The Force is Within Us

Esoteric Essay by David Sky

Deep astrology takes into account after decades of living that our astrology is not static but dynamic for it is only our life itself in its totality. I think that astrology manifests as our genetic structure, our hard wired genetic predispositions, how we are put together, this DNA Machine Body-Mind of ours. It is the ship that we plow these oceans of life in Captains that we are the steering wheel of “Choice” in our hands – or, not in our hands, as the case may be. Fate is the ocean itself always moving to rhythms pulled by planetary force ever impacting our journey. Our living over time moves us on the inside one way or another, for better or worse, but hopefully in some positive direction if we are lucky or diligent or both so that by the time we have been fortunate enough to weather a half a century upon this strange, challenging planet, we have gained some proficiency at the helm.

I admit to believing in a process for good as if love draws us to itself inexorably no matter how strongly or even viciously we may resist its union. What we were meant to be seeks to push through the many obstacles desiring its fulfillment with some obstacles more devastating than others in its wake particularly I feel our early childhood development is key in setting any transcendent course to our adventures here. Too often we are beset upon rather than nurtured and supported in our growth and our soul suffers from a kind of handicap not at all unlike a physical handicap which while real does not mean limiting as this deep, inner drive to grow pushes like water past any obstacle even hard, cold stone.We learn over and over that just because something is not perfect or even broken does not mean it is useless. If we look back from some place of completion, we may well see how at every point no matter how painful or devastating it may have been at the time that our course was divine in nature bringing us inexorably to this place right here and now wherein we are meant to be and for which there could have been no other course than the very one that we just so happened to take.

July 7th 2016

Many things coming clear to me and I realize this is no epiphany situation but a long time coming.I have worked the program and more over many long, often terrible decades for much of my adult life feeling profoundly suicidal and suffering whale-shit-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean depression.Release from that came only at the age of 47 with radical self help actions. I knew at that point that it was only a matter of time before I took my own life. Ironically, I was not a believer in the death penalty yet I made exception for myself while having no real idea of what I had ever done in life to garner a death sentence from myself? I discovered that I have more than faults, that I am a good person, a loving person, a kind person, as well as intelligent, sensitive and perceptive. I picked up what I would call flaws and owned them. This is not selfishness, I said, this is me - for better or worse.

I have not done a good job of living by any stretch but then I have not done so badly, either. I feel as if I am stepping fully into myself, accepting who and what I am: What I value and love in life - understanding, perception, deep, compassionate empathy and comprehension of life, the interconnection of all things. For years it has been so hard to simply self identify what it is that I actually do love and care about in life. Nature and animals of all kinds in all fashions also I love. Very much the simple things I love drinking a beer with friend on the deck, sharing my life with the one I love. I am a big picture guy for better or worse who cannot see the trees for the forest. Details in themselves possessing little interest for me having only a passing interest in how each thing connects to all things. Relationships are everything. Connection. I love all things and seek to understand and reconcile the abomination of suffering in the world that I never could accept. This is what I want in life to understand more broadly, more deeply ... everything.

ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) for me is grounding and this I need very badly and I am most grateful for it. Otherwise, I might drift away altogether.

The 4th of July Never Sits Well with Me 
(I propose a 12 step recovery program for those who grew up in a Fear-Death cult culture to be called ALACult)

"Hi, my name is David and I grew up in a Fear-Death Cult Culture."

A chorus goes up from the group in unison, "welcome, David."

I grew up in an abusive, dysfunctional American Culture. This culture caused me continuous feelings of PTSD throughout my entire life. I can recall no time in the past when my culture did not traumatize me. Instead of a dysfunctional family, I grew up in a very sick county. My county is a violent, arbitrary, punitive, negative Fear-Death cult that makes every attempt to permeate the very beings of its people, controlling, manipulative and predatory in its essence some terrible "thing" that uses (us) for its own aggrandizement. This country (my culture for me like the waters that fish swim in) razes its people and resources at a continuously increasing and almost painfully frenetic pace like some madness of the mind.

Our people, our children and our children's children have been and continue to be transmogrified by this monstrous process that has become our world into the hard, cold metal of The Machine. Into the machine has gone our hopes and dreams, loves and passions. And The Machine will not stop until it has our souls. This military machine that spans the surface of the earth and below the earth; that operates across the great oceans and beneath them; that occupies the skies above us even up into space itself. As we here on the ground weaken and wither away in our strength, this Machine grows stronger and stronger - and that's a correlation that should speak for itself? This Machine does not exist as advertised to protect us, it feeds on us.

"The Machine is upon you now," I hear a voice say once at 7:12PM Winter of 2010 while I am reading peacefully one snowy evening in New Mexico - maybe it is just the wind, I think? "May God help you all," The voice finishes. This mild mannered male voice terrible for the implications of its deep, heart felt tone of compassion for ... us all?

But hey, I am my own person not subject to the whims of this toxic Death-Cult - right? I can remove myself from this sociopathic "family" and stop the madness now. It's time to bring out those Facebook memes of hard won victories and suck-it-up-buttercup pick me ups and, of course, the ubiquitous puppies and kittens, man, puppies and kittens! 

Ode to Caye Caulker, Belize May 2015

On the outside O THE LIGHT it's surrounding more light !
Guarded by angels on the outside, blessed by God on the outside,
on the inside quiet and still and troubled on the inside all brooding,
A Roiling of metamorphic dreaming eyes tightly closed for
                                                                           the light its blinding

Paradise And the Ship of Fools
Prose poem by David Sky

In paradise exotic beauty gleams off of every single living and non living surface alike. In paradise the skies dance with hyper color so electric blue in its intensity that if you listen carefully, you can hear it sizzle; there are thousands of graduated shades of orange, yellow, red and green all washing across the sizzling blues above and the multitudes of greens all around and at sunset each night a warm, benevolent sun slips down into the oceans horizon with to that sensitive ear the softest of sighs. Even if the skies were on fire with the roiling, burnt and horrid colors of the apocalypse - in paradise it would be a spectacle of perfect awe and splendor to witness!

So come friends, one and all, join us upon the ample deck of this Ship of Fools! It is only paradise, after all, and in paradise what better way to greet the cataclysmic abyss than a party with all hands on the deck!. Let there be music and dancing. Let us share what we may have freely on this eve of our doom. Let there be joy and beauty and strength and love. Not out of some Bacchic abandon rather invoking a unity and abiding respect for all creatures and all people in this life so that here at the end of it our many lives, alas, meld seamlessly into one, joyous, dancing thing.

Grandma's Flag, Short Autobiography

Grandma's Flag - autobiographical short story by David Sky

Granddad I recall mostly sitting in a straight back chair in the living room of the old, WWII era apartment he and grandma share only a short drive from the nation's capital. They were built originally to hold an influx of military personnel and their families with The Pentagon only a few miles away. Granddad never says a word to me throughout my whole childhood and sits chain smoking Camel cigarettes and drinking whiskey surreptitiously from small, metal flask. I understand that grandma is not to know of this flask and I do not ever speak of it. I learn the ways of secrecy in what must be that same unspoken manner that evidently is a family tradition.

Occasionally, when grandma's back is turned, Granddad salutes me with the flash before taking a sip, a cruel light in his eyes. It is not a friendly gesture but the closest he ever comes to communicating with me. Mostly I recall him scratching his head as he stares out at the street with long, thick, gnarly yellow fingernails terrifying me when very little, that scratching sound steady and constant, as much as the sight, then finally as a teen and young adult only disgusting me.

I am twenty five when he dies finally of lung cancer and they had lived there since before I was two when my mom would drop me off with grandma for visits lasting from a few months to a year in length as mom transitioned from one abusive alcoholic suitor to another. Soon as mom would find one who she felt might be able to provide us a home, she would come get me and try her best to make a home for us. She tried, you know. She loved me. I would try to tell her at first that it wasn't going to work but I learned that she could not listen and so remained silent waiting for the next shoe to drop and my inevitable return to grandma's apartment. It was some years later after much therapy on my own that it occurs to me that granddad had sexually molested my mom all throughout her childhood even though mom never spoke of this and my guess is that she never spoke of it to anyone at all. She just carried it with her silently in every cell of her body until the moment of her death decades later never having said a word about it so far as I know.

Now granddad is dead and his death for me is about grandma, not him. He called her “Hazel” after the TV character and treated her always as a slave and with great disrespect but now that he is dead, she is utterly and completely lost. She remains lost for the rest of her days and it is not long before she succumbs to severe Alzheimer's and my mother and I take her to a nursing home far out in the countryside where we seldom see her. When I do visit, she has no idea who I am. A few times, she seems to think I am her eldest son, Lenny. I will never forget leaving her there sitting on the bed next to her holding her hand and she is crying and I am thinking Goddammit David if you had any decency at all, you would strangle her to death right now, you coward. But I do not strangle her to death only leave her sitting on that single bed in that bare room alone, crying. It is better visiting later because she is always happy and laughing and has no idea who I am or even who she is.

But now – now granddad is dead and grandma is lost. Now mom lives with a horrible little man I think of as her last alcoholic. He is a passive man at least he does not physically abuse her or even verbally, so far as I know. Grandma moves into their two bedroom apartment for a few years afterwards until the Alzheimers gets bad. I am the first to notice it visiting having lunch with grandma watching some old movie on the TV eating on the couch on TV trays. Grandma makes a comment on the movie and I realize that she has no idea what the movie is about. I eat and watch a while and then I ask her what she thinks of the movie and she tells me and what she says while a moving story in itself bares no resemblance to the movie we have been watching. I tell my mom then to take grandma to the doctor and have them check for dementia.

That is later and now we have to attend to burying granddad, the arrangements, paying for it. We find out that since he is a WWI vet, he can get a military funeral. That helps with the costs. We have to have him taken to a cemetery that is a long drive out in the Virginia Piedmont. My mom drives grandma and I and I do not recall much about the actual funeral. I recall on the way looking out the back window of the car at horses romping through a field in the Virginia horse country: how the horses are so obviously playing and happy.

At the service itself, grandma looks more lost than ever and I wonder if in her mind she is even there at all? The seven soldiers fire their 21 gun salute and each volley makes grandma cringe and the taps rips my heart out even though I feel absolutely nothing for this man, not even hatred. Grandma watches the soldiers fold the flag in front of her as if she has no idea what they are doing but I can tell that when they hand that folded flag to her and she accepts it as if she doesn't really know why they are giving it to her that somehow it sinks in for her right there and I see that she knows what is happening, alright. The way she holds that flag breaks my heart as if she knows that she has something in her hands of great import but not exactly what? This is mostly what I recall grandma holding that flag looking utterly and completely lost at the soldier standing before her saluting her crisply.

I wonder whatever happened to that flag? I have no earthly idea.

Main Street USA

I feel like I'm the only one walking down main street who sees the long line of flags flying proudly from each street pole stretching off into convergence as the sharp, metallic teeth of an enormous, monstrous machine in the process of devouring our humanity at this very moment. I know that if I were to share this perspective with any one of the people around me, I would be rebuffed as insane or worse, beaten as blasphemous. I do not possess an ounce of this much vaunted patriotism.

This no longer makes me feel some pride as it used to when I was younger - that self righteousness in seeing the truth that others either cannot or will not see; that strength of youth burning with an iconoclastic passion. I no longer feel any anger or any desire to rebel nor do I feel any fear for the future. I am hollowed out. Empty. Weary and alone. Hit me and I will ring like a bell. I feel some shame that I no longer have the will or the strength to shake my tiny, human fist at this gargantuan, inhuman machine that we have made of ourselves. I feel utterly and completely defeated.

God, I pray silently, help us all – and that's the only fight I have left.