Lumped firmly in the Solutions category is Permaculture, with its emphasis on local food production and sensible energy designs. I have recently found a torrent of this book: Permaculture: A Designers Manual by Bill Mollison, Australian founder of permaculture, and suggest highly, that you too find it too. As well, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and the Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan are crucial reads to getting a sense of the industrial food systems; their extreme inefficiency and waste patterns, and the unholy terror exacted upon the animals, dirt systems, water systems, workers, and consumers of their uniform, bland product. Joel Salatin also provides us his hands-on multi-generational wisdom in You Can Farm and Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal.
Nothing can replace the reading experience and its fully imaginative powers, but videos are immediate and can implore the curious mind to seek the written word. So let this be a repository of resources regarding better and local ways to tend to our own health and the health of that which contains us all.
Bill Mollison:
Joel Salatin:
Michael Pollan:
Vandana Shiva:
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Communicating and Great Themes
The Great Themes of this Dying Age are everywhere. They ooze out of televisions' marketing blitz and blare out of our stereos. They are the unknown agents in our chickens and cows and the unknowing agents intentionally produced through industrial schooling. There is the political two-party system that is laughably disassociated from the people's voice, with its perverted electoral college and federal reserve. There are the bloated, hidden cities that are American prisons, a product of the capital ethic and its rigid focus and ruthless morals. There remains the expansion of the American military machine and its 700 plus military bases in every corner of the globe. There is the great swirling trash vortex in the Pacific and the Gulf dead zone. Mountain top "mining" remains an acceptable form of industry "progress", as the streams and valley's absorb the obvious and natural brunt of this violence. Pharmaceutical companies dump inorganic waste, chemicals, and antibiotics into the human population which then flows straight into the ground waters, causing unknown and vast chemical disturbances, absorbed by all life-forms on Earth. The Cancer is all around us, in fact, cancer rates soar. Autism and depression rise. Obesity and human population boom like the "good times" will never end. Urban ugly sprawl. Cell phones and laptops zap our bodies with waves of electrical energy and we spend our days in cars, headphones and pods careening at ever faster rates. Isolated beings from self and other, from body and nature, and from ones own power, energy, and agency.
Looming ever background, are the Answers. Sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists have come to the same conclusions as physicists, mathematicians, and Eastern systems of thought; that culture and self are constructs, shifting regularities, not constant and therefor changeable, and wildly manipulatable. We know so many answers and have so much access to the Great Truths of the Human Experience and the Great Sea of Space, yet we do not teach the wisdom of our ancestors, we do not connect the old truths with the new truths, we do not synthesis these into our current reality, whereupon we should redress the old wisdom in contemporary language and de-mythologize how we think about Spirit, Religion, God and Energy. Instead, we get caught in words, symbols and manipulations, forgetting to extract the essence of the knowable human condition. We hold these powerful seeds, but withhold the necessary watering, preventing our becoming, fully human. For the necessary balance of spirit, mind and body, there are the Contemplative Traditions, most succinctly and fluidly expressed through the Buddhist teachings: sophisticated and balanced mindfulness of self (mind) and other (body). Largely, if not solely, our myriad problems, fall into one domain, pedagogy (all the forms learning takes). Faulty education has been rethought and reconsidered numerous times and no matter the form(s) that any of the solutions take, the key focus to real, functional, non-authoritarian education, is on the empowerment of the individuals' own agency. This is essentially creating and expanding the tools of critical thought, awareness of self (mind) and other (body), in order that, he or she can fully express themselves, and skillfully avoid the manipulations of cultural "common sense" or mind control (psychological slight of hand) methods, which attempt to suppress and co-opt ones full power and true potential. The power to grow, cultivate, love, change, think, feel, imagine, forgive. To frame his or her critical thinking within the basic recognition of the Interdependency of all life in the Great System that we all share, and depend upon, for our expression as awake, alive: this, is the role of education. School as we accept it today leaves us essentially tool-less to become anything more than a repeat of our inherited, narrow, and hostile cultural assumptions.
The work of this blog is to teach, expose, expand, and dialogue (thought that is a rare privilege) about the nature of our existential experience and the nature of our daily Work, and we have work to do. I try to not talk down or be condescending, I take seriously the role of explaining things better or from different points of view, if and when confusion should arise. I want you to teach me. I try to keep my ego out of it, but I am, in so many very specific ways, not a perfect human and I may offend, I may lash out, or speak in reactionary ways but this is the nature of challenging, gently, opinions and beliefs. The less precious we are to holding on to our beliefs, the better off we are. Let the old ones go and take more into consideration, take it all into consideration, but critically so, mindfully so.
I oftentimes think of blogs or facebook as tools of teaching. Certainly they are media, but all media has a point of view, and as the new keyword of the day will become, transparency is central to media: who is telling me that there was "collateral damage" in a Somalian air raid, or where does the money source of facebook, for instance, originate? Actually, facebook was a product of Harvard students and was initially an Ivy league forum, as well, the owner Mark Zuckerberg, has refused LARGE sums of money to sell his baby to Google and others. Regardless, I would most like this blog to become reference points in your intellectual and spiritual (even as this word sags under its own weight) journey, a place to learn and teach others from, and another place to establish symbiosis with curious people, so that the learning and the growing may never end, from all directions at once.
Looming ever background, are the Answers. Sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists have come to the same conclusions as physicists, mathematicians, and Eastern systems of thought; that culture and self are constructs, shifting regularities, not constant and therefor changeable, and wildly manipulatable. We know so many answers and have so much access to the Great Truths of the Human Experience and the Great Sea of Space, yet we do not teach the wisdom of our ancestors, we do not connect the old truths with the new truths, we do not synthesis these into our current reality, whereupon we should redress the old wisdom in contemporary language and de-mythologize how we think about Spirit, Religion, God and Energy. Instead, we get caught in words, symbols and manipulations, forgetting to extract the essence of the knowable human condition. We hold these powerful seeds, but withhold the necessary watering, preventing our becoming, fully human. For the necessary balance of spirit, mind and body, there are the Contemplative Traditions, most succinctly and fluidly expressed through the Buddhist teachings: sophisticated and balanced mindfulness of self (mind) and other (body). Largely, if not solely, our myriad problems, fall into one domain, pedagogy (all the forms learning takes). Faulty education has been rethought and reconsidered numerous times and no matter the form(s) that any of the solutions take, the key focus to real, functional, non-authoritarian education, is on the empowerment of the individuals' own agency. This is essentially creating and expanding the tools of critical thought, awareness of self (mind) and other (body), in order that, he or she can fully express themselves, and skillfully avoid the manipulations of cultural "common sense" or mind control (psychological slight of hand) methods, which attempt to suppress and co-opt ones full power and true potential. The power to grow, cultivate, love, change, think, feel, imagine, forgive. To frame his or her critical thinking within the basic recognition of the Interdependency of all life in the Great System that we all share, and depend upon, for our expression as awake, alive: this, is the role of education. School as we accept it today leaves us essentially tool-less to become anything more than a repeat of our inherited, narrow, and hostile cultural assumptions.
The work of this blog is to teach, expose, expand, and dialogue (thought that is a rare privilege) about the nature of our existential experience and the nature of our daily Work, and we have work to do. I try to not talk down or be condescending, I take seriously the role of explaining things better or from different points of view, if and when confusion should arise. I want you to teach me. I try to keep my ego out of it, but I am, in so many very specific ways, not a perfect human and I may offend, I may lash out, or speak in reactionary ways but this is the nature of challenging, gently, opinions and beliefs. The less precious we are to holding on to our beliefs, the better off we are. Let the old ones go and take more into consideration, take it all into consideration, but critically so, mindfully so.
I oftentimes think of blogs or facebook as tools of teaching. Certainly they are media, but all media has a point of view, and as the new keyword of the day will become, transparency is central to media: who is telling me that there was "collateral damage" in a Somalian air raid, or where does the money source of facebook, for instance, originate? Actually, facebook was a product of Harvard students and was initially an Ivy league forum, as well, the owner Mark Zuckerberg, has refused LARGE sums of money to sell his baby to Google and others. Regardless, I would most like this blog to become reference points in your intellectual and spiritual (even as this word sags under its own weight) journey, a place to learn and teach others from, and another place to establish symbiosis with curious people, so that the learning and the growing may never end, from all directions at once.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)