Note: And I do mean abruptly! In the middle of composing this post I shifted. Spelling out my feelings in words on the page “did the trick.” To wit:
This Friday, I plan to attend a weekend Dances of Universal Peace event in Fort Wayne Indiana, about three hours driving time from here. No big deal.
And yet, I am leery, anxious. Given what seems to be the uneasy eruptive state of the whole world, will travel even be possible over this weekend? Because who knows what could happen! The long-term cultural psyopian “reality” we’ve all been subjected to over these many years has definitely infected my internal composure. Constant alertness, fight or flight status, seems to be required, if I am to be-lie-ve any of the X posts that its algorithm pushes my way.
Or is this just the remaining PTSD from my childhood that’s come roaring back, in what Quantum Tumbler, my latest astonishing find on X, would call “a recursion loop,” to be expected, and even welcomed, worked with?
Or is this “just” the fact that yes, as an all-too-human being on planet earth in 2025, I am continuously immersed in the dystopian mayhem aimed to turn us all into compost?
Or, I should say, I continue to be immersed. For this internal shit-storm is nothing new, as I said. Frankly, I remember being astonished when we made it through the millennium shift. And to even imagine, twenty years ago, that we would be still here in 2025 was impossible.
Obviously, I need the Dances of Universal Peace this weekend. These dances, this movement, this consciously invoked social, spiritual permaculture, is a lifeline for me.
Here’s what I wrote about last year’s event. Getting excited already!
And yet, as my son Colin Cudmore (paralyzed from waist down for the past three years, with mild to severe nerve pain 24×7) and I, in discussion this morning over the phone, recognized — and this is something each of us has long known separately, and now, because of our long phone calls during his new status as a “disabled” person, we now realize we’ve known together: We’ve been dreaming together all this time, of a world in which humans are connected like flocks of birds in the sky, attuned to one another without even realizing it.
And it’s true!
The proof? We both, and separately, have long recognized: there should be way more highway “accidents.” Driving at 65 miles per hour, crowded above and behind and across five lanes on an interstate highway, with cars rushing towards us only six feet away — and yet all of us “following the rules of the road,” at ease, pretty much, our driver bodies carried along by the communal flow, the unconscious current of aliveness that courses through and connects all of us and all beings, of whatever size or form, on or in this gigantic biome we call Earth, inside its own gigantic biome with planets and stars and galaxies. None of us alone. All of us together, at-one, inexorably.
Fear? That’s F.E.A.R. False Evidence Appearing Real.
I knew all that back during covid. Somehow I rallied to find and inhabit my larger self during that era when most people did not.
I now find it again, today, this moment, this precious moment in this vibrant 82-year-old body on this beautiful planet, with birds singing just outside my window and eruptive green everywhere.
