Welcome 2015!

I was trained to be a teacher. No matter what we do, nothing can be as important as how we treat the children, except perhaps the ways in which we treat the environment. This year, let us all resolve to spend more time with children and in nature. It is healthy for us (we humans) to touch the Earth intimately and to share our love for learning with the next generations coming up. We have seen the damage that can be done when we abuse, ignore or tear away at either. Let us think long and hard about how we will better serve both the planet and her people. If I can teach one concept effectively, let it be the value of learning to exude compassion. We have heard hundreds of thousands of stories about what has gone wrong. We (humans) have been told billions of times that the world is big, scary and dangerous. The echoes of these warnings and admonitions are rattling around in our brains, stifling our development and retarding our growth. As an individual, each of us has the right and responsibility to ignore what does not serve us. We have the power to walk away.

The "moral majority" was neither, but that has not stopped them.

When I realized the depths to which our educational system had plummeted, I had to find a different way to teach. The majority of people inside educational institutions understood completely my decision tom turn my back on the failing system, but they could not understand how I could educate outside the strictures of public/private schools. Teaching, in my opinion is not a top down, in a classroom, I give you homework and tests sort of thing. Teaching to me is the art and science of discovery made accessible to others through insightful understanding and enticing perspectives that reflect quality and invite reciprocation. There is no need for schools or books or desks in this conceptualization of education. Let me take a step back from my idiosyncratic example, perhaps that will allow a better view of this overarching concept. After all, we may not all see ourselves as teachers. (But we are.)

Imagine, a world that has been hemmed in on all sides by concrete, steel and blacktop. Strictures that have been carefully and strategically laid with such subtlety that the inhabitants no longer understand the nature of the limitations that have them imprisoned. Look around and you may not need to imagine. Realize that what we have been told is of primary importance, namely money/status/power (these things are lumped together so thoroughly that they now constitute nearly one thing) have no value or meaning. Let this really sink in. not only do they have no meaning, but ultimately, there is no value to them, except what we give them.) Then, take a deep breath and plunge into life as if it were a placid lake, anxious for you to make ripples upon her surface. The world around us is far more welcoming than we are usually told. In the rare cases when it is not welcoming, it is at least accepting. When one learns about how to live within the natural systems in which we find ourselves, it can be downright accommodating. Even when we choose to wreak havoc upon the breast of  Mother Earth, she at least tolerates us. The ultimate value and the pinnacle of power is to perfect the art of the give away, giving selflessly to the next generations, for they will be here to carry on long after our demise.

We will need to give up a few things to find our way forward, but silencing the admonitions to fear will unleash virtually unlimited human energy. Letting fear melt away in the face of abundance allows our true self to flourish. As we find our soul purpose, possibilities open up that had never been considered before. Inside each of us there is an abused and neglected child who needs to be loved. Even if your parents were wonderful, loving and never made a single mistake, the world around us has ways of telling us that our ideas are "dumb", that we are naive, or that we do not deserve love. Nothing can be further from the truth. This year, let us all be the change we seek in the world. When I was in school, I can hardly tell you the depths of assault that I had to endure. When the attacks were from bullies, they were crippling, but when they came from teachers, I often felt completely incapacitated. The teachers that I respected the most encouraged me to try, even if my ideas had been deemed "wrong". Sometimes, the best way to suss out the differences between right and wrong are to plunge in, test the waters and use the resources that one has to make better sense of the world. We could each make a list of what we deal with daily that makes no sense, but trying to figure out what is right with the world requires resources that we are frequently denied.

Take time to get to know yourself. Let that relationship, between who you have been told that you are, what is "expected" of you and your "station" in life and the true you, who will forever remain hidden from the world, grow and develop. Learn to love into being a "self" that more accurately reflects who you really are, not be content with what people have told you. Make resolutions that are important enough that you will stick with them, even when the world seems hell-bent on crippling your spirit. Commit to making the future better no matter how dismal the present seems and there will be rewards that spread far beyond your ability to perceive them. 2015 is as good a time as any to do what you were put here on  Earth to do. There will always be turmoil and angst. What humans do best is to rise above whatever hostile conditions they may face and to find solutions to problems that confront us. Blessed Be my friends and may the New Year bring you enough time, as well as the inclination to find your true self. I guarantee that it is the best gift you could ever present to others.

How Do We Separate

When trees lose their leaves or needles, a tin film develops to heal the scar that is created. When mother mammals separate from their babies, the process of differentiation can be slow and ultimately, in humans, may never completely take place. Through the ages, we have sought to find ways to more smoothly separate our lives from what has taken place in the past. One generation wears their clothing or hair differently, another tries reading comic books or listening to feedback and calling it music. Some scar their bodies. It may seem infantile, but we must each try to develop a sense of self, or at least individuality, in the face of overwhelming odds. For our current system to continue to "work", the laws of commerce require that we all do things similarly enough that our wants and needs can be predetermined and products or services to fill those wants and needs can be developed which will wrest currency from our pocketbooks. The currency we "earn" is most often a reimbursement for labor, unless you are a trust baby and your wealth rests on the efforts of prior generations. It is a vicious cycle, especially when you find out that corporations are un-willing to pay for the time we spend at work. Their overarching attention seems to always be on the bottom line and wages are just seen as a way to hemorrhage the money which they believe is theirs. 

It may sound revolutionary, but we are not merely pieces in a giant commercial scheme. Capitalism is just the matrix of ideas that have wooed us most recently. Other systems for meeting the wants and needs of the multitudes have always existed and will continue to exist, but we have become infatuated with this one method of providing "goods and services" to the population. As we move into the future, we will need to find ways of differentiating ourselves from the system that seemed to work in the past, but which has brought so much pain and suffering into our communities.

I'm not going to use this opportunity to point out the fallacy behind the belief that, "We need the rich.", as it has been repeated to me throughout my lifetime. I'm not even going to dissect and analyze the concept that, "It is just the way of the world." There have always been those running things who did not care one whit about the quality of life of the vast majority of the population, as long as they got theirs, whatever the rest of us had to do to survive was par for the course. The people who foist these sorts of ideas on our civilization have a motivation that "I" (the person I call myself)  cannot, will not abide. I routinely speak to the fact that we are all one, however, there are crucial things going on in our world at this time that beg us to separate from who we thought we were, the limitations that guided the development of our culture in the past and to step away from and re-define the world to reflect more clearly who we are, who we want to be and where we are headed as a species.

How do we let old way thinking die out and how do we replace the holes that will inevitably be left where we used to share our sense of identity and how we allocate resources? This has been a deeply meaningful quest for me throughout my life. Because I am a staunch pacifist, the overriding belief that human beings are brutish and harsh has been a cultural belief that I needed to separate myself from and replace with a different belief. I have wrestled with these issues since early childhood. Research is finally proving that all humans start out compassionate and helpful, but through abuse and neglect we can reprogram the human organism to be insensitive, crude and mean. Separating ourselves from what has been done to us is a major step on the path to healing. Some people will begin their journey to a new self by practicing forgiveness. This process can take many years and is effective for individuals, but we need to find ways to heal the entire culture. Finding rites that help to heal the entire culture is the responsibility of shamen. What is called for at this time is an overwhelming act of compassion for those misguided leaders of the past who thought that the abuse and neglect they suffered through in their formative years was "normal", served them somehow by making them 'strong" and who had no intention of having compassion toward anyone.

The tragic consequence of this sort of retardation is that those suffering from it not only see it as 'normal", but they justify their strength and values as flowing naturally from the sick system that ruled prior generations. Making excuses for the very people who abused and neglected them is a double edged sword. In fact it is a sword with no hilt or handle, wherever you grab hold of it, will injure those who wield it. Just imagine for a moment, how much frustrated human potential could be unleashed, if we only taught our children the truth about this single issue.

It seems that the profusion of scientific information telling us that we need to stop using fossil fuels has had little effect on changing the beliefs or the oligarchs or curbing their actions which lead to poisoning the planet, but for many, we are learning to separate wants and needs in ways that lessen our carbon footprint. As I often write about, this process threatens many of those who made their living by raping the planet, stealing "resources" (gifts from creator) from others and finding ways to capture corporate welfare to enrich themselves. There are several examples of this same thing going on right now, today. Sacred lands are still being given to "developers" at a record rate, even though our economy has experienced crash after crash at the hands of those who would hide behind the four letter word, jobs.

Just changing that one concept would take us light years forward in our development as a species. There are no white knights waiting to rush in and save us from our poverty. There are no benevolent overlords about to swoop in and make our lives better. There are no technologies that offer us a better way of life or an easing of our burdens that do not have long-term consequences that will not be known for a generation or two after we have embraced them. We need to understand that action speaks louder than words and those who do have our best interest in mind are often not audacious enough or colorful enough, or well-funded enough to get the sort of media attention that it would require to get their message out. when we start to separate fact from fiction, we will begin to see a pattern and if we want to weave a new pattern into the tapestry of human history, it will require stepping away from the loom and making some crucial decisions about what we will no longer allow to pass for "reason".

It is not our responsibility make sure that we are understood. Some people will not have the experience or background to understand us and that is not our fault. We need to separate ourselves from the fiction that has been handed down to us. I am fond of telling my friends, "There are no more buggy whip manufacturers." Change happens whether we like, or admit, it or not. Getting comfortable with our separations, understanding that they are a major part of our growth and realizing that some separations can be healthy and rewarding may help us to distance ourselves from the feelings of loss that inevitably creep in. The tree does not bemoan the leaves lost for winter, nor should we regret the changes that are necessary to assure our survival.

We Begin

Earth has reached the point where the tilt of the axis, here in the northern hemisphere, has begun to tip inexorably back toward the Sun. The return of the sun will mean longer days and shorter nights for the next six moons. This journey into the "New Year" will see many changes that no one could have imagined. Other changes will be wrought by sheer determination and steadfast adherence to high moral ground. In a very real sense, the old ways are falling away. Corporate welfare recipients are given tax breaks for losses accrued through overproduction. Solstice.

The ebb of darkness exists in myriad forms, darkness turning to light. The ancient tribes of England had Stonehenge, we have no more pagan temples. finding our way through the dark requires temples. places where we can contact the Earth, reset our annual circadian rhythms, and share with our fellow human beings the timeless pulse of the planet.

I propose recording a pagan solstice album. All proceeds will be put toward a pagan temple, or a series of them, depending on how much money the project generates. Who is on board with the idea?

Change In The Whether

Whether We the People lead, or continue to follow will make the difference between whether we continue to run headlong into our own laws of diminishing returns, or take two steps back from the brink. We are all seeing climate disruption first-hand. The extreme drought that has gripped the western U.S., the prolonged cold and advent of the roving polar vortex, bifurcated for the first time ever recorded this past fall. The tsunamis, landslides, floods, hurricanes and increasingly damaging tornadoes, rain events, snow events, massive snows followed by rain, etc. are all warning signs that the atmosphere has been utterly destabilized. The size and types of extremes that we see routinely are record breaking not just in terms of "average" conditions and the extreme departure from "normal", but in the increased frequency with which all records are falling.

I really like posting links to this interactive wind map of the globe. We can watch, in real time, our airshed and the directions that the ocean of air are swirling around our planet. I'm sure that if you look to your own unique region, you will see impacts that I can only imagine.

The uprisings that are going on in The U.S. of A. are being summarily ignored by media giants in favor of the typical holiday human interest stories. If it were not for the internet, you would hardly know that disruption has become the rule at many of the protests. Dozens of cities, schools and shopping centers have been effectively turned into teach-ins, die-ins and mass public demonstrations. Other than cop on protester violence, we have seen dozens of images showing agents provocateur, looting, inciting violence and otherwise lawlessly operating. The police are the thugs in many of these events that go wrong. The actual protesters are standing up for justice, while the undercover folks are upping the ante. Beware of any participant who might try to encourage violence. What we want, and desperately need is justice. Nothing has ever burned down that helped peace and justice to break out across the land. Expecting to use hate to heal is what ignorant people advocate. We are better than that.

The winds of change have pushed the ship of state far beyond the safe waters of the oligarchs harbor. It is time to master the sails and take our culture on a new course. It will be difficult. It will be stormy, but in the end, we have just two choices. Either end up battered along some rocky coast or see things through, learn to make headway in the inevitable doldrums and gales, taking the ship of state to safer harbors. Many of us are looking forward to using our creativity and knowledge to improve conditions across the planet. With a bit of luck and some moral support from the rest of the planet, change has come and more is on the way. Blessed Be this Solstice. Stay warm and dry and as much as possible stay in the arms of loved ones. You know, you are always in their hearts.

The Cult of Ignorance and America's Worship of Stupidity (part II)

In the next few weeks a "new" Congress will convene. This one will be solidly Rethuglican. The same people who use the phrase "shoved down our throats" for any action taken by government want to shove their beliefs and ideas down our throats, but couch everything they are doing in the same rhetoric. "Lower taxes, getting government out of our lives and did I say cutting taxes?" Privatization of any services once provided by government has been their mantra for decades. Recent phenomenal strides toward stupidity have been advocated and passed by the fundamentalist contingent of our nation included such memorable things as banning scientists from presenting their findings before Congress, making it a crime to speak out in ways that can hinder the potential future businesses that corporations could make. I have been in on the ground floor of several businesses that lacked those sorts of protections.

The Earth Cycle, echoes in the analemma.

When I had a silk screen print shop in my home only printing on U.S grown, organically grown cotton clothing with non-toxic inks, the state of Texas made it illegal to grow cotton organically, putting my supplier out of business for a time. Not able to stay true to my goal of 100% ethical clothing, I lost hundreds of thousands of potential sales because of government interference. The cult of ignorance that spawned the law in Texas that crippled my business was based on the fiction that growing organic cotton would create refuges in which the boll weevil would thrive and launch attacks into neighboring fields. In fact, growing cotton organically required healthier than average conditions to prevent sick plants from becoming boll weevil magnets, but that truth was ignored completely in favor of business as usual. Because the majority want to remain ignorant and not change the way they make their living, the advocates of positive change that protects water quality, human health and ecological integrity were handed a massive bill for court actions that attempted to protect their rights to farm as their conscience led them to do and to crush the market for organic fabric grown in our country in favor of foreign produced material from places where slave labor is still legal.

The last twenty years have seen a rapid rise of information becoming available to people who are ill-equipped to handle the new potential. With no filter for the lies perpetrated on the internet, there are those who post fiction and utterly unimportant information here and as the general public spends more and more time sifting through content, they find less and less useful information more and more easily. This is the "new" intellectual territory. I have seen a proliferation of Pablam on the web. Material unfit to be read, my time reading it never to be gotten back. I do not want to post anything if I cannot instill a sense of action. Even activating our own aura, taking up a cause, or utilizing our awareness and action to synchronize with our souls can yield more than any other law or policy could ever do. This revolution can never be televised, because it threatens the threadbare fabric of our modern royals and their supporting culture of hostility and anger, power and control issues, addiction to fossil energy, etc. The revolution thatr is not being televised is the actual LOVE revolution. Humanizing our environment is based in love and flows from love. No room for hate and valid assumptions about our role in ecological transformation is based on absolute abundance, nothing short of that can carry us through troubling times.

The welfare whores that we support with this regime in power are about to fall and for them, it will be harsh, but for those of us who are learning to live on nothing, those of us who consume the least, will be insulated from the coming crash in amazing ways. The value of oil may continue to plummet as we make the switch to electric cars, jumping through one of the hoops of physics by utilizing motors that are over ninety percent efficient and making motors that run on liquid fuels obsolete. But hey, "Drill baby drill!" sounded good. I will bet that for a few more years now, the commercials will still feature giant trucks and SUVs, but ultimately, the market will demand quiet running clean electrics because the revolution is blossoming at such a rapid rate. The message has been the same forever. Whoever adapts to changing conditions first, will reap the biggest reward. In sustainable systems across the globe, extracting the largest number of tiny adaptations will have the greatest chance of survival. Diversity is not possible in the current system because every tentacle of extraction of resources is rotten to the core and oppressive. The new economy will sanctify a whole different sort of diversity, creating zero waste and throughput of energy, of resources and of human capital.

I am willing to share a business plan with anyone who wants to create a local business that truly serves a need in their community. I just don't have time to implement it. Looking for a job? Nothing you've found so far making you happy? Try something different. I hate the catch phrase "Follow you bliss.", but there is great truth to it if you follow it out logically. An internet troll assailed the philosophy, that I have the right to earn an honest wage for doing something I love. On the basis of a warped understanding of supply and demand. He said that if I actually loved my job, I would be willing to do it for sub poverty wages. He called it a "joy tax". I countered with the question. "Would you rather have a hamburger made by a chef who loved it into being (think how much it would be "worth"), or one slapped on the grill by someone who hated their "job" so much that they occasionally spit into the burger?" The employer has a choice between having a wage slave who has no other options or someone who truly wants to be there. The skills brought to any job deserve to earn the worker a living wage. Avoiding the responsibilities of "employer", by working folks only part time, minimum hours, and not supporting your workers with an honest living wage continue to be the biggest corporate welfare system ever devised and as long as we allow the media and their backers to avoid this fact, the more families will be hurt, the more we will face this dumbing down crisis and the longer the cult of ignorance will reign.

Moving On!

At What Price?

I was re-imagining the story that I have heard of soldiers on opposite sides of the line, coming together during World War I, to share Christmas Eve. The generals had to reassign the participants to get them to kill again, some had to be put to desk jobs and could never kill again. The reason it came up is because we were in awe at the culture that is trying to express itself across the planet, that guns are agents of change, "protecting" innocents who will, in the end have just blood on their hands. We are continually pumped on the idea that protecting property is tantamount to saving one's life. As if! As if every petty thief was just hankerin' to kill someone. As if those hours you slaved to buy your car or earn the money to buy that property are justification enough for killing. These important concepts never enter the conversation and that is by design. I do not have hard figures, but in my experience, the vast majority of property crimes are perpetrated by corporations who poison whole neighborhoods to make their profit. These criminals never have to look their prey in the eye. We have sacrificed the honor of looking our foe in the eye to the banner of  the Castle Doctrine. Guns, and the ability to kill at a distance are a cowards way, we must communicate this amongst ALL of the people.

When anyone feel threatened, it is normal and natural to lose peripheral vision, experience increased heart rate, higher blood pressure and increased visual resolution over a much smaller field. If our conscious mind says "It is your right to kill.", your body will have little inhibition. What if you got to know that person instead? What if you had to look through the pictures of family that they carry in their wallet? What if the words we all know, "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes." were removed from our collective consciousness? Imagine instead, a new guiding principle, Don't shoot until you can look your victim in the eye. If you see them as a valid individual, it gets much less likely that you would choose to kill. 

Keep in the front of your mind for a moment that the groups, as we have been assigned to, have been played off against one another for generations, it keeps our focus on the frivolous. The most heinous and costly crimes of all are always going to be perpetrated by the wealthiest, most powerful and influential group. It has become fashionable to refer to them as the one percent. Keep in mind, the county that I want to retire to has annual incomes so low, that to be in the 1%, one would only have to make $100K per year. Our poverty is so vast that many cannot understand the forces that have wrought this desperation so widely. Having tenaciously studied this issue since childhood, I can barely fashion a series of words to convey the depth and breadth of the crimes that have been perpetrated against humanity in the name of profit for the ultra wealthy. Oh, by the way, none of the rich and powerful live in the county to which I want to retire. They could not look their slaves in the eye.

The fly ash from coal-fired electric generating stations in the U.S.of A. kills as many people each year as adding 100,000 smokers to the population. Yet the powers that be have instigated a 50-year crack down on smokers that has saved about the same number of lives that fly ash kills. We have not had a fifty year crack down on wasting electricity, because we do not have to look the victims in the eye.

Some will say that it is our "nature" to push the negative consequences of our actions past arms length or further if possible, yet I see nothing in nature that coincides with that urge. We humans have trained ourselves to overlook, disregard, forget, pay no attention to, and otherwise ignore the down side of any decision. Embedded in the word is the same certainty and cleaving that finds a part of incision precision and excision. Once lopped off, the rest is just garbage after all and is to be left behind. In all natural systems that I have studied, even the waste serves to feed, provide shelter for or somewhere to have sex for other trophic levels. Humans un-naturally create waste that harms other trophic levels, especially when we divorce ourselves from the fact that creating that waste in the first place required us to believe that certain portions of our human family do not deserve to live, or that their impaired lives are "worth" the profit that is to be gained by poisoning them slowly, or killing them outright.

Adding insult to injury, human dead are frequently pumped full of toxic chemicals and or burned to ash with the giant carbon footprint that requires. Instead of feeding the organisms that will be left after our demise, we go out with two more bangs. never even having to consider the other shoe falling, elsewhere.

I would be remiss at bringing up issues that I do not have solutions for, and this is the crux of many different teachings. Twenty-five years ago, I just called it voluntary simplicity, or living better for less, but those terms were stolen to mean other things. The first, became a religiously inspired frugality sub-culture and the second some sort of coupon inspired craze. It was fashionable to use the terms diversity, which got gobbled up by the race craze, sustainability, which people who understand nature realize is impossible or permaculture, again impossible. In nature, flux is the overriding energetic trait. Being agents of change is the most natural impulse in nature.

I watched a program recently on PBS, it detailed the group of nomadic humans that co-exist with the  reindeer herds in what is now considered to be Northeast Russia. The reindeer spend most of their time eating lichen all of the needs of the humans are met from the environment and most of that comes through the reindeer. The energetic cycles, the mineral cycles and the water cycle flow through the region and the beings who inhabit it with virtually no contamination other than what floats in from the air. The more the rest of us, "down here" destabilize and excite the atmosphere with our massive heat and carbon releases, the more of our air flows over them, contaminating the lichen as surely as if it were next door or down the block from poison releases. In the land locked lakes on Isle Royal, in Lake Superior, pesticides have been found that were only used in the tropics. Just because no one is looking for toxic compounds in remote areas does not mean that they are not already there.

I have to remind readers of my work through ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. We try to get within arms length of healing the planet and in our experience, the effort helps heal those who participate in our tours as well. We have taken hundreds of folks on tree-planting expeditions, taken dozens more on seed collection trips and always seem to find people once we are out that participate informally as well. Tens of thousands of trees stand as a testament to those who believed and hoped in a future that allowed their efforts to flourish and that is a pretty powerful legacy to leave upon the planet. I am humbled each time to have been allowed to perform the task of being a bridge to this infinite possibility for the intentions of our guests. What we can afford to give back always pays back with interest!