Grey day? 

Raise your spirits.

See It with Closed Eyes

The young girl sat cross-legged in the center of the LongHouse.
"How will I know my spiritual work?" She asked.
See it with closed eyes. They answered.
See it in the light of day
See it in the dark of night
See it in the clouds
See it in the river
See it in one drop
See it in the scent
See it in their eyes
See it in the touch
See it in the whisper
See it  in the wind
See it in the fear
See it in the memory
See it in the faces
See it in the shadow
See it in the heart
See it in yourself.
"I will." She said
and closed her eyes.

Sometimes I Wonder

   

   Sometimes I Wonder
   looking at world news
   I wonder
   just who's in charge?
   standing on the earth
   looking up
   I wonder:
   those pelicans,
   fluffy clouds,
   darning needles,
   raindrops
   where do they come from?
   the same questions
   I asked as a girl
   lying on my back
   under a tree
   looking up
   through brown branches,
   green leaves at blue sky
   I floated
   into them,
   became them,
   perfectly peaceful
   the questions lost

   definition as the cloud
   shapes shifted.
   now I wonder
   what will happen to it all?

THE POWER OF INDIGO

www.alesiakunz.com
My new speculative fiction novel, The Power of Indigo, has just been published! 

Please check out my website: www.alesiakunz.com
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Intent To Act

Our world needs healing.

What action will I make today to heal us?
What action will I make today to make peace?

Every day.
One action.

Do You Want to Know a Secret?

“Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell? Closer.”
Just take 60 seconds right now and think of what secrets you are keeping. Are they about you? Are they about someone else? About something that happened?
Why are you keeping it a secret? Why do you decide to reveal a secret?
Do we keep secrets because we’re ashamed of something? Because we’re protecting someone? To retain power? Have power over someone? If someone asks you if you want to know a secret, do you automatically say yes?
The lines from the Beatles’ song refers to having kept a secret about loving someone and now telling the person. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were talking about a romantic feeling that many of us have experienced. We have a great feeling of love for a person but we don’t share it right away perhaps because we don’t want to be rejected and the feeling in the meantime is delicious. Keeping this secret doesn’t seem to hurt anyone.
But what about political secrets? Is Bradley Manning being tortured by the US government? If so, why? Why do we not know this? The face of the US must be saved? At any cost? Why did the US government not tell us the real reason they illegally invaded Iraq? We could go on and on with the secrets.
Has Momar Gadhafy been murdering his people? Why is the US concerned with this situation, the situation in Egypt, in Iraq, Afghanastan, and not in Gaza, not in the Congo, not in many other countries around the world? Not poverty and suffering in our own country.
Now, Wiki Leaks is outing all the governments. What a relief. We can now be more informed citizens.
I began writing about Wiki Leaks and how it makes me think about the nature of and process of, and purposes of keeping and revealing secrets. The shame, the fear, the joy, the deliciousness, the sense of power that motivates us to keep them. Political and personal secrets, the aspect of protection of whom from what? Not being able to be informed citizens when governments keep secrets from us.
But I told myself, “You’ve written about that before. Government doesn’t want us to be informed citizens. Informed citizens are death to government.”
Unable to write what I wanted, I tore it up the paper.
Then Tunisia happened, Egypt. The earthquake in Japan, the tsunami, the destruction, the loss of life, the radiation. Libya, Bahrain, Yemen. And all those unnamed and unacknowledged disasters all over our world.
I am stunned. I turned the news off. Each day I try to listen to a little. I can’t. What’s happening?
We are more than the “citizens of the world” that Virginia Woolf identified herself as. We are all one. You are I and I am you and we are all together. How to think together, work together. What shall we do?
Why was the IAEA’s 2008 report that Japan’s safety measures for nuclear plants was lacking not revealed. Does it have to do with the face of Japan? How Japan wants to be seen, including being seen financially viable?
What about Raymond Davis the so-called American “diplomat” who killed two Pakistanis in Lahore? First, the US government said he was a diplomat, then a private citizen, then a “diplomatic functionary”, a security contractor from a Florida based firm, connections to Blackwater? Why was he in Mozang, Lahore?
Yes, this is all old news. But what ever happened to all these events? Anything? We can simply substitute names and places for the present. Now we have an horrendous incident of mass murder in Norway. It’s impossible to keep up with the secrets and the disturbing news of our world.
I hammer on this theme: we are citizens. We need to know the facts of what our governments are doing so that we can decide what we want them to do in this so-called democracy. Since Wiki Leaks has begun revealing governments’ secrets, it seems more and more everything the U.S. Government says is a sham, a public relations opportunity.
It seems as if all the people at the top levels of political power are basically in cahoots financially and deal behind each other’s backs and under the table to acquire as much power as possible while neglecting the populace, our health and well-being. Spending billions of dollars on war and slashing funding for entitlements and education. No one mentions these two elements in the same sentence, as if there is no causal relationship. The U.S. Government, my government, drops the iron curtain that separates the two, implying an absence of relationship. It can make you crazy. Our world is like a large scale 1950’s Hollywood “shoot-em up.” White hats and black hats. Except now it looks like nobody wins.











Power of secrets? Who has the power? Teller? Keeper?

Watch the Spin: "Transitions" responsible for military suicides?

US Military wonders: why so many suicides in the troops?
“Transitions” are the missing puzzle piece


Suicide is a profound act surrounded with sadness, desperation, loneliness, anger and unanswered questions. It is difficult to talk about personally and as a statistic.

Last night driving home from work I heard a special segment on NPR stating that the U.S. Military has been struggling to understand why so many soldiers are committing suicide. Now the Army has come up with a clue. Transitions. Apparently they found that 79% of suicides are committed in the first three years of service. And, the report said, besides the obvious factors of multiple deployments, and the stress of war, there seem to be no predictors of who is most at risk for suicide. Until now. "It's all about transitions,” the report said.

The report highlighted a mother who lost her 19 year old son to suicide when he was ordered to take home leave after being in Iraq for a couple of months. Connie Scott talked about her son, Brian Williams, arriving home at Christmas time to face his mother’s new house, her new husband, and his fiancée’s revelation that she was in love with someone else. Connie Scott said she could see that Brian was in terrible pain and at risk for suicide but she didn’t know what to do or how to help him. When he was set to return to Iraq, there was a sense of lightness about him, she said, and she felt relieved that he would be okay. But the next day he had taken his life. Maybe if he had stayed in Iraq with his buddies and not come home, his mother said, his buddies could have helped him with the loss of other soldiers he knew, and taken care of him. Then would have survived all the losses.

I believe his buddies would have taken care of Brian. But who knows what would have happened if Brian had not come home? The fact that he was sent home after two weeks in Iraq suggests to me that he had terrible experiences in the military and the military couldn't help him.

Suicides are horrific. But they are not The Problem. The problem is war. The destruction and desecration of everything that lives, cultures, infrastructures, land, air. Suicides are a symptom of this problem.

Does the military want to be able to predict who is at risk so they can stop suicides? Why? On the surface the answer seems obvious that they care for the troops. But I can't help thinking that it's public relations more than caring about the soldiers. PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) has become a common word since the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Why is the military not talking about this as a problem? Why is the report being vague and euphemistic by calling the horrors of war “the stress of war?” Why did NPR not talk about the problems that war creates? Every man and woman who goes to the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan are at risk for PTSD and harming themselves and others.

As difficult as it is, we need to come out of denial about war; face the hideous realities of what these young women and men experience, what war is doing to their psyches and their souls, take stock of what our U.S. government is doing everyday around the world and speak up about it. The responsibility is ours. This means the media. The U.S. media needs to get a grip, get courage and lead the way. Let's focus on the real problem of war, and not pretend that fewer or smoother, or no transitions for a soldier will cure the symptom of taking one's own life, or that suicide is the problem.