the rohn report
the rohn report
chaos / and the second anniversary of 'the rohn report'
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chaos / and the second anniversary of 'the rohn report'

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Yeah, so I’ve been publishing ‘the rohn report’ for two years now, 117 posts. I’m proud of that so I’m including the very first post below, as a sort of celebration and because I’m sure most people haven’t seen it. A nice compliment to the one published yesterday which was basically about the end of the world. I mean the END of the world; Opeth’s song ‘Ending Credits’ which is admittedly naive, or at least that’s how the band’s front man, Mikael Åkerfeldt, introduced it.

Anyways back then, two years ago, I was looking for places to publish my writing other than Facebook and personal emails and self-published books, and discovered that there are lots of online venues out there, virtual magazines if you like: The Sun, Medium, Elephant Journal to name a few. Each one is a little different in their publishing style, but like magazines, you can browse through them and access a wide variety of interesting subjects (although that is of course subjective).

Medium is an open collection but whatever you submit is competing against thousands or at least hundreds of other articles. Writers get paid according to how many views they get and other nuanced analytics.

The Sun requests submissions which they then consider and approve or disapprove. They pay writers and pay well. Their about page reads, “We publish personal essays, fiction, and poetry. Personal stories that touch on political and cultural issues are welcome.”

Elephant Journal publishes everything but edits it to fit their audience, adds advertising in between the lines, changes the title and provides an illustration, which you may or may not recognize. For payment you will receive personal gratification if you have any left. If it sounds to you like I have personal experience with Elephant Journal, you would be right.

Then my friend Jewel mentioned Substack to me. I checked it out pretty thoroughly including listening to podcasts with the founder and CEO Chris Best. It seemed like a good fit. It offered the independence that I was looking for and a way to build an audience, a local network. It was completely untethered from Facebook’s machinations and the evil algorithms of Google. It also offered a payment option through a subscription service. Was my writing not worth something? I believed it was. Would people pay for it, even $5/month? Good question. I decided to find out.

This post was born after I received a couchsurfing request from a person in Egypt. When I looked up his town I discovered he was living in the delta, where the Nile river flows into the Mediterranean. Most people in Egypt live in the delta, as it turns out, or nearby and have since the time of the Pharaohs. I started researching the Nile river and got fascinated with it’s history. The Nile river, of course, gave rise to the ancient Egyptian civilization but it’s source is deep in the heart of Africa’s tropical zone, in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. It flows out of Lake Victoria and travels 4,000 miles through 11 nations before it arrives at the Mediterranean. It was a mysterious and compelling adventure back in the mid 19th century to try to find the source of the Nile. “Doctor Livingstone, I presume.” and all that.

I started thinking about the flooding of the Nile, how every year the monsoon rains would raise the level of the river so precipitously that it would inundate the valley down river, destroying everything in its path, but it would also bring fresh silt and enrich the land where the Egyptians planted their crops. In their myths they represented that event as a story about the death and rebirth of the god Osiris. I realized, In fact, that all the ancient creation myths have a similar theme - from chaos comes renewal, from the void comes the world. That was my little adventure and here is my story.

Note, this was written two years ago, July 2020. Donald Trump was president and the campaign was raging.

The Babylonian sea god flooding out the land before Marduk defeated him.

chaos

The word chaos comes from the Greek kháos, meaning chasm or void.  It also has a protean quality when it’s used to describe the creation events of the old myths like Babylonia’s primeval sea, the chaos of Egypt’s recurring floods, the Iroquois’ water covered world and of course the Hebrew version: “The earth was without form and void; darkness was on the face of the deep.” 

Our country is in a time of chaos.  Instead of truth and guidance and inspiration from our government leaders we get lies and obfuscation and blame casting.  The idea of a unified nation seems to be on no one’s mind, instead we create divisions and cliques and define ourselves by the conspiracy theories we believe in.  Social media, instead of being a place to socialize, is inundated with political memes and outrageous, attention grabbing posts that have little to do with verifiable facts.  

Extreme opinions have become trendy.  It’s a form of acting out, a kind of self expression.  The uncertainty of our times has created anxiety and the anxiety has created all kinds of strange behaviors.  It’s a fear reaction to changes that we sense are happening but can’t control. 

But our creation myths tell us the story of renewal and rebirth from the chaos. “Then God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”  That was a positive development.  The Iroquoian Sky Woman fell from her island in the sky, but landed on the back of Big Turtle floating in the primordial waters that covered the world.  Osiris, the Egyptian god, was killed but then was resurrected from the dead with perfumes and magic spells performed by his devoted queen, Isis. The Babylonian's battle with the watery chaos that was all around them was won by their hero Marduk.  All the stories of our ancestors proclaim not only rebirth but renewal.  Our chances of coming out of this chaos are 100% if myth is a reliable guide.

 And how bad is the chaos going to get?  It could be much worse than it is now, we could look back at this time as the halcyon days when things were ‘normal’.  It just depends on how much fear and anxiety we choose to carry around with us.  As can be seen from Donald Trump’s spectacular rise to power, people’s fears and anxieties are easily aroused and manipulated.  The same technologies that were supposed to make our lives easier, more productive and more fun, have enabled massive brain washing.  That’s not a nice word but appropriate.  People don’t know the difference between opinion, preference and truth.  There are facts and there are ‘alternative facts’.  There is news and there is ‘fake news’. 

I would call that some pretty rich chaos.  We should be able to make something out of that, like the Iroquois story of Sky Woman who fell out of the sky onto the back of Big Turtle floating in the primordial ocean. There was no earth and no land back then, just sky and water and all the animals came to help her. One by one they dove down to the bottom of the ocean to try to get some mud so she could make the world. Muskrat tried, beaver tried, duck tried, one by one they all tried but failed to bring back any mud. Finally, the smallest of them all, toad, dove down to the bottom of the ocean, grabbed some mud in his mouth and brought it back and with this tiny bit of earth the world was created on the back of Big Turtle by Sky Woman and her friends for all the animals to live on.  

Maybe that’s what we need, story time around the old campfire, telling each other the stories of who we are and how we do it.  I know we have TV and movies and they kind of do that, and the evening news tells us about all the bad things that are happening in an entertaining sort of way, but maybe we could have some discourse amongst ourselves.  Maybe, when the fog lifts and we stumble out of the chaos into the light of a mid-day sun, we’ll be able to do it again - remind each other of who we are and how we do it. 

We are the human beings (spoiler alert) and we do it with a wide range of amazing behaviors but our most celebrated, our most sublime is when we do it with kindness and compassion.  That’s also when we are the most content.  That’s also when we are at our most powerful and creative.  And that’s also when a nation or an individual can become great again.

music :: 41:35

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the rohn report
the rohn report
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