The Paradox of ‘Tribe’
HERE’S A SCREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS RAMBLE from when I awoke in the night… Where to find my tribe? I looked here. I looked there. I looked every where. Does it exist? Folks keep saying, “Find your tribe!” I kept thinking it will be in this schtick or that. But it wasn’t. So many clubs to feel secure in (so they think). But I don’t belong. Not to any tribe on earth. Let me expand on this…
There is the whole rightist “Make-Amerika-Something-it-Never-Was”, Trump QAnon, trust-the-plan, the-swamp-is-being-cleaned, all-the-baddies-are-about-to-be-arrested delusory schtick. But I have no home in cloud-cuckoo land or Wishful Thinking Inc. (Where did so many of my Fakebook friends’ minds go? Hint: I never accept invitations to go ‘out to lunch’). I don’t juggle and have dreadlocks, a caravan or a dog-on-a-string and a toke-in-my-mitt, so that clan is out too. I don’t vote (especially not for controlled opposition parties!) and I ain’t ‘woke’ (least not in their sense! 😉), and I don’t need an external ‘safe space’, so I can’t be a leftie-liberal. Boo-hoo NOT. I don’t believe presidents and prime ministers have any power whatsoever, while almost the whole world (having been successfully gaslighted) clamours for one. The tribe of political salvation. 🙄 I don’t do left/right, red/blue, conservative/liberal. Do you? Really? The darkness grooming this world wants you to take a side so it can laugh at your gullible tribalism and rule over your mind. Then again, I don’t wanna be a ‘coach’ conning people into thinking that personal wealth, health, and abundance are signs of spiritual blessing (the height [or depth] of delusion). I’ve always eschewed fame and fortune. I can’t be considered “respectable” by ‘normal’ society (thank God!). I have no personal ambitions (other than to be a Knight and a metaphoric Musketeer). I cannot find an iota of comfort in ignorance or stupefaction. I will never wear a suit and tie (least of all at a funeral!). I find people in general want me to conform to their idea of who or what I should be so I will be in their tribe. But I cannot be. Even most families are little cults to be escaped from. Someone in platform heels with manufactured hair comes to my door and says, “Do ya wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang?” I politely close it in his face. I love everyone really; but I do not, cannot, belong. I have no tribe. Not even my own. I am a vagrant on the hinterland of time. Only with beauty, love, truth and peace can I rhyme. I cannot join clubs, societies, groups, or cabals. I cannot be what some other gink wants me to be because prison is not where I belong. I belong in the mountains, forests, and seas, surrounded by birds and for lost crowns I grieve.
I searched for my tribe across this earth, but I found it not.
Then it hit me. I realised that it cannot be found in the physical. My tribe does not, cannot, exist in any physically gathered group. My tribe could only exist outside time and geographical space. My tribe is all those in this and any cosmos who do not, will not, cannot, conform to silly human norms. My tribe sees right through the deceptive bullshit going down on this earth but does not subscribe to trigger-happy paranoid conspiracy madness. My tribe excels in ‘keeping its counsel’ in the midst of the mayhem. My tribe is a wise panoply of laid-back unlazy layabouts biding their time in this theatre of dreams, who know that all is so much more than it seems, and who don’t pin their hopes on a bunch of moonbeams. My tribe is filled with poetry and music. My tribe is made up of prophets (of doom to darkness) and priests (ministering Lightness and Christlikeness). My tribe is a counterculture of misfits and metaphysical vagabonds who belong in an as-yet unattainable paradise, yet who still even now have an anticipatory inner smile and a ruthsome sense of justice. My tribe is an ekklesia of mavericks and outsiders who have no home in 3-D banality. My tribe has no tribalistic traditions whatsoever. No outfit or uniform. No costume. No patronizing ethnic quaintness. My tribe lies so far outside culture of any kind that it cannot exist on this earth. National, familial, cultural, or community identity are true tribe wreckers, giving only the illusion of tribe. For an earthly tribe runs counter to the integrity and authenticity of the transcendent individual. The transcendence of consciousness cannot lie in absorption into a physical tribe but only by melding into an extrasensory vibe. If you get what I am grasping at here, and you are nodding joyly within at the prospect of a tribe which exists beyond the absurd limitations of skin, then you are my tribe!
But it goes even deeper than that… and this is the great paradox of ‘tribe’. Wanting a tribe = a desire to belong. Having the desire to belong can never be wholly realised in the flesh. For that desire is merely an ember from the fire of our lost wholeness. Our real tribe is supernatural, angeloid, mysteriously beyond our remembrance. Thus, if we seek the tribe which is not of this world, then it will find us, and it will kill us. For we will be ‘taken’ by it. Wonderfully…
© Alan Morrison, 2021
The Naked Troubadour 