Listen to a reading of “Owl Eyes”.
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Crawling on our hands and knees vomiting up life hearts which go bouncing across the floor like pennies, disgusted by the latest headline, the latest heartbreak, the latest bill, the latest bullshit.
There is an owl sitting upon the arm of our sofa. We don’t know how long it has been watching us and we are too nauseous to care. Something is scratching at the insides of our walls.
“It’s all fake and I can’t take it,” we cry from our depths with sobs of motherhood and milk. “The YouTube ads, the lonely cereal, the sitcom reruns full of dead people’s laughter. The coworker small talk painted over oceans of anguish and the maddening impulse to tongue kiss each other just to make a real connection, the skyscraper savagery, the screens full of pundits arguing which boot to lick. When I was small everything crackled and was boundless, but now I’m waiting to die on a dying world with a rectangle in my pocket that keeps trying to sell me things I don’t understand.”
“There is a deeper wisdom at work here,” says something from the blackness in the owl’s eyes. “Something watching all this unfold, something ancient, something nameless. We shall not call it god, because it doesn’t behave like any god concocted by the minds of men. It is utterly agendaless, eternally patient, entirely embracing of all that is; still the great powers of our day splat against it like a cooked spaghetti noodle tossed against the wall. Before the empire arose, it is. Before humanity’s great Fall from wisdom to cleverness, it is. It is beyond us and before us, yet closer to us than our own mitochondria.”
“But the tyrants!” we protest. “And the rainforests! And the screaming red children who won’t leave the center of my vision no matter how hard I rub my eyes! And the black tie oil orgies, and the persecution puppets, and the fentanyl boneyards and the spinmeister Slack channels and the nursing home warehouses and the Reaper drones in flock formation and the tent city police raids and the schizophrenic street wailers and the gig economy car sleepers and the microplastic metastases and and and and…”
“In school they taught you how the world works, and that it is sane and happy,” said the blackness. “Then you grew up and you learned that was all a lie, and that everything is dark and crazy. Now you’re growing up some more and learning that, underneath everything, there really is a deep sanity and happiness after all.”
And then the camera zooms out, out from our cratered heart floor, out from our living room, out from these words being read on this page, out from the eyes of the reader, out through the reader’s mind and through the flotsam and jetsam of subconscious currents, back back back as far as it can go, to that peaceful point of origin before all arisings, to your original nature, to your original self.
And from here it’s all happening just as before. The sharp-toothed bank boys, the cackling talk shows with eyeless hosts, the ballbuster billboards selling geoengineering and prosthetic contentment, the electronic escapism and the overpriced brain fog.
But it’s seen differently. Seen in a much, much larger context. And oh so clearly doomed to fail.
“Humans have built tall language castles,” says the blackness. “But the language castles are built upon the unlanguageable. The empire is built on quicksand. Human dysfunction is built on a bottomless hole.”
We struggle to our feet.
We stand.
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35 responses to “Owl Eyes”
Birth gives us the right to exist,
how long depends upon others,
Until we are able to exist on our own
Adult, we are responsible for self
Accountable to self
To do no harm to others
Responsible to all other
Accountable to all other
Country always comes first
Take only what is yours
What you need to exist no more
When in surplus — share
Our choice who we are, and how
The gift of existence – a life
Thank you, Caitlin. A pleasure to read; delightfully evocative; illuminated by the Light of Wisdom 🙂
if it’s not god, he might be satan. that’s why i say – trust (some of the) human texts, but don’t trust the humans themselves – they’re just different levels, more overt or covert, of the conspiracy. This site, which used to make half of the anti-propaganda, presented three disinformation articles the day after someone used them as illustrations for a third party. and most of them are shocking, which they didn’t use to do. the goal is not the truth, but the “common actions” suggested by the same “good faith” authors in the backstage, outside the internet publicity – the human begins in private, these are just public masks. it’s an art perfected in millennia.
In Greek mythology the owl often accompanies visual depictions of Athena the goddess of wisdom.
Nice poetry Caitlin, good news though is that I’ve been offered another assignment, and so I probably won’t be able to read your wonderful essays for much longer, but I wish you and your wonderful species the best, as it seemed to me to be a total wasted effort, no matter how many good people there seemed to be, it just never seemed to be enough.
Does this really make sense to you?
give me arms and hands to feel you
legs and feet to seek you
find the me which i have lost
my clear window is caked with frost
Beautiful piece! Thank you.
What do I have to do to print one of your articles????? I have tried everything I know but all I get is bullshit runaround nothingness and maybe the first page and then blank sheets and a few words of the last page. Are you being censored? I love you but this is maddening!
Probably, even my keyboard is messed with as I try to type a comment
Bobby, Go to the email version without the picture, then simply copy and paste onto a page to save as pdf or print. The article email with the picture goes to crap and wont let you do it.
“Humans have built tall language castles,” says the blackness. “But the language castles are built upon the unlanguageable. The empire is built on quicksand. Human dysfunction is built on a bottomless hole.”
Talking about that, it looks like the Covid game is over, much to the chagrin, I suppose, of the capitalism watchdogs in revolutionary clothing we’ve got in this comment section.
Don’t worry though, a new scare is in the making that you will soon be able to enforce :o)
You might find this of interest. A Dr. Charles Hoffe addresses a crowd of “anti-vaxxers” in Britsh Columbria, 90% of whom have received at least one vaccination I would guess?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-biggest-disaster-medical-history/5790270
I keep thinking, when is the lid going to blow on this thing? Because the numbers that are coming out of this are staggering.
30,000 dead says Dr. Hoffe. Big Insurace here in the US believes they’re dealing with once a billion year catastrophe. Just the other day, I was listening to an interview Dr. Peter McCullough, the cardialogist with 521 peer reviewed papers on his resume, the same one who doesn’t know jack shit about the heart according to our media, told me that 1,000 fully vaxxed soccer players have dropped dead on European football pitches in the past year alone!
I could go on and on.
I mean, how long can you keep a secret after it has been made known to everyone? Apparently, the answer is indefinitely.
Never have so many been killed and maimed by so few. And it will go on and on and provide Big Pharma for decades with an endless stream of addicts to their (mostly just as useless) drugs, that’s the perverse beauty of it.
As Voltaire said already back in the XVIIIth century, “Doctors are folks who prescribe drugs of which they know very little, in order to cure diseases of which they know even less, to human beings of whom they know nothing at all.”
It sounds particularly appropriate here with the added bonus that an undetectable serial killer is now among us. “Brought to you by… Pfizer” – with the complicity of polititutes and pressticians in the employ of Mammon and/or terrorized by the globalists’ Gestapo.
Brave new world…
” … the perverse beauty of it.”
Indeed. I find a good mashup beautiful. Here’s the Pfizer mash, for any folks out there who haven’t seen it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC1h6l-eXJw
Pfizer is the first individual corporation that I think deserves the Big tag. You know what I mean?
There is Big Pharma of course, but we also must conside Big Pfizer, all by its little lonesome.
And this is only the first of Gates’ brilliant ideas to save the planet. Here’s the next one:
https://expose-news.com/2022/08/17/bill-gtes-sinister-plan-force-you-eat-fake-meat/
Being essentially vegetarian myself, I’m certainly not a meat die-hard fan. But synthetic meat when there are so many other natural sources of proteins anyway, like beans, sounds very much like another apprentice sorcerer disaster in the (money) making.
Fortunately for Gates & Co, a sucker is born every minute, I wonder what they’re gonna come up with next. Sustainable nuclear bombs?
I had a blackbean burger the other day and it was phenomenal. Didn’t need buns, katsup, onion, nothing, could’ve ate the thing all by itself, but chose not to..
This fake meat thing, is it just a simple function of, they have established these labs all over the world, that work on everything from bio-weapons to cloning lifeforms, and when they hit on something they can immediately scale up cheap, like fake meat, it’s then just a question of creating a market for it?
Don’t get me wrong, some markets should prove more difficult to create than others. This fake meat thing, for instance, will meet with an incredible amount of resistance!
Lmao .,.Then again, maybe not. Who can predict what marketing schemes will work in an era when humans brains seem to have been sucked right out of their cavaties, to be replaced by grey matter more acceptable to our global masters.
Last time the US food industry had brilliant ideas about what to put in people’s plates, the country ended up in forty years with an overweight or obesity rate of 70%.
Of course said industry, instead of trying to find solutions to the problem, saw that this was good for the cash register of both itself and Big Pharma, which have the same shareholders, and packed off teams of paleo-wokesters instead, to explain urbi et orbi that “fat is beautiful” and claim that saying excess weight is bad for your health is white supremacist fascism mixed with trumpism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and a whole lotta similarly disgraceful “isms” and “phobias” that would make Hitler pass for Mother Teresa with a moustache in comparison.
Lmao … Good stuff. True stuff.
It’s brutal being an American of a certain age, it really is. I can remember a time, when I would look upon a small beer belly that had made a recent appearance on a friend and think, why is he letting himself go like that? Should I say something?
Now, when I see a beer belly of any size, on anyone, it’s like, holy moly, that motherfucker is practically in fighting trim, compared to most of the rest of the folks in my visual field.
Right on Pascal. AND they have a pill for weight loss too for those who do not accept the fat is good mantra.
Have a look at old newsreel footage showingn the people on the streets of say NY in the early 50’s and then today. Look at the movies of the 1930/40’s and see how many FAT, I mean truly FAT people and where are the skinny ones today?
Of course we news consumers live in a virtual reality that has to be taken with a grain of salt (otherwise you get mad) because we spend our days watching trains derail, planes crash and people being killed, maimed, raped and taken for fools…
Real life is nothing like that. The guy who’s content with just cultivating a piece of land in a mountain somewhere with only birds and butterflies on his radar is not even aware that the Ukronazis are shelling a nuclear plant, that Harry is at odds with his grandma because of the wicked witch of the West, that Amber shat in Johnny’s bed or that Sleepy Joe has recovered from his second bout of Covid after being vaxxed and boosted a million times…
True he’s got other problems because the outside world only affects 10 to 20% of what we think, the remaining 80 or 90% being the fruit of our own independent concoction: fears (which is why some people hate solitude), fantasies, peaceful easy feelings (which is why some people love solitude)…
But in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Great post of the Beatles thanks.
In my own write, “In order to be loved, you must first be lovable.
Owl – So, what is this about the Inflation act?
Fox – I guess it is something about collecting back all what you saved and invested over the last 30 years.
Sheep – Fuck! Can’t they just invest and solve it?
Fox – Nope. The idea is not to print more money but take it back.
Owl – It does not make sense.
Fox – When it started making sense?
Owl – ^^
Nice
Once again Cait’s article poignantly hits right to the core of the matter.
Consider this & be of good cheer, it is not The One God doing this but the “god of “this world” (this synthetic reality)
Satan the deceiver will rule for “ a thousand years “ but one day the truth will get out and those who were fooled into his damnation will writhe in agony and self loathing for not resisting the seduction. Then they will wrack their brains with hate and venom seeking an agent to prosecute or execute their tormentors.
Ignrance is bliss. The best way to overcome it all is to simply put it down, go outside and smell the flowers, that is of course you dont have drought conditions and can water your flowers. Reality is a bitch.
Just brilliant…
You should feel better after that upchuck. Take the rest of the day off. Spend time with your family and friends.
You are one of my favorite commentators. You have a nice ‘big picture’ focus. Think you went a little ‘Alice in Wonderland’ with this last post. Still – remarkably creative.
It’s hard to accept that the universe is unfolding just as it should.
The pain comes from being told that we are separate, isolated, individuals, unconnected to those around us, numb to the great life force all around us, animating us.
Well done, Caitlin. Meditate us some more. You speak sanity better than anyone.
Thank you Caitlin Johnstone !
Thank you.
Standing.
Thank you!
YOUR BEST YET!!!! Thank you thank you!
perhaps i’ll be the first to comment. or maybe someone will beat me to it.
this poem brings to mind a bit of a documentary that aired on pbs in america. it was about confronting death, and this particular bit was about an elderly woman with terminal cancer who was very disturbed and frightened by the prospect of it. on someone’s recommendation, she ingested a psychedelic substance known for it’s therapeutic value in such situations. indeed, in this case it completely removed her fear and anxiety. she said that it taught her that life was utterly meaningless, and since this was so, there was nothing to fear about losing it.