We the people of today’s artificially capitalistic-, socialistic-, and fascistic-leaning tribes drink varying flavors of toxic Kool-Aid. This is a route to extinction for all (except for the extremophiles), i.e., these high-input, artificial Kool-Aid-sustenances and -connectors are not sustainable.
I propose that we slow down, meet together in ritualistic and traditional ways, struggle to scientifically communicate, and symbiotically drink the best of the naturally home-grown and locally prepared atoles. Thusly we’ll exist much longer in quality lives of symbioses on a healthy Earth through future generations.
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My first taste of atole was when I was about ten years of age and mowing my Uncle Peggy and Aunt Jo Bailey’s lawn on very hot July day. A beautiful young Mexican Carmelite nun who–along with her colleagues–my mother and dad had invited over for supper, gave me a thick and very “cold atole” in a Mason jar as a gift to the family in return for the food, fellowship, and enjoyment during the previous evening with our family. That atole was unbelievably gooood!
A few years back I was stumbling over hills and dales of a mountainous Mexican village in Oaxaca on a miserably cold and rainy day, attempting to keep up with three jovencitas who were our guides to households needing our services, and vaccinating chickens, turkeys, pigs, dogs, and other small animals as a member of a trio including a crazy veterinarian and a wonderfully kind and learned Episcopalian priest. (We were labeled “El doctor, el profesor, y el Padre”.) During one particular day of volunteering, Father David Chalk was doing all the heavy-lifting and carrying of our vaccines and doctoring supplies, Dr. Jeff Jorgenson was tuckering-out from chicken-whispering and miraculously bringing a couple of hens back to life after we had apparently accidently punctured lungs in the process of vaccinating them in their slender breasts, and I, the dysfunctional professor who has lost his sense of balance, had fallen into a big puddle of water in our process of crossing a make-shift bridge made of a single plank of wood, and was soaking wet.
Toward the late afternoon, we came upon a family and their friends warmly gathered around in a simple rustic atrium with una estufa en la escina. They were enjoying conversation and drinking atole … and they offered us some of this nutritious, delicious, heart-warming, and soul-expanding ancient-drink.
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This is what robust, spiritual, and quality life is about. Folk of different tribes, coming together peacefully as one, and sharing good solid, or not so solid, knowledge. Communicating! Connecting!! Realizing dialectical interactions toward knowledge, wisdom, prudence, and appropriate policy and actions. And hopefully also retrofitting our very necessary rituals and traditions, and our ethos and mores, with good scientific inputs.
We need to create systems of symbioses in which we toss the Kool-Aids afuera and share the atoles toward lives which are sabio, simple, small, slow, strong, sharing, and sustainable.
7Ss / VV->^^
pbm
