National borders are a waste of psychic energy. We spend so much time, effort, and imaginary tokens of exchange (“money”) on enforcing childish boundaries.

This latest political farce was predicated on, ensconced in, and capitalized upon, our collective fascination with a myth that there is some fundamental difference between people who were born in one set of coordinates and those born outside of that set of coordinates. It’s childish insanity. And that’s just at the foundation. We worship a statue with feet of quicksand.

You may say I’m a dreamer… and it comforts me that I’m not the only one. It is in my nature to conjure fanciful solutions to byzantine puzzles that defy my ability to logically understand. I cannot grok, so I unravel the Gordian knot and reweave it into some narrative tapestry. I guess I do the weave, too.

But let us pull this one thread… this tangled knot of reality ties us into a matrix of confusion and separation. But there’s a little thread… do you see it? I see it. Let’s pull.

At the very end of this thread I see a word, nationalism. Funny word. Nation. It’s right in there. Let’s pull on nationalism and see what happens to this big scary knot. Or would your rather not?

I pull the strand and feel the resistance… this thread is tangled, this thread is infused. This thread is integral to the tumored tangle of twine. So with the precision of a drunken surgeon I yank that thread…

Countries, Nations … what are they really? Yes yes yes, I know what the textbooks say. But what are they outside of the thinking that makes them so? They are collections (some looser than others) of people who identify under a single “community” or “culture” or “language” or “ideology” or any combination thereof. But none of this is imposed by nature. None of this is by divine decree.

So long ago we created a fiction that we have been living by for ages hence.

Like children making up the rules of some territorial play-act in the backyard at a picnic while the adults are grilling and sipping beverages over pretzels and chips.

In groups and out groups. Like insecure cliques in high school.

Along comes the prom king, captain of the football team, alpha male, not the smartest but bold and ignorantly confident… he’s more lost that everyone but he’s learned to project an air of unwavering faith in his abilities that those who are probably smarter, likely more talented, more able, but less assured, cannot help but follow him. In an uncertain world, the man who lights a torch (even with his own misguided bravado) lights the way.

The king starts to draw his lines. Us /// Them. Us = good, better, righteous, holy, elite, chosen, deserving… Them = bad, less-than, corrupt, unholy, preterite, undeserving, enemies, vermin…

The king’s power is largely determined by a system, long ago created, wherein ideas of value are treated like and worshiped as gods. We call these ideas of value “money”, “credit”, “wealth” and at some point we all agreed that we would live by these commandments and allow them supreme power over all but those who wield the magic commands: buy, lend, charge, sell, borrow…

In our little backyard game, from nothing but the thin air of child-like imagination, we’ve constructed a matrixian framework upon which all subsequent games will commence.

Look at how many people have traded their critical, free, human, gloriously flexible minds for the arbitrary rules of hegemony.

They voted to keep immigrants out… as if those human beings are any different than they.

They voted to hoard their wealth… as if it’s any more than numbers on a screen.

They voted to take away the rights of those who love differently than they… as if another human loving another person threatens their ability to love as they choose.

They voted to maintain a hierarchy that, while maybe restrictive, is comfortable.

They voted to maintain this hierarchy because they’ve been led to believe if they try hard enough… they’ll get to be one of the people who writes the rules as the game (d)evolves.

Oh, that’s the other thing. You remember when you used to play those backyard games? What did the dominant kid do when the story organically moved to a place that challenged his dominance? He changed he rules. He confidently says that while rules are important for maintaining his dominance, he, and only he, can change them to maintain the sanctity of his game.

There’s a reason, by the way, I’m using the male pronoun. This will to power — this folly-laden, comically-inept, desperate will-to-power is such an archetypically “male” trait that even when manifest in a woman, it wreaks of unchecked male power in a purely symbolic sense. We all contain the anima and the animus. I am using “male” and “female” here more in a yin and yang sense. The masculine force is ever-expanding, ever spreading its dominance, while the feminine force is containing, embracing, protecting, cocooning, reflecting. It is unfortunate that the ascription of masculine and feminine, an abstract metaphor, is taken so literally that insecure men cannot embrace their femininity ,while strong women are feared and ostracized for being too manly.

So America played into this backyard game, and they played into it hard. They chose the Big Daddy figure. They chose to play by the us v. them rules. They chose to see people who speak different languages, were born in different lands, love by their own hearts, and live by their own truths as other.

Approximately 248 years ago a bunch of boys sat in their clubhouse and made the rules of a game wherein they could rule a new nation. They passed on corporeally and they passed on an idea. Other little boys took those rules and continued the game, the alpha boys changing the rules along the way to maintain their elite status. The game they started so many years ago took on the illusion of permanence and omnipotence.

Today it enslaves us.

National boundaries are a waste of psychic energy. We spend so much of our mental and physical energy maintaining lines on a silly board game that we have nothing left for our better natures. The energy that I put into maintaining the wall between us and them could be better spent transcending that wall. Paradoxically, the instant I stop projecting that wall I no longer need the energy to transcend it because it is gone.

What to do with that excess energy but to follow my heart and love?

I pulled the thread and there is no more knot. The knot is not.

Between my hands is a jumble of twine.

I see a similar jumble between your hands as you sit across the table from me. My twine is one color, your twine, its twin, another. Down the table I see another, with a different color twine. Let’s do the time-warp again, and with warp and woof weave a new tapestry.

Oh the tapestries we weave

When our minds have freedom to perceive.