How often have you heard someone - and in my experience it is rarely a person with an indigenous background, upbringing and understanding - say something about living in ways that honor the seventh generation?

Me, I’ve lost count. And I say with great compassion, that in my experience the majority of these people are usually mouthing a phrase they really do not understand.

It’s a phrase I used for many years without any true understanding.  

I would say things like: We need to consider how this decision will impact people seven generations from now! 

And in so saying, I’d think that I had made a comprehensible statement capable of creating change when I saw heads nodding around me.

Rarely did I, or the people with whom I was speaking, have even the vaguest idea of how something we were doing now would impact someone 140 years from now, or have the slightest notion of what an effective way of changing our actions would be.

The idea of the seventh generation sounded good, but did not really have much traction when it came to the way I live my life.

Then in the early 1990s I encountered the work of a woman who would later become a personal teacher to me for a very brief time, ah, far too brief a time  - Paul Underwood - would that she was not called so soon from this world!

Paula was a wisdom keeper. A living link to a past that stretches back over 10,000 years and is remembered and celebrated in story and song.

Paula taught that indigenous people are careful observers of the world and of life - after all, if your very survival depends on distinguishing between two plants that look almost identical, one of which is a healing plant and the other a deadly poison, your powers of observation become highly refined.

This kind of knowledge is kept alive in the culture by being passed along carefully from generation to generation, being handed only to those who show aptitude for such stewardship.

One of the things that indigenous people observed was the cycle of life - in spite of our contemporary ideas that before the advent of modern medicine no one lived past the age of 40 - it was not unusual for Elders to live into their 60s, 70s, 80s or even longer - take a look sometime at the photos of Indian Elders that were taken in the late 1800s.

Over time it became apparent for those who were inclined to notice such things, that someone blessed with a long life would come to know seven generations:

Great-grandparents

Grandparents

Parents

Siblings

Children

Grandchildren

Great-grandchildren

It was noticed that regardless of the time described in their stories (history) there were always Seven Generations Alive and Walking Through Time. Seven Generations who are responsible for the creation of The Stories That Are The People.

It was noticed that a person blessed with a long life would actually move through each of these generational stages - the circle begun as a great-grandchild would come around to be completed as the experience of being a great-grandparent. 

The Seven Generations Walk Together Through Time and their care for each other and the world is what builds the road they walk upon.

As a result of this noticing, a core tenant and competency of life in the indigenous world was that any decision which might impact the lives of The People would be looked at and considered from the perspectives of the Seven Generations Who Walk Through Time - the very old, the very young, those in the middle, those who had passed from this world, those who were waiting to come in, and on the world itself - for the world is infused with the energy of aliveness.

Seems to me this is an incredibly valuable piece of wisdom. 

What shifts in our leadership and decision making when we begin to view the world as filled with the energy of aliveness? 

What changes in our daily lives when we start to ask questions about how this decision or that action impacts the very old or the very young?

How do our individual and collective actions and practices honor those who have come before, upon whose shoulders we stand?

And, how do they make way and prepare an hospitable space for those who will follow after, who will one day be standing upon our shoulders?

What changes in our relationship to things like oil and plastic and nuclear waste when we think of what life will be like as a result of our actions today for the Seven Generations will will Walk the Earth 10,000 or even 100,000 years from now?

What moves inside of us and inside of our families, our colleagues, our communities, and our governments, when we begin to ask questions about how we can effectively live up to and into our individual and collective responsibility for the care and stewardship of the ongoing presence of Seven Generations Walking Together Through Time? 

What is the road we are building now? Will it bear the weight of The Seven Generations?

Can we really build a sustainable civilization without looking at the world through such a lens?

How do these questions and ideas strike you?

Does anything awaken in the reading of them?

Does anything resist them?

What might you do differently as a result of entertaining them?

 

 

A friend sent me a most interesting blog post on the great cognitive surplus. 

How many times have you received an email which after reading, you think or remark to whomever you are with - some people have too much time on their hands!

That’s an example of the cognitive surplus.

So is Wikipedia, blogging and even World of Warcraft - at least according to this blog post.

The blogger is Clay Shirky and, based on the cultural references in his post, I am guessing he’s around my age - it seems we both wasted many hours in our youth watching Gilligan’s Island, and, while he did not mention it, I’ll bet Lost in Space was probably a factor in his misspent youth as well. There was something mighty appealing about Angela Cartwright in a tight fitting spacesuit - even for a prepubescent lad.

Clay’s post is based on the address he delivered at the Web 2.0 conference in April 2008.

I found his observations to be really insightful. His post is longish, informative, thought provoking and well worth reading in its entirety.

Here are just a couple of things that stood out for me:

It is estimated that in its current state, Wikipedia represents around 100 million hours of human thought.

In the USA people watch 200 billion - that’s 200,000,000,000 - hours of television each year. That’s 100 million hours of just watching commercials alone each and every weekend!

The worldwide internet connected population watches a trillion - 1,000,000,000,000 - hours of television a year. 

The media of the 20th century was viewed as a single race - consumption. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. 

When you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer.

One percent of those trillion hours represents 100 Wikipedia-sized projects!

What an amazing thought - if just one percent of the amount of time people  around the world spend watching TV were channeled elsewhere it would unleash an astonishing amount of cognitive capital.

And of course given the times we are in and the challenges we face, I found myself immediately wondering if we could shoot for ten percent. That thought was followed closely by one along the lines of - as great as it is building up cognitive and intellectual capital on the web, there’s probably a far higher rate of return when we build up relational capital in our communities.

The shadow side of blogging - at least for me - is how it reinforces my introverted and introspective tendencies, sometimes to the point of my neglecting the people in my life - including myself. I might well find more satisfaction and different kind of self-expression leading to greater fulfillment, were I to focus on connecting f2f through volunteering some of the time I spend blogging.

What might become possible if just ten percent of the time we humans spend watching TV were channeled into community restoration projects?

There’s a question worth exploring!

I spoke with a friend today who turned me on to Bob Sutton’s blog. 

Sutton, for those of us unfamiliar with the man’s name might be better recognized as  the best selling author of The No Asshole Rule.

While I admit to having seen the book, I knew little about it or the man who wrote it until my friend told me to visit Bob’s blog and read the 15 things Mr. Sutton believes. 

I am now hooked and will need to spend more time investigating his work.

Reprinted below - copied and pasted from his blog actually - forgive me any copyright infringement here, I am giving full credit where is it due - are 15 things that Bob Sutton believes make the world a better place.

Perhaps he’ll make a believer out of you too. 

For more please visit his every informative and entertaining blog.

• 1. Sometimes the best management is no management at all — first do no harm!
• 2. Indifference is as important as passion.
• 3. In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can’t have both at the same time.
• 4. Saying smart things and giving smart answers are important. Learning to listen to others and to ask smart questions is more important.
• 5. Learn how to fight as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong: It helps you develop strong opinions that are weakly held.
• 6. You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behavior.
• 7. Getting a little power can turn you into an insensitive self-centered jerk.
• 8. Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.
• 9. The best test of a person’s character is how he or she treats those with less power.
• 10. The best single question for testing an organization’s character is: What happens when people make mistakes?
• 11. The best people and organizations have the attitude of wisdom: The courage to act on what they know right now and the humility to change course when they find better evidence.
• 12. The quest for management magic and breakthrough ideas is overrated; being a master of the obvious is underrated.
• 13. Err on the side of optimism and positive energy in all things.
• 14. It is good to ask yourself, do I have enough? Do you really need more money, power, prestige, or stuff?
• 15. Jim Maloney is right: Work is an overrated activity

 

“You are what you eat.” - Old folk saying

“There is an old folk saying that you are what you eat, I think more accurately, you are what you don’t poop out!” - Swami Beyondananda.

Each of the above contains some pretty profound wisdom.

The cells of our bodies are nourished by what we put into our mouths, chew, digest, and assimilate, and they are cleansed by what we excrete. 

The last fifty years have seen a revolution in the way food is grown, processed, packed, shipped, prepared, cooked, digested, and assimilated.

Unfortunately, this is having some impact on the cleansing function of waste excretion - in many cases wastes that should be excreted are being stored - usually as fat.

After living close to the land and eating local foods grown in season or preserved by natural processes like pickling, fermenting, drying and salting, for as long as anyone can remember, suddenly we find our diets flooded with foods from around the world, shipped vast distances, grown with chemicals that are toxic to insects and other biota.

Most of what is in the diet of the average American contains elements refined far beyond anything recognizable to the digestive system of our great grandparents.

Often the additives in our food are not food at all, but waxes, fillers, dyes, and flavorings made of the by-products of the chemical and petroleum industries.

We now have foods so highly processed and refined that they deliver huge amounts of calories, while being nearly devoid of nutrients our bodies can use to repair and maintain cellular health.

Besides the toxicity to our soils and aquifers - a post for another time perhaps - our bodies are paying the price.

Obesity among people with incomes below the poverty level is now common. This is feature markedly different from that of poor people in the past.

Even among the affluent, the paradox of being overfed and undernourished is a common feature of the peopled landscape of the Western world.

The fact that our food is shipped over vast distances - some estimates give an average travel distance of over 1,200 miles from place of origin to place of consumption - also plays a role in contributing to our climate change challenge.

Consider the carbon released into the atmosphere through the exhaust of the many machines - tractors, trucks, trains, planes, and the coal or diesel-fired generating plants that make factory processing possible.

So, what to do?

Here’s the short answer:

“Eat food. Not too much. Locally grown. Mostly vegetables.” - Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is rapidly becoming one of my all time heros.

Anyone who can examine the complexity of the interlocking systems that make up the globalized industrial agriculture of the 21st Century, assess its detrimental effects on people, planet, economy and ecology, and offer up in nine simple words a surprisingly effective remedy for what ails us, is someone worth paying attention to.

In an op-ed piece this past week in the New York Times he wrote a marvelous reflection entitled “Why Bother?”

In it he reframes for us the radical and empowering act that is planting a garden, and how much the world can change from this simple, humble act.

He also delivered a fantastic speech at last year’s TED conference.

 

 

 

Today is Earth Day 2008. 

As an eighth grade student in 1970, I thought Earth Day heralded a new age of reason.

Richard Nixon created the EPA. Congress passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Conserving and restoring the environment was seen as a national priority.  

Pollution joined poverty and drugs on the list of items upon which to wage war.

Perhaps that is why things have not gone so well.

There was a popular slogan during the Vietnam war: War is not healthy for children and other living things.

War mentality is insufficient to the task of restoring the ecosystems of our world to health and balance.

We do not need to make war on pollution and climate change so much as we need to make peace with ourselves and our ways of being on Earth.

Here’s a suggestion for creating a “Personal Sustainability Challenge.”

While this practice can be done alone, it is much more fun to work with a couple of friends or family members - they’ll help you think of things you would not come up with on your own.

All you need is a pencil and some paper.

You are going to explore four questions:

1. Qualifications and passions - What are some of the personal characteristics, qualities, skills or talents that I love to engage and that make me uniquely suited to contribute to the sustainability efforts now sweeping the globe?

2. Resources and relationships - In what ways does my family, school, community and/or work situation provide me with resources and relationships where I can take effective action on sustainability issues?

3. Noticing - Looking around from where I sit or stand, what are two or three things related to sustainability, that I see are in need of doing, and for which I am both qualified and resourced?

4. Actions - Based on the above information, what are two or three simple actions I am willing to commit to taking on a daily or weekly basis to make a difference?

Share your commitments with your partners.

Make sure they are commitments you can actually keep.

Make them simple.

Far better to take a five minute action each day or week that can be sustained over time - insignificant though these actions may seem - then to tackle some huge project that will overwhelm you and soon be abandoned.

Everything we do matters.

Is the sky falling? Watch this and decide for yourself.

 

 

I was in the eighth grade when the first Earth Day was held.

Somewhere in the piles of books around here is a paperback first edition of The Environmental Handbook.

I’d like to say that it is dog-eared and well worn, but in fact I can’t recall doing more than giving it a fairly cursory glance.

Back in junior high school, in a small town in Maine, the thought that the cycle of the seasons could be knocked off its axis, that the fish in the sea could vanish, that the forests that seemed to stretch forever could disappear, or that our air might become so polluted that respiratory aliments would reach pandemic proportions, was the stuff of science fiction, and nut jobs putting forth wacky, end-of-the-world fantasies.

But reading the newspapers lately, each of these things seems to have either already come to pass, or appear very likely to become features in the world’s landscape that I will wander through in my lifetime.

As young man of 20, I spent a year on an isolated coral atoll half way between Honolulu and Midway.

French Frigate Shoals was small - 3100 feet long by 410 wide, flat and six feet above sea level. It was stark, a tiny strip of blinding whiteness nearly lost in the vast, blue Pacific.

The joke in the Coast Guard was: What’s the worst they can do to me? Ship me off to French Frigate Shoals?

Though there were some who found it a kind of personal hell, I was not among them.

I read an article about the island in my local paper when I was 14 and somehow, I knew my destiny was bound up on that little spit of land. Six years later I volunteered to go.

I’ve never regretted a moment of the 11 months, 17 days six hours and 43 minutes I was there.

I found it an astonishingly beautiful place. Pristine is a word that springs readily to mind, though I know even now I am romanticizing it.

Home to 18 men, two dogs and some 35,000 birds, it was hardly a tropical paradise.

Hawaiian Monk Seals (now endangered) patrolled the lagoon along with sting rays and sharks. We swam anyway, the coral was amazing and the fishing was great.

The island is breeding ground for the majestic Laysan Albatross (endangered)  a.k.a. the “Gooney bird” - so named for its poor landing skills. The opportunity to watch these birds mate, incubate, hatch, shed their gray down and become great white fliers who will spend their first seven years at sea before returning to the Shoals to mate was a privilege that few get to experience.

We also witnessed the hatching of the Green Sea Turtles (endangered) and their race from the sand above the high tide line into the safety of the ocean amid the onslaught of hungry birds after a tasty morsel.

Now, only 30 years later, my beautiful island is under siege,  and much of the life it supports is threatened with extinction. Plastic bags are a large part of the reason.

Flooded in plastic waste, French Frigate Shoals, like many other Pacific Islands, is another victim of convenience and consumer culture. A remote, wild place seemingly so far removed from everything is, in fact, intimately connected to us all.

The statistics don’t all agree, but there is a mass of plastic roughly twice the size of Texas floating around in the Pacific Ocean. Twice the size of Texas…

That’s over 500,000 thousand square miles of plastic waste!

It boggles my mind for sure, but far worse - it hurts my heart to think of it. 

When I was a kid there was a commercial that ran on TV portraying an Indian walking around a landscape divided by highways, with cars zipping about, the people carelessly tossing litter out of their windows, and the trash piling up along the roadways.

I don’t remember the voiceover, but I’ll never forget the tears falling from the man’s eyes as he looked upon land his ancestors from only a few generations previous, knew as a clean and pristine place.

Today, I am the one shedding the tears as I think of what we have done to our oceans, our land and our air. To the place we call our home.

I am staggered when I consider how much damage has been done in half century I have been around. 

I could not find any videos, showing the current state of my beloved island refuge. But I did happen on this one shot at Midway, a close neighbor, as neighbors in that part of the world go, being only a few hundred miles west.

 

Next time you throw out a plastic bag, picture in your mind the 500,000 square miles of plastic refuse floating around the Pacific.

We need to do better - we can do better - we will do better.

How big is the market for biodegradable packaging?

Here are three resources you can use to begin to eliminate plastic waste from your life:

http://www.to-goware.com/

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/09/onya_bags-_a_cl.php

http://www.trellisearth.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=56

 

“Love is misunderstood to be an emotion; actually, it is a state of awareness, a way of being in the world, a way of seeing oneself and others.

” 

 ~ David Hawkins

“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

~ Mary Oliver, from Blackwater Woods

“Without love intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence love is not enough.”

~ Ashley Montagu

“Love expands intelligence and creativity. Love returns autonomy, and as it returns autonomy, it returns responsibility and the experience of freedom.

I am going to tell you what love is, not as a definition, but as an abstraction of the coherences of our living… Love is the domain of relational behaviors through which another (person, being, or thing) arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself.

The dynamics abstracted above, are how we act, whether or not we reflect on it.

Aggression is that domain of relational behaviors in which another is negated as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself.”

~ Humberto Maturana

“Love and magic have a great deal in common. They enrich the soul, delight the heart. And they both take practice.”

~ Nora Roberts

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

~ H. L. Mencken

“There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.”

~ Mother Theresa

“The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.”

~ Elie Wiesel

“We can only learn to love by loving.”

~ Iris Murdoch

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”

~ Abraham Lincoln

“What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.”

~ Pearl Baily

“If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?”

~ Lily Tomlin

 

 

The Wise Woman’s Stone

A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains 
found a precious stone in a stream. 
The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, 
and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. 
The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and 
asked the woman to give it to him. 
She did so without hesitation. 

The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. 
He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. 
But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, 
“I know how valuable the stone is, 
but I give it back in the hope that you can 
give me something even more precious. 

Give me what you have within you that 
enabled you to give me the stone.” 

 

~ Author Unknown

I received this in my inbox today from my friends at Season of Non-Violence. If you’d like to subscribe click the link below.

 

http://list-manage.com/subscribe.phtml?id=7307c9db0f

 

 

If you are following the news you may be aware that:

It is 2008 and several ‘leaders of the free world’, meaning the highest ranking officials in the government of the most powerful nation on Earth - as they like to refer to the country they were elected or appointed to govern - are locking themselves inside of secure rooms and personally approving which methods of torture can be used on ‘detainees.’ - source ABC News

The President of the United States is aware of this.

The President of the United States approved of this, and admits it openly on national television.

I’ve been trying to get my mind around this.

Under what conditions would it be possible to create a sustainable conversation around torture?

A conversation where no one erupted into violence or became so frustrated that they left the conversation?

I honestly do not know if I am up to the task.

Still, I will offer what few ideas I do have and hope that other readers of this blog might be able to add to them so that something new and useful can be fashioned among us.

A core tenant of the dialogue work I do is that all perspectives are valid, and that depending on where we want to go together, some perspectives are more useful than others.

Valid in this context is not to be confused with condoned.

Valid means something exists in a particular way that shows up as real for someone and informs their actions as a result.

Torture is real.

Torture is here now.

Torture is being practiced in numerous countries around the world.

Torture is being practiced by certain agencies under the aegis of the United States government with the full support of the President.

The torture being practiced by these agencies is funded by the money collected from the citizens of the USA via taxes.

Torture shows up as a useful perspective in the mind of the President of the United States, and informs his position that torture is, and will remain, a policy and practice of his administration.

Whether you agree with the President or not, his perspective is valid - remember to grant validity to his view is not the same as agreeing with or condoning it.

I submit that denying the validity of his position, raging against it and/or pointing out its moral flaws is of very limited use in bringing about effective change.

The national discourse on torture is stuck.

It is polarized around the rightness or wrongness of its use in certain situations.

Questions about whether it is right or wrong are useless in moving us past the stuck place.

It is the nature of poles to be magnetic - when you are close to one its power is nearly irresistible and its lines of force set up a field that repels any attraction to the other.

Arguing the superiority of one pole against the other only reinforces the dynamics of polarization.

That’s how we end up with poems that begin with: Nothing has changed. [see previous post]

We need a different approach to get unstuck.

The two ways I am experimenting with to change historical discourses are to widen the context - get a larger perspective by exploring it from new perspectives - and to include the excluded voices - which is a different way of introducing new perspectives. 

If we are to do either one, we need questions that can help us think differently and that can source new information.

So the rest of this post is devoted to some questions that might be able to help us think differently and change our conversations around this troubling issue.

Note: Ideally, we’d be able to sit down with the President and his senior staff and ask these directly, but even though the chances are slim that that will happen, it can still be a useful exercise to ask these of yourself and a few friends.

As always I welcome your comments, but most especially I’d love to read questions you would add to this list…

Questions for widening the context for torture:

What is the function of torture?

What is torture in service to?

Who is served by torture? 

Who benefits? - let’s include both direct and indirect beneficiaries.

Who suffers? - let’s include both direct and indirect sufferers.

To what ends is the torture being employed?

How effective is torture in achieving those ends?

What documented evidence is available to justify the efficacy of torture?

And to whom is it available?

For example, how many people who have been waterboarded, or placed in stress positions, have given up useful evidence that solved or prevented crimes?

Is that evidence openly available to judicial and journalist scrutiny? And if not why not?

What percentage of people tortured have yielded such useful information?

What percentage of people tortured have failed to yield useful information?

How do those two figures compare?

If you were a business person about to invest millions of dollars on something with a similar track record of results would you sign the proposed contract or look for other prospects?

By what criteria are the victims of torture selected?

And who exactly can be tortured?

What are the effects and consequences of its application to both the torturer and the torturee?

How are torturers selected?

What kind of training do they receive?

Do they practice on “dummies” similar to the ones the Red Cross provides for CPR training, or are novices turned loose on victims and if they happen to make an ‘oopsie’, that is just figured in as the cost of doing business?

Speaking of the cost of doing business, how much are torturers paid?

Do they receive extra wages similar to combat pay?

What kind of psychological and spiritual counseling is provided to them for working in such high stress jobs?

How many of them breakdown after a while and require expensive rehab efforts?

How many excel in their chosen field and what kind of job opportunities open up as a result?

What kind of homelife do they have?

What kind of ‘work - life’ balance issues do they face?

How does their profession affect their children?

Do they make good parents?

Would you want your daughter to marry one?

Would you trust one with your grandchild? - or even your pet?

Where do torturers come from? Are they drawn from the ranks of  government service employees, the military or private contractors? Or some combination of all three?

What is the cost to our reputation and standing in the world community paid by our employment of torture?

What other ways are open to us to achieve the goals we are aiming for when we employ torture?

What prevents us from using them?

Questions for including the excluded voices:

Where is your voice in this conversation?

With whom do you speak about this issue?

What changes and shifts for you as a result of those conversations?

Where do you get the information that informs your position?

In the national debate about the use of torture where are the interviews with the victims who have been on the receiving end of torture?

How are their perspectives represented in this conversation?

Do they get equal time and coverage in the media?

Are there people in your local community who have undergone torture and are willing to speak publicly about their experience?

If their voices are not present, why is that?

Who benefits from the absence of their stories?

What are their stories?

How was it for them to be placed in stress postions?

What is it like to be waterboarded?

Did they come to respect their torturers as ‘simply doing a nasty job in service to a noble cause’?

Or did they experience their torturer as having something personal against them?

Do they feel the use of torture against their person was justified?

What was it like for their families while they were incarcerated?

What is it like now that they have been released?

What kind of healing and care is afforded to them now that they are back home?

Did they give up any useful information to their torturers?

Why do they think they became target for and victim of torture?

Have they seen the error of their ways?

Are they willing to forgive and forget?

Where do they plan to be in five years?

News item:

WASHINGTON, DC - April 10 - ABC News reported that in dozens of top-secret White House meetings, the most senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, discussed and approved specific torture techniques for use on detainees. According to this report, Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft sanctioned these tactics…

I have a lot to say about this, but I think it best to let the poet speak first.

To help ground my thinking about torture, I turn to the work of Nobel Prize winning Poet Wistawa Szymborska. 

Born in Poland in 1923, she was a first hand witness to the kind of thinking and behavior that condoned torture and created the insanity that was WWII in her homeland when the Nazis invaded.

I find an amazing wisdom in her words.

The following is not an easy poem to read - but when the news headlines inform us that the highest levels of government are approving torture - it may be among the best things we can read to restore us to sanity.

Torture

Nothing has changed.

The body is a reservoir of pain:
it has to eat and breathe air, and sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.

In torture all of this is considered.

Nothing has changed.

The body still trembles as it trembled
before Rome was founded and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.

Tortures are just what they were, only the Earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away.

Nothing has changed.

Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones-
real, make believe, short-lived, and non-existent.

But the cry with which the body answers for them,
was, is, and will be a cry of innocence
in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.

Nothing has changed.

Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances.

The gesture of hands shielding the head
has nevertheless remained the same.

The body writhes, jerks, and tugs,
falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees,
bruises, swells, drools and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.

Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.

The little soul roams among those landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.

            Translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh        

If you find this news as repugnant as I do, speak out - sign the ACLU petition at:

http://action.aclu.org/topdowntorture