Tag Archives: jungle

Binge

Binge: (n) a short period devoted to indulging in an activity to excess

Dictionary B

Until guilt learns how to work in harmony with willpower, we will all feel like marionettes dangling from strings.

It doesn’t matter what your vice may be, although I must admit, some vices are allowed to be more visible than others. A fetish for hot fudge sundaes with extra bananas and cream can be touted much more than a preference for keeping company with little girls.

Yet deep inside every human being is some nagging piece of indulgence which always shows up on the days when our willpower has taken sick leave.

Thus the binge.

Even if guilt and willpower wrestled to a tie in our lives, we would have a fighting chance to control our inclinations or at least channel them in more productive directions. But because willpower and guilt are both affiliated with self-pity, we are never able to control our safari into the jungle of excess. Self-pity tells us that we are being cheated, but also that we are too weak to resist.

So we would seem to be at the mercy of the gluttony of our flesh.

There are those who overcome this by using some sort of rigid mental karma, but I don’t know how they ever reach that point.

‘Tis is the great mystery of this journey.

I think it’s probably one of the first things we’ll learn after passing on to a new world of understanding.

We will arrive in the heaven of our dreams, to discover that the secret of overcoming our binges was …

 

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Beseech

Beseech: (v) to ask someone urgently and fervently to do something

Dictionary B

I beseech politicians to answer the question and then offer explanation instead of the other way around.

I beseech women to stop thinking they are smarter by treating men like they’re dumb.

I beseech men to stop acting dumb while secretly relegating women to a secondary position.

I beseech religion to start believing that God is our Father and therefore does not want to hurt us.

I beseech business to perfect the product before inflating the price.

I beseech parents to create a balance of responsibility and blessing for their children.

I beseech the military to be so prepared and so powerful that they don’t ever have to actually prove their worth.

I beseech educators to teach a balance of humility with information, since we are constantly learning things that contradict our arrogance.

I beseech those who are blessed to imagine what it is like to be without such a courtesy before deciding to judge weaker brothers.

I beseech the homeless to organize and simplify their lives to match their financial intake.

I beseech those who offer counsel to do so with an eye on their own weaknesses instead of merely poring over the philosophies of psychologists.

I beseech humanity to step far enough out of the jungle to plant a garden.

I beseech myself to remember all these things that I have beseeched from others.

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Beast

Beast: (n) an animal, especially a large or dangerous four-footed one.Dictionary B

Disney had to work really hard to make the word positive.

I imagine there were great debates about whether it was possible to portray “beast” as a protagonist, even if you were linking it up with “beauty.”

Beauty and the Beast.

Yet I will tell you–it is exactly the problem, or dare I say, situation, which encompasses our thinking daily. People who only seek beauty either end up discouraged or ethereal, hiding out in a habitat reserved only for their humanity. Those who think “life is a beast” are over-sensitive and constantly looking for a victim to claw.

The unusual, but practical, approach of blending beauty with the beast is ignored or ridiculed for its implausibility.

But if candor has its moment, we must admit that in the midst of the beastly, beauty emerges.

And certainly, while celebrating the beautiful, something beastly lurks in the shadows.

To love life, you must find Beauty and the Beast, and work with the beast in pursuing beauty.

How? Or maybe the question should be “why?”

In other words, why can’t I be jaded, frustrated and disappointed with a life that does not offer me standards, but instead requires too much assemblage?

Shouldn’t it be possible to locate beauty and build a house there instead of occasionally finding ourselves abandoned in the jungle, stalked by the beast?

So long before we get to the “how” of mingling Beauty and the Beast, we are stymied by “why.”

The true beauty of the beast of life is that without the presence of one another, we cease to be invigorated … because we are not challenged by the predator.

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Battalion

Battalion: (n) a large body of troops ready for battleDictionary B

Every once in a while I think about my own death.

It makes me cry.

You know why? I start thinking about all the people I know and how devastated they will be with my absence.

It’s very silly.

But you see, the only life that completely matters in my thinking is mine.

I try to be equally as concerned about others. Sometimes I muster some real mourning for their well-being, but nothing on the level of the compassion and care I have for myself.

I suppose I should feel bad about that–but since it’s not going away, and I am certainly not alone, I will choose to guide it by understanding the value of all human life.

When I was sixteen years old, hundreds of young American men were dying in Vietnam every week. We had a death toll number. It wasn’t like the numbers tallied nowadays over mass shootings, earthquakes or explosions. Many of these young fellows had just been in our classrooms, churches and bagging groceries in our supermarkets three months earlier, and now they were returning home draped in flags.

It seemed surreal but became our reality.

We were experiencing battalions of young American males going off to fight in a jungle and coming home dead.

There was a sensitivity that swept the young generation.

It was reflected in the music.

It was being released from our pores as we stood side-by-side, wondering what in the hell could all this mean.

So gradually, we joined together and became battalions of protestors. We went off to a different kind of war. It was a war waged against war, because the war being executed was killing us.

We had a greater awareness. We asked questions like, “Where have all the flowers gone?”–waiting for an intelligent answer.

Nowadays we speak of war in a clinical Ethernet third person. It is something we launch rather than something that strikes back at us, filling up coffins and alarming us to its viciousness.

We have a professional army with people who have made a profession out of arming themselves and going off to wars that have been created by old men who miss John Wayne.

Nowadays our grocery baggers get to go to college without ever feeling the loss of life.

I would not wish the agony of Vietnam and the deaths of friends and loved ones on anyone, but it would be terrific to have battalions of young people who are socially, spiritually and emotionally conscious of our aching world … instead of battalions of soldiers chasing the errors of misguided politicians.

 

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Back-slapping

Back-slapping: (n) the action of effusively congratulating or encouraging someone, typically by slapping a person’s back.

What is praise-worthy?Dictionary B

I must be honest with you and tell you that I’m often disturbed by what we consider to be acceptable, and also what is granted accolade.

There’s a lot of back-slapping going on in America–mutual appreciation for matters that are certainly not advancing the cause of humanity.

Merely showing the reality of street violence, and using it as a premise for making numerous movies, is not cause for parading down red carpets and receiving cast-in-gold trophies.

Lying to the press, thinking you’re going to get away with some egregious error and then, for some reason or another, escaping the social guillotine, is not admirable.

And merely making decisions to disrupt your own life and demand that others accept your decision as completely normal without question is certainly an American right, but should not afford you a parade.

The only deeds that demand back-slapping happen when human beings step out of the jungle and attempt, through intellect, art, spirituality or hard work, to place our human family back into the Garden of Eden.

Perhaps that is too idealistic for some folks, or they feel that exposing the underbelly of the human creature is essential, but I am interested in the heart.

It is located just East of our soul.

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Arboreal

dictionary with letter A

Arboreal: (adj) chiefly of animals living in trees.

Intellectualism often frightens me because it is willing to be stupid for the cause of alleged progress.

To me, one of the ways this shows up is the penchant that the intelligentsia often has in placing the human being into the animal kingdom.

Matter of fact, if you are of a mind to be ridiculed, just walk into a party at a university anywhere in America and suggest that human beings were created instead of spawned from the jungle, hanging in the trees.

Let’s just deal with the arboreal. I’m not even gonna discuss our lack of a tail, our superior intelligence and our deep-rooted emotional and spiritual capacity.

Setting all of that aside, I remember as a child the idea of climbing trees with my friends. It was never very successful. There was always one small child (who might have actually been ape-spawned) who could scurry right up the tree and look down at us mere mortals (yet human) who were standing on the ground, terrified to take the first step.

Most of the people I knew who tried to climb trees ended up with a broken something-or-other. I may be speaking out of school, here–literally–but I don’t think monkeys fall out of trees very often.

Humans, on the other hand, are far more likely to choose that descent.

So based just on tree-climbing ability, unless we have attributed that to the Missing Link, Homo Sapiens have neither the footing, the tail nor the grasp to achieve it very well.

One of my chimpanzee-like friends actually built a treehouse. The rest of us took about two weeks to get up into it, and eventually devised a ladder to acquire participation.

I think it’s good for us to study science, discovering as many different truths as possible. But we also must deal with the reality and the distinctions that exist between us and the animal kingdom.

Then, rather than mocking one another … we can celebrate the blessing of our uniqueness.

 

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Appetite

dictionary with letter A

Ap·pe·tite (n): a natural desire to satisfy a bodily need, especially for food.

I stumbled across a conversation on the Internet between two women, arguing with one another about food.

Each of them had posted a picture of herself, so I had a quick visual of the combatants.

The extraordinarily slender woman was piously offering advice on better food choices that her “friend” might want to select to escape the rigors of obesity.

The “friend” in this case, who was a plump lady with a big smile, lamented in her diatribe about people who judge her by her appearance, offering way too much advice on how she could become more attractive and meet their standards.

It fascinated me in this day and age, when people are so convinced that we are “born a certain way,” that we excuse all of our prejudice against one another based on the necessity of consuming food.

For I will tell you this–because I am a fat man, I know more about calories, good food choices and what is healthy than twenty skinny people. I can tell you exactly how much I overeat, and how those particular carbyhydrates or sugars affect not only my plumpness, but also my mood.

There is no chubby person in America who couldn’t apply for a license to become a dietitian.

The sooner we realize that our appetites are primal, if not genetic, the better we will be able to address them, bringing them under our scrutiny if not our control.

I have the metabolism of a sloth, so I also have to fight to escape having the exercise regimen of the same creature. In other words, I would much rather hang from a tree by two claws than fall to the earth and run about hunting bananas.

Add to that the fact that I do not eat because I’m hungry. I tend to eat because the refrigerator has not yet been emptied. It seems to be my mission.

I don’t expect someone who’s thin and burns calories by looking at a book to comprehend this dilemma. But I do think one of the more cruel aspects of human prejudice is to squint at the weaknesses in others as we smirk at our own.

Appetites are what confirm that somewhere along the line we had a merger with the jungle. Addressing them, acknowledging a problem and controlling them is what confirms that we have a divine lineage.

 

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Anthropology

dictionary with letter A

Anthropology: (n) the comparative study of human societies and cultures

There is an abiding, if not persistent, inclination to believe that intelligence invokes individuality.

In other words, because the human race possesses greater brain power than, let’s say, the duck, we are segregated into a multitude of clumps that not only differentiate us from one another, creating chasms of separation, sprouting suspicion.

Anthropology would do a great service to humankind if it pursued the premise that we are much more like the duck. No one sits around and discusses how ducks from the south are different from ducks from the north. (Maybe it’s because they fly south for the winter and north for the summer. Of course, most of our aging human population has similar travel plans.)

It is ironic to me that a scientific community which fastidiously places us within the animal kingdom as brother and sister to our jungle family suddenly decides to separate us from that kingdom when it comes to matters of race and culture.

Is it possible that we would be better off if we punctuated our similarities instead of showcasing our differences?

  • For instance, does someone born in Siberia who is transplanted right after birth to Southern California still prefer to wear parkas?
  • Would a native of Africa, born in the Serengeti, if translated to London-town, constantly find him or herself pining to hunt with a spear?

Can we really continue to take the attributes that are engrained and nearly beaten into us by our families and pretend that they’re a part of our natural desire?

Very few people ever consider the personality profile of an individual chimpanzee. Yet in some sort of “Homo sapien silliness,” we think that each and every one of us is a snowflake falling from the heavens, with our own particular jagged edges.

Yes, I believe anthropology would provide a salvation to humans if the science explained how much we share in common.

We would certainly be more like the duck, and realize that our particular quack … is not that special. 

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Anthropogeny

dictionary with letter A

 

Anthropogeny: (n)  the study of the origin of humankind.

I guess it doesn’t matter much whether you believe in Darwinian evolution, all the way up through the human, or if you believe in a Creator who spoke everything into existence in seven God-ordained days.

Still, somewhere along the line, if it’s evolution, some monkey looked around the jungle and said, “Enough of this banana farm! I’m launchin’ on my own.”

Or some Adam, in a Garden with Eve, said, “Enough of the rules. I’m gonna eat what I want.”

For at the core of humanity, there is a willingness to learn and a strong unwillingness to apply the knowledge.

This has caused many people to be self-loathing, with disparaging thoughts such as, “I’m only human” or “human beings are crap” or “people are no damn good.”

But I think the true essence of the history and the progression of the human race is found in the simple statement, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

And those who focus on their flesh often find that they gain only temporary pleasure because there’s no spirit, and those who tighten the spiritual belt become critical of other folks because they’re jealous over unattained pleasure.

So what’s the best way to be a human being?

Clean–unafraid to admit who you are, what you’re feeling and what you desire, realizing that tomorrow it may change. So since you know that it may change tomorrow, you aren’t intent on stealing, killing and destroying to acquire the moment’s whim.

In the process you can try to become a bit more effective at taking what you’ve learned and using it to improve your situation.

So as it pertains to the raging debate between the evolutionist and the creationist, we still end up with today, in which we’re human beings in need of some direction … and are desperately required to be more honest.

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Animalism

dictionary with letter A

Animalism: (n.) behavior that is characteristic or appropriate to animals, particularly in being physical or instinctive.

I think it is possible to appreciate members of the animal kingdom while still being candid about their limited capabilities, and often vicious tendencies.

People who do not respect the teeth of the lion often get swallowed up in their error.

But what bothers me the most about the animal kingdom is how we, as human beings, who have been granted great heart, spirit, intellect and physical abilities, have deteriorated these gifts to the more base representations.

So our emotions are animalistic.

For instance, our movies and art fail to portray the sensitivity available to us as human beings, but rather, expand on the aggressive, selfish and dark aspects of hapless iniquity.

And I am certainly fed up with a spiritual animalism which turns the life of Jesus of Nazareth into a human sacrifice, complete with the members of the cult cannibalizing over his remains in some symbol of religious consecration.

As it pertains to intellectual animalism, I am bewildered why we think the accumulation of knowledge with no application of wisdom does any good for us in our progress as a species. I, for one, have grown weary of people who are smart but unwise. I am tired of hearing debates, serving up facts without allowing for the smorgasbord of human heart.

And let me be the first one to say that I am appalled at the physical animalism which has taken human sexuality into the realm of unashamed pornography. There is nothing more awkward, comical and tender than human beings having sexual relationships with each other. To turn it into a circus act or some sort of abusive domination of power, where one person is subjugated, is a glorification of the mating season, with beleaguered females being raped by their male counterparts simply because nature demands the encounter.

I am willing to be part of an animal kingdom which I respect and caretake. But I am not willing to take the beauty of my heart, soul, mind and strength … and allow them to be defined by the rules of the jungle.

 

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