Spirit
Warriors
By
Phil Penner
Is there any
singular intelligent life in this Universe? Socrates felt not. I asked it of
myself and came up wanting, my thought processes are but a snapshot in a grand
sea of souls. I sought it from religions but was perplexed for I fancy myself
an honest man. I asked it of many scientists yet even Einstein fell short by
not being able to extrapolate the pain of contributing to the potential for the
nuclear self-annihilation of humanity. I asked if society is intelligent life
and questioned how a house built on greed can stand the test of time. I asked
it of the potential extra-terrestrial life forms that may even exist in our
ether, and no, why would they leave behind their most nurturing environment
that created them? Therefore I query, “If there is no singularly intelligent
material life, can the aggregate be more than chaotic struggle and does every
fiber of our being long to decompose into another dimension that harbors divine
serenity?”
On the 17th
of February 2013, my residual guilt of being a spoiler vote that contributed to
the election of George Bush in 2000 had factored into my journey. My primary
driver was the Keystone XL Pipeline. This cornerstone of global ecological
demise convinced me to snort dry air at an estimated average 17 degree
Fahrenheit wind chill factor. Exiting the Washington D.C. taxi from the
Downtown Youth Hostel proved a need for me to separate from my jovial traveling
acquaintances. I’d constructed an awfully large protest sign that implores, “STOP
OUR CHEMICAL AND CARBON MASS EXTINCTION” on one side and “DIVEST CARBON NATIONS
= GLOBAL ENERGY ENEMA” on the other. The wind buffeted my sign to near failure
so I had to remove myself from the crowd lest I injure someone. I left the
masses gathering around the Washington Monument. They were swaying and dancing
in frigid joy like the antithesis of the selfish children in the Lord of the
Flies. Their energy was so radiant that my body began an extended divine
tingle.
As I plowed my
sign up 17th street I thought back to the day before. My wife had
added loving links to my chain and stayed in Los Angeles whilst I freeze my ass
on those days. As a neophyte to DC, the Botanical Gardens on the National Mall
was the first attraction to catch my eye. I traversed the warm and humid
enclosure up and down while marveling at the complexity of life being nurtured
within the glass zoo of foliage. I sat in repose near the exit and became
disheartened while asking myself, “Will we need to build an enclosure over the
entire Amazon?” Not to control the atmosphere, to keep the human arboreal pests
from laying it all to waste. Seven billion egos leave an awfully large
footprint. I reasoned that this is one major cause of our gathering of spirit
warriors.
Following the
garden I moved on to the National Museum of the American Indian. For hours I
marveled at how the common thread of all of these cultures is a reverence for a
power greater than themselves. Being one who has been healed on more than one
occasion by a power greater than myself I felt bonded to this perception of
reality. I became more depressed than at the Botanical Garden due to genetic
shame. My European ancestors were greeted with compassion by some Native
Americans who offered to co-exist and breed together. Instead we (and I know
few details) committed genocide upon the majority of the indigenous Americans.
These appeared to be honest souls who chose to revere the creative forces of
the universe from Canada through South America.
I was snapped back
to attention at the corner of 17th Street after pacing in front of
the White House. In splendor, the chanting bulkhead of spirit warriors 40,000
strong rounded the corner with, “Hell no, Keystone Pipeline’s got to go.” The
greatest beauty is that front and center are the aboriginal Americans who can’t
tolerate this horrible incursion into their sacred ground. Their natal lands
are being ravaged by clear-cutting of boreal forests. Massive stacks of trees
rot like so many beached whales poisoned by our ignorance. The Earth they
cherish is torn open by grizzly commerce which rips the guts from under the
peat forest floor. Left is nothing but money maggots for there are no vultures
to consume the waste products already killing wildlife and humans alike. The
vulture capitalists will come later, when we taxpayers make a futile attempt to
clean it up and restore thousands of years of vegetation.
My sign has me
struggling to stay just far enough ahead of the emergent masses to prevent
smashing someone. I beg of the cameras to include me as a voice of dissent.
Soon Bill McKibben, who’s left of their center beams into view. Bill appears as
euphoric as a man at first embrace of his infant miracle.
This my friends
was in fact the greatest spiritual experience of my 56 years of incarnation and
I loved it. I felt the healing of the ecosystem unfolding while humanity
begins breaking through its cocoon of greed. I pray that soon most of us will
emerge as butterflies in the mass ‘Awakening’. Being a spirit warrior for truth
is my calling and I deeply desire to be a finely tuned instrument of this
light.
The Keystone
protest is part of the healing of the schism of Western Cultures. We have for
thousands of years divorced ourselves from nature. In our hubris we have
pretended to be copies of a grand creator that we don’t actually know exists.
We have myths that exacerbated our egocentric ideologies from the Greco-Roman
Age of Aries. After over 2,000 years of mystical creation and Piscean guilt we
have hit a moral bottom. As this energy now begins to climb into Aquarius we
must begin to shake off the decadent energies that have allowed so much
suffering and greed as of late. We, my fellow humans, are on the cusp of the
Age of Aquarius. For hundreds of years this energy has been emerging and now it
is beginning to become dominant.
It appears that
our global society is a mega star of capitalism. It’s fueled by 7 billion egos
slamming together in the sea of greed that is the gravity of physical life. The
core of this greed grows smaller and denser with every nanosecond of trading on
Wall Street. When the core can no longer sustain the fire that slams against
the outer shell of population, then it shall collapse like a super nova. In a
particularly psychological manner it may explode into a new order(s) of life.
Will it seed the Earth with mostly higher consciousness diamonds of spiritual
harmony and balance? OR, will it produce mostly low consciousness lead
projectiles and thus create our own materialistic hell? When staring down the
barrel of a devastated eco-system this spirit warrior asks, “Do you feel lucky?
Or would you rather plan ahead and try to fix it?”
