“Great Ones we are grateful” was an expression my younger brother Teddy used to shout to the sky above Venice Beach in California during early mornings and late evenings many decades ago, at a time when his intuition insisted that we were not alone in the universe, and that we had benign mentors watching over us.

Times seemed bad to Teddy back then, back in the seventies and early eighties of the last century during another millennium when the Age of Aquarius was purportedly about to dawn. Of course, now, those times seem like a golden age, at least in comparison to the present. And now, even to Teddy, the Great Ones, if they exist or ever existed, seem as distant from us, and as disinterested in us, as do our own divinities, leaving us abandoned to our own devices, led through illusions and delusions and deceit by the very worst among us.

So while my brother’s optimism and hope were beautiful in their way, they were more than anything a symptom of the reality that we’d lost our way and that we seemed congenitally incapable of finding our way back.

Although back towards what, given our history as a species, seems a depressing thought.

And our path forward, unfortunately, now seems even worse.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.