Metahistory Quest: A Woman’s View
By Joanna Harcourt-Smith
I came back to the States last Saturday after several months of living outside the country. I feel life is not very different here than when I left for Spain in October. However, I am different because I have not watched American TV for a long time, nor been exposed to the atmosphere of terror prevailing in this country. In Europe I have been living inside a different narrative (so to speak). It is not better than the story Americans are being told and hence tell themselves, it is slightly different. I would say that people in Europe have been buying and selling the lie of civilization for a longer period of time, so they are for the most part polished and polite about the lie.
During the time I have been away I have come out of the high degree of paranoia and fear that was the fuel I ran on in America. Without the isolating shield of fear, I see more clearly the symptoms of pain and loneliness inherent to the story that guides many good people here. Here people are consuming enormous quantities of toxic food, poison specially marketed for dummying and numbing the population. Twenty-four-hour-a-day-drugs disguised as food are been peddled to people.
I am staying in the house of a kind couple who watch Fox News all day and all night. Even while they are asleep, the television stays on. The man in the household says he thinks the country should not change presidents while the war is going on. I had forgotten the mainstream rhetoric while I was in Europe.
“What war?” I said honestly, without defiance.
“The third world war” he answered, meaning every word of it.
Why is my heart broken by these things? I do not want to overshadow my pain with fear, the tempting fear that I could give in to to cover up the sadness I feel all around me. And collude in the story, the narrative Americans are trapped in.
I see all over the place obese people starving, in the streets and behind the windows of the houses in the town where I'm staying.
Indeed the starvation might be worse here than in Haiti, because in Haiti people know they are starving so at least they know both what is killing them and what they need: food and medical care. American food has gutted many American people. Television has turned many people into talking heads (like their favorite television pundits) completely severed at the neck from their bloated bodies.
TYes, righteous Christians want to precipitate the apocalypse so that the chosen few rise into heaven, uplifted by their balloon- like bodies. The others can rot in piles under the mighty trees that will still stand tall while their roots intermingle and reach out to each other for love and comfort.
I am a Metahistorian woman, I am not part of a cult or a movement, nor am I for that matter an intellectual. I am one of the many women that family and society tried to silence because the words that come out of my mouth are connected to my heart. All my life I have transformed suffering into precious manure to grow compassion for myself and other sentient beings.
I am a product of the collective trance and I have been able to wake up from it.
What woke me up are hands and eyes, hugs and closeness, cats and dogs, leaves and flowers. The scent of rain on the wet earth and tears, many, many tears.
I see the waste and the devastation going on all around me, I feel the unexpressed grief of those who have been brainwashed for Jesus or Mohammed or any other superman who is advertised as better than they are. "I’m a true Christian, Jew, Muslim, etc, and you’re not."
In the past I stopped reading so that I would not stray from the pure expression of my heart. I also became a television watcher made lazy by the display of "culture." Because of Metahistory I am reading again, people like Christian De Quincey, John Lash, Bill Plotkin, Ian Baldwin, Barbara Walker and Julia Butterfly Hill, to name a few. What these people are saying is intelligent, yes, but most of all what they write about in their own song is a call to care, to be grateful for the piece of life we have been gifted with.
I have read Arundhati Roy and Vandana Shiva and they too say: Stand up like an old tree and care. Granted our collective sense of futility is growing like a cancer, but care. Words, ideas and beliefs make all the difference, especially when they come out of the hearts and minds of people who care enough to burst through the trance.
With Metahistory we are diligently seeking to make available, on line, words that call people to care, to have the courage to refuse to participate and enact the stories that are killing us. Stories and the beliefs enforced by them make up the reality we live in. I feel responsible for the many species alive on this planet because I feel the rampant stain of extinction spreading across our little world.
I see that war is the very admission of defeat, defeat of human instinct and intelligence.
Metahistory Quest is our effort to become educated to alternative stories for humanity, to publish authors on the net who are thinking with the heart of hope.
We are in a dire emergency. Are we going to let 500 people blow up the planet? Because they must enact the story they are telling themselves? Can’t we counteract the 24 hour a day broadcasting of the coming apocalypse?
I heard on television today that God is sending us hurricanes and Mother Earth is cruel and angry. Please let these sick concepts off the hook.
People in Europe are numb because the blood of so many dead people is imprinted like scars on their hearts. People in America are numb because they are drugged by food and disinformation. Indeed, this is the time to urge the thinking and feeling choir to be radical and that is what we are doing at Metahistory.
Please, all people who are alive in love and detachment join together to create a different story for the human species. A story that supports Gaia, the living Earth, in her remembering how to heal herself from the abuse we have inflicted upon her.
A story that frames us, humans, not as conquerors or victims, but as a species living from the awareness of gratitude.
A different story, a story that takes its clues from stones and trees, oceans and streams. It is urgent that we re-write the story of who we are and what we are here to be. It is urgent to create this story and tell it to each other with tenderness and helpfulness so that it will spread to everyone out there who is hungry for a bowl of dignity.
Remember that Hernan Cortez took Mexico with only 500 fellow Spaniards. Those men were propelled by “Manifest Destiny,” and they also had a few horses. (The Aztecs though the horses were gigantic dogs.) Montezuma played right into Cortez’s plans because he believed in the second coming of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec savior. The Aztecs did everything they could to welcome the white God who came from the sea; hence they lived in the reality of their beliefs. A prosperous People were destroyed by the story they told themselves.
A clue from Metahistory: the story is about the feminine, the Magdalenic aspect, the story is about the Earth’s generosity, the story is about the Earth not as a coffin for the human race, but as a sublime garden of life. This story is not about helpless people being saved but about all living things sharing the ecstasy of the cosmos.
I hold the intent of an inclusive and compassionate story within my heart like the North Star high above an open sea.
Joanna Harcourt-Smith
Marion, August 17 th, 2004
http://www.metahistory.org/CallToCare.php
