Spirit Mountain

[mnaz]

Spirit Mountain, over the desert.
Spirit Mountain, the sacred rise.

Nothing is sacred.
Everything measured.
Digits to the cent.
Claimed.
Maimed.
Scooped.
Scraped.

I went to see the mountain,
past pickets and thickets,
and big guts muttering.
"Those dam hippies."

I reached the sacred mount.
It was fenced and gouged.
A different spirit.

[sasha]

my parents brought us kids to Plymouth Rock once... a middling-sized boulder on the beach, surrounded by a fence... and tourists with brochures... history/legend reduced to a revenue stream...


sorry you had to experience that... profit engines rarely treat all parties the same

[mnaz]

I wrote this some time ago,
after I'd been in the desert a while.
It's a (too thinly veiled?) protest
against mines interrupting my
road, even way out there.

Btw, there really is a Spirit Mountain
in the desert, south of Searchlight,
Nevada.

[saw]

if there wasn' already, there should be a Spirit Mountain....a place to quietly honor the majesty of time immortal....

in Key West in 1970 there was a bunch of us hippies that would meet at the end of the day to watch the sun set at a place called Mallory Square. Beautiful sailing ships lined the harbor, dogs played in the shallow water, and folks sang and played guitars. Talk about spiritual. Closest thing to what I think churches never were able to capture. And when that last liitle sliver of burning light sank into the sea, everyone applauded. The Conchs ( the locals didn't take part in this )...I suppose it was ho hum to people born there. But to hitchhiking travelers looking for something different than where they were from, it was heaven. As the years went by, some capitalist thought, we can make money from this....and the next thing you knew there were kiosks selling souvenirs, and food, and jugglers etc. That was the end of a beautiful natural spiritual gathering. For the hippies, when you met someone during the day, it was likely when you parted, someone would offer, "Yeah man, I'll see you at sunset "

[mnaz]

Thanks Steve. What an amazing time that must've been. Most of us, including, yes, myself at times (too often), are losing touch with the natural world, and are being assimilated into a creeping glaze of a virtual digital world. It's kind of shocking, the change(s) in just 2 decades. In 2005-06, when I wanted to post my road adventures here, I had to find a library computer. The other issue is hyper-materialism, and the deification of maximum extraction and profit above almost everything else, which has actually been building for centuries in the "Western" world, but is really accelerating at this point.