Butler

Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

but he can be scary without lifting a finger.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

Any Change may bear seeds of benefit. Seek them out. Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware. God is infinitely malleable. God is Change.

Anyone KSF hired would have a hard time living on the salary offered. In not very much time, I think the new hires would be in debt to the company. That’s an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery.

I’ve changed my mind. I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos that would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit.

All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund. Understand this. Use it. Shape God.

I’ve finally got a title for my book of Earthseed verses—Earthseed: The Book of the Living. There are the Tibetan and the Egyptian Books of the Dead. Dad has copies of them.

That was my message. I left it there, hanging before them with an unfinished feel to it. I could feel them expecting more, then realizing that I wasn’t going to say more, then biting down on what I had said.

I don’t think I gave any sign of sudden excitement. People tell me my face doesn’t show them what I’m feeling. My sharing has been a hard teacher.

They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.”

Embrace diversity. Unite— Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.

“You believe in all this Earthseed stuff, don’t you?” “Every word,” I answered. “But . . . you made it up.”

I reached down, picked up a small stone, and put it on the table between us. “If I could analyze this and tell you all that it was made of, would that mean I’d made up its contents?” He didn’t do more than glance at the rock. He kept his eyes on me. “So what did you analyze to get Earthseed?” “Other people,” I said, “myself, everything I could read, hear, see, all the history I could learn.

focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there’s no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you. You know that. You knew it when you took your family and got the hell out of your boss’s house. God will shape us all every day of our lives. Best to understand that and return the effort: Shape God.”

“People forget ideas. They’re more likely to remember God—especially when they’re scared or desperate.” “Then they’re supposed to do what?” he demanded. “Read a poem?” “Or remember a truth or a comfort or a reminder to action,” I said. “People do that all the time. They reach back to the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, or some other religious book that helps them deal with the frightening changes that happen in life.” “Change does scare most people.” “I know. God is frightening. Best to learn to cope.”

God isn’t good or evil, doesn’t favor you or hate you, and yet God is better partnered than fought.” “Your God doesn’t care about you at all,” Travis said. “All the more reason to care about myself and others. All the more reason to create Earthseed communities and shape God together. ‘God is Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay.’ We decide which aspect we embrace—and how to deal with the others.”

“Began to discover it and understand it,” I said. “Stumbling across the truth isn’t the same as making things up.” I wondered how many times and ways I would have to say this to new people.

“Buddhism doesn’t make a god of the concept of change, but the impermanence of everything is a basic Buddhist principle.”

Your teachers Are all around you. All that you perceive, All that you experience, All that is given to you or taken from you, All that you love or hate, need or fear Will teach you— If you will learn. God is your first and your last teacher.

God is your harshest teacher: subtle, demanding. Learn or die.

We are a harvest of survivors.

The universe is God’s self-portrait.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.

These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

In his place beside me, there is a tall, beautiful woman, black-brown-skinned and slender with long, crow-black hair, gleaming. She’s wearing a soft, silky green dress that flows and twists around her body, wrapping her in some intricate pattern of folds and gathers from neck to feet.

He has a voice that’s a whole-body experience, the way my father’s was.

It seems inevitable that people who can’t read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should.

You take Jarret and you get beatings, burnings, tarrings and featherings. They’re a package. And there may be even nastier things in that package. Jarret’s supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret’s talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could wind up in a war. Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.

There are millions of people like them—people who are frightened and just plain tired of all the chaos. They want someone to do something. Fix things. Now!

We’ve survived as well as we have because we keep learning.

We all need dreams—our fantasies—to sustain us through hard times. There’s no harm in that as long as we don’t begin to mistake our fantasies for reality as she did.

To shape God
With wisdom and forethought,
To benefit your world,
Your people,
Your life,
Consider consequences,
Minimize harm
Ask questions,
Seek answers,
Learn,
Teach.

They’re good words. Not good enough to welcome a child into the world and into the community. No words are good enough to do that, and yet, somehow, words are needed. Ceremony is needed.

Our Gatherings, aside from weddings, funerals, welcomings, or holiday celebrations, are discussions. They’re problem-solving sessions, they’re times of planning, healing, learning, creating, times of focusing, and reshaping ourselves.

“Any Change may bear seeds of benefit. Seek them out. Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware.

although Bankole would never say this, I suspect that somewhere inside himself, he believes that large, important things are done only by powerful people in high positions far away from here. Therefore, what we do is, by definition, small and unimportant.

hardship. It reminded us that we were not growing or raising as much as we should. Now it’s a pleasure. We’re doing well.

“Even if when I pray, I ask God to help me?” he asked. “Even so,” I said. “You’re the one your words reach and strengthen. You can think of it as praying to that part of God that’s within you.”

“He does seem to enjoy calling people things like that. Once he’s made everyone who isn’t like him sound evil, then he can blame them for problems he knows they didn’t cause. That’s easier than trying to fix the problems.”

“But how do you know you’re right?” he insisted. “How do you know Earthseed is true. Who says it’s true?” “You do, Dan.” I let him chew on that for a while, then went on. “You learn, you think, you question. You question us and you question yourself. Then, if you find Earthseed to be true, you join us. You help us teach others. You help others the way we’ve helped you and your sisters.”

Beware:
At war
Or at peace,
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease.

It’s always been much easier to make war than to make peace.

This could initiate a whole new level of slavery. After a while, needing the pleasure, fearing the pain, and always being desperate to please the master could become a person’s whole life. I’ve heard that some collared people kill themselves, not because they can’t stand the pain, but because they can’t stand the degree of slavishness to which they find themselves descending.

We all voted—all of us who were old enough—and most of us voted for Vice President Edward Jay Smith. None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple.

wound up with a couple of books on drawing. I haven’t tried to draw anything since I was seven or eight. Now, all of a sudden, I find myself interested in learning to draw, learning to draw well—if I can. I want to learn something new and unrelated to any of our troubles.

God is Change
And hidden within Change
Is surprise, delight,
Confusion, pain,
Discovery, loss,
Opportunity, and growth.
As always,
God exists
To shape
And to be shaped.

He sat alone as we had agreed, so I went over to him alone and introduced myself. I didn’t like his dry, papery voice or his tan, almost yellow eyes.

He shrugged. “It was just politics. You know those guys will say anything. But why would you stop being a Christian? Why would you make up a new religion?” “I didn’t make it up. It was something I had been thinking about since I was 12. It was—is—a collection of truths. It isn’t the whole truth. It isn’t the only truth. It’s just one collection of thoughts that are true.

Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life. Any entity, any process that cannot or should not be resisted or avoided must somehow be partnered. Partner one another. Partner diverse communities. Partner life. Partner any world that is your home. Partner God. Only in partnership can we thrive, grow, Change. Only in partnership can we live.

Purpose
Unifies us:
It focuses our dreams,
Guides our plans,
Strengthens our efforts.
Purpose
Defines us,
Shapes us,
And offers us
Greatness.

He laughed. “When I was a boy, Siberia was a place where the Russians—the Soviets, we called them then—sent people they thought of as criminals and political troublemakers. If anyone then had said that Americans would be giving up their homes and their citizenship and going to make new lives in Siberia, the rest of us would have looked around for a straitjacket for him.”

The intruders’ guns are, like our own, good-quality, well-cared-for automatic rifles with laser sites. One is German, one’s American, and the three newest are Russian. They’re all as illegal as hell and as common as oranges.

We can,
Each of us,
Do the impossible
As Long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before.

When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.”

Earthseed is true—is a collection of truths, but there’s no law that says it has to succeed. We can always screw it up. I can always screw it up. There’s so much to be done.”

Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool. To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen. To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.

When vision fails
Direction is lost.
When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten.
When purpose is forgotten
Emotion rules alone.
When emotion rules alone,
Destruction . . . destruction.

Strong female characters were out of fashion in the fiction of the time. President Jarret and his followers in Christian America believed that one of the things that had gone wrong with the country was the intrusion of women into “men’s business.”

How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented—reeducated—before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care? There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know.

The war began in anger, bitterness, and envy at nations who appeared to be on their way up just as our country seemed to be on a downward slide.

breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.

All prayers are to Self
And, in one way or another,
All prayers are answered.
Pray,
But beware.
Your desires,
Whether or not you achieve them
Will determine who you become.

There are times when I wish I believed in hell—other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.

Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.

“That’s what Earthseed was about,” I said. “I wanted us to understand what we could be, what we could do. I wanted to give us a focus, a goal, something big enough, complex enough, difficult enough, and in the end, radical enough to make us become more than we ever have been. We keep falling into the same ditches, you know? I mean, we learn more and more about the physical universe, more about our own bodies, more technology, but somehow, down through history, we go on building empires of one kind or another, then destroying them in one way or another. We go on having stupid wars that we justify and get passionate about, but in the end, all they do is kill huge numbers of people, maim others, impoverish still more, spread disease and hunger, and set the stage for the next war. And when we look at all of that in history, we just shrug our shoulders and say, well, that’s the way things are. That’s the way things always have been.”

“Focus on what people want and tell them how your system will help them get it. Tell folksy stories that illustrate your points and promise the moon and stars—literally in your case.

“People followed me, though,” I continued. “And they didn’t only do it because they were convinced that I could help them get what they wanted. They followed me because I seemed to be going somewhere.

purpose beyond survival. Get a job. Eat. Get a room somewhere. Exist. But I wanted more than that for myself and for my people, and I meant to have it. They wanted more too, but they didn’t think they could have it. They weren’t even sure what ‘it’ was.”

Len, but the world is full of needy people. They don’t all need the same things, but they all need purpose. Even some of the ones with plenty of money need purpose.”

To survive,
Let the past
Teach you—
Past customs,
Struggles,
Leaders and thinkers.
Let
These
Help you.
Let them inspire you,
Warn you,
Give you strength.
But beware:
God is Change.
Past is past.
What was
Cannot
Come again.

To survive,
Know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past
Go.

thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we’ve made right here on earth.

She never really needed us, so we didn’t let ourselves need her.

Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped “the company.” I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it is.

When apparent stability disintegrates, As it must— God is Change— People tend to give in To fear and depression, To need and greed. When no influence is strong enough To unify people They divide. They struggle, One against one, Group against group, For survival, position, power. They remember old hates and generate new ones, They create chaos and nurture it. They kill and kill and kill, Until they are exhausted and destroyed, Until they are conquered by outside forces, Or until one of them becomes A leader Most will follow, Or a tyrant Most fear.