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January 2 - January 10, 2025
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING By Lauren Oya Olamina Here we are— Energy, Mass, Life, Shaping life, Mind, Shaping Mind, God, Shaping God. Consider— We are born Not with purpose, But with potential.
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING We give our dead To the orchards And the groves. We give our dead To life.
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Darkness Gives shape to the light As light Shapes the darkness. Death Gives shape to life As life Shapes death. The universe And God Share this wholeness, Each Defining the other. God Gives shape to the universe As the universe Shapes God. FROM Memories of Other Worlds BY TAYLOR FRANKLIN BANKOLE
I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia
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Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.”
Q
Join us and thrive, or whatever happens to you as a result of your own sinful stubbornness is your problem. His opponent Vice President Edward Jay Smith calls him a demagogue, a rabble-rouser, and a hypocrite. Smith is right, of course, but Smith is such a tired, gray shadow of a man. Jarret, on the other hand, is a big, handsome, black-haired man with deep, clear blue eyes that seduce people and hold them. He has a voice that’s a whole-body experience, the way my father’s was. In fact, I’m sorry to say, Jarret was once a Baptist minister like my father. But he left the Baptists behind years
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It seems inevitable that people who can’t read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should. And no doubt the new picture ballots on the nets will give Jarret an even greater advantage.
We can fight a gang. We’ve done that before when we were much less prepared than we are now. But we can’t fight Jarret. In particular, we can’t fight President Jarret. President Jarret, if the country is mad enough to elect him, could destroy us without even knowing we exist.
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Chaos Is God’s most dangerous face— Amorphous, roiling, hungry. Shape Chaos— Shape God. Act. Alter the speed Or the direction of Change. Vary the scope of Change. Recombine the seeds of Change. Transmute the impact of Change. Seize Change. Use it. Adapt and grow.
We have, it seems, a few people who think Jarret may be just what the country needs—apart from his religious nonsense. The thing is, you can’t separate Jarret from the “religious nonsense.” You take Jarret and you get beatings, burnings, tarrings and featherings. They’re a package. And there may be even nastier things in that package.
Jarret’s supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret’s talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could wind up in a war. Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.
Q
“I’ve got four kids left alive,” Ramiro Peralta said yesterday at Gathering. “Maybe with a strong leader like Jarret running things, they’ll have a chance to stay alive.” He’s a good guy, Ramiro is, but he’s desperate for solutions, for order and stability.
Interesting that they fear Edward Jay Smith’s supposed incompetence more than they fear Jarret’s obvious tyranny.
OMG! So creepy!
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING God is Change, And in the end, God prevails. But meanwhile… Kindness eases Change. Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful Positive obsession Blunts pain, Diverts rage, And engages each of us In the greatest, The most intense Of our chosen struggles FROM Memories of Other Worlds
I cannot recall ever feeling as certain of anything as she seems to be of Earthseed, a belief system that she herself created—or, as she says, a network of truths that she has simply recognized. I was always a doubter when it came to religion. How irrational of me, then, to love a zealot. But then, both love and zealotry are irrational states of mind.
Olamina believes in a god that does not in the least love her. In fact, her god is a process or a combination of processes, not an entity. It is not consciously aware of her—or of anything. It is not conscious at all. “God is Change,” she says and means it. Some of the faces of her god are biological evolution, chaos theory, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and, of course, the second law of thermodynamics. “God is Change, and, in the end, God prevails.”
Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways. God is inexorable, yet malleable. Odd. Hardly religious at all. Even ...
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“We are Earthseed,” Olamina says. “We are the children of God, as all fractions of the universe are the children of God. But more immediately we are the children of our particular Earth.” And within those words lies the origin of the Destiny. That portion of humanity that is conscious, that knows it is Earthseed, and that accepts its Destiny is si...
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“We can be a long-term success and the parents, ourselves, of a vast array of new peoples, new species,” she says, “or we can be just one more abortion. We can, we must, scatter the Earth’s living essence—human, plant, and animal—to extrasolar worlds: ‘The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.’ ” Grand words.
The Noyers had driven up from Phoenix, Arizona, where food and water are even more expensive than they are in the Los Angeles area.
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING To shape God With wisdom and forethought, To benefit your world, Your people, Your life, Consider consequences, Minimize harm Ask questions, Seek answers, Learn, Teach. FROM Memories of Other Worlds
If my mother had created only Acorn, the refuge for the homeless and the orphaned.…If she had created Acorn, but not Earthseed, then I think she would have been a wholly admirable person.
“Javier Verdugo Ortiz We, your people Welcome you. We are Earthseed. You are Earthseed— One of many One unique, One small seed,
One great promise. Tenacious of life, Shaper of God, Water, Fire, Sculptor, Clay, You are Earthseed! And your Destiny, The Destiny of Earthseed, Is to take root Among the stars.”
Well put, but not all that well received. We say “God is Change,” but the truth is, we fear change as much as anyone does. We talk about changes at Gathering to ease our fears, to desensitize ourselves and to consider consequences.
The rest…well, the best we could hope for from them would be that they ignore us if we get into trouble. That might be the kindest gesture they could manage—to turn their backs and not join the mob. Others, whether we thought of them as friends or not, would be all too willing to join the mob and to stomp us and rob us if stomping and robbing became a test of courage or a test of loyalty to country, religion, or race.
“So you’re saying praying doesn’t work.” “Oh, no. Praying does work. Praying is a very effective way of talking to yourself, of talking yourself into things, of focusing your attention on whatever it is you want to do. It can give you a feeling of control and help you to stretch yourself beyond what you thought were your limits.”
“How do you know you’re right?” he asked at last. “I mean, that guy who wants to be President, that Jarret, he would call you all heathens or pagans or something.” Indeed, he would. “Yes,” I said. “He does seem to enjoy calling people things like that. Once he’s made everyone who isn’t like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn’t cause. That’s easier than trying to fix the problems.” “My dad says…” The boy stopped and swallowed. “My dad said Jarret’s an idiot.” “I agree with your dad.”
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Beware: At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease.
Human competitiveness and territoriality were often at the root of particularly horrible fashions in oppression. We human beings seem always to have found it comforting to have someone to took down on—a bottom level of fellow creatures who are very vulnerable, but who can somehow be blamed and punished for all or any troubles. We need this lowest class as much as we need equals to team with and to compete against and superiors to look to for direction and help.
Thanks to climate change, they do have most of it. The climate is still changing, warming. It’s supposed to settle at a new stable state someday. Until then, we’ll go on getting a lot of violent erratic weather around the world. Sea level is still rising and chewing away at low-lying coastal areas like the sand dunes that used to protect Humboldt Bay and Arcata Bay just north of us. Half the crops in the Midwest and South are still withering from the heat, drowning in floods, or being torn to pieces by winds, so food prices are still high. The warming has made tropical diseases like malaria
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We’re becoming more and more isolated as a people. We’re sliding into undirected negative change, and what’s worse, we’re getting used to it. All too often, we shape ourselves and our futures in such stupid ways.
I’ve saved the worst news item for last. The election was on Tuesday, November 2. Jarret won. When Bankole heard the news, he said, “May God have mercy on our souls.” I find that I’m more worried about our bodies. Before the election I told myself that people had more sense than to elect a man whose supporters burn people alive as “witches,” and torch the churches and homes of people they don’t like.
We all voted—all of us who were old enough—and most of us voted for Vice President Edward Jay Smith. None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used that analogy more than once.
His speeches during the campaign have been somewhat less inflammatory than his sermons. He’s had to distance himself from the worst of his followers. But he still knows how to rouse his rabble, how to reach out to poor people, and sic them on other poor people. How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?
Well, now he’s conquered. In January of next year, he’ll be sworn in, and he’ll rule. Then, I suppose we’ll see just how much of his own propaganda he believes.
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING God is Change And hidden within Change Is surprise, delight, Confusion, pain, Discovery, loss, Opportunity, and growth. As always, God exists To shape And to be shaped.
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one’s own place, One’s own people, One’s own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise— Into growth and destruction, Into solitude and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change. FROM Warrior BY MARCOS DURAN
I figured there was nothing for me in southern California. It was a place where you could only be poor unless you were born rich or you were a really successful crook. I thought that meant I had to go north.
“There was a politician. He was running for the state senate, I think. He won. He was a Jarret supporter. He was making a speech in Arcata when I was up there, and he was listing devil-worshiping cults. He named Earthseed as one of them. I’d never heard of it, but I remember because he was going on about how the name actually referred to the devil, the seed deep in the earth and growing like a poisonous fungus to spread its evil to more and more people.” “Oh, Marc….” “I didn’t make it up. He really said that.” I drew a deep breath. “We don’t worship the devil. In fact, we don’t worship anyone.
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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life. Any entity, any process that cannot or should not be resisted or avoided must somehow be partnered. Partner one another. Partner diverse communities. Partner life. Partner any world that is your home. Partner God. Only in partnership can we thrive, grow, Change. Only in partnership can we live.
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Purpose Unifies us: It focuses our dreams, Guides our plans, Strengthens our efforts. Purpose Defines us, Shapes us, And offers us Greatness.
If there are sins in Earthseed, shortsightedness, lack of forethought, is the worst of them. And yet shortsighted is exactly what she was. She sacrificed us for an idea. And if she didn’t know what she was doing, she should have known—she who paid so much attention to the news, to the times and the trends. As an adolescent, she saw her father’s error when he could not see it—his dependence on walls and guns, religious faith, and a hope that the good old days would return. Yet what more than that did she have? If her good days were to be in the future on some extra-solar world, that only made
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They’re nice people, but they can’t wait to get out of the United States. They say it just doesn’t work anymore. The election of Jarret was, for them, the last straw.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2033 Jarret was inaugurated today. We listened to his speech—short and rousing. Plenty of “America, America, God shed his grace on thee,” and “God bless America,” and “One nation, indivisible, under God,” and patriotism, law, order, sacred honor, flags everywhere, Bibles everywhere, people waving one of each. His sermon—because that’s what it was—was from Isaiah, Chapter One. “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers.” And then, “Come now, and let us reason
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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING To make peace with others, Make peace with yourself: Shape God With generosity And compassion. Minimize harm. Shield the weak. Treasure the innocent. Be true to the Destiny. Forgive your enemies. Forgive yourself.
Marc spoke at Gathering yesterday. This is the third time he’s done it. Each time he learns more about Earthseed and tries harder to convince us that our beliefs are nonsense. He seems to have decided that the unity, the Christianity and the hope that Jarret has brought to the country makes Jarret not the monster we all feared but a potential savior. The country, he tells us, must get back to God or it is finished. “The Earthseed Destiny,” he said yesterday, “is an airy nothing. The country is bleeding to death in poverty, slavery, chaos, and sin. This is the time for us to work for our
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Marc has gone. He left yesterday with the Peraltas. They’re gone for good too. They were the ones Marc managed to reach. They’ve always felt that we should be more Christian and more patriotic. They say Andrew Jarret is our elected leader—Ramiro Peralta and his daughter Pilar helped elect him—and a minister of God, so he deserves our respect. Esteban Peralta is going to enlist in the army. He believes—the whole family believes—it’s our patriotic duty, everyone’s duty, to support Jarret in his “heroic” effort to revive and reunify the country. They don’t believe Jarret’s a fascist. They don’t
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They should be small communities,” she said. “No more than a few hundred people, never more than a thousand. A community whose population grew to more than a thousand should split and ‘parent’ a new community.” In small communities, she believed, people are more accountable to one another. Serious misbehavior is harder to get away with, harder even to begin when everyone who sees you knows who you are, where you live, who your family is, and whether you have any business doing what you’re doing.
