

Please pray for the safety of Ben and his band mates. They are determined, he told me, to stay on and continue volunteering with the local rebuilding efforts, as they had been doing for several weeks. He has more love in his heart than I do.
Sadly,
Lilly

Who stole my time?

Never enough time.

I spend two hours commuting each day and eight and a half hours daily at work. Consider how much additional time most people spend on shopping, watching television, and other passive entertainments. It's no wonder that life seems to pass us quickly by.

In prehistoric times, it's estimated that the daily chores, including food acquisition and preparation and other necessities, used about four hours daily, and those four hours were also social time.

When I was a kid in the late 50s and 60s, there was talk of the coming era of leisure time, of four day work weeks and extended vacations, of hobbies and do it yourselfing.

Our contemporary spiritually-ill culture demands that we move faster all the time, valuing speed for its own sake; that we spend the best hours of our day working for others for pay, often in personally meaningless tasks; that we see time doing nothing as lazy time and that we fill every unworking moment with passive entertainments.

In despair for time, I carefully apportion my weekends: this much time for art. This much time for loving play. This much for baking a cake or wandering along the frozen creek.

Who stole my time? I worked and drove my car and shopped and worried and did what I had to what I had to what I had to for 53 years and now I look back and mourn for the book I didn't write and the sunny days I was stuck inside at a job and the art school I never attended and the sledding expeditions with the kids I put off until the free time that never came.

Who stole my life?

Every day's pay I put away for the time when I will have enough to buy back my life from the Dominators.

Love,
Lilly

An Introduction to Contemporary Animism: One

I am an animist. This is what I believe:

I believe that the universe (for want of a better word) is made of spirit-matter stuff. All that exists, exists because something non-material and something material became joined, as in a sexual intercourse, and out of that joining the universe was born.

All material being is suffused with intelligence and spirit.

All spiritual being is manifest in some way, be it as stars or blades of grass.

God—Great Being, All Things, Our Source—is also spirit-matter. The universe is the body of God.

Human beings are also spirit-matter. We are spirits in animal form. And so, too, is all of creation spirit-matter, all of creation is intelligence and spirit made manifest, and all things, even stars and blades of grass, are intelligent and spiritual.

All creation has language, even if we cannot speak it, although once upon a time, humanity could speak the language of animals and animals could speak the language of humans, and we recognized our kinship. We also recognized our kinship with rocks, waters, sky, and other created beings. Once upon a time.

An animist believes these things. An animist is so named because he or she believes in a reality in which all things are animate, and no thing is without soul. All creation is family. All is worthy of respect. We have no right to enslave another being, human or non-human, even though we kill and eat it. Nothing may be owned. It is all the body of God.

Love,
Lilly