There are creatures the size of mountains swimming beneath the ice.

There are babies laughing at things you can’t see.

That quiet old woman there, sitting in the corner:
she has seen some shit, man.

The lushest plants have their roots in shit,
and the lushest people, too.

They do not rise above the shit,
their roots dangling like car wash tentacles as they levitate in the air.
They sink into it.
They build their foundation in it.
They do not transcend,
they embody.

And they grow.
They grow above the shit.
They grow into the shit.
They grow of the shit.

You are not a snipped and dying daisy in a vase,
all manifestation and no manure,
all show and no shit.
You are alive, and your roots go deep.
You will spread your seed. You will join in life’s dance.

Your roots are just as beautiful as your flowers.
Your scars are just as sacred as your smile.

Below and above the horrible hands of the abusers,
below and above the parents with sharp fangs,
below and above the mirror faced manipulators,
below and above the rapefinger dog men,
your roots and your branches grow.

Inseparable from the shit.
And in no way limited by it.

The old woman looks up.
She gazes at you,
and she sees your roots.
And she loves you.
And she smiles.

_____________________

_____________________

_____________________

_____________________

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31 responses to “The Best Plants And People Grow From Shit”

  1. Yes. There can be no doubt that dealing successfully with the challenges of adversity builds character. I suggest there may be more gracefully poetic modalities for expressing that universal truth than has been presented here. Kipling did it best in his epic poem “IF”.

    1. Kipling’s If is a fine poem, but is also a monument to the same defiant ego that built the British Empire. Catlin’s poem has a different outcome for that self confident “master of my fate” ego.

    2. Yes, but thats because you’re a wanker with no depth. The word shit is only considered vulgar cos of its Anglo Saxon root and to discuss the true nature of the duality of shit, how it is both poison and nourishment is considered vulgar only by those afraid to address the fullness of their humanity. The Kipling poem you mention is about reason. The virtues of measured consideration. It isn’t about the challenges of adversity and neither is this in my reading. It’s about growing up with the boot in your neck, how we, the working classes are fed on nothing but hate yet manage to love. Something you and Kipling have no clue about.

      Now do I have to justify my ad hominem?
      I’d argue the evidence is all there in his comment. You cant blame me for not conforming to the new norms, I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter and thus retained my humanity and common sense.

  2. I get paid over $98 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I just got paid $ 8460 in my previous month It Sounds unbelievable but you wont forgive yourself if you don’t check it……………………Read More 

  3. Hemp is a weed that can grow anywhere practically (marijuana). Apart from being used to make rope it’s almost as good as oil. Thousands of products can be made including fuel oil.

    You need lots of chit though.

    Straight from sunlight and no bats or eagles get hurt.

  4. Beautiful Caitlin. Your words are very healing to me. I share your pain and your joy. You and I are on the same journey – the agony and the ecstasy – up the dark mountain by paths opened for us by mysterious forces of hidden destiny. Stumbling, losing our way, rising to continue on in spite of all. To be on this path however fitfully is to be already blessed, already beginning to remember who we really are.

  5. Roundball Shaman Avatar
    Roundball Shaman

    “The lushest plants have their roots in shit, and the lushest people, too. They do not rise above the shit, their roots dangling like car wash tentacles as they levitate in the air. They sink into it. They build their foundation in it. They do not transcend, they embody.”
    .
    So remember, now when we say to someone “You are FULL OF ‘it’!”… you just gave them a great big compliment! Even so, it might be wise to make a hasty retreat a few times until they understand the message.

    “Below and above the horrible hands of the abusers, below and above the parents with sharp fangs, below and above the mirror faced manipulators, below and above the rapefinger dog men, your roots and your branches grow.”

    Life is just a big practical joke. We take it all serious-like. But the joke’s on us. Quantum physics now tells us that nothing is “real”. It’s all just a big mental (spiritual) exercise of us animals each constructing a “world” made of shadows and ghostly images from inside the dark interior of our own brains out of our own fears and desires while we wait for our own spiritual release from the very prisons we ourselves constructed.

    1. My oh my!! That is a lovely, cheerful outlook on the metaphysical meaning of life!!! I sure it is conducive to a happy philosophy of life.

  6. The real truth is way beyond ugly!
    ~
    An eerie silence oppressed the election news-space much of last week as Mr. Trump and his people seemed to lay low, Br’er Rabbit style, and a lot of folks wondered what was going on in that-there briar patch. Towards the weekend, Rudolf Giuliani methodically described some of the evidence at hand about janky ballot reporting, but that must have been too plodding for the Big Media gang. Then another Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell, came on Lou Dobbs’s Friday evening news show and some people started paying attention to some things she said, like, “I’m going to release the kraken” — referring to the largest and most feared sea monster in Old Norse mythology. Miz Powell, she means bidness. She went on, “We have staggering statistical evidence; we have staggering personal testimony… we’re beginning to collect evidence on the financial interest of the governors and secretaries of state who bought into the Dominion [vote tabulation] systems… President Trump won this election in a landslide, it is irrefutable… we are gonna go after it, and I am going to expose every one of them.”
    ~
    Well, that might have put the fear of Gawd in some people. In case anyone in the back-of-the-class wasn’t paying attention, Miz Powell went back on the air Sunday morning with Maria Bartiromo and said, “We’re fixing to overturn the results of this election in multiple states… President Trump won not by hundreds of thousands of votes but by millions of votes that were shifted by this software that was designed expressly for that purpose…. We have so much evidence I feel it’s coming in like a firehose.”
    ~
    This article can be read here:
    Do Not Mess with Miz Powell by JHK
    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/dont-mess-with-mix-powell/

    1. Thanks for sharing that Ron. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any crazier, this was so whacky, I finally got a laugh out of this sick election denialism!

  7. I love the comments and how off track & they do whine
    Old lady smells funny Once upon a time she tasted
    fine wine and bathed in honey
    Was a queen of the village
    These days its just fiscal policies
    pharmaceutical one-upmanship
    Beyond the alise of illusions past the dumpster of dreams through the piles of discarded compressed forests an old lady fossicks for her very life
    In the setting sun of unlimited consumerism micro plastics makes my shit shine

    1. Thanks for the cheery note Jupiter!

  8. there is no shit,
    only apparent shit,
    we are the dreaming
    of the dream
    of shitness.

  9. It is a well known fact that austerity makes us stronger while bounty makes us weak. In history, people did not take the years of bounty for granted because they knew years of austerity would come too. We have had three generations of plenty in the west. We have been the rose in the vase for too long with no roots. It has made the west weak spiritually and socially. When austerity comes which it always does, a new stronger generation will be born as the older spoiled generations are tilled under.

    1. Well said. I hope you are right.

  10. I don’t know what this means, and even Google does not know what this means: “rapefinger dog men”

    1. Alex, I thought immediately of Trump’s “grab ’em” line, but it’s surely more than that–an evocative image, pregnant with connotation and allusion. The kind of image that elicits wonder like yours and mine. Caitlin can write one hell of a poem, can’t she?

    2. Perhaps it’s a reference to Joe Biden. How he digitally penetrated her back when she was an Intern.

      1. How he digitally penetrated Tara Reade when she was an Intern.

      2. Oh, that makes sense. It also sounds like one of Biden’s gibberish insults, “dog faced pony soldier.” It’s like using his own language…

  11. old poem :
    my god is shit.
    because shit makes plants and plants make food and food is my only need.
    {even if the plants and me are nothing but weeds}
    we’ll have goats and buffalo and buckwheat and greens like
    arugula and wild berries
    so life is only as good as the soil.
    homo sapiens:
    humus and knowing, the earthy wise ones.

  12. In any case, it would be futile to try to give the US some semblance of a democratic election system. It would be like trying to clean up a beach by picking up empty beer cans around a beached whale. The presidency, after four years of ham-handed efforts to unseat a president using false evidence, is a failed institution. Congress, which now nonchalantly overspends federal revenue by a factor of three, is a fiscal zombie. The Federal Reserve, which is now a pure pyramid scheme, is a financial zombie. And then there is the rest of the ridiculously bloated US economy, which is waiting for a stiff gust of wind to cause ephemeral wealth to flood out of stocks and bonds and into cash, much of it evaporating in the process and the rest causing a tsunami of consumer price inflation.
    ~
    This great article can be read here:
    “Watch This!” By Dmitry Orlov
    https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/

  13. 1) That’s a little marijuana seedling
    2) Tessa Fights Robots has this to say about “Build Back Better” shit, which we both suspect won’t grow good plants or people
    https://tessa.substack.com/p/build-back-better-conspiracy

  14. Nice, and since the poem is about life I’d like to add a little tidbit that I learned about just last night; just as a canary was once used to detect carbon monoxide in coal mines, Marijuana plants are used to monitor the relative toxicity of the diesel exhaust of locomotives in railyards. Who would guess that that plant would be so sensitive to pollution?

  15. It’s good fertilizer.

  16. No shit
    No Life.

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