Parable of the Talents

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.