TOEHOLD

Before the changing of the guard, toes linger in twilight dreams. There is a niggle to the wiggle. What are toes worth?

Contenders for the prize are gold, paper, beads. It will require negotiations. Anything will do, once it's agreed, but what do toes care? Dreams, reality, what the hell . . .

Once the no-man's-land is crossed, reality has its boots on, demanding answers. It speaks in symbols.  Money!

Once it has been conjured, it can be exchanged for work. Or the other way around, how droll. It becomes dried work, like cranberries that can be reconstituted. Anything that can be packaged, even an idea hedged in with laws -- just say “commodify” -- and poof it's dried, ready to go.

Money is as real as it gets once it gets named. Say “Dollars” and drying sheds appear. There is one on El Camino Real that has hung out a shingle: Bank of the West.

Right on the border of the twilight zone, though few people have actually spotted it, is one that doesn't need berries or anything but just makes Dollars when the right people pray for them. In hushed tones, people call it The Fed.

There is a genie at a really big shed, The Market, that magically transmutes Dollars into Capital, which is then divided into bragging rights called Compound Interest and Appreciation. These are distributed as Profits that are recycled for another round of Profits that are added to a growing pile that is recycled again, and so on without end (a matter of faith). It is amazing.

Imagine building a house, which convinces the genie to finance two more. When these are finished the genie decides a housing tract is deserved to make more Profit. It goes on. An entire city. And on . . .

The guardian has let a nightmare through in which the planet is a snowball in hell. For thousands of years, plants grew in profusion and died, taking the energy of the sun with them. Solar energy, as we have learned, is stored in cranberries. Dried cranberries are good for people's health. Transmutable uses of stored energy in the earth are vast, like distilled work which reconstitutes as wealth.

The bonanza has been distributed along preexisting fault lines, inequities that benefit mostly those inheriting positions of power. Those with wealth and power, taking credit for what the planet has provided, have been unable or unwilling to acknowledge the results of a runaway exploitation, resources now tending towards reversible depletion. The faith based assumption of unlimited growth was a dream. Reality is an over heated planet, with too many people, heading for a sixth extinction.

Some humans are waking up. Some burrow under the covers. Which are about to be yanked off, and worse. The genie has been bled for thermonuclear weapons, wasn't thinking ahead, and now the whole pile of Capital can be vaporized.

Will Enlightened Capital replace Capitalism? Why speculate? At any rate, the genie doesn't serve just Capitalists.

More relevant is the miracle in every backyard that exists right now. Fukushima, Syria, Chicago, Area 51 in Nevada, numerous wastelands show what happens when the miracle is destroyed simply by ignoring it. Too simple?

It is the butterfly effect. So far as we know right now, this planet and our biosphere are the one instance of intelligent life in the universe. We have our warning. Paying attention advances beyond awe to silence, and not doing is the power of silence.

Do no harm. Correct mistakes. Make things better, not worse.

Appreciate the miracle.

Too simple?