Vegetarians Beware

Some not-so-good news about soy products, staples of a vegetarian diet, in terms of both health and environmental concerns.

The Dark Side of Soy:
Is America's favorite health food making us sick?

Soy, Biofuels and Environmental Disaster in Paraguay:
The world’s insatiable hunger for soy products, including biofuels and cattle feed, is creating an environmental and social disaster in South America.

you know that what you eat, you are
but what is sweet now turns so sour

~~~~

Pay Attention to the Poet

The Sacred Balance, Part V

Giving voice to Earth's voice has been a specific human task since the beginning, according to the stories we tell ourselves, the songs we sing, our rituals and our poetry. Repetition, rhythm, rhyme, patterns of gesture, movement and language: these are the ways we speak out and give coherence to experience, assert our connection with everything else. These repetitive, echoing forms of speech and movement shape meaning out of randomness, mimic and embody the cyclic, interdependent processes that create and maintain life on Earth--the web we are part of. In place of the linear time of mortality, dance and poetry beat out a circular measure, keep time with the world.

Naming a thing creates an identity; names establish values and functions, give something life, a separate existence. We are our names in ways we cannot describe; we hear ourselves called across a noisy room, we feel as though the very letters are somehow ours. Language weaves worlds of being and meaning; but this is a double-edged sword. Calling a forest "timber", fish "resources", the wilderness "raw material" licenses the treatment of them accordingly. The propaganda of destructive forest practices informs us that "the clearcut is a temporary meadow". Definition identifies, specifies and limits a thing, describes what it is and what it is not: it is the tool of our great classifying brain.

Poetry, in contrast, is the tool of synthesis, of narrative. It struggles with boundaries in an effort to mean more, include more, to find the universal in the particular. It is the dance of words, creating more-than-meaning, reattaching the name, the thing, to everything around it.

Since poetry began, poets and songwriters have been fighting the mind/body dichotomy, singing their sense of the world, of the body and spirit moving together through the world eternally. Poetry takes the fractured, mortal, longing human creature and reshapes it into be-longing. Crafted words attempt to resolve the contradictions of consciousness, catching speech (as insubstantial as air, as transitory as breath) as it comes and goes, tying it into the eternal.

Maybe the poet is gay
But he'll be heard anyway
Maybe the poet is drugged
But he won't stay under the rug
Maybe the voice of the spirit
In which case you'd better hear it
Maybe he's a woman
Who can touch you where you're human

Male, female, slave or free
Peaceful or disorderly
Maybe you and he will not agree
But you need him to show you new ways to see
Don't let the system fool you
All it wants to do is rule you
Pay attention to the poet
You need him and you know it

Put him up against the wall
Shoot him up with pentothal
Shoot him up with lead
You won't call back what's been said
You can put him in the ground
But one day you'll look around
There'll be a face you don't know
Voicing thoughts you've heard before

Pay attention to the poet
You need him and you know it

- Bruce Cockburn, January 1982

~~~~

The Ghost in the Machine

Alienation of the Spirit
D.Suzuki, The Sacred Balance

The movement away from the natural world was made possible by a quite remarkable train of thought--the ideas that shaped our civilization. Today we take those ideas so much for granted that we see them not as ideas (which can be rethought, revised, discarded) but as reality. Many thinkers trace the origin of our particular and violent fall from grace, our exile from the Garden, back to Plato and Aristotle, who began a powerful process of separating the world-as-abstract-principle from the world-as-experience - dividing mind, that is, from body and human beings from the world they inhabit. In the process they laid the groundwork for experimental science.

Through Galileo, who identified the language of nature as mathematics (an abstract language invented by humans), and Descartes, who learned to speak that language powerfully, the modern world emerges. Descartes' famous definition of existence ("I think, therefore I am") completes a new myth about our relationship to the world: human beings are the things that think (the only things, and that is all they are) and the rest of the world is made up of things that can be measured or thought about. Subject or object, mind or body, matter or spirit, this is the dual world we have inhabited ever since - where the brain's ability to distinguish and classify has ruled the roost. From this duality came the ideas we live by, what William Blake called "mind-forg'd manacles", the mental abstractions that seem too obvious to question, that construct and confine our vision of reality.

Mind within body--the ghost in the machine--that is what our culture teaches us we are, what we accept as obvious, normal and real.

Eventually the body must weaken and die - the machine wears out. When it does, the ghost must disappear. These are the consequences not of mortality but of the way we think about it. Divided from each other, we try to make contact beyond our own limited selves, struggle to construct and maintain a community in a world designed around the individual, search for lasting connection. Separated from the natural world, we are lonely, destructive and guilty - but our solutions to environmental destruction are crafted within the frame of mind that created the division and isolation. "Saving nature" because it makes economic sense, because the natural world may contain drugs to heal human ills or even because doing so is "natural justice" - these are all arguments from the Cartesian world, where mind acts on the world, observing, analyzing, quantifying. Above all, they are arguments, and in every argument there is a winner and a loser.

O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- W. B. Yeats

~~~~

Returning to the Garden

More from D.Suzuki's, The Sacred Balance

Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They ... have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies; their senses, their dreams.
- Lame Deer

All human stories work to weave meaning and order out of disjunction and confusion, but the story told by the Western world specifically excludes human experience as a source of truth. We assert an "objective reality" made of abstract universal principles, which is more correct, more accurate than the messy sensory world we experience daily. But that sensory world is the one we are part of, which penetrates us, and which we create and re-create continually. Just a moment's thought reveals how "subjective" the world really is.

Walk your garden in mid-summer and watch how it moves and changes around you. Each plant has a history known to you--where it came from, who brought it to the garden, where else it has grown, how it has thrived. Each plant is dense with relationships made and sustained by your consciousness, like a field of meaning extending through time and space. Flower beds grow other meanings as well: some speak directly to you--of success, perhaps, or reproach for weeding or pruning still undone--others hint at possibilities, at relationships with other parts of the garden world. Do the colors changing on that leaf describe the chemistry of the soil, or do they signal the arrival of another organism--a mildew, perhaps, or a fungus? Ants always crawl on the peony's fat buds; how do they affect the flower? A multitude of living beings, including the gardener, create and maintain that field of meaning--butterflies, birds, insects, soil organisms moving and acting in their own sphere, intersecting with each other, intent, purposive, beautiful.

Is this "objective reality"? Of course not. Is it reality? Of course.

Attending to our experience, putting spirit back into the fingertips, allows us to redefine consciousness--instead of being trapped inside the mind it becomes a reach, a region of care, the conversation we have with the garden around us. "The conversation of mankind", according to ecologist Joseph Meeker, "is an open and continuing dialogue that connects our bodies and minds intimately with the processes of nature that permeate all life forms." Like any other dialogue, it requires attention. He believes:

Learning to converse well with the world can begin by listening carefully to the messages sent ceaselessly by our bodies and by the other forms of life that share this planet. The best conversations are still those that play variations on that great and ancient theme:

"I'm here; Where are You?"

look, upon my garden gate's
a snail, that's what it is
- Donovan

~~~~

Sex, God & Rock'n'Roll

Stuart Davis Show, Episode 1, featuring Genpo Roshi

This guy is so fun - here's a pageful of YouTube videos (might wanna pre-screen before showing Grandma or Grandkids - up to you)

Davis - "Count me as a cranker in the gerbil wheel of Dharma"

bring it

~~~~

Youth Revisited

While sifting through old photo albums to find the picture in the previous post, I came across these and wondered, who is that pretty young woman? I've seen her somewhere before...

OMG - that's ME!~

~ I can still sit like that...

Me and the wusband ~

~ Skinny legs and all ~

My hair is shorter now, that's why I look so different.

mirror, mirror, on the wall

who is the fairest of them all?

~~~~

Dawson Street Revisited

A little stroll down memory lane...

My friends in Dartmouth used to tease me that every time I went to Gampo Abbey I brought home a new boyfriend, and that was true. The first time I went there in 1991 I met Stephen Hill. He was the cook, and we hit it off quickly and intensely on an idyllic day-long hike to Pollett's Cove.

Stephen called himself a writer. He wrote prose and poetry. Now understand, I am no literary critic, but it was obvious to me that when Stephen was writing for himself, like in his journal or during some kind of spontaneous, often alcohol-induced, visionary flood of creativity, his writing was, like him, real, intense, raw, edgy and more than slightly insane. But when he was writing to impress someone else, he would try to write in some "style", and it came across stiff and dead and oh so pretentious.

In any event, Stephen came to stay with me for a while. At the time I was living in a small but charming apartment in the funky north end of Dartmouth, on Dawson Street, near the bridge, not what proper folk would consider a nice neighbourhood. But I knew what my neighbours looked like, and they at least knew my dog's name if they couldn't remember mine. It was a neighbourhood where people walked, probably cause not everybody could afford cars, and people sat on their front steps so we saw each other and talked to each other. I lived there for 12 years. So Stephen came to live with me there. We spent many many nights in the company of Jack Daniels or Wild Turkey or some other consciousness-altering substance, smoking cigarettes, writing poetry together, cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them on colored paper, writing poems around them and adding scraps of this and that, creating this strange and disturbing but somehow beautiful collection of artwork that eventually all but filled the kitchen walls and it was all very wonderful and bizarre.

S. wrote, "...and Marilyn missed work, I felt like a bum, cause we stayed up so late and made pictures and poems all night that were on the wall for our waking-up eyes next morning, and by that evening and the tall drinks the pictures came easy on our minds - and more nights reading poems to one another, making photographs and telling the stories, dreaming privately together into human connections all around the city right out the door, right from her kitchen table with candle where it was warm and private, dreaming over the city, privately and openly..."

We would wander around the neighbourhood at night, talking to the winos and wierdos we met on the street, drinking under the bridge and down by the train tracks, hanging out with the 4 am folk at Tim Horton's (a whole other world) - three months of an alternate universe. I finally had to ask him to leave because my life was becoming a Bukowski movie and that's not really where I wanted it to go, and I desperately needed some sleep and to have at least one day without a headache/hangover.

In case you're not familiar with Charles Bukowski, he was a writer/poet. Remember the movie "Barfly" - that was a Bukowski movie, biographical. Mickey Rourke played the male lead and Faye Dunaway the female lead, and Bukowski himself made a cameo appearance. One scene I remember, was when the two meet in a bar and Jane (Dunaway) asks Henry (Rourke), "What do you do?", and he replies, "I drink". A classic line or what? Well, she liked it anyway.

Here's a Bukowski poem from a book I have of his poetry (Mockingbird, Wish Me Luck):

reality

my little famous bleeding elbows
my knotty knees (especially) and
even my balls
hairy and wasted.
these blue evenings of walking past buildings
where Jews pray beautifully about seasons I
know nothing of
and would leave me alone
with the roaches and ants climbing my dying body
in some place
too real to touch

So on Dawson Street, back in 1991, there was a picture on my dresser, an old black and white of me and my dad. My dad had died in 1974 at the age of 58. Stephen had obviously never met my dad, but something about that picture inspired him to write this poem:

on the dresser, under the mirror
there you stand

shy, somewhere between

14 and 16 years of age

that embarrassing age

eyes shy, downcast

and against side of your father

leaning into his love, because

black and white photographs never lie

he was a good man in the old sense

he had handsome simple features

and went about his business in the world

a personal face that understands

without close words

in a close world

and he's lonely as such men are

so personal

but by the same flip as distant

because there's really nothing worth sharing

besides a smile

and the arm around his daughter

is perhaps for him the best part...

fine men come and go into the grave

that last embrace

and there's nothing you can say
about the sadness they leave behind

Have you ever had someone just casually say something, maybe not even directly to you, but whatever it was just stays in your mind and pops up sometimes, like the words of a favorite song that have some special meaning for you? I have known, and still do, a few people who seem to have the knack of quietly saying stuff that flips my mind/heart/life around, all of them men, and I don't think they know they're doing it.

In any event, what made me think of all of the above was that something Stephen said a long time ago popped into my head today. As I said, he was/is an aspiring writer, and what he said was, "We should treat people as if they already are who they want to be."

Could we do that, I wonder? Maybe if we could just allow that thought to be in our heart/mind, that would be a really good start. And you know, maybe we could even treat ourselves that way.

Just a thought.

~~~~

The Law of Love

from D.Suzuki's The Sacred Balance:

It is not economics that creates community but love, compassion and cooperation. These qualities exist in individuals and are expressed between people. And they cannot be fully expressed in isolation, without context, cut off from their place in time and space, their source in the natural world.

Economies were once created to serve people and their communities. Today, economic rationalists contend that people must sacrifice and give up social services for the economy.

The law of love will work, just as the law of gravitation will work, whether we accept it or not ... a man who applies the law of love with scientific precision can work great wonders ... The men who discovered for us the law of love were greater scientists than any of our modern scientists ... The more I work at this law, the more I feel the delight in life, the delight in the scheme of this universe. It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.
- Mahatma Gandhi, quoted in P.Crean and P.Kohn, eds., Peace, A Dream Unfolding.

The evolutionary context of human history makes it plausible that the human genome--the DNA blueprint that makes us what we are---has over time acquired a genetically programmed need to be in the company of other species. Edward O. Wilson has coined the term 'biophilia' (based on the Greek words for 'life' and 'love') for this need. He defines biophilia as "the innate tendency to focus on life and life-like processes." It leads to an "emotional affiliation of human beings to other living things ... Multiple strands of emotional response are woven into symbols composing a large part of culture."

Elders, poets and philosophers in all cultures, including our own, have expressed a similar sense of brotherhood or sisterhood, of mutual compassion and common interest with the rest of the living world--a relationship that can only be described as love. Its source is 'fellow-feeling': the knowledge that we are, like all other forms of life, children of the Earth, members of the same family. It is not an accident, Wilson says, that more people visit zoos than attend all major sports events combined.

The truth is that we have never conquered the world, never understood it; we only think we have control. We do not even know why we respond in a certain way to other organisms and need them in diverse ways so deeply.
- Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia

and the time will come when you see we're all one
and life flows on within you and without you

~~~~

The Great Unlearning

Alzheimer's Disease
What remains after memory is gone?

Alan Dienstag is a New York-based psychologist. He was an early practitioner to integrate support groups into his work with Alzheimer's patients. He also created a writing group for early Alzheimer's patients, together with the novelist Don DeLillo, that met for three years.

Here are a few stories from his article/interview with Speaking of Faith about Alzheimer's Disease, in particular about his support and writing groups:
~~~~

I was working with a woman who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She was in the group for a long time, and then it became impossible for her to participate. The conversation was moving too fast. She didn't have the language. She couldn't string together more than a sentence or two, and it just wasn't working. And so she had to leave the group. Her husband, who was extraordinarily devoted to her, really wanted her to maintain her connection with me. It was very helpful that I had known her before. And she would bring photo albums in. She would do a little tchotchke tour of my office and when it wasn't really possible to talk about things, she would walk around and we would look at objects. She was very taken by the birds outside the window. That was the kind of time we spent together. And then even that became difficult. She started to retreat into almost a mask-like blankness. It was harder and harder to access her.

And around that time I was going on vacation, and she loved the beach and I loved the beach and this was something that we used to connect about. And as I was leaving I said, "Ann, I'm going to the beach. I'm going to be away for a while." And she smiled and her face lit up. I said, "What do you love about the beach?" She kind of drifted away, as she did, and she got very quiet. And again I waited and I thought, well, she can't really answer that question. And she turned to me and she said, "There's some kind of music that lives there."

That was just a wonderful answer. And not a summer has gone by that I haven't thought of that at some moment at some beach. So to me that's like a prayer. Where does it come from? You know, in this A.J. Heschel sense of prayer, this sense of wonder, this sense of place between knowing and not knowing and the mystery of things. So that's in there too. And you never know when it's going to come out.
~~~~

There is body memory that I think we're learning more about in the 21st century even than we knew a couple of years ago. How eye contact and touch and just presence and indulging simple pleasures. There was one woman who I could wheel her outside to sit in the flowers, and she would be so sad and withdrawn when I arrived, sitting in that common room. And she would come to life. I could just imagine what stories were behind that. And I think that was also about body memory. I'm imagining this woman who wrote about picking the fig from a tree in Athens, if you could somehow take her to that place in Athens, even long after she could write those sentences, she would feel that story. I think she did. I think she did feel that story when she wrote that. And I think she felt that story when she shared it with us. She was delighted to share that with us. It's still with us. She's gone; she's been gone for a while and here we are, talking about her lover and that fig tree.
~~~~

There were about 20 people in the room and we were going around the circle and people with early Alzheimer's were talking about their lives and what they do to give their lives meaning, find stimulating things to do and so on. This man started talking about his experience as somebody with early Alzheimer's, and he was painting a very benign picture of it all. He said, "Well, you know, it's difficult not to be able to remember, but I get up and I can do this and I can do that." Basically he was just saying he's fine, he's OK. And over his shoulder, sitting behind him, was his wife. And she was crying. She was crying. And I knew then how much he'd lost, how much she had lost.

But there he was. He wasn't uncomfortable. He really wasn't. And so I think we project our feelings onto them, and we assume that they are suffering some terrible thing, but in fact that's not necessarily their experience of it.
~~~~

I was working with a woman whose husband was in a nursing home. And there's that period of time when people with Alzheimer's begin to not recognize their family members, and it's wrenching and it's painful and it's awful. It's just awful. And he was in that stage, and so it would happen every so often. The first time it happened, she came to me in kind of a panic and she was distraught and said that she didn't want to live anymore if he wasn't going to recognize her. What started to happen was that she would go and see him, and the first thing she would say is, "Do you remember who I am?" And I was trying to convince her and trying to help her to kind of back off of that.

I was suggesting to her that there are other ways that she could see that he recognizes her. And there are, in fact. Even when someone can't answer that question, you can see on their face, you can see in their body language. There are lots of ways that you can tell. But he got to a certain point where he just couldn't answer the question. And one day, she went in and she asked him, and he looked at her and he said, "I don't know who you are, but I love you." And I thought, oh, he thought of the right answer.
~~~~

When you've seen the unraveling of this consciousness that we have — and that is definitely a word that I would use — when you've seen the unraveling from beginning to end, you can't help but recognize what a miracle it is, this mind that we have. This conversation that you and I are having, the fact that I'll leave here and just put myself out there into the world and think about a hundred other things. So I have come away, certainly, with a renewed appreciation of that. And I guess that does sound a little bit like the near-death experience and now I really appreciate life, but on the other side of the coin, I realize how ungrateful we are. We don't notice it, really.

I think we tend not to notice it unless it doesn't work. And then we get all bent out of shape, "Oh, I can't remember this. I can't remember that." But for moment to moment, it's a miracle. It's really a miracle that all of this works and that it works in the way that it does and that it has the richness that it does, that it takes in so much and that our internal lives and the lives that we can build as a result of what's inside are so rich. So I absolutely have been touched in that way.
~~~~

long ago, it must be
I have a photograph
preserve your memories
they're all that's left you

~~~~

The Promethean Bargain

The myth of Prometheus explores the ambiguities of fire power.
from The Sacred Balance by
David Suzuki & Amanda McConnell

Zeus had reserved the divine fire for the gods alone, but a cunning trickster in the Greek pantheon, Prometheus, stole it from the gods and brought it to men (there were apparently no women in those cold, suffering times). Later myths said that he had actually created humans with that gift.

Such audacity could not go unpunished. Prometheus was chained to a mountainside where daily an eagle tore out his immortal liver. But the human race suffered even more severely. Zeus could not remove the gift of fire, but he could craft another double-edged present. He created Pandora, the first woman, whose name means "all gifts", and sent her down to Earth carrying a sealed jar. Like fire, she was enchantingly beautiful, but she was also uncontrollably curious, unpredictable and deceptive. Inevitablty she opened her vase; out swarmed Zeus's gifts--a horde of miseries to plague all humans for all time--disease, despair, rage, envy and old age were just a few of them.

This is the Ancient Greek equivalent of the story of the Garden of Eden: human beings reached out recklessly, daringly for knowledge and power and got more than they bargained for. And if we think of fire as the first true technology with which we began to change Earth, we can see the force of the story for our time.

we are stardust, we are golden
and we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden

~~~~

Economic Crisis, Morality and Meaning

Trusting Our Deeper Knowing:
On Cataclysms, Contemplation and Circles of Trust

"Who doesn't know that an economic system that encourages us to live beyond our means and refuses to regulate greed is one in which our avarice will come back to bite us? Who doesn't know that at every level of life, from personal to global to cosmic, what goes around comes around?"

"...activism ungrounded in contemplation can lead to ego-induced blindness, shutting down those soul-deep sources of knowing that open us to larger truth."

What do the French Revolution, roosting chickens and Thomas Merton have in common? Parker Palmer of Speaking of Faith reports on a three-day Circle of Trust retreat held in October of 2008, just one day after the Dow Jones had fallen nearly 40 percent below its record high, set only a year earlier.

Faith -- faith is an island in the setting sun
but proof -- proof is the bottom line for everyone.
- Paul Simon

~~~~

Is Everyone Creative?

TED* talk by Sir Ken Robinson

In this video, Robinson argues passionately that as children we are all naturally creative, yet by the time we reach adulthood our creativity has been 'educated out of us' by the barriers of school, society and corporate business.

"We have to see our creative capacities for the richness they are and see our children for the hope that they are."

The comments at the end of the article are lively and diverse, and the article also presents an alternative viewpoint by Gordon Torr (Managing Creative People). Though I admit to being pretty firmly in Sir Ken's camp, Torr does score some points by introducing variables like motivation and personality into the mix.

*TED = Technology, Entertainment, Design - website is called TED - Ideas Worth Spreading, and they're not kidding. Where would you like to go today?

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, each of us has one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange ideas, then each of us has two ideas. - George Bernard Shaw

~~~~

Edgar Mueller - Urban Art

A great crevasse.

Hard work...together with up to five assistants, Mueller painted all day long from sunrise to sunset. The picture appeared on the East Pier in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, as part of the town's Festival of World Cultures.

Mueller spent five days creating this 250-square meter image of the crevasse which, viewed from a certain angle, appears to be in 3D. He then convinced passers-by to complete the illusion by pretending the gaping hole was real.

"I wanted to play with positives and negatives to encourage people to think twice about everything they see", he said. "It was a very scary scene, but when people saw it they had great fun playing on it and pretending to fall into the earth. I like to think that later, when they returned home, they might reflect more on what a frightening scenario it was and say, 'Wow, that was actually pretty scary'."

Wow indeed

~~~~

The Reading of the Will

From Deep Ecology: The Ecological Self on Joanna Macy's site
an excerpt from the section on Deep Time:

...our true regard for beings of the future is portrayed in a recent cartoon by Tom Toles of the Buffalo News. To a group sitting before him expectantly, a lawyer is reading a will. It says:

Dear Kids,

We, the generation in power since WWII, seem to have used up pretty much everything ourselves. We kind of drained all the resources out of our manufacturing industries, so there’s not much left there. The beautiful old buildings that were built to last for centuries, we tore down and replaced with characterless but inexpensive structures, and you can have them. Except everything we built has a lifespan about the same as ours so, like the interstate highway system we built, they’re all falling apart now and you’ll have to deal with that. We used up as much of our natural resources as we could, without providing for renewable ones, so you’re probably only good until about a week from Thursday. We did build a generous Social Security and pension system, but that was just for us. In fact, the only really durable thing we built was toxic dumps. You can have those. So think of your inheritance as a challenge. The challenge of starting from scratch. You can begin as soon as – oh, one last thing – as soon as you pay off the two trillion dollar debt we left you.

What is staggering about this cartoon, to the point of being funny, is not any exaggeration, for there is none, but the sheer enormity of the reality it portrays and our apparent insouciance in the face of it. This state of affairs can be approached, of course, from a moralistic perspective, in terms of the selfishness of our generation. But I find it more helpful to understand it in terms of our experience of time, for it reveals a blindness, a pathetically shrunken sense of time, that amounts to a pathological denial of the reality and ongoingness of time.

time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin
into the future

~~~~

The Great Turning

the shift to a life-sustaining civilization

Eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, Ph.D., is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with four decades of activism. She has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application known as The Work that Reconnects.

This website offers a veritable feast of information on what is needed to heal and nurture our earth, the work that is already under way, and personal guidelines to help us take part in this revolution. Joanna also explores Deep Ecology, Engaged Buddhism, Living Systems and Nuclear Guardianship. There are abundant links to resources, organizations and groups who are moving forward in various areas towards the goal of a sane and sustainable future.

This video of an interview Joanna did for the Pachamama Alliance is absolutely riveting.

This is definitely a site to spend some time with...

you tell me it's the institution
well, you know
you'd better free your mind instead

~~~~

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Civilization: A Blessing or a Curse?

This shortish video features entertainer Stuart Davis in a dramatic philosophical face-off with... well, himself. In a schizophrenic scene situated in an idyllic Colorado mountain meadow, 'Techno-Progressive Stuart' dukes it out with 'Eco-Spiritual Stuart' over the ultimate value of human civilization.

no time for losers
cause we are the Champions
of the World
- Queen

~~~~

Family Photos

Just so this is a proper blog, here are some pictures of my kids...

This is Dechen Nyima, beautiful boy toy
Dechen Nyima translates as "glorious sun"

Da boy in his favorite tree

here's Tashi Dawa, prettiest girl kitty EVER
Tashi Dawa means "auspicious moon"

Hey Mom, you gonna let me in or what?

~~~~

Why Do I Blog?

I created RoadKill and published my first post on March 15/09.

Some say they blog to be heard - for me it’s more about learning to express myself, having a space where I can do that. You may never know if anyone at all is reading your blog - but the offering for me is the important part. And miraculously, the more I do this, the more I step forward through whatever fear or hesitation may arise, the more I feel I have to offer. There is no benefit to keeping your insights (or your kindness, or your humor, or your love) to yourself. The world needs all the wisdom that is out there - mine and yours. Don’t think that you have nothing to contribute - everyone has a gift that they can share.

Blogging helps me to clarify what it is that I care about, what attracts me and how I might move towards that. It expands my awareness and my consciousness. Not every item I find (or every book I read, or every thought in my mind) gets to the blog, but the process encourages me to think beyond my own interest or enjoyment to “would that benefit someone else?” My circle of compassion grows.

Most of my posts so far are links to articles or websites. One of my blogging goals will be to find and cultivate my own voice, putting things in my own words. But passing others’ wisdom along is a good start - it too is a way of expressing what I care about, what moves or inspires me, what makes me laugh - maybe someone else cares about that too but feels they are the only one or doesn’t know how to take that caring forward. Every bit of insight, warmth, humor, kindness, etc., that you put out into the world is that much more goodness in the world, and that is what we all need to do, each in our own way.

And you know what else? It's really fun.

Well, maybe I do have a voice after all.

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack, a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen

~~~~

Planting the Future

with Dr. Wangari Maathai

A Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Wangari Maathai founded a grassroots organization that empowers African women to improve their lives and conserve the environment through planting trees (30 million so far). She speaks with Krista Tippett (Speaking Of Faith) about the global balance of human and natural resources, and shares her thoughts on where God resides.

This is a powerful and moving story of how one person, working from her own heart and passion, can change the world.

Click here to access the website, then you have a choice of listening to the podcast (53 min.) or reading the interview (Program Particulars > Transcript).

Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground
- Rumi

~~~~

Wisdom from Stephen Levine

from Healing Into Life and Death:

"Nothing has to be different for us to be whole. It is not a matter of change as much as it is of merciful acceptance. We don't even have to be less angry or less frightened or less doubtful. We don't have to be more loving, or more compassionate or more wise. To be whole is just to take ourselves within wholeheartedly, to meet even our lovelessness, our mercilessness, with a deeper ahhhh!"

May you dwell in the open heart
May you be free from suffering
May you be healed wherever healing is called for
May you know your deepest joy, your greatest peace

always ourselves we love the least
that's the burden of the Angel/Beast
- Bruce Cockburn

~~~~

Liberal English

A good example of why politicians can say so much and mean so little. Or, how history re-writes itself!!

Judy Wallman, a professional genealogical researcher, discovered that Stéphane Dion, the ex-leader of Canada's Liberal Party, had a great-great-uncle, Robert Dion, who was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Québec in 1889. The only known photograph of Dion shows him standing on the gallows. On the back of the picture is this inscription: "Robert Dion; horse thief, sent to Quebec Provincial Prison 1883, escaped 1887, robbed the Canadian Pacific Railway six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted, and hanged in 1889."
Judy e-mailed Stéphane Dion for comments. Dion's staff sent back the following biographical sketch:
"Robert Dion was a famous horseman in Québec. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to service at a government facility, finally taking leave in 1887 to resume his dealings with the railroad. Subsequently, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Dion passed away during an important civic function held in his honour, when the platform on which he was standing collapsed."

so fine, so fine the web you spin
you spin your web and you draw me in
spin, spin, spin, spin

~~~~

How We Die

Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

Just finished reading How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland. In this compelling and deeply moving book, Nuland eloquently describes the various processes by which our bodies inevitably age and die. His ability to blend clinical accuracy with a profound compassion transforms what is too often a painful and much-avoided topic into a natural unfolding and ultimately a celebration of the human spirit.

"We have been given the miracle of life because trillions upon trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died - in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life."

"The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. Ars moriendi is ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them."

Gone from mystery into mystery
Gone from daylight into night
Another step deeper into darkness
Closer to the light
- Bruce Cockburn

~~~~

The Story of Stuff

"From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever."

But the video is only the beginning. As Annie Leonard says in the film, “the good thing about such an all pervasive problem is that there are so many points of intervention.” That means that there are lots and lots of places to plug in, to get involved, and to make a difference. There is no single simple thing to do, because the set of problems we’re addressing just isn’t simple. Everyone can make a difference, but the bigger your action the bigger the difference you’ll make. Here are some ideas for starters: 10 Little and Big Things You Can Do.

Definitely bookmarking this site.

money don't get everything, it's true
but what it can't get I can't use

~~~~

Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream

I attended this symposium today, April 18, 2009 at the Halifax Shambhala Centre along with about 50 others. It was led by Leila Bruno.

These are my notes - realizing that they are hopelessly inadequate to convey the warmth and power of the program, nevertheless I wanted to share some of the insights with you. Many of the ideas are not new but it is encouraging to hear of so many individuals, groups and organizations springing up at every level, locally and globally, to address the concerns that face us all.

The purpose of the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream program to bring forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet.

There is an already emerging movement and we are part of this. We need individual, small-scale protests to continue - this is how change happens.
MicMac Grandfather Billy does a blessing/purification ceremony at the beginning and end to bring energy back to the heart. There is a new beginning between now and 2012 - this is what Pachamama is all about. Pachamama can be translated as Earth Mother, Universe and All Our Relations. Water is the blood of our Mother Earth and it is being threatened everywhere.

Four questions we will be exploring:
Where are we?
How did we get here?
What’s possible for the future?
How do we get there?

Pachamama Alliance was formed to help the Achuar tribe in the rainforest in Ecuador who have been displaced by petroleum interests. Rather than replace their culture with another, the Achuar and the Alliance are working together to blend the traditional earth wisdom with technical expertise and funding. We need to "change the dream of the modern world" to save the natural world.
The prophecy of the eagle (materialismj) and condor (earth-based wisdom) is coming true - there has been a 500 year cycle during which the eagle has dominated but the eagle and the condor have begun to fly together - "dancing together in one sky".

Where Are We?
Environmentally:
What is our current relationship with the planet, each other and ourselves? We have such a great opportunity to explore this question.
Industrial Revolution led to a population explosion which has continued. The earth is under very severe stress and human activity is putting an intolerable strain on the earth’s natural life-support systems. Climate change, resulting from burning fossil fuels, is the most imminent threat - we are already seeing extreme changes in weather patterns.
We are in the midst of a global mass extinction - African lions, tigers, elephants, 90% of large fish are gone from the oceans.
The "ecological footprint" is an accounting tool - by 2007 we were using 30% more resources than nature can keep up with. If this trend continues, by 2050 we will be using resources at twice the capacity of the planet to cope. We don’t have 50 years to solve this crisis. Nothing this destructive has happened in 65 million years. It is so catastrophic we can’t conceptually relate to it - what we need to do is to really feel the grief in our hearts.
Environmental justice - race and class still determine what type of environment people live in. When we destroy natural environments people are displaced to cities. This puts them at risk for many health and social problems because of the polluted air and other stresses. This impacts minorities hardest - blacks, native people, Hispanics.
Socially:
Ideally every person in society has an equal opportunity to live a fulfilling life and all are treated with equal dignity.
We are part of a world-wide society and we are inter-dependent. The notion that we can prosper individually just doesn’t work. We take so much for granted - food, clothes, shelter, etc. We care more about our personal economic well-being than about the well-being of society.
Spiritually:
There is a "great loneliness of spirit" - we feel hopeless and overwhelmed. This is how our lives are reflected to us, but we still yearn for connection with nature, each other and with ourselves. Mass consumption is fueled by loneliness and a culture of isolation and increasing depression. Children witness thousands of hours of violence on TV each year.
As we open to the pain of all this, we can use the energy of our grief to power our inspiration and our efforts.

How Did We Get Here?
Wendell Berry: "We can [not] live harmlessly or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration……in such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."

Human decisions and behavior, not evolution, have led us to this predicament. Thomas Berry - we need to change our human presence from a destructive one to a benign and constructive one.
Our worldview has become unsustainable. We feel ourselves separate from other species, largely because of technology. Our actions follow from our view - we have to examine our assumptions. One is that the natural world is there for us to use as we see fit. Since the post-Industrial Revolution population explosion this attitude has become destructive.

When we throw something away, we could ask ourselves, "Where is away?" There is no such place as away. We are throwing the planet and its people away. We are literally "trashing" the planet - disposables are insidious - disposable cups, species, people, cultures. This is the core mindset.
Once we see our assumptions we can consciously make different choices.
Most of our assumptions are based on our idea of a separate self - separate from nature and from each other. We are related to everything on earth. Whatever we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. Whatever we do to each other, we do to ourselves. We have developed a reductionistic view of the natural world since the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern technology. The Earth is our mother - whatever befalls the earth befalls us. We did not weave the web of life - we are merely a strand in it.
We have been using the wrong operating manual - but there is good news. Humans are not fundamentally flawed, we are simply mistaken, and that means we can change our behavior.

Assumptions (from group discussions)
- someone else will take care of it
- don’t question progress
- it can’t happen to me
- I deserve what I have
- rationality is superior to feeling
- more is better
- money fixes everything
- entertainment is engagement, not distraction
- the individual is the most important unit
- our actions have no consequences
- earth’s resources are infinite
- if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist
- humans are separate from, and superior to, other species
- technology will save us
- we have lots of time
- technology helps us communicate
- new is better
- chaos is un-natural
- capitalism works
- I can’t make any difference
- my happiness is #1
- we’re right, they’re wrong
Unintended results of these assumptions:
- loneliness
- separation
- more consumption
- bullying > aggression > wars
- enemy making
- ethnic cleansing
- misogyny
- small view - me, mine
- everybody needs their own space
- lack of urgency - just put it off
- no spiritual connection
- individual is primary

What is Possible for the Future?
Pachamama Alliance - the indigenous connectedness of the world joined with modern science.
The human story is the story of the universe. An emerging universe is a new concept, but we have been profoundly related for a long time - we came out of the earth - thus we are kin with all beings. There is a profound wisdom at work in the universe.
Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago - all space and all time started at that one point. Everything came out of that molten rock - creativity and consciousness as well as all sensory phenomena and all life forms. We are cosmological beings - we are the universe in the form of a human.
Our current path is unsustainable. But can humanity really transform in such a fundamental way? Humans have the creativity - the future is in our hands, once we are aligned with others. We have seen so many changes already that would never have seemed possible and that started with one individual.
We need to engage in holding actions (stop harming), pro-actions (start helping) and consciousness raising. All three are necessary. We need to know what is happening in our local areas as well as globally.

The Emerging Dream
Paul Hawken - "there is a movement, the most diverse ever seen, a global movement where no one is in charge - a shared understanding that has its origins in indigenous culture, environment and social consciousness issues. This is the coming world. We are in the largest social movement in the history of humanity. Our actions now will determine the future."

Grassroots actions make the most difference - it is where we can start as individuals. We have the means to address our global problems - we can emulate nature and work with it rather than destroy it. In terms of our personal spiritual growth, once we become aware of this movement, we will see it everywhere. It is who we are. The crisis of imagination and creativity needs to happen now. We need to speak from the heart about what we care about.

Where Do We Go From Here?
George Bernard Shaw: "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

So what do we do now that we know?
The Power of One is the power to do something. Authentic action comes from the heart - feel it, don’t think too much about it.
Community is vital - we are already profoundly interconnected - we must work together. There are no ‘single’ issues. We need to be able to combine what we already know into what we need. But we don’t have much time. The word community means coming into unity - together we are a genius.

"When a caterpillar reaches a certain point in its own evolution, it becomes over-consumptive, a voracious eater and it eats everything in sight.
At that same time, in the molecular structure of the caterpillar, the "imaginal cells" become active. While all this gorging is going on, those imaginal cells wake up, and they look for each other inside of the caterpillar’s body. When enough of them connect (they don't need to be in the majority) they become the genetic directors of the future of the caterpillar. At that point the other cells begin to putrefy and become what’s called the nutritive soup——out of which the imaginal cells create the absolute unpredictable miracle of the butterfly.
What’s possible is that we're the imaginal cells on the planet right now. "
Inspired by Elisabet Sahtouris

We don’t have to be in the majority to effect change but we do have to work together. Today we have created a cadre of local citizens who have woken up and who have a vision for the future. This is what we call Blessed Unrest. We will become the instrument through which the world works.
Hope is a state of mind that is already in us - it is the certainty that a course of action makes sense, no matter how it turns out. If only one person in the world has hope and is committed to action, then there is hope in the world. We get to start over every day and this is a miracle.
We stand now at the moment of creation. This is the moment when the human species can rise to its full potential. We have the opportunity to live the most meaningful lives ever lived. We are the people we’ve been waiting for, and we have enough love to save the planet.

And as if that weren't enough for one day, there was a wombat video!

~~~~

I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
but love’s the only engine of survival
LC
~~~~

Opening To Our Lives

Jon Kabat-Zinn's Science of Mindfulness

Interview by Krista Tippett, Host of Speaking Of Faith, a program on American Public Radio.

Scientist and author Jon Kabat-Zinn has changed medicine through his work on meditation and stress. We explore what he has learned, through science and experience, about mindfulness as a way of life; about slowing down time, as he says, and "opening to our lives." This is wisdom with immediate relevance to the ordinary and extreme stresses of our time; from economic peril, to parenting, to life in a digital age.

The real challenge that defines our humanity is this: how do we take on reality as it unfolds, navigate it, and truly stay awake and alive in this moment of life, whatever its contours. And here is the silver lining, if you will, of Buddhism's frank insistence on suffering as a feature of life: a parallel insistence that equanimity and even joy are within our grasp in every moment, without anything at all needing to change. The stakes for getting this right are high. As Thoreau said, in one of Jon Kabat-Zinn's favorite lines, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake."

Kabat-Zinn: "All of us... are being called upon to find out who we are and to live that authentically in the service of the world..."

no agenda
just this moment
just this breath

~~~~

Technically Incorrect

This is a fun website, with such (apparently real) news items as:
Is technology ruining children's lives in Colorado?
Obama gives queen an iPod (she already has two)
Domino's apologizes for booger-sandwich video
Oh, so now Twitter is making us immoral
Woman discovers apartment trashed on Facebook
Gmail now knows who you want to e-mail
and many many more

Warning: you might wanna think twice about ordering that Domino's pizza.

I read the news today, oh boy!

~~~~

Lonely in an Electronic Wilderness:

"The Great Emotional Sickness of Our Era"
(click on title for full article)
Handan Tülay Satiroglu is a Turkish-American independent journalist who divides her time between the U.S. and Europe.

iPods and Blackberries offer instant access to a virtual world, but are technological gadgets keeping people apart and breaking down society?

Derek V. Smith, author of A Survival Guide in the Information Age:
"Technology does not loan you money or come by to see you when you are sick or sad. It may connect you with someone who does, but the characteristics that are truly human must be transmitted by humans," surmises Derek Smith. "Much of the human experience is about sight, sound, smell, touch, and intuition that in turn require human contact and proximity."

Dr. Aric Sigman, Psychologist:
Dr. Sigman believes that spending too much solitary time with the almighty gizmo may actually change our chemical makeup. In a recent article on the technology news website cNet, he cautions internet addicts that "there does seem to be a difference between 'real presence' and the virtual variety."
"There's something to be said for the spontaneity and richness that only a real-life meaningful encounter with a person can bring. After all, how do you convey with electronic devices the magic of a smile, hug, handshake or infectious laughter?"

Gonna back away from the computer now -- well just one more link.... oh, that looks interesting... I wonder if the wireless signal could be beamed straight into my cerebral cortex or wherever, or maybe cloning is the answer, I and I could drift between real and virtual. Okay, backing away NOW -- going outside where there's air and birds and a really really big sky and the smell of rich moist earth that sqishes under your feet. Later over to the Lodge and see some, whaddayacallums, ... people, yeah, people.

and I'm crazy for love
but I'm not comin' on
I'm just paying my rent every day...
LC

~~~~

25th day of Spring 2009

Just when you thought it was safe to put the snow shovels away...

And the seasons they go round and round...

~~~~

Secular Web

A drop of reason in a pool of confusion...

Just found this website today. The kiosk has a variety of easily-digested articles on topics ranging from Atheism to Theology.

One I liked is:

Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion -- by Dale McGowan

"...there is no rock that can't be upended if you think there might be something under it."

http://www.infidels.org/

~~~~

Is God All In Your Head?

Inside science's quest to solve the mystery of consciousness.
by Craig Hamilton

Apparently the mind/body "problem" is as enigmatic as ever. In this article the author broadly explores what David Chalmers calls the hard problem -- the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience. Does the brain create consciousness? Can reductionist scientific theory explain our most basic experience of being alive? If consciousness is, in fact, created by our brain, what does this say about the truth of our perceived reality?

Some excerpts from the article:

Francis Crick
Co-discoverer of the DNA helix
"You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules...You are nothing but a pack of neurons"

Paul Bloom
Developmental psychologist, describing a conversation with his six-year-old son Max about the function of the brain:
"Max said ....it is very important and involved in a lot of thinking--but it is not the source of feeling sad or dreaming or loving his brother. Max said that’s what he does, though he admitted that his brain might help him out."
Bloom, who clearly aligns himself with the neuroscientific perspective, goes on to explain that "studies from developmental psychology suggest that young children do not see their brain as the source of conscious experience and will. They see it instead as a tool we use for certain mental operations. It is a cognitive prosthesis, added to the soul to increase its computing power." And, Bloom laments, "This understanding might not be so different from that of many adults."

Andrew Newberg
Radiologist at U.Penn Med Center, meditation researcher and author of The Mystical Mind and Why God Won’t Go Away
"When people have mystical experiences, they universally report that they have experienced something that is more real than our everyday material reality. ...which means that the brain perceives God, or pure consciousness, to be more real than anything else. So if the brain is what determines what is real and what isn’t, and this is a universal experience of human brains across cultures, where does that leave us?"
"The belief that matter is primary provides a good basis for explaining the material world", he said, "but it can give no clear answer as to where consciousness comes from. On the other hand, if we take a religious perspective and say that consciousness is primary, it’s not so easy to explain the existence of matter. My own feeling is that perhaps consciousness and matter are two ways of looking at the same thing. But I think the bottom line is that we really don’t know yet."

Towards the end of the article the author suggests that in an ironic turn of events, brain science just might end up supporting humanity's spiritual aspirations in a way no one expected, and leaves us with this challenge -- can we find a world view big enough to include it all?


What about the bond ?
What about the mystical Unity?
- Bruce Cockburn

~~~~

11th Day of Spring 2009

Fun With Food

Check out the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. They give new meaning to the expression playing with your food.

~~~~

The Blue Marble

This is still the most moving photograph I have ever seen. It was taken on December 7, 1972 as the Apollo 17 crew left Earth’s orbit for the moon. It is the first photo ever in which the earth is in full view.

Do you remember the first time you saw this?

~~~~

We have always been here

Andrew Cohen, founder of EnlightenNext magazine, is a spiritual teacher and acclaimed author widely recognized as a defining voice in the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality. In this recent article, Awakening to Evolution, Cohen further probes the questions, why is there something and nothing? and what part do we play in this miraculous unfolding?

"I’m convinced that the momentous enlightening leap that needs to be taken .... is the delicate and all-important transition from the mere intellectual and philosophical recognition that our cosmos and culture are evolving to the direct, felt, living experience of the energy and intelligence that is driving the entire process, vibrating in one’s very own heart and mind."

~~~~

Redefining enlightenment for our time

The Evolution of Enlightenment

The Guru and the Pandit
Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen in Dialogue

Andrew Cohen -- "The goal now, as audacious as it sounds, is not merely to transcend the world but to transform the world, to become an agent of the evolutionary impulse itself .... awakening to the truth of who we are, and then daring to allow ourselves to experience the urgency to make it manifest in this world with all of our being."

"I think .... that the traditional definition of enlightenment may not actually be able to meet the needs of the evolving world in the time in which we are living."

Ken Wilber -- ".... the only way you can permanently and fully realize emptiness is if you transform, evolve, or develop your vehicle in the world of form."

"So we have to have a radical embrace of the world of samsara as the vehicle and expression of nirvana itself."

~~~~

Scientists probe meditation secrets

This just in (well, a year ago) from BBC News:
"Scientists are beginning to uncover evidence that meditation has a tangible effect on the brain."

Who knew???

In case you aren't confused enough about what's true...

What Ever Happened to Truth
by Carter Phipps, Executive Editor of EnlightenNext Magazine
"Truth, like beauty, has been knocked off its mythical pedestal as eternal objective fact and has tumbled headlong into the eye of the beholder."

Look For the Truth No Matter Where It Takes You
F. David Peat on David Bohm, Krishnamurti and Himself by Simeon Alev
"Maybe science is being tempered by things like intuition, by compassion, by other sets of values that have not been present before."

~~~~

Freedom's just around the corner for you
But with truth so far off, what good does it do?
- Bob Dylan

Begin with the Unknown
- Krishnamurti

~~~~

New Element Discovered

An Interesting Discovery.
Lawrence Livermore Laboratories has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (symbol=Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected by its retarded (even completely absent under some conditions) ability to react. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium' s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalyzed with large injections of fiscal elements, Governmentium becomes Administratium (symbol=Ad), an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium, since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

Well I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them

You Decide

Reinventing Capitalism by Howard Bloom - "By re-inventing capitalism and injecting our own souls into the machine, you and I can raise the bar of human possibility."

A couple of snippets from the article:

"The Western system is not at all what we've been taught to believe. This is not a mindless consumer culture destroying the planet in an orgy of greed. It is the most creative and potentially idealistic bio-engine this planet has ever seen. But if we fail to open our eyes and spot this reality fast, everything we believe in may easily disappear."

"Imagine what it would be like if your superiors asked you to do what artists and psychics do - find your hidden selves in the hidden hungers of those you serve. There is an implicit code by which we in the Western system live - a code that demands that we uplift each other . . . and that we do it globally. "

Cat Haiku

in deep sleep hear sound
somewhere cat vomits hairball
will find in morning

grace personified
leap - splat! against closed window
I meant to do that

I Blog, Therefore I Am

Rene Descartes was sitting in a bar late one evening when the bartender came over to announce Last Call. He asked Descartes, "Would you like another drink, sir?"

Descartes paused for a moment, then replied, "I think not".

and POOF, he disappeared.

There's something happening here...

but what it is ain't exactly clear...

here are some links to discussions of what that might be:

Signs of the Times
"bits and bytes of the digital flotsam that refer to changing patterns and conditions ... with reference to 2012 - assumptions of a psychic apocalypse"

Repossessing Virtue
"As the global economic crisis began to unfold this past fall, we wanted to respond immediately, in our way. We began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture's more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways."

This series is accessible as an audio program or as a transcript (goto Program Details and click Transcript).


On a lighter note, here is a 2008 Darwin Award nominee:

Thou Shalt Not Steel
Confirmed True by Darwin

(8 March 2008, Czech Republic) Steel is valuable, especially the high-grade alloy used in steel cable. Scrap metal dealers do not ask questions. They pay in cash. And a good supply of steel cable can be found in elevator shafts.

This particular gold mine was a towering shaft inside an empty granary near Zatec, forty miles northwest of Prague. The cable was tightly fastened, and the far end of it disappeared into the shadowy distance above.

After substantial wear and tear on a hacksaw, our man finally cut through the strong steel cable. At that instant the counterbalance, no longer held in check, started to move silently downward, accelerating until it reached the bottom of the shaft.

Result: one proud winner of a "terminal velocity" Darwin Award.

R.I.P.

The surest way to becoming an old dog is to stop learning new tricks

Some stuff I have found interesting recently...

Awakening to the Blob - review of Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and The Way You Live In It by Thomas deZengotita - the interview at the end is very provocative - http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j29/mediated.asp?ifr=hp-ftr

Answer Cancer - ebook by Stephen Parkhill - he asserts that cancer is caused by a subconscious self-mutilation program that activates sometime between conception and 4 yrs of age. http://orchidwomen.com/rk/Answer%20Cancer.pdf

Creation as an Unfolding Reality - a discussion of evolution and (not versus) creation http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/darwin/kristasjournal.shtml

Two columnists with the San Francisco Chronicle - Jon Carroll - http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/ - warm, fuzzy - sometimes it's a cat column! and Mark Morford - http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/archive - edgy, satirical & sarcastic - a fun read.

The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner - "Bringing Discipline and Focus Into Your Life" - this is an actual book that you can hold in your hands and curl up with on the couch. How quaint is that? Marvelous insights into how we learn (and how we set ourselves up for failure). Haven't finished it yet. You can read some of it on Amazon.com - bring up the book, go to Search Inside & push "Surprise Me" as many times as you can.

Vesey's Seed Catalogue - yes, it's time!! I no longer order from Vesey's but love to cruise the catalogues to get ideas of what to look for at the local garden centres...

The living-room looks like a greenhouse - geraniums are huge, fuchsia on the window ledge are sprouting profusely after their cold/dark winter dormancy and canna lilies are just starting to grow. They, along with a large parlor palm, will all go outside when it's warm enough. In the yard daylilies are sprouting and sedum "Autumn Joy" are peeking up. Everything else is still way buried under the snow. The ice on Tatamagouche Bay remains completely frozen, but within a few weeks it will be quite different.

Gonna go make sure the birds and squirrels have enough to eat.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle