Confront or Companion?

I often write of the beauties of natural life and friendships. I am as often upset with our society's ignorance of healthy connections with the earth and dull indulgence of food and consumerist addictions, eroding habitat for all of life on the planet. I see that each of us forms our own beliefs. We may borrow them from others, but we choose them. So I am not in charge of other's beliefs, or actions. Everyone is subject to some "herding" instinct. Everyone belongs to a group that offers comfort in numbers, in "belonging", especially in times of chaos and uncertainty.  So when I confront that other's belief or statement or action, I better remember I am confronting a whole group, most of whom are not present… Not much chance of success, better try to walk with that person a while, see if we can find some overlap in our groups…Nice place to go for some quiet time...http://www.donatopoetry.com

Mindful about Meditation

Lots references recently to Dalai Lama, ideas of using meditation techniques, now called "mindfulness", for gaining or keeping body, mind, spiritual, emotional, health. Just now  I remember a quote from a Zen teacher years ago that when meditating, "we should not meditate "for" something" that being a self defeating exercise. We should simply meditate and accept what comes, or doesn't. Like breathing, we breathe for itself, right now. Personally, I often get caught in the need to act towards something. Makes meditating,  being mindful, difficult. I resolve this somewhat by just stopping now and then whatever I'm doing, and just gaze at the scene, empty mind, empty hands, for a moment. Things seem to become still around me, as in a painting in a gallery. For that moment,  I lose my sense of myself. On the Red Road, I feel myself doing my smudge, my Pipe, in that same way, stepping into sacred space. My son Michael when in Grade 1 age 6 used often to slip into a way of daydreaming. This annoyed his teacher who determined he was being deliberately lazy and disrespectful. She bruised his soul somewhat before we got him out of there, and with a kind and loving teacher who gave him the respect he needed and deserved.

So when to meditate, when to act? To be, or not to be, that is the question...

for my poetry web site, lots of words and photos to meditate up on   go to  http://www.donatopoetry.com

6 seconds to get your attention

According to the marketers who are the priests of our time, I have 6 seconds to get your attention. Some of us will survive the coming chaos. They will be those who are still reading this a few seconds from now. The rest, will likely not.

As an intellectual who enjoys reading, writing, thinking about the philosophy of making life among other living and non-living entities on our planet, I see widespread chaos and despair coming, and of course, cannot make a difference, except by my witness and my determination to do what I can to further a good life for all life in my immediate habitat.

But I see something else here besides bad government, or ignorant consumers devouring the wealth of the planet without regard to the welfare of their grandchildren.

The Socionomists say we are living in a time of negative social mood, which comes along like a change in the weather, and produces economic crashes, and authoritarian despots and crooks oppressing and cheating the masses, who respond by "herding"into small groups of like-minded others, for protection in the chaos, some who try to hide, some who try to control others, some who fight back. So don't blame the COD's, (The Obsessive Compulsive Deniers), the Tea Partiers, they're doing what we all do in a time of uncertainty and perceived chaos, find safety by joining the herd.

I understand that in our time, because of the economic and climatic chaos and uncertainty and fear that  brings, humans are abandoning individual exploration, individual life styles, and retreating into their own particular "herd", with its particular slogans and sound bites, for comfort and a feeling of safety., and ideas for action and confrontation with all "the bad guys", the "others", the "not us".

No taxes, small government, the science isn't certain,
Big is better, growth is imperative, wealth is money
Small communities, back to the land, back yard gardens, home schooling
All institutions suspect, God or Allah is caring for all, our hope is in Heaven

Which of the thousand and one groups might I join to know the comfort of belonging, the challenge of action?

I bet you have an answer, but is it my answer? Is it Stephen Harper's?

It's evident to me our government has the same attitude to the environment as that of the US government, "of course, God will keep the environment clean and healthy, and if He doesn't then who are we to argue with the Almighty?" And is this not one of the slogans proclaimed by the hard right wing Christians? So Prime Minister Harper  is doing what we all do in time of uncertainty and chaos, finding security in his particular "herd". Not much original thinking or or even intelligent thinking in that, particularly because the herd he has chosen has no survival skills beyond the contradictory and confused slogans in their 1000 year old Bible and 200 year old economic ideas.

I believe instead, that with what's coming, the ability to adapt to major change in our habitat and economic and educational institutions will be paramount. No particular political groups are showing those that I know of. There are organizations working towards this though. Try theTransition Town movement.  And there are hundreds of websites, and blogs, around Green movements, etc.

We have invented, with the Internet and the mobile phone, communication tools that may be like a genetic mutation enabling our survival in this new much warmer, much stormier, petroleum deficient world we have already created (there's a lag time, we are living in the Fall but Winter is surely , inevitably, on its' way).

The bibles just now for me are Bill McKibben , of 350.org,  Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet: Bill McKibben
and Richard Heinberg,of the Post Carbon Institute, Richard Heinberg | The End of Growth

American citizens have turned their future over to the corporatist groups running the global  military industrial complex, global marketers generating consumption ( and 24 times that amount of waste) of useless goods for the sake of corporate profits and CEO's stock portfolios, and generating wars for the sake of profit making for corporations and promotions for career soldiers, all  paid for by printing free money in US$, and supported by governments voted into power by COD (Compulsive Obsessive Deniers) red-neck, hard right -wing Bible hypocrites  who have no notion of the mercy Christ embodied. 

I believe it is certain the American Dream hypocrisy will end in bloody chaos of civil war, starvation, and disease as the oil runs out and the climate heats up unbearably. We in Canada will become a target of their raiders. Our own government, with our consent, has been taken over by the COD fascists among us. and supports the current American Way without reservation.

The two commandments all Conservative members, and all Federal Government bureaucrats and scientists obey are, "Thou shalt not offend the PMO" and so "Thou shalt not publish or say anything unless it is first reviewed  and passed by the PMO." Means that the mess that is coming to all our lives will be blamed entirely on the Prime Minister, and those Canadians who support Him on his royal throne.

As ever in history,  we will blame someone else for our shortcomings and failures.

I keep writing my poetry and various epistles like this, poking into the readership environment,  to see how it responds, and thus get some idea, a fuzzy picture, of the mental world I inhabit with others like you.  This is somewhat how the physicists conduct their experiments, poking into the structure of atoms and other communities of small particles, to see how they react, and thus to get a model of how they are made and how likely to behave, and how to refine their relationships with those groups.

So poke your MP, see how he responds, and get some idea of the deeper, unseen structure these Conservatives espouse, or maybe, it's not  so deep, just unseen because vacant, absent, a void. That MP is just a tool in the hands of his/her PM, like  a tractor or a manure loader used by a farmer.

By my publishing publicly, I may alert the computer systems and thus their masters, which troll the media for signs of subversion. Maybe I would find their interest in me very unwelcome indeed. However, if enough communicate as I do the sort of rational thought and opinion the security apparatus finds subversive, we would overwhelm them with our sheer numbers, the way lone pigeons confuse the hawk by joining a flock. Maybe we could be the Pigeon Partiers, PP's for short?

How about that? A new group, The Pigeon Party!  Dedicated to making our sh.. visible, so it's easier to clean up, or use for fertilizer…

Donato Apr. 25, 2012   http://www.donatopoetry.com,   donato poetry,  on Google

Gasoline Prices up Bike Riding up

You want to know what gas prices are going to be in the next year ot two? Here’s the math. Over the past decade or so, convention crude oil production numbers are about 6 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil  equivalent used for energy to produce them, so the net gain is 5 barrels of oil to be sold for every barrel of consumed by the oil companies. This means, at today's prices, the oil companies need to get about $500  ($100 per barrel) out of every barrel they consume in producing the oil they sell. BUT, the tar sands oil, and other expensive deep sea stuff, only net about 1.5 barrels of oil for every barrel consumed in production. So now, the oil companies, running out of conventional oil, are going to have to get $500 back from every 1.5 barrels they sell. Prices are going to be $330 per barrel instead of $100. So gasoline is going to be over 3 times as expensive in a few years... for sure...there is no science that can compensate for the increased cost of producing hard to get oil out of the ground. The best way to prepare for our future is to do a lot of bike riding, figure out how to live without a car. 

All other life, and our grandchildren, will be happy if we quit using crude oil.

Let's adopt Respect and Learning to find a goodpath forward

 I want more happening around me of Respect

 for the Red Road of Respect and for the White Way of Learning . Maybe you d like to check out more on this at my web site page http://www.donatopoetry.com/earthbound.html


Soul

Soul is not in the head
It’s in the feet, the sole
Our language knows that
Walking barefoot
Connected to Mother Earth
You are ensouled
Living in high rises
Never going barefoot on earth
Leads to our desolation
De-sole-ation

Nothing more erotic than going barefoot
Try it!!

1500 lb. of soybeans can be grown with the resources it takes to grow only 1 lb. of beef It takes 40 000 lb of water to grow one lb. of beef, only 250 lb of water to grow 1 lb of wheat.

Humans can live well on a diet of plant foods only. The diseases of the rich would disappear, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimers, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, cancer. Medical care costs would drop drastically, all could afford good educations, and good medical care. The competition for scarce money between the old needing medical care and the young needing education, would disappear.

Let us imagine a world and so create a world where children are taught from an early age to treat food as a sacrament, ingesting the products of the soul of the world, so as to manifest ourselves as creative beings, products of the soul of the world, giving back what we have been given.

Teaching children to grow and prepare their own food, and to eat soulfully, we teach them to connect to the earth. Connected to the earth, they stay healthy, to old ages we seldom see now, but which would become normal.

The communal spirit of growing and preparing food and of eating soulfully together, brings people into the right relationship with each other. It forms the basis for peace and resolution fo conflict and inordinate desire. It is the new sacrament.

To eat soulfully is the first and most important ritual of beginning and renewal that brings us into right relationship with others of our kind, with all living and nonliving beings of the universe.

After emerging from the Sweat Lodge of the Red Road, having re-experienced .our birth journey from the Spirit World, we feast. Our feast reminds us we are now here, in this world and must eat in order to stay. If we then feast soulfully, we keep ourselves in the right relationship with the Spirit World, and we will have no fear of returning there, when our time comes.
Love Donato
http://www.donatopoetry.com

Apocalypse Now

I’m thinking that most of the journal and magazine articles I read, and the news reports of politicians' and think tanks’ outputs, desires and forecasts, are irrelevant. I can only relate them to imagining the Captain of the Titanic at the dinner table, blandly regaling to his special guests his stories of this great ship’s exceptional functioning, all the while as they rush towards that iceberg...... out of sight, just over the horizon, in the dark.

What’s the point now of my adding another rant against the  heedless ignorance of our times, adding to the g growing yet still feeble pile of clear eyed visions published?

It’s time to read, to write,  what i can do to prepare to live in a different land,   
under a different climate, where the basics, food, shelter, community, cannot be taken for granted, have to be built from the ground up, by us as newcomers, who do not yet know the language we must use. In the land we will all shortly occupy we will have to acquire new skills to do the work necessary . We will find few teachers, and so have to invent, or re-invent our own skills of basic survival. We will have greater reasons to fear the predators and  power-seekers among us.

How it has come to this...

Everything we have come to rely on as if of course that is what sensible people do , all the articles and faiths of our present consumerist oil based culture, all are irrelevant and will be swept away by the coming tsunami of global scarcity.

We have overpopulated the planet and are running out of the cheap oil and the readily available resources, of metals, and chemicals (think fertiliser) , and pure water and clean benevolent air, that fuelled our population growth since the 1700’s. The global economic scheme that started with the Industrial Revolution is ending. 80% of what we do, or eat, or wear, or use for medical care, is fuelled by cheap oil. Which will soon be gone. Our children will have to stay close to home, get everything they need for survival near by. Medical care will be seen as the fraud it is, based on the wrong kind of science, a mechanical science, instead of what would work, an ecological and biological science. We are members of a culture, we are not mechanisms with interchangeable, replaceable parts, and will soon have to relearn that fact, forgotten for a mere century. All the speeches and prognostications claiming what we must do to save our education systems, our medical care systems, our economic systems, our democratic organisations, are now all irrelevant. No one knows what the coming collapse will look like, or how to survive it. All we can do to prepare, is to try now to learn to live as if we had no oil, nor any food except local food, nor any medical care or education save that we could  provide ourselves.
with love from Donato

http://www.donatopoetry.com
http://www.postcarbon.org

Storm Warning

Long Distance Sailing

All experienced long distance sailors know there comes a time when they have to stop just sailing along, enjoying the local wind and weather, and start doing what they can to see beyond the horizon, into tomorrow or the next day, make a forecast of the conditions coming at them from afar.

In our societal economic and cultural conditions, we are in such a situation today. What is coming is not pretty. But we can handle it if we are prepared. Those who do not prepare, will be in grave danger of being sunk, economically, physically, maybe even psychologically and spiritually.

We can prepare by getting together with like minded people, sharing knowledge forecasts and ideas, and making plans together to weather the storms and make life useful, bearable, and even pleasurable for all of us.

The issues we have to face, in my opinion, are:

A. Collapse of the economic system from two (interrelated) causes,

1. the collapse of the monetary system, and

2. the depletion of resources, agricultural land, pure water, and most importantly, depletion and greatly increased cost of fossil fuel energy.

B. The ensuing collapse of the cultural norms and spiritual mores that are the "glue" holding civil society together.

History teaches us that human cultures are like ecosystems. They always reach a "climax" stage and eventually collapse, and either disintegrate completely, or reform into a different system. They collapse from the psychological shock of major resource depletion, triggered and accelerated by climate change, or from contact with or take over by, an "alien" seemingly vastly superior culture.

The task of a "Transition" group is to form and commit action to, a rational and spiritually satisfying plan to handle these issues as they appear in our lives, which in my opinion, they already have done. Many people are aware of these issues, and are beginning to think and plan how to deal with them. So, for these people, the "transition" has already begun.

Why can't we rely on advanced science to free us from these worries?

In my opinion, it is not at all helpful to imagine that some form of science will enable "business as usual" to be carried on by 7 to 9 billion billion people into the future.

Historically, the vast majority of people have not used scientific knowledge to reduce the human footprint on their earth habitat. Instead, science has been used by the majority (who are ignorant of the methods and forecasts of science) to do more of what they have always done, which is to procreate without limit, and consume and waste earth resources and energy sources without limit. A simple example, humans have always travelled. They used to go by hand made canoes and other boats, now they use science to fly. It is clear that humans would have ensured they lasted longer on the planet if they had continued with only the slower, hand made methods of travel.

We are in danger of virtually extinguishing human life on this planet within the next century or two. Humans would likely have lasted at least several millennia more before reaching this point, if it had not been for the "Industrial Revolution" invented in England and carried around the world and forcing the collapse of indigenous cultural ecosystems everywhere by the dominating capacity of the will and enterprise of the British culture. (Note that nothing in ecological theory suggests that a "dominant" species can be so capable as to ensure the survival of the ecosystem it has come to dominate. )


What's another point of view?

The science of neurology is telling us these days that our brain functions to programme our decision making based on past encounters, chance experiences, and our inherited DNA tendencies to follow certain paths and reject others. It may be that our notions of free will are just illusions, that we are more like ants than popularly supposed.

So none of what I have said above has any value except to enable us to continue being happy under the illusion that we have some degree of control over our lives. In fact, the Popes who excoriated Galileo and other early scientists were quite right. Those early scientists banished "spiritual values" as a basis for decision, making them seem like pure illusion, only to substitute their own illusions that we humans are powerful enough to overcome our basic limitations.

The latest neurosciences have this virtue at least, that they teach us to be a lot more humble in the face of our own incapacity to order our existence as we wish. They bring us back to the position of the old time Christian theologians, and North American native teachings, that is it not by our own will , but by the grace of some stronger power, that we are given our daily bread.

And if you want to insist that it is only by chance that we get our daily bread, I would say you are entitled to that view. However, I don't see how we can organise a moderately civil society on that premise. It would enable an axe murderer to go unpunished, claiming he was just an agent of chance.

I choose instead to believe that my actions are guided at least in part by moral imperatives proceeding from a Spiritual Creative power greater than I am, with whom I can be in touch every time I go barefoot on the earth, which gives my culture what I call its "soul".

We are into the Christian Christmas season. Always a happy time of nostalgia and celebration for me brought up in the most ecumenical fringe of this culture. I take the birth of the Christ Child to symbolise the best of what we can get by being part of a human culture whose members enjoy each others company, value each others lives and families, and efforts to live as best we can, and who maintain a hope that if things are not good today, they can be better tomorrow, by the grace of God, or whomever we call that Power.

Donato Dec. 5 2011