Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Gem Fire Air
What Do You Do When You ‘Go Away’?
by marty kleva

What Do You Do When You ‘Go Away’?

You know what I mean . . . when you hear something that you’d rather not hear, or you read something that you don’t want to know about?

What do you do?

I know what I do. My eyes immediately glaze over and I retreat behind them. During this time, my mind gets fuzzy and I cannot focus.

And then — my body — it slowly tightens the reins on my muscles. My solar plexus begins to ache, and I can detect the awareness and warmth drain from my body. As they leave, I feel like an empty shell.

No one home to contact or connect with.

I know this well. I’ve had lots of practice to become aware of this in the past five years as I recovered from the devastating effects of the auto accident I had in 2000.

But the most important lesson I have learned is that the mind fuzziness, the lightheaded feeling I get when I cannot focus my attention, means that I am leaving my body again. Just like I did in the accident.

And the other main lesson I have learned is that when I am not in my body, I am not in charge of my life.

I have an agreement with myself that I will stay present to all that goes on around me in my world, and work through it, even as it may be painful and difficult to be with.

I will tell you what I have learned about to how to stay in my body, even when my instinct says there is a clear and present danger. You might want to join me here as I talk us through it.

The initial point is to bring my awareness to the fact that my body is breathing on its own. My chest is rising and falling. I hear the air pass through my nostrils, and feel the muscles of my torso as they expand and contract while I breathe in and out.

This brings me back in touch with my body, my body that has never left anything. It is my awareness that has left. And so I continue working this way, with my awareness. Always bringing it’s attention back to my breathing. I don’t have to do anything about the way I breathe. My body knows exactly how to do this of its own accord.

So I trust my body’s innate ability to breathe, until my awareness is synchronized with my natural breathing.

Once there, I know from experience that I will begin to feel totally fused and cohesive. I am my breath and my body, as one and the same. A union has occurred that locks me into a dynamic, living, breathing body.

It is a beautiful feeling. A warm feeling. A safe feeling, even as I am also aware of danger.

Once there, I begin to move the two together throughout my body, so that while staying in touch with my breathing, I expand my awareness to include other parts of my body, and I can feel my pelvis, hips, knees, ankles and feet — still breathing.

Then, as I move the awareness of my breath throughout, it is as though I am also breathing in and out, to and from all those parts, even as I know that the lungs are acting as bellows and the chemical laboratory for oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange.

I can feel my feet touching the ground or floor, my back expanding and contracting against the seat that I am sitting in, or the floor that I am lying on.

This can happen anywhere, in the grocery store checkout line, or in my own bedroom.

I breathe myself into total awareness with my body. And as I do, I become more centered within.

From here, I can take actions aligned and balanced within the integrity of my instinct as well as my intellect.

I have learned that during the traumatic impact of the accident, my soul was shattered . . . into millions of unrecognizable shards. It was as if a beautiful stained glass window had been blown out by an explosion, with the pieces strewn to the four directions.

To recover from the trauma, I’ve needed to learn how to call those shattered pieces of my soul back to me, and eventually fuse them back together again.

The practice that I shared with you above, the one of synchronizing my breath with my awareness, is called “Body Awareness Practice.” This is what I’ve used to help retrieve my soul pieces. I still use it daily to live my life as fully conscious as I can be.

So that now, after five and a half years, even though I may have retrieved them all, and that I have all the parts of who I used to be . . . can you see or understand that nevertheless, my makeup is different?

All the pieces could hardly fall back into the exact same place. And the fusing that takes place through the intensity of the healing process melds the facets of the soul together differently than it originally was. Breath awareness is integral to this fusing.

I decided early on after the accident that I would not judge who I turned out to be through this experience. And I chose to look upon it as a brand new adventure, for I have always been adventurous. That has not changed.

So I was embarked upon this healing journey with all its steep mountainous terrain, and boggy marshes, until finally, I believe that now, I am at the place I was previous to the accident.

And yet, I am also further advanced as respect to who or what I was then.

My abilities and priorities are different. I take more time for myself for one thing. I pay attention to my instinct that previously was deeply buried amongst a heap of logical thinking and left brain reasonableness.

Presently, my instinct is screaming, like an engine in downshift of a car going too fast.

In the past, that signaled me to leave and go to that shell of a place where my mind got fuzzy and I didn’t have to focus.

Today, I know that it will not serve my purposes, and I deal with the clenched fist in my gut and the ache in my heart.

For a situation has arisen within the past week. It began when I read Eric Francis’s blog last Friday on PlanetWaves, where he first brought up the subject of the newly awarded $385 million contract for Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR to build detention facilities for "an emergency influx of immigrants".

Only this is not a facility that will be built in Morocco, like the new interrogation and detention facility the United States is helping the government of Morocco to build for Al-Qaeda suspects near its capital, Rabat. (This news is according to western intelligence sources and reported by the UK Timesonline.)

No, this is a facility that will be built here inside the US. The question needs to be asked, what scenario could bring that amount of “immigrants”? From where?

I took note of Eric’s mention of it and decided I would come back to his request for any reader feedback after I had finished reading his blog.

But it was so funny, as things go, when I looked for the place to go back to after finishing, I couldn’t find it! So I let it go, but could not stop thinking about it or remembering that I had seen it.

It took me back to the various accounts and records I have seen and read in the last ten years about the facilities in my own area here in the southwest. And particularly when I lived in Colorado and regularly traveled a route that took me by a state prison. Early on, the prison was easy to see from the road, given the wide-open southwest terrain.

Years later, I realized one day as I drove by, that it had taken on a new look, and even a new feeling. It was larger, much larger. There were now many buildings, where before there were a few.

The expansion seemed to have sprung up overnight, yet I know that was impossible.

Then I began to hear some talk that I dismissed, talk of huge underground facilities far greater than those seen above ground: of state of the art everything, including a crematorium. This info was reportedly provided by workers, who helped build the facility. Of course I never met one of them, so I couldn’t say for sure about the truth of that information. And therefore, I did not say anything to anyone about this.

But I knew what I personally saw. And I knew what I felt.

A huge complex was now in place that spread out over the southwest desert. Where once there was a small nondescript sign announcing the entrance to the prison, now there was a major entry point that could not be missed. (Today it is touted as a “superplex” on a government affiliated web-site.)

And where once I might have barely noticed what I was feeling as I drove by it, the feeling became intense and foreboding. After that, I began to drive by another route, and I put it all aside.

So why am I bringing it up here, now?

Well as I said earlier, many things have changed for me since my accident. I see things differently, and my priorities have changed. My instinctual nature has become more keenly attuned, and as I said, it is screaming at me now to, “Pay Attention”, to “Wake Up!” to the realization that there is a threat on the horizon, that things are not what they seem to be . . . and that this time I had better stay in my body.

Today, I read Eric’s blog at PlanetWaves. . . and there he has a story sent in this morning by a reader, the mother of a four year old son telling us what he saw as they were recently riding by an old, worn-down looking “army village” in New York State.

You can read the account for yourself here. (Feb. 22 Where Do You Go?)

After I read the mother’s account, I sat stunned, and what flashed before my eyes were the thousands of four year olds who in past times were torn from their mother’s arms at the train stations full of “cattle cars”, and as the mothers were dragged away, their children screamed, “Momma, don’t leave me!”

So in my world, the bell has been rung . . . by a four year old.

Are you still with me on this after hearing the information above, sparse as it is . . . or was just hearing the word crematorium enough to have you go away? Or perhaps it even took reading the words of the children screaming for their mothers for you to leave.

I know very well that it took a lot for me to stay when I read that this morning.

What I used in order to stay present and not go away was the body awareness I shared with you above. As I did it, I became aware of the deep rage within my belly. Nothing can raise a mother’s rage more than a threat to one of her children, or any child for that matter.

That’s what I became aware of as I synchronized my breath and body.

Can I stand by and not say what I am aware of, when it might save one child’s life? Am I willing to be seen, regardless of whatever some will make of me, simply because I have pointed out the shadow of darkness that has great foreboding for this country’s future?

Do I not know that what the present administration says is not the same as their actions? Am I not aware, using past performance as a guide, that when this administration says they are planning to do something in the future that what they are really saying is that their mind is already made up and it is a done deal?

I am aware of the deep threat that I feel about the sordid intentions and Faustian agenda that others apparently have for those yet to be named, yet to called “immigrant.”

The bell has rung its warning. Who will heed?

Will we choose to stay, or will we ‘go away’?

Friday, February 17, 2006
Gem Fire Air
Brokeback Mountain: a Rarefied Love Affair
by marty kleva


Today, I went to see the movie Brokeback Mountain — it opened here over a month ago. So the ultimate excuse to see it came earlier this week, after I wrote the review in Monday’s blog, for 9Songs, which I believe to be the ultimate screenplay endeavor portraying a heterosexual love-sex affair.

To complete Valentine’s week, I thought I’d give equal time to a homosexual/gay love-sex affair involving two cowboys who live out west, in ultra-conservative, redneck country.

I really did not know what to expect as for the way this subject would be handled in a mainstream film. This is not some art film that is screened off the beaten path where conventional America could comfortably ignore it.

So I decided to go to a matinee show. There were approximately twenty-five people in the audience; about a third of them men, most of whom came with a woman.

The setting for the movie is in the vast open landscape of the northern Rockies of Wyoming near the Tetons, where the sky is never ending, the stars at night are pillowed on black velvet so real that you feel sure you can literally stretch on tiptoe to reach up and touch them.

The movie takes place in a typical tiny western town where trailers abound, everyone knows everyone else’s business, and where the wind and dust seem to carve out the terrain, all beneath a wide open sky that allows you to paint your dreams on it.

The west, where old pick-up trucks never die, cowboy hats and boots are de rigueur, where people go to church socials and drink in the bars—a place where people try to eke out a living.

The two main characters both are male, young, unmarried, and who have come looking for a job with a local sheep rancher who needs two men to herd sheep up to the high country for the season.

Ennis, is the more up-tight character of the two, the type you can literally feel the repressed anger gnawing away at. Likely he had the crap beat out of him by a strict, God-fearing father.

You almost have to strain to make out what he is saying at first; until your ears adjust to the way his words come out through tightly clenched teeth and barely opened lips.

Like we say back east around salt-water country—he’s as “tight as a she-crab’s ass.”

As for the other character, Rodeo, aka Jack Twist, he’s the complimentary opposite in disposition — easy, fluid, and friendly natured.

So the two of them land the job and off they go into the high country with a couple thousand heads of sheep to graze through the summer on Brokeback Mountain.

At first, talk between them is slow, and self-revelation is non-existent.

Ennis is assigned to the lower camp. He makes the meals, chops the wood and stocks the food, living out of a tent. His task is that of caretaker.

Jack’s job, on the other hand, is to sleep in the high country with the sheep in order to protect the herd from night predators. He arrives every morning back at camp where Ennis has made breakfast. Eventually, the men switch roles, and Ennis becomes the protector, a role he naturally assumes.

The remaining shift between them happens after a night of drinking and sharing stories by the fire, a night where self-revelations abound, trust is established, and Ennis is too drunk to get on his horse, so he stays for the night by the fire. Before too long, his shivering and moaning wakes up Jack, who insists Ennis should sleep in the tent.

It begins as a casual sharing of warmth on the part of Jack, when he reaches around behind him, takes hold of Ennis’s hand and pulls it over his body and around to his chest, so that the two men are spoon-snuggled in this tiny tent.

During the night, Ennis wakes up, realizes the body contact, and is enraged. He hits out at Jack, and the two wrestle into a fight for male dominance. The tent is filled with suppressed desire and before you know it, one of them has the dominant position—Ennis—and the rugged, raw sexual power is unleashed.

The next morning, of the two, Ennis is the one who has trouble with what happened between them. Jack brushes it off as no big deal and as no one else’s business.

Eventually it develops into an intimate emotional relationship as well as sexual.

I won’t reveal the rest of the intricately woven story of the two who after the season, separate and go their own way, where both marry women of their choosing and have children.

But after four years, a postcard from Jack brings the two of them explosively back together again, and they go off alone on Brokeback for two days. Their meetings occur regularly for years after that.

Ennis is the one, who nevertheless, has the most trouble dealing with his bi-sexual nature, which is contrary to his core values. But he cannot help the feelings of deep attachment he has for Jack.

While Jack wants to have them live together, Ennis is continually frozen by a childhood memory of being taken by his father to see the dead body of a man who locally lived together with another man. The town male bullies had dragged the man by his genitals until they were ripped off his body, and he was left to die.

A violent act based in fear.

Ennis never forgot that moment, and literally has flashbacks to it. This is a traumatizing event in a young boy’s life, one that will be ingrained in him, and which will color all his actions forthwith.

Ennis is the most brittle of the two, and has the deepest struggle with his true feelings for Jack. He lives everyday in denial of his repressed sexuality and his life is miserable, foreshadowing the future of his marital relationship.

Our own sexuality is the most creative aspect of our nature. Unfortunately, everywhere we turn, there is doublespeak about the subject. Sex is what sells products from cars to the latest apparel. In Hollywood, you can’t tell if what actresses wear to the Oscars are evening gowns or nightwear to sleep in. It is the fashion for intimate apparel to be worn on the outside.

Everyone has great sex—at least according to the ads and magazine covers at the grocery checkout. I for one have doubts about that.

As one takes a good look at the culture, the message is that heterosexual is right, moral, and where you’d better be, and that homosexual is corruption and sin, regardless of the popularity of TV shows with stars like lesbian, Ellen Degeneres.

For all that heterosexual is the moral high ground, sex education in most schools is either non-existent or it consists of the religiously preached warning that sex is wrong before marriage and that abstinence is the only way to prevent pregnancy.

Speaking for myself and the professional staff I taught with in a public school system, we instructed all forms of co-ed sex education, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, and in which at the high school level, we included the application of condoms as well as the choice of abstinence in the curriculum. We were very sensitive to the understanding that every student comes from a different background, and allowed room for their own belief systems to make their personal choices.

However, I have come to see that in essence, our sexuality is not ours unless we claim it. Otherwise, factions of the religious and the legal system own it. They proclaim that sex is for procreation—not pleasure.

In many places in the US, still today, it is illegal to have oral or anal sex with your spouse.

How would anyone find out?

Well the guilt that is projected by the very existence of the “laws” is enough to make the party confess to a friend, minister or priest, especially if one attends a church regularly. This is suppression of our sexual nature at its most invasive to our psyche.

Suppression of this kind robs us of the ability to express freely the nature we have that is closest to God—meaning God in whatever form you and I personally know it as.

And to set the record straight, I have no objections for anyone’s choice to attend church. My consideration is the question of who does the thinking, and who makes the choices?

This movie covers a lot of emotional and psychological territory, both personal and collective, of the way men ought to be—rough, tough, and straight. It conveys the struggle that men go through, like the characters Jack and Ennis, to match the expected rules which society has handed them, a society of regulations that originates from their fathers, who reach out from the grave to future generations with guilt and fear, to decree that you and I will not stray from the flock upon penalty of banishment from society, ejected from our father’s house.

What, I ask, would the world be like were those who have sexual preferences for the same gender, live without the restrictions we now have in this country?

Would there be chaos?

Would there be attacks on those of us who prefer heterosexual relationships?

Would the world go to hell in a hand basket?

Or would it just be that we cannot bear to even think that the core beliefs of those ancestors are being dismantled?

Instead, would there be less heartache like Jack and Ennis lived with, less repression of our creativity, and more expression of our love, which might transfer itself to lives that are more gratifyingly lived?

Might that then correlate to less anger, less aggression in society?

It is as if males cannot live according to their own nature and in the repression of it, there surfaces this outwardly forced aggression toward other men. So we make up male games to play, sports that make it fashionable for men to have body contact and not be considered gay, like football, wrestling, and hockey. Games where men can take that repressed anger and work it out on others.

I am not saying that men or anyone should not play games such as these. That is not the point.

The point of the matter is why we play games like we do, and what we covertly use these games for.

What repressed part of the psyche is not being acknowledged at its source?

What is the ticking time bomb, that if it does not get addressed, will erupt in a fashion beyond repair?

Leaving sports behind, historically, the real games used to be played at with swords and knives.

Then came guns, and then tanks and bombs.

Now let’s add to the arsenal, nuclear weapons, biological germ warfare, weapons of mass destruction.

Finally in present time, let us not wait until the perceived enemy attacks. Let us instead pre-empt their intent to attack, and not allow them access to material that would provide them with the possibility of developing the very same weapons that our friends and we possess.

So the chosen great “men” of the world, who lead nations, get to decide who is allowed to have the biggest dick.

The one or ones, who may likely be the most sexually repressed, are the ones who brag about having the greatest arsenal, and who bully the rest into agreement!

The movie also has a big dick bully who is Jack’s father-in-law. The power struggle between them finally comes to a head in a scene that spans generations of male dynamics, three of which are present in the scene, including Jack’s son; a most interesting lesson on how to handle a bully.

In a system where there is mutual adult consent, and where there is no harm directly done to others, except perhaps to unravel society’s strict and rigid beliefs that are rooted in male dominating power needing to have the absolute say about everything we do, speak, and even think, where is the harm?

Ennis's wife suffered more harm from the repression of his homosexuality than she would have were they never married.

Where is the harm of mutual adult consent, except perhaps to the perceived threat to our own sexuality—something which comes from an authority outside ourselves, that being the “law”, the “moral” upbringing rooted in a patriarchal religious-based society where angry, sexually repressed males have the rule over every quadrant of the lives of the rest of us?

This is not male bashing by any means. I am speaking of the unconscious content in an undeniably male-powered system; male-female alike that destroys the balance of masculine/feminine consciousness in the entire male and female population.

I remember the very period of time when I was confronted with the issue of my personal sexuality. I was taking a self-improvement class of which some members were openly committed homosexuals. This was actually the first time that I was so close to those who were homosexually oriented. What can I say—previously, I had lived a very sheltered life. It was very uncomfortable for me. I did not know how to act with them.

Given that this was a long-term weekly class, I began to examine my feelings about “those people”, and the fear I felt when I was around them in class. Although we acted friendly towards each other with the usual class banter back and forth between us, as time went on, nothing out of the ordinary happened. It wasn’t as if I expected to be approached sexually, but more, that I did not know how to act.

Eventually, I realized that it was not about them, but about the fact that their clear declaration of their personal sex preference forced me to look at myself, and to examine a part of me that I had just taken for granted, simply because there was no other way to be in my world.

I was that way by default, not by choice.

I was hetero because my family, society, the church declared it was the only way to be. In my world, anything else was unthinkable and nonexistent.

So there it was in my face, very scary to look at, because then, who knew what I might find out, were I to look? I was afraid of what I did not truly know about myself.

I had no informed basis for who I portrayed myself to be sexually.

I had no choice!

Instead, some deep repressed part of a societal ingrained belief was choosing.

Not me.

What constitutes a preference, be it homo, hetero, or bi-sexual?

Is there a real difference that goes beyond the obvious?

Our embedded beliefs would like us to think that there is.

Is there a difference between that choice and the choices we usually allow others to make freely? Choices between chocolate—vanilla—or Jerry Garcia!

I know what my preference is in both cases, and for me, I cannot get enough of JG.

However, I also cannot believe that I have the say over what someone else’s choice is for their sexual preference, anymore than I have for their choosing chocolate over vanilla or JG.

This is what I see as the basis for homophobia—our US culture is overrun by it. I cannot speak for cultures I do not live in.

Homophobia is fear of the highest order, literally being against the very thing we may ourselves be, for it shuts down all creative expression in the members of the culture and shows up as repressed, unexpressed sexuality.

The true expression of our sexuality may be the closest we come to experience God—that God-force within each of us.

I’d say that Brokeback Mountain is loaded with the very complex dilemma of dealing with sexuality, all beneath the cover of the mountain, where it seems in this movie, the mountain represents the one place where the creative expression of genuine sexuality can be freely revealed and declared.

Brokeback Mountain, in this case, provides the folds of the wise, nurturing Feminine, where everything is accepted for itself, without reservation or exclusion.

Meantime, the mountain patiently awaits us all.

-mek

February 10, 2006
The Next Uranium Sensation
Gem Fire Air
by marty kleva


My intent as I began writing today was about a discussion of the photography you will find on this site. More will come, and we will build a gallery as time goes on.

However, when I got into the subject, another topic peeked through, one which I warn you ahead is not for the faint-hearted.

But then, I have already forewarned you all about my relationship to the status quo these days. I hope it does not wig you out too much. Please don’t stop in the middle, even if it seems like I am off the mark here.

As for the photography that you will find on the site, it is purely for my own pleasure that I take photos. They are not of professional quality, nor am I a professional photographer.

So I request that you recalibrate your expectations and simply enjoy the photo settings, such as the opening photo, Santa Fe Sunset that I shot because of the splendid colors.

I am just beginning to learn the value of focus in photography — that translates into the use of a tripod, and which for me is a bit cumbersome to deal with.

I have tried to incorporate the practice of taking my camera with me when I walk out the door, finding that it comes in handy for an unexpected shoot — like today. When I got to the gym for a workout, I was surprised by Kathleen the owner, who was in the middle of a trunk show.

There were silks of all designs arranged everywhere. Gorgeous colors and textures: two of my favorite reasons to take a shot. My workout session just got a little longer, and I ran out to the car to get my camera and tripod.

Long story short — putting this website together has been a very high learning curve, and added to that is the element of placing my photos in a web-format which has its own learning curve. Technology is great, but I for one believe it is here for us to use, not to be used or abused by it.

Up to now, I haven’t had the need to make sure that my photo is in focus. What can I say? I’ve been living for years now with Neptune making passes over my Mid-Heaven. And I’m talking about the planet Neptune, not some male named Neptune, involved with me in an erotic act — although come to think about it, I wouldn’t be adverse to that.

But about the planet Neptune — now I am not an astrologer — but I am a student of it as regards to my own chart. Astrology can be as foreign to me as is Greek, literally like learning a different language. Neptune’s influence, as I hear Eric Francis of PlanetWaves.net talk about it, is pritt-eee foggy territory, one that is out of focus, and fluid, as in watery. And dare I say it, illusional.

For a person such a I who has a Capricorn sun, illusional, watery, and foggy are not in my ordinary nature, a nature which is more prone to structure, form, and the status quo of the established culture.

So for the past several years, good old Neptune, King of the watery depths, has been passing directly over the Mid Heaven point in my birth chart . . . slowly . . . years worth . . . not just once and be done with it — but three times!

Well, you get the picture. My structured Capricorn nature is not so structured anymore, after living with Mr. Neptune in a very personal way. Consequently, my world is no longer so focused, therefore my photos may be a bit soft or even blurry.

But I am ready for a change, and with Neptune now moving on, it seems an appropriate time to begin to use the tripod. Imagine that! Some in focus photos to come.

But I digress . . . which admittedly is also a bit Neptunian, but I have learned to chuckle about it and just go with the flow.

There are many things that attract me to take a photo shot. Texture has a very high value for me. Elements next to each other that have contrasting angles and lines, surfaces that are contrary to one another, like rough rock beside a polished surface of shiny marble or smooth glass.

Color is another value, which I suppose is the case for most of us. However, my fascination is not so much with different colors in the same frame, but of the same color with different hues, in the same shot.

Do you know how many different hues of adobe houses there are in Santa Fe? And not one of them exactly the same? But the eye will not detect the very subtle nuance of the differences at first glance.

As I discovered, it’s somewhat like the question of how many different colors of white-skinned people are there?

Enter light as another factor and take the same adobe colored house, add a few corners here and there, especially with the newer Santa Fe architecture. Add a little shadow, and you have up to three or four different colors of adobe on the same structure, and in the same photo.

Allow some time to pass, take another photo of the same framing, and magically, you have a very different photo. Sort of like seeing the effects of the passage of time on life, only in condensed, real time reality.

There is another element that really catches my interest, and that is the layers of possible meaning, openings that continue to open and unveil to my eye, transferring to the world of my inner eye — like linked portals of space which lead me through from one to another, on and on to a space that can only be perceived in the depths of the beholder.

It totally fascinates me.

So this is my palette with a camera, similar yet different from that of the artist who uses brush and paint to create a blurred, or what I refer to as a blended image — for now, I use the camera.

For those of you who may have looked at the opening photo, Santa Fe Sunset, and remarked to yourself, “Hmmm doesn’t Marty realize it’s not in focus?” Yes, I certainly do realize it.

But the colors are so stunning and gorgeous, that I could not trash it! So I did my best to bring up the focus.

Buck up! Things will change. Indulge me for a bit. The use of the tripod is definitely to come!

But allow me to get to the telling of the real story for today, a story radioactive in nature.

Several weeks ago, I received an e-mail advertising stocks. Sometimes these things just slip through for reasons unknown. I looked at it because the title caught my interest.

Uranium Stocks were touted as the “Next Uranium Sensation.”

But wait, that isn’t the “best part.” The brochure goes on to describe how a certain company has “just acquired a lucrative mining project in Kazakhstan”, further stating how rich that country is in natural resources, “super-rich.”

The brochure further states that “a few years back”, a certain company, the one that the brochure is hawking, “landed an oil project there”, which “handed early investors” with a “hefty 14,000% gain!” (Believe, me, I checked that figure over and over again so I wouldn’t misquote it.)

Now don’t you just want to make sure that you get in on the bottom line with the very same savvy petroleum company which has “just acquired a lucrative mining project” in uranium?

Are you connecting any dots here?

Why, “Holy Cow!” it’s the “Opportunity of a Lifetime”, as quoted from the brochure.

Now this topic has my attention. I especially remember the Three Mile Island incident, living on the Jersey coast at the time. Residents were acutely aware of how vulnerable our position was if the plant were to go into full meltdown. Aside from that, we lived with a nuclear power plant nearby at Oyster Creek.

I have done extensive research on the subject of depleted uranium, so I do have a good sense of the topic at hand.

Days later, I received another sales brochure from a different source. Both brochures were about seven pages long. The second one began by soothing the reader’s fears about the myth of the danger around nuclear power.

Let me say that what happened at Three Mile Island is no myth.

Neither is Chernobyl.

The brochure went so far as to say that even environmentalists are touting the graces of nuclear power, linking that insight with a statement made by Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, a quote that for all I know could have been taken out of context.

The quote was used again, to allay the fears of the reader to the possible risk in the use of radioactive material such as uranium, warning that “Outdated Beliefs About ‘Nukes’ Could Cost You A Fortune.”

The brochure goes on to support the use of uranium because it is a clean fuel that is safe.

Imagine that!

Safer than what, I ask?

Was Three Mile Island safe, or for that matter, emissions free?

Well of course not. But the article was comparing it to the dangerous emissions that come from the coal and oil energy industry.

All I could see is the emission of a silent, invisible nuclear cloud over Three Mile Island, and over the land around and beyond Chernobyl.

The pot gets sweeter.

They stated incredible profits to be possible.

Over 200% in only four months!

Instead of profits, what I saw were the tons of DU armed munitions dropped on Bosnia.

Remember Bosnia?

And Iraq?

Yes, for over ten years we of the United States, have dropped munitions with depleted uranium warheads all over the country of Iraq, like radioactive rain from the sky.

DU is a radioactive “waste” from the enrichment of reactor fuel, and is used in military weapons. It contains proportional amounts of the U-234, U-235, and a form of the U-238 isotope.

The US has turned it from a “waste product” into a profitable product sold on the world arms market to be used in the manufacturing of bomb casings, armor-piercing bullets, tank shielding, missile penetrators, and cluster bombs.

Just imagine an area of the two combined states of New Mexico and Arizona, or an area the size of the combined seven states of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Delaware, and Maryland being bombed for ten years straight, and being littered with the destruction of those bombs.

Just imagine the numbers of people who would be killed, or maimed, or left homeless.

The numbers of children who would survive only to find their parents dead.

Take that scenario and insert it over the region that you and I live in, and equate that with our family, our friends and neighbors — men, women, children — living, breathing, flesh and blood human beings, who we are intimately connected with.

Now take that, as if it’s not horrendous enough, and add to it an invisible, hideous, and insidious danger, one that cannot be seen, smelled, or detected, except with a Geiger counter.

But you, me, the neighborhood, we don’t have a Geiger counter, nor would we even know that we need one. We are too busy dealing with the unusual amount and strange quality of illness in the area. And perhaps we have our own symptoms of illness.

Perhaps we are now five years into the constant bomb-dropping destruction, and are now a new mother or father of a baby born with a head deformity. We have a new baby niece or grandson born without arms or legs.

And still the bombs keep dropping.

I know that this is a horrific picture to paint.

However, it is extremely difficult for us to realize that this is fact, a fact of life that it is truly happening in real time to real people in the country of Iraq.

That, my friends is a picture in focus.

Nothing blurry about it, except for that which is our personal relationship to it.

Now back to our own collective reality.

What we may not have yet realized is that in some way, every one of our own military people stationed in Iraq have been exposed to the invisible DU dust that litters the very ground that our tanks rolled over, and which our military vehicles travel through daily in Iraq.

Even the very ground, over which stand the numerous tents that house our sons and daughters, may be contaminated with DU.

DU dust in the desert does not have the same qualities as it might were it in the jungle. Dust does travel easily in the desert. It is the way of life there.

And although the DU particle may not move as readily, the dust has already been contaminated by it.

And who is breathing that dust?

As evidenced by the amount of illness experienced by our veterans, and shown in the death statistics, once they have returned home seemingly healthy, something invisible is killing them.

DU literally liquefies in the air when it explodes and becomes an aerosol, then, it leaves an invisible residue in the dirt that has an estimated half-life of 4.5 billion years.

It does not go away.

We cannot sweep it up or even vacuum it up to eliminate the contamination that has already seeped into the lungs of the soldiers who walk over it, sleep over it, or who eat in the mess tent set up over it.

This is the reality. Do a google search on DU, and Dr. Doug Rokke, Lt US Army Preventative Medicine Command, who headed up our own military clean-up operation after Desert Storm of the Gulf War contaminated vehicles hit by“friendly-fire” DU rounds.

And to think that these brochures are talking about how much profit you and I can take . . . get that . . . take . . . from the sale of this element of uranium at the expense of someone else’s life, that of hundreds of thousands of people.

All to keep our portfolios in the red zone.

Make no mistake, I realize that there are things we sometimes need to do for our own survival.

But taking promised profits of over 800% per annum from the sale of yellow cake is not survival mode!

It seems diabolical to me that instead of creating new technology for the purpose of exalting the human life, we use technology for the destruction of it.

Progress is not about identifying someone else as the enemy, but rather it is coming to terms with the enemy who resides within us.

Now, we are speaking of the juncture where illusion meets delusion.

I know about the illusion of my out-of focus photos, and yes there is a difference. My out-of-focus photos will not kill anyone to look at them, nor am I bombing anyone with them.

I also know that they are only one picture of reality among the many others available.

Nevertheless, it’s what I have today to relate to, and I remind myself to take just one conscious breath in these interminable moments of insanity.


From the wild beast within me,
mek

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Welcome to Gem Fire Air
2-06-06
Marty Kleva writer and editor

I’ve often wondered how people could set up their own website. I mean, not just the physical planning of it, but the act of making oneself vulnerable to have everyone read their life-revealing stories across the web.

For one such as myself, who is more reserved, and who some would even say reticent to reveal myself to people I know, opening a website such as Gem Fire Air is almost unthinkable . . . six months ago.

I acknowledge and thank my friends Terry and Suzi Turner of HMSCrown.com Eric Francis of PlanetWaves.net whose website inspired my vision. And I owe so much to Anatoly, my trusted web-designer and web-master. Between us there have been many hours and skype conferences to put this together. It has truly been a pleasure to bring this vision forward with his help. who first suggested this to me, and to

I hope you find this a place of restful, yet inspirational beauty, and that you return here often. This site is dedicated to the Divine Feminie Archetype. You will find more about this here.

There will be photos, a not-so-daily editorial, and other forms of expression in writings that have been brewing within me for many years, some of them more recently.

The phototography will be changed regularly with the replaced photo consigned to a gallery.

The main writing feature is “Soul Dancing,” a book that is in progress, and is my personal account of healing from a closed-head injury sustained in an automobile accident in July of 2000. It has taken more than five years to physically and emotionally heal from that trauma.

As a professional trauma therapist negotiating the past five and a half years, I documented my journey that took me through several brushes with death, an unexpected visit before a twenty- foot angel with a sword, and to a remote cabin tucked away in the deep ponderosa forest of northern New Mexico, where I regained my life force.

Aside from the book, featured are what I coin “WildWrites”, exercises that are written in a 10-20 min time-span, during which I allow my mind to take a wild ride while I record it on paper. Sometimes fun, sometimes tedious, but always there is a thread of the wild beast within me that makes its appearance.

Also, since a main theme of this site is about natural ways of healing, I am publishing my master’s thesis, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Path To Individuation Through The Hero’s Journey. It was completed in 1997, yet the subject of stress and the process of individuation is always present. This study remains one of my personal guides for everyday living, and the incredible stories of the participants in the research project are some of the most courageous I have ever encountered. If you want to be inspired, read about their lives as they learn how to handle stress through the classes of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. This method was created by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at UMASS in Worster. I have personally trained with Dr. Kabat-Zinn, and also interned at the stress reduction clinic at UMASS as well as at El Camino Hospital Clinic in Mountainview, CA with Dr. Bob Stahl.

We will start with these features and add more as time progresses. Plans are to include erotic writings (look for that to celebrate Valentine’s Day next week), a place for what I call BodyTalk, and a resource on trauma recovery for those who have experienced a loss or trauma of any kind. I hope that it will draw those military men and women who have returned from both Iraq wars, and for that matter anyone who has ever been to war or in a military engagement, as well as their families; their wives, husbands, and children. It is important that you read both major works here; Soul Dancing, and then my thesis. I promise, although the thesis is an academic work, it is easy reading. It reads like a book, not in stuffy academic high-brow language. Anyone who has experienced any sort of trauma will be able to identify with the material, and personally gain something from it.

Some of the content that you will read and see here may appear as liberal-minded or progressive in thought. Goodness! Although I will not deny this, it does not mean or signify that I can be classified or categorized as one or both of those exclusively. I am more than either of those.

This material can be challenging to old, outdated, and embedded attitudes, no less than it was to my own. It can be very dark, and in many cases resides on the edge of the abyss. It also rises to the transcendent realms, which I found can be just as difficult to maneuver through. The one continuing thing I have been taught throughout all of this is that there is so much to more to learn than I ever imagined. No need to stop now.

Nothing/all, or for that matter, anything I say may be what is called the truth. It is simply my truth and even then, it may only be a temporary truth wafting away on the next breeze. Feel free to examine it and to turn it around, inside-out, and even upside down to see what it is you can see differently. Otherwise, what you and I have will always be no different than what we have always had before. Be forewarned, this is not the place where you will find the status quo promoted.

All in all, I welcome you to my world, as well as your feedback and questions.

con amore,
- - mek