The Child Within -- Remembered

     By  L.S. Heatherly

We should never forget, my friends,
How our Common Soul gathered in,
Deep breaths of time, back when!

Still now, child within, remembers--
How Adult, still, wishfully creeps:
To re-catch sweetest love, through sleeps!
Glow of  revelation's embers!
And long-lost joys in childhood's leaps!

Don't forget spells within our reach,
That gathering wild berries teach!
Catching fish, storing food, once, reaped
Panting breath of ol' hide and seek!

Being, within child, remembers
The glowing of spirit, its shine!
From intimate concourse and consorting
With passages of time!

Being, within child, remembers
Spirit-time, before machine-time!
When all systems were go
For Earth-place, we could know,
As our rhythm and rhyme!

Being, within child, remembers
A time, before Ego's thrusts for power,
Released the tragic flood --
Automated bodies over concrete;

Before urban time and commercial feat
Crowded out rituals of mealtime!
And many of Life's sparks
That our Spirit was meant to greet!

Being, within child,  remembers
A time -- before speech suffered culture's breach!
When pure words from a primal spring,
Flowed true in Earthly, Human banks of time!

Being, within child,  remembers
Spiritual intercourse-- all living things
Within an Earthly Soul,
Sprouting  family-saplings,
Catching  ancient breeze-songs --

Whispering, It takes a village. --
An ancient creed, now, gone;
As arrogant storms, still,
Flash-flood along!


--Edited from a poem published in Ch. XI of
The Last Human Spring (2002) E book (2011)

New Years: Youth, Age, Life and Freedom

Man was born free and everywhere he is in shackles.
                                                                   --  Jean Jacques Rousseau
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest
love not freedom, but licence.
                                                                     -- John Milton
What is the nature of natural, innate, human freedom-- authentic
to our natural, human species? This is almost never asked nor answered.
To know, to have consciousness of, free human life and world; go to places
where there is abundant free forms of other social mammals, preceeding us.
For, we emerged from these freedoms, with these, are a part of these;
or we are diminished and perish.

You can identify human freedom by the company it keeps-- by abundant
free plants and the animals that preceeded our emergence from free
plants and animals. We come from the slow natural selection of freedoms,
interactive with, and dependent upon, many other species. Their
life and freedoms are a part of our life and freedoms.
                                                                           
What is the nature of natural, innate free plants and animals?
These can be identified by the free, unadulterated lands and
waters they keep to. You will not find them and their communities
in the city's land and water-scapes! City-life is conquered and ruled
by a quasi, human organism, engaged in the pursuit of elitist power;
rather than Earth's ecological growth in interactive, freedoms of many
ecological species of life, of which, our human being, lives
and freedoms are part.
                                                                          --  L.S. Heatherly

To be truly free, it takes more determination, courage, introspection,
and restrant than to be in shackles.
                                                                        --   Pietro Belluscb

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men [often unknowingly]
dread it [the real thing].
                                                                --   George Bernard Shaw

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
                                                                       --  Victor Hugo

To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one
of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
                                                                  --   Henry Frederic Amiell
Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit.
                                                                    --   George Santayana
Behold! I do not give lectures on a little charity.
When I give, I give myself.
                                                                      --   Walt Whitman

That best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
                                                                  --  William Wordsworth



Copyright 2015  L.S. Heatherly

Soul Songs: Humanity Retaken

Taking root, a song again long-stirs,
Freeing up souls of songsters;

Patient is the waiting spirit's hold
On universal, human heart and soul:

These songs, by nature's knowing of what's just,
Sprout from shared humanity deep within us.

Soul songs, deeper than personality, ego, career;
Wider than ethnocentricity and all fetters
Of nations, industries and language- letters.

Listen! Beyond the many ways love hardens,
Songwriters seed soul songs
Outside the annual, commercial song-gardens!

Sprouting sounds from heart's perennial ground,
Ringing out the universal, song-garden,
Singing shared humanity, unbound.

In the end, alone, one call is there:
To share or not to share,
To sing the soul
Or enter-tain a show,
To free or not to free--
To be or not to be.



Copyright L.S. Heatherly 2013

Art and Human Liberation

Art is not the slave-built things of conquest-nations.
Art is ceaseless paths to human liberations.

Art is not the artist: the ego freshly sold.
Art is democracy, springing fresh, barely told.

To feast on artist is idolatry forlorn.
Art is villageocracy ceaselessly reborn.

Art redeems our besieged human nature:
The Soul's tongue, without regard for nomenclature.

The spirit-storm felling written storied-steeple;
Art is the instinct to liberate the people.

Art is the fair, naturally selected rights restored;
The call, to which artist, by conscience is implored.

All are inspired; all reborn and able.
Our Soul kindles light upon this table.

Behold not stage: for artist's limelight glow;
Soul-art, not artist, is truest light of Home we'll know.



Copyright 2012  L.S. Heatherly

Children Born Free: Natural Culture

American Youth of the 1960's and 70's counterculture were told: "Get your act
together!" More recently, the acts on the stages of the Human Circus-Zoo--
called "modern civilization"-- are more automatically programmed via an
artificialization of childhood. But, a deeper pondering asks: of what kind, and
of what merit, are these un-natural, unecological choices! These fabricated
choices made on such slippery, mechanical, digital, virtual slopes!

These choices are provided to our children throughout youth's long, dietary,
spirit-being-culture-mind salad of scientific 'certainty', spiritual-ontological confusion, high-technicized senses and perception, digitalized, cyberized
language and relationships, spiritual-ontological frustration, commercial adulteration, and the ego's inflation.

An inflated ego that eclipses the whole human self -- human self as organismic union of family, community, mind, consciousness, being, spirit and culture; all within Earth-life!

Is this chaos of exploding, fragmenting, naturally evolved, human being and
socioculture merely stuff for social theories, and engineered, corporate,
cultural empires! Merely stuff for humanity as egocentric careers and
comodities! Have not our pesonal selves, our families, our communities, our
cultures and our particular ancestors emerged from, with and by means of,
our long-running, natural humanness; carried through, and around, written
historical time; carried through and around history's enslaved, subjugated, 
human being! Carried primarily, by our innate, evolved, organismic, naturalistic,
Earth-folk Society and Culture! By the Earth-life-Humanity relationship!

Dare we evoke, through deepest human restorations, a deep soul-rebellion!
Shall we proclaim that our very humanness cannot be perpetuated, be
socioculturally reproduced, be sustained, for human posterity without sufficiently
preserving our root human being, nature, spirit and culture, all resprouting
from our, original, Paleolithic being! That we must and we shall, excavate our
200,000 year-old ecovillages as birthrights of our human species!

Shall we abandon achaeology of things for archaeology of our soul! Shall we
replace excavations for career's passion with excavations for lost, wide, deep,
manifold, human loves. Loves, once, innate and free.


(adapted from pg 38, 6, of The Last Human Spring, L.S. Heatherly 2002)

Copyright 2011-2013  All rights reserved

Stopping by Woods on a Showy Descending

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For Earth (her Life's days, eons, Her peoples),
and for Robert Frost, U.S. Poet, 1874-1963:

from Frost's watching "woods fill up with snow" and his personal
"promises to keep" to Our watching Earth and Humanity fill up
with technological polution; and our going-scarce promises of "Earth's 
human soul to keep."
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Prologue:

We saw Her, thru artificial eye,
As scope, screen and lense, told not the why.
We failed to pull Her pure Life near,
And hold Earth-human systems dear.

I.
Whose truths these were, we barely know;
Their home: old, organic village though.

They and Earth, divine us stopping here
To mourn their truths, now, buried low.

II.
Our mortgaged hearts sense love is near,
Stopping here to quell our fear:
To foil ego's desire and greed,
Should soul aspire an Earth so dear.

III.
These truths give shackled hearts a break,
Calm civil mind's deep Human-quake.
The only other move's the creep
Of Human Nature's rape, History's true mistake.

IV.
High-tech arts are charming, dark and deep.
But we've Earth's human soul to keep,
Truths to regrow, 'fore we humans sleep.
Truths to regrow, 'fore we humans sleep.

Epilogue:
Stopping by Earth's life descending,
Her powers, she will be defending--
Our coldness to Life, rescending.

L.S. Heatherly 2010-2013 All rights reserved

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