I love the music of Bob Dylan, but he is not the hero we need right now.

Last night, as I watched the recently Oscar-nominated “A Complete Unknown” story of Bob Dylan’s early career, I was reminded of the many days I rode the bus to and from school with ears and consciousness clothed in music spinning from the shock-proof disc-man with Dylan’s shrewd wit and raspy callout of society, government, hypocrisy, and war. I remember discovering Dylan’s music as a preteen and teenager, moved by his slightly off-center guitar rhythms, the complex and florid lyricism that evoked the sense of crazy wisdom and rebellion, turning me onto new ideas and giving voice to an ongoing fight led by a legacy of warriors of song. He became what I might consider a personal folk-hero, an artistic inspiration to me as a young songwriter-poet.

“A Complete Unknown” shares the story of Bob Dylan’s emergence into the work of folk music in the mid-20th century that stood against fascism, fought for civil rights, fought for peace, and environmental protection. As a significant early supporter of Dylan’s work, Pete Seeger a major folk hero and warrior of song, pleads to Dylan who at this point is already a megafauna in the world of folk music, that Dylan may see the work that many before him had laid to invigorate these causes. Dylan’s radicality became a perceived threat to break the momentum of the movement by transitioning to a more electrified rock-and-roll sound.

In Dylan’s characteristic fashion, he employs the aloof, mysterious, “I don’t give a f*%k” manner in which is illustrated throughout the movie to express his art, to express his persona in the way that he wants, ultimately upsetting, confusing, and pushing the envelope. As an act that certainly took courage, that is oft hailed as a type of testament to Dylan’s authenticity and dedication to his values, it ultimately launched his career to new heights helping him to reach a far greater audience. The actions were lauded in lieu of the pushback, and yet I now wonder, are these qualities of expression what we should be idolizing?

For decades, I’d heard, read and had known this story that was told in this movie. And after entering back into Bob Dylan’s world in this current 2025 era of the rise of the American Fascist state, I found myself feeling a reticence to celebrate Dylan’s conduct of radicality in the particular way he was portrayed, and in which I’ve come to know him in my lifetime of listening to his music. My criticism is not in what Dylan did, in this crux, as I believe it was righteous of him to express the art and the messages coming through him to share, freely as he wishes. What I disagree with now, and perhaps passionately so, is with whom and how he rebelled, and for what purpose.

As we face the consequences of a divide-and-conquer strategy engineered into the technosphere of social media, a level of division rocks our human community in ways that seem unprecedented. The social media revolution has exploded a “post-truth” world which has exacerbated the dynamics of in-fighting that has plagued and caused the implosion of activist communities for decades.

Betrayal and division from our enemies is easy, in comparison to when we are betrayed by our friends, or those of our own ilk. It is a betrayal which is more difficult to heal from, more insidious in its capacity to reach into the tender intimate zones of our hearts and psyches.

We need to rethink radicality and rebellion.

Rebellion and radicality are hallmarks of the rock-and-roll revolution. Counter-culture was birthed in its own namesake, “counter”ing the norms. Ultimately, these labels of rebellion, aren’t themselves the expressions of that rebellion. However, if we take it at face value, we are countering culture, countering the norms of a culture which we don’t agree with, and further I would add, to create an alternative culture to the normative culture.

If we take only one part of the concept, “Counter,” we are left endlessly countering and radicalizing. The true merit of the concept of counter-culture requires us to take a strong precedent for the second half of this label, the word “Culture,” itself which requires a type of investment in by its members, and at least a type of unity to function.

I’ve heard it said that the original “counter-culture” was the revolution that began during the life of Jesus Christ against the Roman Empire. Jesus spoke of a new way of looking at life, a new way to conduct oneself in relation to life, earth, power, God and community. In essence, what was being ignited was an alternative culture in place of a hurtful and dominant normative culture. It wasn’t until 300 years after Jesus had died, that Constantine, the leader of the same Empire that Jesus resisted, created “Christianity” to be the national religion of Rome. We could say that the culture which the original counter-culture sought to resist engulfed the concepts and face of its resistor, arguably making the wisdom of the resistor obsolete, or worse, weaponizing those ideas and the face of that counter-culture to uphold the status quo. This wouldn’t take much historical observation to postulate, this is exactly what has happened.

When Dylan was limited by the dogmas of his predecessors, those creative Elders who had been using folk music as a tool to fight oppression, I believe he misplaced the severity of significance of that Dogma and broke himself from that movement as an outlier, a radical, not to be boxed in or connected or labeled.

“This machine kills fascists,” was famously written on Woody Guthrie’s guitar. This image exemplifies the paradigm from which the foundation Dylan grew into the superstar he became. Although the musical framework through which Bob Dylan wanted to work expanded, the ideological associations through which he sang and lifted a movement with his voice could have carried on and developed, when instead he chose the path of the mysterious artist, the edge-walking trickster, the shadowed shaker.

With any basic familiarity with world mythologies, we can identify with two different types of stories outlined originally by Joseph Campbell. The first, famously coined by Campbell is the heroes journey story, while the other, is the story of the trickster. In the hero story, we follow the hero through the trials and tribulations of becoming, sacrificing in order to receive the gift to bring back to the people, community, and/ or creation to the betterment of those relations. The hero story shares a framework of values, and a potential roadmap for us to follow. The trickster, in contrast, is the teacher through mirroring, the shaker of norms, the reflector of pomposity and hypocrisy, but is not one to be followed. If you follow the trickster without shrewdness, you will certainly find yourself in a tangle of lessons which will teach you, grow you, and transform you. This is not a bad thing, but it’s important not to conflate the tricksters lessons with the guidance and leadership of the a heroes tale.

Now, I can’t conflate Dylan’s worldly role with that of Jesus Christ. It’s certainly over-the-top to do so, and doubly sacreligious, both to rock and roll and to the teachings of Jesus. It’s not really my intention to be either religious or non-religious in pairing the two in this treatise. However, if we look at the two of them, one a shaker and a leader, and the other, in my humble opinion is simply a shaker, but not a leader.

I don’t think you have to be Jesus Christ to be a leader, by the way, but you have to do more than shake the status quo.

Shaking is an essential aspect in the healing process. We need pattern interruption for change to take place. The trickster comes into our life and shakes things up, giving us an opportunity to walk a different path. A true radical is a cultural healer in their highest form. They are able to shake the norms, and be a guide into more helpful alternative norms. Simply shaking the status quo can leave people shaken, disoriented, and doesn’t necessarily lead to a better alternative. If a revolution ignites, it may lead to a return to the same pattern, or a worse one instead.

Great leaders are often shakers, or if not, they are those who are able to step in when a shaking has occured to guide us into a better alternative. We might call these people radicals. It is my opinion, that this radicality is a worthy and helpful radicality, one that reaches beyond radicality for the sake of radicality.

In the precipice of that moment, when Bob Dylan had become a leader in a movement of folk music and all that it had stood for, the shaking rose up through him. In its happening, pushing buttons, bridging genres, and breaking norms, the power of potentiality opened through this vacuum. I see it as a failure of opportunity from my vantage looking back from the year 2025, to break the dogmas and and deepen the unification of a movement. This, of course, was not Dylan’s role, and it certainly isn’t his role now in a time when we are experiencing a great shaking, and in need of real leadership.

We get confused conflating trickster for leader. And ultimately, this is the role of the trickster: to teach us through mirroring our own folly.

Counter-culture too often focuses on the “countering” that we get addicted to going our own way, instead of looking around for the legacy of resistance, rebellion, and countering unhealthy dominant norms that exist, and have already been built into the discourses of our time. We might consider that we are part of a many thousand year project of resistance to the human folly that wants to dominate, control, and give over to the self-indulgent, stingy, and toxic traits of humanity. We forget that we need to focus on the unity, on the common project of being human, of being creative, of bringing forward the gifts towards living together on Earth in Peace.

One might take a step back and imagine that a culture which honours every living thing and the sovereignty and giftedness of each human being is the actual culture, and that the dominant norms are the true “counter” which we are resisting, rebelling, and becoming radical for purpose of facing.

Dylan was a trickster with the platform of a leader. As illustrated in the movie, Pete Seeger sought him to see the shoulders upon which he stood, and to do well with his capacity to shake and lead. We live now in a time of great shaking, and we need leaders and role models who can help lead us into new norms, to express transparency and honesty and authenticity so the movements of culture have a road to walk. This treatise is one that asks us to stop idolizing those who go their own way, but who walk in the true Spirit of radicality, shaking and leading so that others can find traction on a better path.

We need radicals who can point us to those shoulders we stand on, and who can bring out our giftedness, so we can contribute to the unity of a culture in progress.

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As a US Citizen, I was grateful for the opportunity to vote against Donald Trump three times.

I was greatly dismayed and shocked in November 2016 when he won the election. I received the news as I was heading to North Dakota for the second time to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline that was redirected from the predominently white city of Bismarck through the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, without consent. The pipeline construction had finally been shut down in the Obama administration, after a year of protests, and downright horrific eye-opening warfare against indigenous people that brought me into a past I was mind-blown to realize was still occurring.

The use of sonic violence, chemicals being sprayed in the night over tent-camps that had been erected, water being blasted upon protestors in sub-freezing temperatures, excessive tear gas, all of which was considered non-lethal forms of anti-protest by the local police. After a year of this, when around 300 tribes and 2000 US veterans had assembled to support the protest of this project, the US Army Corps of Engineers finally denied the easement needed for the project to cross the Missouri River on grounds of an infringement on treaty rights and clean water violations. This was a huge victory which was overturned by Trump in his first day of office in 2016 with an executive order.

I remember on that night in 2016, I went outside under the rural night sky to see a small private plane doing victory laps, I assume, in celebration of Trump’s win.

The air was eerie and thick with foreboding, and the juxtaposition between what was being fought for in Standing Rock and the election of this reality show billionaire with no political experience who already made fun of a disabled reporter, expounded racist and xenophobic rhetoric, and had ample evidence of groping and sexually harassing women was to be the next leader of the so-called “free world.” This was all before the first Trump presidency, before 2 impeachments and before the insurrection and capitol riot of January 6th 2021 based on Trump’s “Big Lie” of a stolen election, before 34 convictions, and a list too big seemingly making him unfit to lead the country, at least to me.

Now, in Trump’s second term, we see Trump’s allegiance and loyalty to Putin and Russia more clearly, his allegiance to the billionaire class by gutting federal programs and massive firings of federal employees to replace with loyalists who serve only Trump. His flurry of executive orders and rhetoric point to his desire for absolute power, to become the King of the United States, to own the Gaza strip in Palestine, to align with dictators and authoritarian movements around the world, and to distance the US from its allies. He in fact told us this was his plan on the campaign trail.

Its not my interest to amplify division here, or really anywhere. As I write details of the history, even writing it feels like beating a dead horse as these stories are constantly swirling around us like broken records as things change rapidly in the current Trump administration. Certainly, I am not the most qualified to interpret the news, current events, or historical context.

I am a poet, not a journalist or historian. But, as all of this has been unfolding, I hear from people a lot right now, “Democracy is over in the US.”

This sentiment, although I agree with the urgency and the warning behind it, calls me to remember that the original founding fathers of the USA and Canada were mentored by the Haudenosaunee Nation in how to build and run a democracy. This is often not taught in the history books. The People of the Longhouse mentored Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others, introducing them to their long standing civilization that had lived by a Great Law of Peace which guided their civilization and continues to this day. I remember that when the Constitution was signed, Elders of the the Haudenosaunee arrived to voice their protest that certain essential aspects of the US democracy did not follow their mentoring, and would invite “darkness to dine at their table.”

I remember I was raised to understand the Revolutionary War and the succession from the British Monarchy, but what was left out was the fact that some of the impetus for revolution was by wealthy colonials who wished to continue to own slaves to build their wealth, when it was outlawed under royal decree. I remember that the “white” race was built into the laws, to encourage the stratification of wealth and privilege, allowing only “white men” to own land, to vote, etc… Before this time, there was no such thing as a “white” race. It wasn’t until 1964 during the civil rights act that legally discrimination and inequality by race, gender, religion, or sex was outlawed. The massiveness of this achievement in a long history of discrimination has been overshadowed by the norms I grew up in.

This is not to say that I have no pride for growing up in the USA, for being a US citizen, for an investment in the future of the US. I absolutely do. But if this current unfolding has taught me anything, is that democracy has ALWAYS been a work in progress in the USA. Democracy is based on principles of Unity, that every voice matters.

But Trump is not the end of democracy, even if we plunge into an authoritarian system of government.

And as bad as Trump is for the function of democracy, Biden/ Obama were not nearly the paragons of democracy either. War mongering and genocide abroad, putting more money in the elite’s pockets, were done alongside expanding medicare and social systems that supported the most vulnerable domestically.

Democracy is beyond function, a system based on principles of service to all, by all. The downtrodden working classes of history elect strongmen to fix broken systems, inadvertently beginning the dictatorships of the world. We are in a time like that in the USA right now, but democracy is not dead.

Democracy lives in our hearts, in our values, in how we hold space for each other, and all our relations, into the future.

This recent unfolding has been teaching me/ drawing me deeper to understand how government, especially democratic ones, require our participation. It looks like more than simply voting. It requires strategy in action, in articulation, and in thought. I have decided I will not resign any longer to falling into the propaganda that mine or any one else's voice doesn't matter.

I am not interested in division. And yet, in the Haudenosaunee’s teachings of governing, from which US government found much deeper roots, I often came across the phrase, “We are peacemakers, not pushovers.”

I think there is a larger propaganda that we are unable to influence our government, that our hands are tied, or that it doesn't concern us. This is in due part to subtle and at times less than subtle autocratic tendencies, perhaps sometimes unintentional but likely mostly deliberate manipulations for more power by those who seek it. Democracy is a beautiful and crazy idea that we can organize and take care of people, land, and resources in service to all, by all. But we must stand by our principles, and not simply be pushovers. We must be peacemakers.

And we need Peace for us, for each other, and for all life. Because, we all live in the same longhouse, with the roof which is the sky and the floor which is the Earth.

What the rise of Trump requires of us is that we remember this thread, that we all play a part, and that not only our voice matters, but that all voices matter. We can’t let go of the thread. Democracy lives in our Hearts.

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The idea of spiritual bypassing is a common term often defined as the"tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks".

Maybe you’ve been hurt or disturbed witnessing someone engaging in spiritual bypassing. Maybe you’ve been victim to feeling overlooked or abused by someone whose hurtful actions were written off as something “higher vibe” or “god’s will. Spiritual bypassing feels hurtful, in bad taste, and downright icky.

So its understandable that we develop a radar to sniff out such off-colour, not very spiritual masquerading that is inherent of spiritual bypassing.

On the other side of the spectrum, what happens when this sniffer gets too sensitive, too zealous, swinging that pendulum the other way?

The world we live in is now, and perhaps has always been, bigger and more mysterious than the human mind can think its way through. Let’s face the truth that it is likely the over-active human mind, unhinged, disembodied, and armed with disregard for the rest of life, that has gotten us in the apparent mess we find ourselves. We look towards those revered once-renegade thinkers like Einstein or Buckminster Fuller, who shared the sentiment that we can’t fix a problem upon the premises it was made. We have to get out of the human’s trickster mind, and return (or move forward) into something much deeper, older, and more integrated.

If we look at the world’s indigenous wisdom, we see that we as the inheritors of western expansionism and colonialism are missing something that would otherwise place human beings in the role of caretaker within the web of life, as opposed to supreme manager.

The story of colonialism through time could be characterized as a type of mega-narrative about the pathway of spiritual bypassing through time. “God’s will,” as a claim, has been invoked time and time again to do the work of maiming, dismembering, and devastating culture, language, landscape and people. A newer and simpler provocation of such bypassing expresses as a sentiment that “your pain and trauma doesn’t matter,” because “everything is meant to be,” so we would do best to “just stay positive.”

And yet, in an era where we have more access and freedom to explore our trauma, our pain, as well as our power and privilege, we may find ourselves stuck in a mechanistic and reductionistic world where relationships operate within the limitations of neuroscience at best and an ethos of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” or “it is what it is,” that keeps us lost, despairing, and dismal in our approach to life.

And yet, where in that balance, between the deep spiritual lineages of the world, against the at-times rationalistic and methodical truth seeking of the cultural commons, do we find our true blue for being with the hurt?

Indigenous and Earth based lineages around the world point us to an interconnectivity, a dancing web of living beings, a vibrant lineage of creative human expression through time, and even a mysterious creator (or creators) somewhere behind the veil of our physical senses? In that place of relationship, all relations are inexplicably tied to all others, and theres no hiding place to be without. In this place, there is both support for and responsibility to all others.

When the crude, brutal, dismal, and despair-inducing come to our door, or the doors of our neighbors, we find both solidarity in our empathy, and solace in our connectedness. Our connectedness is with one another, and with something beyond our physical knowing and understanding. If we are truly standing in that place, the web feels the impact of our personal awareness. It speaks to us through our empathy, our inspirations, our thoughts, our actions as it moves us to heartbreak, as it moves us to reach our arms out to hold one another, and to be held by the divine. It speaks to us in the way we settle in that place to be with what is, and to find our footing in a reality that requires us to rise above the collapse, the dissociation, and to face life again to keep on living.

It comes to us in those quiet places in the forest where life comes to us teeming greater than we’d known possible, or in the hallowed passion of love-making, or in the heat of music that has carried us away, or in the depths of devotional action. That connectedness hits us and gives us that feeling to know and trust in something beyond the mechanistic and rational. It wakes us from a stupor and proves in a moment that life is deeper and more real than even our most devastating losses.

Some might call it a fine line: To spiritually bypass, or to bypass that which is spiritual.

What is spiritual requires us to feel more deeply, more real, to enter more fully into what is and let it soften us that we may be more fully alive, and more fully able to respond in alignment to that aliveness within our web of relationships. What is spiritual requires us to forget spirituality for its own sake. That’s not spiritual at all. It requires us to equally enter the fire, or to take a nap, or to answer the phone when it rings.

What is spiritual is knowing we are never alone, and that we are not owed understanding or recognition, and yet we are still responsible. Bypassing this is a mistake as well.

Getting amongst it, and letting it move us to higher ground, and bringing others with us. That’s a line, and we’ve got to choose to walk it. In those moments of deeper expansion, greater connection, we grow our capacity to walk that line. We become more responsible to that line. When we’re close to the crude, with our faces heavy with soot, that’s when the line matters the most. That’s when being spiritual makes a damn difference.

Those who bypass haven’t had enough time walking that line.

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Have you heard about the concept of Word Power?

There is an important traditional Haudenosaunee story that I have heard about a Sacred Peacemaker that came to this world and carried the capacity to divide the minds of the people with his speech. This gift of dividing the minds, when applied with a calling to bring forward a Vision of Peace, was instrumental to bringing about the end of a 1000 year war.

I have always been fascinated by this idea of the power of “dividing the minds,” in contrast to purely speaking coherently, clearly, and cogently a truth that we can get behind. In so far as this piece is concerned, I wish to address the efficacy in this concept of word power and the immense uncertainty we as a human species and Earthly community face.

We live in what feels to me like “unprecedented” times. Whether or not these times are actually unprecedented, I’m not sure. But it is perhaps not as important to say, as it is to say if its resourceful to think of them as unprecedented. Or even more so, how and when is it or isn’t it resourceful to think of these times as unprecedented? Or in what ways will our resourcefulness be deemed resourceful, and from what premises is that we know such a concept to be resourceful or not?

Of the many challenges life gives us to face, its in our approach to perceiving and knowing them as challenging and how we think and know about them that defines so much of how they act upon our lives.

When we look at the dissolution and unraveling of what I’d call our “modern myths,” the stories about the structures of modern society, capitalism, colonialism, all of it, we are met with a frontier of the unknown. It’s difficult not to at least rub shoulders with paradigms and realities that speak to us of the collapse of the structures of modern society, the devastation of climate, the descent into authoritarianism, apocalyptic warfare, the emergence of dangerous meddling into the realms of genetic engineering and AI, the impending confluence of crises or possible crises, even one of which would deepen and exponentiate the already immense suffering to humans, the Earth, and its diverse inhabitants towards irrevocable terminality.

And yet, there can be resourcefulness in storytelling.

However we punctuate our life defines our perceptions, which defines our motivations, our dreams, our behaviors, and our actions. Our free will as human beings allows us the capacity to make meaning and purposefulness within a malleable reality of experience.

Punctuation is not simply something we choose intellectually, but also something that is informed and informing an embodied experience of our life. The way the patterns and textures of our world, the light of the sunrise, the dew on a fern leaf, the thrumming of an engine as it turns over, the stale air of a broom closet. Inward and outward, we are impacted by the physical environment. And as such, the ideas we take in, conversations with friends, family, and co-workers, the media we view, reach our senses and soak into our perceptions influencing that which we punctuate as truth. These punctuations dictate our certainty of “what is.”

We don’t often pause and wonder, “Yes, its true. But, is it helpful?”

We can’t help but punctuate our reality. Even in shrewdly seeking truth, the premises upon which we make our observations dictate so significantly where and how we look. If there is a shift in premise, a new reality awakens. And yet, the question remains, why this reality over another? How to not bypass, fool ourselves and each other? And can one simply shift to a new reality, a new premise, a new set of myths and their enfolding structures within which to live?

A change of perception dictates a change of behaviour. As such a change of emotion, changes thought. A new insight changes feeling. It would seem, this ain’t no linear formula.

Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motivations, visions, dreams, behaviours, actions.

At any point in the wheel, the entire wheel can not only change shape and colour and texture, but also its location in space-time or its anchor point in the circuit board diaspora of forms.

Facing the loss of one set of myths and facing the unknown of a new set of myths which aren’t easily gleened into focus, we aren’t simply in the business of new strategies but of entering into new premises within which we seek and know what life is.

Our dance with uncertainty is a Holy opportunity

In facing this journey of dissolution and re-creation, we have what may be punctuated as an opportunity, or perhaps better punctuated as a responsibility to navigate to the best of our current capacities. Or, maybe life will pull our realities limb from limb as we decide what to do with the experiences that we face. Ultimately, a more connected epistemology is being called for as we navigate the dissolution of these modern myths.

When I learned this word, “Epistemology,” I really had to slow it down. E-pssssst-mology. The study of how we know what we know isn’t a straightforward idea, requiring many secret routes around our conscious and unconscious rules and regulations that dictate our reality.

That which breaks us out of one reality to enter another rarely happens through intellectual means, but requires an embodied shift that will redefine the world we live in. Perhaps, this most often happens in the events we might consider traumatic, that which breaks our sense of the world and our self that we have to build anew. But that’s if we are lucky to have the resources and/ or support to recover from such an event. Many walk around with the various scars and injuries, wallowing in the loss of the world they once knew to be true, or assumed they would receive but never did.

And certainly, there are those moments that lift us out of the quagmire of a world blown apart, to a new height and capacity. Maybe it comes in a peak spiritual experience, something that breaks the ice of our reality and helps us to get a viewpoint from a higher vantage.

These moments aren’t defined by a new certainty, but a greater capacity to hold uncertainty. The stability we require transfers from our beliefs in “our truth” to a little more comfort in “not knowing,” at least not really. This capacity is built in connection with a holiness beyond us, and it becomes a cane we can use to walk.

Accessing connectedness with consistency helps us to build new paradigms not designed by our intellect but married in relationship with our anchoring in the unknown. As Rumi said, “When Faith turns to Betrayal, and Betrayal turns to trust, only then we begin to know Life.”

What is actually resourceful?

This concept of “dividing the minds” can put us into contact with a generative uncertainty, one where we loosen grip upon our rigid rules and regulations that punctuate our “way that it is,” enough for us to get some light coming through the cracks that draw us deeper.

When we are certain about something, we defend it, fight for it and over it. Our certainty builds religions, starts wars, and closes our minds to diversity. Our certainty leads us to condemn, judge, and suppress aspects of ourself and others to shadow.

So, what is resourceful in this time? I wonder whether it is what helps us build capacity for connection amidst the uncertainty. I wonder if it helps us to hold space for not-knowing more than knowing, for the mystery more than what is coherent, clear, and cogent.

Do we live in an unprecedented time? I’m not certain. But the cracks in the “modern myths” are difficult to deny, and there is light coming through.