4 of 12 | Monday is for Religion: The Art of Connecting What's Not Really Separate

Hi lovely Earthlings!

Yours truly is back with another piece of the Chief's Lament.  This time the wisdom is even deeper.  Animals are our siblings, Chief Seattle claims, and when we destroy their habitat, we destroy them, our turn is next.  Since these wise words were pronounced a century and a half ago, we've explored space, we've landed on the Moon.  In that search for other planets who might be hospitable to our species, we've only found out one thing for sure.  If we ever find another astral body willing to have us over, we humans will have to migrate along with all the other species.  Why?  Because no species can live alone: we're all connected!  "Animals are our bothers" as Chief Seattle puts it.  He already knew what took so much effort for us to discover.  Oh well . . .

"The Land Is Sacred to Us"

Chief Seattle's Lament, Cont'd

So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will make one condition: The white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.

3 of 12 | Monday is for Religion: The Art of Connecting What's Not Really Separate

Hi again lovely Earthlings!

Wish yours truly a Happy Birthday for this is the right day!  She is getting wiser and happier every year, and more adept in the arts of love.

When you think of religion, what comes to your mind?  When we desacralize nature, we imagine things as separate, each one a cute toy we can play with.  If the toy breaks we get a new one and throw the old one away.  Chief Seattle berates himself.  "I am the savage" he says.  "I don't understand."  How ironic!  Now that we've used up everything nature had to offer, the fun is over.  "Who was the savage then?" Chief Seattle would ask today.  When we do religion we sacralize nature again.  We revere and respect all its elements in an aura of ecosexual love.  Chief Seattle shows the way. 

"The Land Is Sacred to Us"

Chief Seattle's Lament, Cont'd

I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps it is because the red man is a savage and does not understand.

2 of 12 | Monday is for Religion: The Art of Connecting What's Not Really Separate

Hi again lovely Earthlings!

Have you been thinking about religion?  Religion has a bad name today.  It's the excuse for wars.  But has it always been so?  The Civil Rights movement was inspired by religion.  And it was a social space where people of different races met, worked together, fell in love.  What other antidote is there to racism than the commingling of all shades so that difference does not matter?

More to the point, in the supposed land of religious freedom, those with belief systems that sacralized nature were not considered religious at all.  They were considered "heathens," something in between a savage and an atheist.  Their belief system was against nature and had to be extirpated at the cost of eliminating its people as well.  So the genocide of Native American civilizations had to be almost successful before progressive monotheists became respectful of their belief systems, and sometimes fell in love with them.

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens

But who was savage?  Who betrayed nature and got a license to kill her?  The earth remembers, Seattle says.  Animals, plants, rocks, are our family.  The lament resonates with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens's ecosexual weddings, designed to marry the natural elements and make them part of the fold. 

Listen to Chief Seattle as he predicts what will happen:

"The Land Is Sacred to Us"

Chief Seattle's Lament, Cont'd 

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

A Letter about Myself - What Is Success and How Is it Measured?

Hi lovely Earthlings!

Last spring yours truly took a human potential course called Personal Passion Formula.  It's a way to push oneself to play out of the box and redesign one's life to suit new interests and inspirations.  

Students had to evaluate their current level of success and determine the values based on which success was measured for themselves.  

These are always somewhat sensitive moments and the value of these trainings is mainly introspective.  They force one to look within more closely. 

1 of 12 | Monday is for Religion: The Art of Connecting What's Not Really Separate

Hi lovely Earthlings!

Yours truly is back and she feels this sudden shift toward religion.  What is religion?  "Re-" for doing again something that was done before.  "Ligion" for linking together.   So it could be the art of connecting what was not separate but appears to be so.  

For one who was raised atheist religion is not exactly an easy conversation.  As a kid, I often felt the "god" we rejected was an entity of its own.  We simply had to brave the desire to "believe" there was any power in that.  Living a sling shot from the Vatican, we had no choice.  It was either "religion," and that meant Roman Catholicism, or "atheism," and that meant pushing Catholicism away.  

It was only as a student in California many years later that I realized people had different religions.  They were ok with the religion of their neighbors.  Did not try to convert them!  Then, I thought, these deities are all inventions!  They really don't exist outside people's imagination.  There's nothing out there that will get mad at you if you're not afraid.  Oh!  What relaxation!

7 of 7 - Bisexual Epistemologies: A Journey form Nausea to Commitment

Bisexual Epistemologies: A Journey from Nausea to Commitment 

An occasional piece by

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

For The Journal of Bisexuality’s 10^th Anniversary Issue

Hi dear readers!

This seven-in-one piece will be great fun--yours truly promises.  Find out all the ins and outs of 10 years of Bisexuality!  What does "epistemology"mean?  Big word, right?  Well, all it means is that when you're making love you're producing knowledge.  A good thing!

We follow What Wisdom Accrued to Me? with the Conclusion.  If you followed us this far, we hope you found this seven-in-one piece really revealing of all those things about bi you've always been curious about.  Why is it so good?  What can it do for you?  For the planet?  For the future?  For authentic intimacy?  It's all here, spiced with a bit of irony and critique of why we're so behind on our agenda.  What's keeping us from being more efficient.

Also arcane words you've been told have no meaning unless you got a PhD are explained--made very easy!  "Nausea," "existentialism": it's all about the chakra system--really.  Commitment?  It's not about going to jail (as in, "being committed").  But rather, it's about "being-in-action" about things.  Being the one who makes the difference!  No mysteries.  Woooooow!  Come back for more, will you?  We'll post every week, on Tuesdays.

Namaste,

Serena

7. Conclusion

At the end of my journey, I would like to conclude with a few remarks about the itinerary.  I was not sure how I would respond to the call that so acknowledged me as one who had at least tried to do my part.  Now I have done it, and I can claim that the very act of doing it is proof of my commitment.  Yet it’s not so simple. 

6 | Friday is for Poetry | Venerdi Poesia | Introduction 2 | "A Lake for the Heart | Il lago del cuore" | Luigi Anderlini

The Old and the New:  
Synergy and Medi(t)ation in Luigi Anderlini’s Works

by Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio


an Introduction to A Lake for the Heart, poems by Luigi Anderlini 

Part Two

The collection is synergistic in ways that my father’s life also was.  He does not invent new metric systems, but borrows from other poems, by Montale, Leopardi, Foscolo, and others, all the way back to Dante.  Perhaps the poet just wants to show off as a virtuoso.  But there is more than vanity.  My father’s aesthetic choices are similar to his political ones.  When, in the mid-1960s, he decided to get out of the governmental majority and move back to the opposition, he chose to inhabit, not join, a political party and change it from within rather than found his own party.