Steer Your Way – From You Want it Darker, Leonard Cohen
Diversity, nature’s fail-safe, is rejected by the fearful. The mob thinks they are losing something, but they can’t describe what it is. And how will the rise and fall of a once-great country work?
It will work like humanity and the planet, all three evolving on the same arc where the end is written in the means. And the means of our present say something sinister and deadly about the ends of our personal, corporate, and planetary journey.
And when our fall, driven by an idiot-wind fired by unfettered Capitalism, a failed moral compass, and egocentric human rectitude is fully set upon Earth, the good Ol USA will be another footnote in the book of tragic and deadly experiments – a most recent illustration of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
The crown of a once-rooted Democracy is now tilted. If its roots can hold, and if its old leaves (Constitution and Declarations) can hold through vile winds, perhaps we may avoid the fall of an empire won through violence.
The sustaining equation is buried deep in the roots of Democracy, deeper in the DNA of humanity, even-deeper in the planet. In the present, as the Earth waits for us to get our shit together and stop mass suicide, cold winds fracture the philosophy of a once stable creed: e pluribus unum.
Ripe for an ending, the Democracy which is US, shakes our crumbling temples and rotting malls: year by year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.
STEER YOUR WAY
Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the Mall
Steer your way through the fables of Creation and the Fall
Steer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rot
Year by year Month by month Day by day Thought by thought
Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterday
Such as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the Way
Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you bought
Year by year Month by month Day by day Thought by thought
Steer your path through the pain that is far more real than you
That has smashed the Cosmic Model that has blinded every View
And please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or not
Year by year Month by month Day by day Thought by thought
They whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weep
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap
And say the Mea Culpa, which you’ve gradually forgot
Year by year Month by month Day by day Thought by thought
Steer your way, O my heart, though I have no right to ask
To the one who was never never equal to the task
Who knows he’s been convicted, who knows he will be shot
Year by year Month by month Day by day Thought by thought
Oversoul in Leonard Cohen’s “Steer Your Way,” music and video original work by Randy Anagnostis, and my reading, backdrop to this three minute film a commentary on the crumbling temple and rotting mall that is US.
GREGORY ORMSON'S Notes, Articles, Blogs, Vlogs Gregory Ormson writes from the ecotone, the vibrant intersections of landscape, spirituality, and physical presence. His essays and poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and print magazines. Author of *Yoga Song* and other works, Ormson blends lyrical observation with grounded reflection drawn from his Midwestern roots and global travels. He lives in Arizona and Wisconsin, seeking stillness where stories emerge like bears. 
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