long time no post

birthdays Christmas Virgin Islands epiphany

here I am.

Whatever brilliant thoughts I had during that intervening time are gone.

But here’s what’s on my mind: I spent a coupla hours looking through magazines for inspiration the other day–literally.

What may be no surprise to you, but was something of a surprise to me was the extent to which Madison Avenue takes the deepest longings of the soul and uses them to sell products–phrases like “blissful peace” “perfect love” and such crop up in car ads, clothing ads, you name it.

The brilliant “visionary political astrologer” Caroline Casey [really: she’s the daughter of a congressman, astrologer for cynics, uses phrases like “believe nothing. entertain possibilities;” speaks around the country doing what Bertrand Russell used to call “stand-up philosophy”] quotes from the New York Times science pages that substances if deprived of what they need most will seek out their “toxic mimic” which ultimately destroys them.

So one of the reasons why styrofoam containers are so odious is that one of the chemicals in the styrofoam is a toxic mimic of estrogen that can be attracted by animals and humans and negatively affect their reproductive systems.

Although it’s been said many times, many ways, I simply had a visceral sense that consumer culture, and the drive to consume, is the toxic mimic of soul food. In other words, these advertisements trigger and appear to feed our deepest innermost longings of the human spirit or soul and so we eagerly gobble up what they serve us. But then it doesn’t work. And it poisons our spirit and our soul is even needier and we are driven to consume more and more to fill that hole.