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How to feel at home with myself, in family, in community, and with all of life

I felt compelled this morning to write. It was a kind of two-way prayer, a conversation between myself and my higher power. May my life be a prayer. Today, I have been contemplating the artifact of shelter, the sense of place, and the possibility of home. For Luna Solterra, it is week 47 of this orbit of the Earth and Moon around the Sun.

Luna Solterra by Stephen Bau, created with Midjourney, 2024.

A place to call home: earth, air, and water. Photo by Kees Streefkerk on Unsplash

I feel at home with myself, with my wife, with my daughter and her family, with my three sisters, with my friends, and with a neighbour’s cat, who has found his home in our house. I am enjoying the work I am doing. I am taking my first steps into a new identity as an artist and a writer.

I was thinking about how we choose to comply with the rules of a system designed by white male landowners for white male landowners—a global economic system dominated by corporations based on the model designed by the British Empire and other western European nations that were themselves once dominated by the Holy Roman Empire.

We can remember that the systems of nation states, of constitutional monarchies, of representative democracies, of slavery, prisons, schools, borders, land titles, national parks, corporations, and national currencies are the tools used by the rich white male landowners to enforce the submission and compliance of their labour forces.

We can choose to have a different relationship with each other that is not mediated by these oppressive systems of disempowerment. Why should we comply with these laws that are designed only for the benefit of the few at the top of the hierarchy?

What is the alternative?

We can choose to live according to a different set of priorities. We can expand our notion of kinship. When the trees are our kin, we do not abandon them to those who would cut them down for profit. When the river is our kin, we do not pollute the river or allow the flow to be constrained by dams that restrict the flow of life. These are obstructions in the arteries of the Earth’s circulatory system.

There are relationships that are outside of the bounds and the reach of the law: kinship. These are relationships of trust. However, the relationships of kinship have been broken by violations of apathy, neglect, abuse, and violence.

Colonial laws have been designed to restrict the flow of love in the relationships of kinship. Boarding and residential schools are one way of separating children from their families and communities to assimilate them into a system of organized abandonment.

Children become accustomed to this breaking of the bonds of kinship to be assimilated into the role of individuals who are separated into specialized labour camps called corporations. These legal entities drain the power and life of the individual for the power and profit of the corporation—designed to imitate, but ultimately to replace the human body, the corpus, with a corpse—a non-living legal entity that has been granted legal personhood. People willingly give up their power and their lives to the corporation because they hold the monopolies on the distribution of currency, which is the way the current and flow of energy is restricted by a central authority. Lawyers, economists, and governors are responsible for managing the homeland. The word “economy” comes from the ancient Greek word “oikos”, which refers to the family and the family's house. The economy is the management of the well-being of a household. We have outsourced the management of the home—the economy—to municipal, provincial/state, and national governments. Technology has made the world too complex for people to manage their own homes, so we outsource that responsibility to those who are tasked with our governance as wards of the state.

We have become so used to this arrangement that we no longer understand what it means to be family. Kinship has become meaningless.

What structures can we build to shelter us from a hostile environment, from the harsh realities of life? How do we nurture a sense of place? How do we live into the possibility of home?

I realized that family had been reduced to economic transactions and nothing more. My family of origin did not know how to share. They did not know how to connect emotionally, because they have lived as economic individualists, trained to take care of themselves and their own selfish interests. The limit to sharing is defined by the limits of one’s own household.

An indigenous perspective tends to be that we do not own land. Rather, we belong to the land. We are kin to Mother Earth. We are family with all living beings, including trees, plants, mushrooms, birds, fish, beavers, wolves, bears, orcas, oceans, rivers, plains, and mountains.

The colonial perspective is that the crown or the government owns everything and grants title of the land to those who can afford to pay the price for the land. These property laws were intended and designed to restrict the voting rights of the nation to white male landowners. They also separate us from our kin and from access to the commons—the land which is our birthright and our mother.

The notion of “Mother Earth” needed to be destroyed in favour of a white male God who owns all of the land and rules the entire kingdom through a supreme white male landowner who is God’s representative on Earth. (In this instance, I am speaking of the racist, sexist, white supremacist system of the British Empire, to which the citizens of Canada are subjects.)

The children of indigenous peoples were kidnapped from their families to destroy the bonds of kinship and to enslave them as wards of the state. The intent was to “kill the Indian in the child.” Ultimately, to kill the Indians was the goal, whether in reality or in essence. Settlers had already been assimilated into this system of organized abandonment and the industrial labour camps built for the power and profit of corporations, the nation state, and the wealthy white male landowners who pledged allegiance to the crown and the nation.

These industrial labour camps are now called cities. It is an open air prison, since the entire land has been claimed by the crown or government. Australia was once a penal colony. Canada was settled by the French and British with the undesirables—the poor and the destitute—who were forced into labour in the penal colony, exclusion zones, and the resource-rich lands owned by the crown, granted to the corporations responsible for mining and resource extraction on behalf of the kingdom. Governors were appointed to manage these wards of the state in exclusion zones called colonies outside of the bounds of the island kingdom of the crown. The U.S. represents the prison colony which was able to stage a rebellion and form their own government. The government was designed by the council of white male landowners and warlords who had staged the coup d’état.

Under these conditions, where colonial expansion, violence, war, genocide, and ecocide served the purpose of resource extraction and profit for white male landowners, what has changed in five hundred years of colonization, imprisonment, forced labour, genocide, and ecocide?

Not much, except that the prisoners have become more comfortable in their open air prisons and forced labour camps. The strategy of “divide and conquer” has been a success. Peace has been sustained for the empire by placing a monopoly over the use of violence in the hands of the military and police forces. The legal structures are enforcing the willing compliance of the prisoners and labourers.

How might we now change our circumstances and become liberated from our servitude?

The propaganda of the empire holds some clues. There is a history of revolt that is being distributed by the missionaries of the military-industrial complex whose mission was to assimilate everyone into the language, laws, and labour of corporate wage slavery. It is called the Bible.

It documents the plight of slaves who revolted against an empire only to build their own kingdom of slaves and labourers and to be conquered by other kingdoms and empires until they were again imprisoned and enslaved in a far-off land, dreaming again of liberation.

They dreamed of a saviour who might conquer their oppressors and liberate them from their enslavement.

One person they thought might be their saviour said that the kingdom is within. He was tortured and executed for insurrection against the empire.

What might we learn from such a document? Don’t repeat the same mistake of building kingdoms and empires.

What is the alternative?

To build a home. We learn to be at home with ourselves. We learn to be kin to each other. We learn to be kin with all the living beings with whom we share this Earth. We learn to be kin with Mother Earth.

I was raised with brothers who no longer regard me as kin. My mother has turned our relationship into a series of monetary transactions and not much more. She is emotionally unavailable, as are my brothers. My father died without really caring to know me.

I am left, then, as an orphan, a ward of the state. I know the state does not care whether I live or die.

What can I do?

I can begin to build my own sense of self, my own sense of family, my own sense of community, my own sense of kinship with all of life.

Enough of kingdoms. I desire to feel at home. I desire kinship.

So, this year, I have been making a home for myself by creating the family I never had. I never had sisters. So, I am reaching out to people I know and trust to be my sisters.

I don’t know what kinship feels like beyond the sense of family I have been able to create with my wife and child, and with my daughter’s husband and children, and with the friends we have made along the way.

I find that it helps to understand myself as an internal family. I am a multiplicity of cells working together to create this life. My body knows how to communicate with all of these beings, but I do not. In fact, such a prospect sounds overwhelming. That separation between the “me” that is writing these words and my own body is perplexing. Also, it is oddly reassuring. I don’t have to worry about all of these cells. They just seem to be taking care of themselves and the whole of my body, as long as I fulfill the basic requirements of this body.

This makes me wonder, “Is that how the body of the Earth is functioning?” Does the Earth have a similar sense of agency?

It seems that white male landowners are not happy with me considering such an idea, because it might be dangerous for anything to undermine the authority and control that they are wielding over their prisoners and labourers, even though they are themselves willing prisoners and labourers within this same system.

They have voted for a king to rule their empire, a self-centred narcissistic tyrant to make their decisions for them. It seems ridiculous, and he and his followers appear to be more and more ridiculous. Protecting the interests of white male landowners seems to be the order of the day. It’s weird, to say the least.

Not everyone is enthralled with the prospects of such an idiocracy.

So, what do we do? They still hold a monopoly on the use of violence.

I remember some words from the Book of Rebellion and Liberation.

“Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.”

The words of the “Book”—let’s call it—attribute these words to a higher power, a power that is reticent about what to call her or him or it. (English, the colonial language, is pretty weird when it comes to assigning gender to that which has no gender and is not an inanimate object.)

If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, Mother Earth might have a sort of agency that we refer to as an emergent property of the cooperation of a myriad of living organisms. That feels like a higher power. There is a form of kinship in this relationship that deserves my respect. Let’s refer to Mother Earth as “she/her.”

If Mother Earth is communicating with us, it is through her Spirit. The Book says she has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to this present time. What is she giving birth to?

A new way of being that transcends the violence of kingdoms and empires.

Liberation seemed to be the aspiration of the executed saviour’s mother on learning that she would give birth to a child.

She was giving birth to liberation and a sense of place and home that would be a new way of living on this Earth.

The followers of this child of liberation called their movement the Way. Eastern mystics had similar ideas. They called it the Dao, the Way. The empire called these followers, these rebels and insurgents, using a derogatory term, “Little Saviours.” They became known as “little Christs,” or “Christians,” in the same way that the little people of Lilliput were called Lilliputians. The Christians overcame empire by becoming the empire, which, unfortunately, was also a way of capitulating to the power and violence of empire, effectively disrupting the growth of the liberation movement of the Way of Love.

The Way of Love became the Empire of Violence, War, Colonization, Genocide, and Ecocide. The Empire waged war against the Way of Love, against Nature, and against the Earth, turning the Way of Love into a global campaign for domination and supremacy over land and peoples.

We now live in a world of corporate domination. The white male landowners cry for domination over women’s bodies, including the body of Mother Earth.

What we know about empires is that they fall. They come and go. Like a flower, they bloom, they whither, and they die.

The Way of Love is eternal, because the Universe is held together by gravity—both the physics of gravity and the metaphysics of gravity. Love is metaphysical gravity. Love is the integral of gravity and radiation.

I find faith and hope in this reality of love as the root and origin of all that is.

I find kinship with faith, in my mind. I find kinship with hope, in my heart. I find kinship with love, in my body. I find kinship with Earth as the incarnation of the Way of Love in this experience of being alive.

My mind creates a map of the world as a historical reference of where I have been, what I have done, and what I have experienced. The mind stores in memory and language what I have learned.

My heart aspires to the imaginative possibilities of a world liberated from empire. My heart aspires to connect and imagine and co-create the future with Mother Earth and to live in the Way of Love.

My body is present to the multisensory experience of being alive. My body finds its centre of gravity to walk as Love on the Earth with respect, gratitude, reciprocity, and reverence for all that is sacred—for all who are alive and are my kin. When I love the other I love them as myself, because they are not other than me. They are me.

May we be one, I in you and you in me.

That is the Way of Love.

That is how we find our way home.

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The Apocrypha is a place where I feel at home to write about the religious dogma I was handed as a child and how I have been wrestling with that god, coming to terms with the harms and traumas of these belief systems, questioning their validity, and finding my own sense of what faith, hope, and love might mean in our current context. I write outside of the canon of the scriptures, because the empire forbids such writing. I do not believe in the power and violence of empire. So I write about what is sacred, about what may be considered too sacred to be shared with the uninitiated. Consider this your initiation into liberation and into the journey of finding our way home to a different way of being in the world—the Way of Love.

The word apocryphal (ἀπόκρυφος) was first applied to writings that were kept secret because they were the vehicles of esoteric knowledge considered too profound or too sacred to be disclosed to anyone other than the initiated.
— Wikipedia: Apocrypha

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