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

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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

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