The Hows

There were so many ways of transformation, it seems pointless to try to recollect them in hindsight. What was a path of beauty to one was a mis-step to another, but somehow—all the hows—we transformed something that no longer made sense—you could even call it prison bars, though they were not physical—into the place of our own making. We ourselves were no longer being remade into cogs of the machine, the bureaucracy, the cult of the idol of money. Instead, we encouraged our surroundings into what, for us, passed as paradise.

Not to say it was perfect; it never is. We are humans, and we are social. We have preferences and differences and odd manners about us. But we participated in every day, in every moment. We were present and included. The Bible might say that we blew our fury trumpet, and I say that we blazed a glorious path to beauty, though that is always in the eye of the beholder.

Simply put, we picked up the pieces of what capitalism left behind, and built ourselves the best lives we could. We remembered the communities of old, and these became the basis of our personal economies. We delighted in food that grew itself and beckoned, upon ripening, to be devoured. We discovered ways of using our bodies and minds that we could not have imagined ten years prior.

Capitalism, and the cult that perpetuated it, became too bloated and control-oriented. It forgot how to be relevant to peoples' lives. People stopped worshiping at its altar. They stopped listening to media prophets, stopped caring about the increasingly static spectacle. People started talking to each other, and found out their mutual skepticism of those in power having any idea of how to care for those not. Things changed.

We began to walk a different path. Like the Hebrews trekking through the dessert, living off manna and hope, it was hard at times. And yet we knew in every molecule of our being that our honesty of feelings would lead us to something better than slavery, better than pyramid-building. When we started planting gardens for our grandchildren, and gardens for anyone and everyone, that is when in my heart we had reached the promised land. Not that this place and time was promised to us. But I think all of us had a feeling things could be better than that bullshit called the American Way. It was a promise we made to ourselves. We just needed the courage to begin, and the faith that we could build, plant, and flourish.

Yeah, I know, Jeremiah, that still does not answer your question of how. I'll keep thinking about it, and you keep asking, and maybe someday we'll both figure it out.