Saturday January 7th 2017, 8:45
You can BUY tickets here or at the door. Tell ’em the Rev sent you and get a free download from our upcoming album, “Playland at the Beach”. An adventure in funktographic color with 25.1 Progressive Surround Vibes. A New Americana experience!!
You know, last blog I said I wasn’t going to go down the negative road. I wasn’t going to preach anymore about these horrible times and just focus on the good.
Fuck that shit now!!!
We have just elected a corporate fascist clone of Il Duce and it’s going to be rough!! We can weather the storm of bad governing-we do it all of the time. We can also weather the storm of partisan politics, we’ve done that as well. But America has never had a true ideologue like Trump in power before, and it is fucking dangerous.
Check it out.
I doesn’t matter if he’s proven wrong on something, it doesn’t matter if he lies and doesn’t care. If he spews hate rhetoric and divisive racist remarks, they have no effect negatively on him. What matters are that his followers-and I say followers because this is now a cult of personality-will do his bidding. They will follow him gladly to the hall of glory, gun in hand singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
He will take us to war with Islam and the whole rest of the non-Christian world. Don’t believe me…just look at who elected him. Looked at who backed him. The “Alt Right”, neo nazis, White people who believe they’ve been done wrong by a world that naturally is coloring. This is passions last dance for them and they are not going to give it up so easily.
Not today, Not tomorrow, but most definitely in his first term.
I realize I sound like an alarmist and my mother would say-listen to my dermatologist everyday will be just like the last. But republicans love war. Republicans love the war machine (and not the dude from Iron Man). It feeds the corporate brotherhood of military-industrial cabals that have suffered during the Obama administration.
Children who are not born yet will have more rights than women will. It will be open season for cops on African-Americans. Cats will sleep with dogs-But the LGBT community will be prevented from marriage and equal rights. Sharia law-or his version of it, will be the law of the land.
We will become everything we hate and we will do it with a smile, wink and a nod.
I said it here, today November 9th 2016.
Selah the rev
So I’m not the poster child for the mourning crowd. Never have been, never will be. I believe in the wheel. It carries us from life to life and from moment to moment. It allows us the ability to get through the tough times and reminds us all, that the good pass as well. The wheel turns whether we want it to or not. So my question is;
Do you enjoy spinning?
Come party with us at the Brick and Mortar this Saturday August 27th starting at 8 pm. It’s my way to say goodbye to those who have passed and hello to those yet to come. LordRifa will be welcoming some new members and new songs. We will be joined by our friends the High Card Drifters as well.
It will be a rocking night of NEW AMERICANA!
Selah
The rev
I was out surfing around the Farallon Islands the other day and I came across a beautiful women on sitting on surfboard, whiling a way her time. She had thick black hair that dropped to her shoulders with deep, deep brown eyes. She looked at me as if it was completely natural for her to be there in this time and place and asked:
“Would you like to know your future darlin?”
“Huh?” I responded in my normal doltish manner.
“Do you want me to divine your future silly? She replied.
“Do you do this often,” I ask?
“Do what, darlin?” She looked deeply into my eyes as if waiting for me to put two and two together-never a chance for that!
“Sit around an island, in the fog, in the ocean, waiting for schmucks like me to come around so you can tell them their future?”
“No”, she said. “I live here, you came to me!”
She was right of course. I had paddled out to this crazy ass rock for no particular reason other then an urge, so I thought, why not. Let’s give the oracle a whirl.
“Sure” I said, and she then scooped up a bit of water from the ocean and let it fall gently onto the surfboard. As the drops hit the board they became tarot cards that formed the Celtic Cross. Good trick, I thought!
As far as tarot goes, it went pretty much as expected. Past, present, future all laid out on the board before me, couched in ancient symbolism, to be interpreted by a person of extra special abilities, who had all of the knowledge and certainty of a person you would expect to do this. A woman-on a surfboard-at the crack of dawn-in the middle of the ocean. (My shrink will love this!)
This thing about the tarot though, is when all is said and done, it’s just a card game, a bit of chance and interpretation. Generalities and non-specifics abound. Everyone has money issues, love issues, health issues in one form or another, so it’s a safe bet that if you run with one of those, you will look like a bit prohetic.
But I wanted to like the oracle. Hell, she just grabbed a bit of water and turned them into cards for me. (Not an easy thing to do). So I wanted the oracle to be right. Not because it foretold of great things -cause it didn’t-but because I wanted to touch that part of reality again. It had been a long while since I let anyone go there and I wanted to believe.
I remembered the spirit wars of the 80’s. Ascended master battling ascended master for dominance of the arena. (Very much like the Kung fu movies of the time). It was bloody! I had my astrological charts done, Tarot, palm, numbers, tea leaves and entrails read (The last one hurt!). Psychics healed me, warned me, told me my future, told my of my death, you name it and much to my dismay, none of it came true.
So I just watched and waited to see would win. I stayed out of the battle zones and took no sides other than my position of non-interference. I guess I was Switzerland- I even had the chocolate hook up!
After quite a while and an immense loss of spiritual blood by the community, this master, this Shyster, this con artist won. He/she then proceeded to take this flock up to some remote town in Washington State and begin the indoctrination that is still going on today. Milking the poor bastards for all they have financially, as well as spiritually. He /she used all the great tools of the trade, fear of big cities, fear of government, fear of disease, fear of anyone who wasn’t part of the “tribe”. Sound familiar?
All religions, every god damn one of them uses these tools to get you to join, cause they work! These things are close enough to the truth to almost stand up in the light. But they never really do, because a thousand generalities do not add up to a single truth.
So I never went, partly because running has never been part of my make up. But mostly, it was because I didn’t believe, even though I really, really wanted to. I read all the books, took all the classes, met with all of these shit heads in person, but could never turn the corner and suspend my belief. I had an easier time believing in “knight Rider” than this. It’s the same reason no religion would have me. I do not believe in something that I cannot feel.
There I said it.
My spiritual beliefs are based on my intuitive reactions to a situation and I trust my intuition more then anything else on this plane. (Not that I always interpret them correctly).
So based on this, my search for god is one huge sham right?
Wrong.
We are a society who relies on the messenger more then the message. The messenger makes us feel the way we want to feel-not the message. The message just becomes a bunch of buzzwords that we can regurgitate for conversational use.
But the messenger gives us identity- a face we can think of when looking into the recesses of our hearts for our lives troubles. But the message is the thing that changes our lives.
It was during this era that I had my first encounter with my past lives and that changed me completely and forever. To be honest, I was not the tea totaling kind of guy I am now (Although I do like my cocktails). So a good majority of my time was spent in a drug induced fog. But I shared a visceral experience with another person that was impossible to debunk. A shared memory, where we both filled in the blanks of an image we saw independently.
Damn, if I didn’t try to debunk it. With all of my heart I tried to rip that shit to shreds, give reason or rhyme why we both remembered that. But the physical manifestations of that image changed how this person slept and what they feared. After this revelation, they no longer suffered from ill sleeping and could now sleep in all positions. (Where before sleeping on her back was impossible) and the errant pain of her abdomen ceased to exist.
For me, the flood-gates opened. I not only remembered that moment, but all of the moments that I had forgotten from my thousands of years of walking this amazing planet and I found my sense of god in it.
So when the exodus for Washington came, I no longer needed to believe nor cared to.
My eyes were opened to the flow of life. The cycles of birth death birth, pain joy pain so on and so forth. My eyes were open to the only metaphor that I can give about this:
We all live in the ocean of eternity. We are more then this manifestation currently, but cannot or at least have a hard time fathoming it. The responses of the heavens to our pleas are meaningless because the heavens are the waters of the ocean and they seem to do what they want.
So when my oracle reached into the ocean to pull out the cards I knew it was worth a listen. Maybe the oracle is right and maybe the oracle is wrong. All we can do is hang on to our surfboards and ride the waves as best as we can.
Selah
the rev
In the years that have past, I have seen many things that gave me cause to guess if I was in a dream state or in reality. They blur and blend over time. What seemed to be a slight remark became an all out war and what was a glorious evening was just a dream.
My nightmares have become real and the dead seem to talk to me. My daydreams have become my nightmares and sleep, well that has become a luxury. After a few thousand years what can you expect? Too many friends have died, too many wars have failed, and too many hearts have broken under the crushing blow of a single word.
What are you gonna do?
The point of this somber bit of discourse is some of my actions of the recent past. As you may or may not have figured out by now, I believe in activism. I believe in getting off of one’s ass and fixing it. The action does not have to be massive, but just large enough to move a grain of sand or a bed…
I have spent the last few weeks helping over at A Woman’s Place homeless shelters. My friends over at Potrero Post are doing a documentary on it and I wanted to lend a hand.
Here are women from all walks of life who come together in this time because of a single unifying experience. They are homeless and out of options. Their dreams are no longer real and their worst nightmares have become their life. This I understand.
But beyond that, it was not what I expected. It was a much deeper, sadder and richer experience than I could have imagined, with a myriad of grey, as it’s main emotional color. Maybe I am a man who could only up till this point believe that it was a black and white issue. But the overriding emotion of my time there was;
Shame.
How could I have let this happen? Did I not see this coming about over the course of my long stay here on this earth?
Shame, that I wasn’t doing enough for them?
Shame, that I did not know enough about them?
Shame, that I felt relived not to be one of them, the homeless, the forgotten, the abused?
So I lifted and carried, listened and cried and tried my best to understand their stories, so I could tell their story to others. To lift my own shame from out of he shadows where it stood hiding all this time.
To that end, on June 7th at the Cova Hotel in San Francisco there is a benefit for A Woman’s Place and I urge you all to come. Learn more about the plight of these women in San Francisco and all over the country. They could be your mothers, sisters, friends and wives. But don’t just come to visit; come to take part in the solution.
Give of yourself!
Give money, their funding gets cut every year as a matter of course. Women seem not to matter in our society except as mothers and concubines.
Give time, they need volunteers to do everything from help with clients, fixing, painting and driving.
Give things, items like blankets, shades, TV’s, Clothes anything that you can, will make a difference in their lives.
Give love, be part of the answer and separate fantasy from reality.
Selah
Congregation of WE by The Reverend LordRifa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The Reverend LordRifa 