Smoke and delusions

As the smoke from the California fires began to blow away this afternoon, we could see patches of pale blue sky and a few beams of sunshine. I spotted this Smoketree, and it’s a fitting image for the talk Sue and I attended tonight. 

Reverend angel Kyodo williams is in Portland talking about the delusion we all live in: a capitalist delusion that depends for its stability on many people agreeing to myths about race, about hard work and productivity, about who deserves to be called an “American,” about who gets to own and control resources, about divisions of labor and ownership. She said we’re in a cage, and the conversation we need to be having is not who gets a larger piece of the cage, but how we get out of the cage. How we liberate ourselves from this delusion. How we can see each other and love each other. Because we have come to hard times: and we need each other.