AND NOW…THE NEW FABULOUS SINGING GROUP: BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Archive for September, 2019
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The tree…a short story
People came to see the tree. They said they felt something when they were around it. Some brought books and food and stayed for days, reading and communing with the tree itself. A few thought the tree was breathing. They watched carefully and said they could see it inhaling.
Artists came. They sang to the tree and danced around it. Some drew pictures, others painted. A famous violinist played classical music until he exhausted himself and fell to his knees. He said he had never played that well in front of any audience in the world.
No one touched the branches, or the tree itself. They somehow knew that that would be crossing a line of some kind.
Religious people came and prayed to the tree, all of them asking for something. They chanted and begged. Some took a pinch of dirt and put it in a box, or locket, and wore it on their heads or necks. They believed that the tree was sacred, holy, god’s work.
Children came and screamed and shouted as they ran around playing and laughing. They looked at the tree and waved, then they giggled, and smiled at it, before they started doing cartwheels and jumping jacks.
Businessmen came and tried to figure out how they could make money off of the tree. Maybe they could cut it up and sell the pieces. Fence it in and charge people to see it.
The government came and tried to figure out how to make the tree into a weapon. They decided they couldn’t kill enough people with it, at least not the way it was, so they were going to form a Blue Book Secret Committee to figure a better way to use it.
Group by group visited the tree until the flow of people finally stopped.
Then one day a girl walked by. She saw the tree and said, “I didn’t realize that Death was so beautiful.” She climbed the branches, until she found one she liked. Then she sprawled across it and sighed. “You are SO comfortable.” She tried to turn on her side and almost fell. She laughed so hard, she almost fell again. Then she sat on the branch and swung her feet back and forth. “You’re not very tall,” she said, looking up. “You’re just right.”
It started to get dark, so she laid down on the branch and looked at the moon and stars. “If you had leaves, I wouldn’t be able to see the sky,” she said. “Thanks for picking me up.” When she took her last breath, the tree simply wrapped it’s branches around her and they both disappeared.
Weeks later, the government returned with three scientists. When they saw that the tree was gone, they accused another country of stealing it and set off an international incident and the possibility of WW III.
Okay, so…
Another thing about so called history…the person writing it, is usually from a different era, unless is’s current history, only a few years old. I mean yesterday can be considered history, so there is that. But I’m talking about history that took place long ago.
If the writer is American, then what s/he writes will be seen through American eyes. It will also be seen through the thoughts of the current ERA. Both will impact what is written.
Prejudices, biases, resentment and all the other feelings people, or countries, may have for each other, come through in what they write. We do that with the North and South, with cities and the country.
History is conjecture and play acting. For many, history is learned through movies or novels. Rarely do kids learn history in school. Ask anyone what they remember.
“Write what you know,” isn’t that the advice everyone gets? Well, history is made up of guesses, probabilities, imagination and propaganda. Even in the past propaganda was used to control the masses. We have absolutely no idea what people thought, except through the scraps of writing or hieroglyphs left behind and those things were written for gods, or written by people who could actually WRITE.
There’s a program on PBS called FINDING YOUR ROOTS. The guests on it, have no clue as to their own family history. I don’t know anything about mine, after my grandparents. Nothing at all. A lot of us don’t have a past that we know about. And that’s right now, while we are alive. History is a shadowy thing. We don’t know what happened a couple of generations ago but we act as if we know what people in Egypt thought, or what Americans lived through, when they were slaughtering Native Americans. I think that’s crazy. Where are the books written by Native Americans, about that period in time? Why aren’t books by them taught in school, so kids know what we DID TO THEM, you know small pox blankets and all the rest? How can we teach history and leave the IMPORTANT THINGS OUT? The things actual people LIVED THROUGH?
And current history, well, how much truth do you think are on those pages, when they lie to our faces. Tricky Dick? Johnson and the war, the idiot in office now?
History is: omissions, secrets and lies.
There are alternative histories. Those are the histories told by the people left out of the things kids have been taught. Those are the histories told by women and minorities, which do not agree with, or have anything to do with, the white male history we’ve had shoved down our throats. That’s why they have Black History Month and Women’s History Month. The ten other months belong to while males, well those two months belong to them too, they just step back to shut us up and act like they’re giving us something. If you don’t think that’s a joke and a tell, you need to think again. History is all about white rich males and power.
No one can write history if they don’t know what’s going on and no one knows what’s going on. There has been so much suppression of information for so long. Women had to publish under male names, minorities couldn’t get published…what kind of history does that make? It makes a false one, that’s the kind of history it makes.
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Featured Post: Juliet Takes a Breath – Georgiann Carlson — Brave & Reckless
Juliet takes a breath
and stops listening to
her own heartbeat
and instead
listens to the world
fall apart
freedom
is gone
America
is on Her knees
the world
is in free fall
everything is
dying
men hunt us
they want to control
our bodies
she wants to
warn other women
to stay still
to not turn on
the lights
to trust no one
and remember
to keep their
guns loaded
and their
knives sharp
then join
their sisters
and take
back the
fucking
NIGHT
and their
own
LIVES
via Featured Post: Juliet Takes a Breath – Georgiann Carlson — Brave & Reckless
Okay, so…
No matter how many books are written, or read, we can never know what took place in the past. When written by those who lived during a certain time, we simply get their personal point of view. Those who do research, piece those personal points of view together and try and give us a bigger picture. But the things they find, have been written by educated people, usually by men, in specific places. There are few facts and many opinions and lies.
Our view of history is a sham, written by those who had money and were in charge of what was printed. Fortunately, we have diaries and accounts from people who wrote down what their lives were like. If we didn’t, we would think there were no women in the past and that children simply appeared of their own accord. Until recently, no one mentioned what they went through, crossing the land in wagons, pregnant, caring for the sick, wounded, children and doing EVERYTHING else. We never get more than a bird’s eye view of what the men in charge want us to know. Lies, omissions and more lies and omissions.
The truth is, even if you’re right there, when something happens, you’ll get as many stories as there are people. And, those who weren’t there will be writing about what happened as well, even though they have no first hand knowledge of the event/s.
So, history is a kind of joke. We can’t ever know what happened in the past. We are simply trying to put pieces of a gigantic puzzle together without a picture on the front of the box. We can’t know. We DON’T know. And again, most of history was written by MEN, white men, white rich men. Those men don’t write about the rapes, the murders, the terrible things that are done to normal everyday people, however. Those things are left out.
I think we should stop teaching lies to every generation, as if we were telling them something that was real. There’s nothing in the books about the manipulation the treachery and all the terrible things our own men and country did. We aren’t supposed to know about that. How we destroyed other countries, enslaved their women, for the use of our soldiers.
It’s happening today. The lies continue. History is distorted and stretched so that even if there’s a shred of truth on a page, one has to question it’s authenticity. WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT OUR GOVERNMENT IS DOING AT THIS VERY MOMENT. The history that is being made right now is shrouded in darkness and WE THE PEOPLE don’t have a clue as to what’s going on. That’s what history is…hidden agendas, lies, lies, and more lies. It has always been that way. People write history books without having all the information since we are never allowed to know what’s going on. We are lied to constantly and that’s why history is a lie. We are constantly lied to by the people who are running the show. Again, rich white males in office and in charge.
The brutality, hatred, cruelty, and LIES of what our country does to us, as well as to others, is simply covered up, left out, erased. History isn’t real. History is FICTION.
I’m reading a couple of books right now that give an entirely different slant on what Paris was like in the 20s. It’s written by a woman and it’s about women living in Paris, during that time. It starts by saying that the history we know of that time, was written by men who were drunks and spent their time in brothels and chasing women who did not want to be caught. The men, who were turned away by those women, tried to destroy their reputations and careers for spite. Lying and doing what they could to punish them for not giving them what they wanted. So, part of the history of that time period, was filled with lies, written by men who were turned away by women who refused them.
All I’m saying is that we teach something called history when it should be called Lies and other Fictional Stories. Factual history would be made up of things like: The first train ran on this date. It took this long to get where it was going. Anything else is pure fiction and should be taken with a ton of salt.
Men lie and men wrote history. Jefferson didn’t talk about all his slaves and how he had them move through underground tunnels to SERVE him. Someone else found out about that and the fact that his mother owned 144 slaves. So, if another person didn’t give his POV and find out about the things that were LEFT OUT OF THE HISTORY BOOKS, no one would have ever known about those lies and omissions.
History is whatever the person writing about it says it is. Now women are writing and history looks much different. History is BIG and ENCOMPASSING and cannot be fit into one man’s opinion.
Women’s diaries and writings have given us a different view of our past. A view that was intentionally left out. Minorities and women have always been erased by white men. That means that what we considered to be history was not only incredibly incomplete, it was faulty and pretty much a lie by omission.
I realize that a lot of people reading this won’t like it. But we are force fed what the guys in charge want us to know. Everything else is hidden. That’s what disinformation is for. It’s to make the truth look like lies and the lies look like truth. People who tell the truth have to flee or are killed. One whistleblower said, to a group of people he was speaking in front of, that the government would kill him for what he was saying. He was found dead, strangled. It was called a suicide. His wife said the government murdered him but no one is listening to her. History is filled with lies and omissions. It’s not really history it’s propaganda.
The conversation…
the owl
said that she was looking for
a snowy owl whose stage name was
Hedwig
she told me that he had
a part in several films
but that no one had heard from him
in a very long time
I told her that I didn’t know where he was
but the films were finished
a long time ago
she sighed
fluttered her wings
and thanked me
she said that some owls
were like that
and she would just tell his mother
that he was having a
fly-about
she said she lived in the tree next to his
and they had grown up together
he always wanted to be an actor
whereas she enjoyed
being in the open field
I told her
it was a pleasure
meeting her
since it’s not often
that owls
talk to people
she told me
her name was
White Feather
and that Hedwig’s
real name was Tom
we said our goodbyes
and I felt very fortunate
to have been in the right place
at the right time
to have a conversation
with an owl
The end…is sometimes a beginning…a very short story
He had reached the end of the line. There was no going back and he didn’t know what waited for him in the darkness. He sat quietly, eyes closed, contemplating his life and how he had lived it. He was as honest as he could be, about what he had and had not done, and he was satisfied. He remained sitting, letting things fall away, saying goodbye to those he loved and once thought important.
When he opened his eyes he was staring at his own face. He no longer resided inside the body in front of him. He looked familiar, but from outside, he might not have recognized himself on the street. He was amazed at what he was seeing. As for what he was now, well he was wisps of what remained of his aura. He was smoke and energy.
Finished with earthly things, he was ready to move on. He was free from the weight of the world, from responsibilities, from all the heavy things that held people down and drained their energy and joy.
That’s was the moment he joined in the singing of the universe.
Rethinking Life 
Written
on September 30, 2019