Beautiful words for our times:







You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour.
And there are things to be considered:

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.

Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.
This could be a good time!
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart, and they will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore,
push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open,
and our heads above the water.
See who is in there with you and celebrate.

At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally.
Least of all, ourselves.
For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.

Source

Maybe you all have seen this since I came into the BSG camp late in the game. (woodwoman15 and I only started watching the series about a month and a half ago and have now been caught up for three episodes.... best show on TV since Firefly in my opinion... and this one we actually get to see to conclusion. But I digress.)

I came across this recently and it's pretty fraking awesome. Check it out.

"As for local food production, anybody who thinks that a population that remains completely dependent on a food production system which they don't understand, in which they do not participate except as consumers, and over which they have no influence will manage to achieve anything resembling liberty or self-rule is missing a huge and critical piece of the puzzle."-kmo of the C-realm podcast.

This was taken from this thread from the C-realm forum.

Absolutely bloody brilliant!

There's quite a bit of information (an at least as much disinformation) out there on the web right now regarding the current economic crisis, the ecological crisis, and peak oil. It ranges from alarmist, the-sky-is-falling-so-stock-up-on-ammo-and-canned-beans-now approach to a much more optimistic and forward-thinking approach. Both camps can offer good information, but it's really hard to know where to begin for someone who legitimately wants to try and get a handle as to what's going on.

Most of my reading has stemmed from the information presented in kmo 's C-realm podcast; of which peak oil and the debt-based economy are ever-present themes. However, I have recently come across a resource which is spreading throughout the cyberplane virally that is probably hands-down the best introductory approach for the interested laymen who has only just heard the term "peak oil" and has never taken even a 101 Economics course. Everywhere I look, people seem to be giving it praise.

It's called The Crash Course; a three-and-a-half hour long slideshow presentation, created by a cat named Chris Martenson. If the length of the presentation sounds intimidating, there's nothing to fear; it is broken down into 20 chapters ranging from 3 minutes to 20 minutes in length. (I wouldn't recommend watching it straight through, anyway. I took about a week or so to get through it all, which included going back to watch certain chapters multiple times.) Martenson has the credentials, too. It's presented in a very pragmatic and even optomistic tone, yet is very effective in delivering the severity of the situation.

Anyway, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND The Crash Course to anyone who is some part involves themselves with any of the three E's. (economy, energy, environment.... this pretty much means everyone living in industrialized society.) At the very least, watch the first 4 or 5 chapters. This won't take much of your time, or psychic energy, I promise. If you find yourself intrigued, baffled, flummoxed, outraged, hopeful, disparing, or caught up in any of the other myriad types of emotion afterwards, watch on.

From John Michael Greer:

Only problem is, I did buy one of their shitty cars. Which means they'll be taking my money twice. Jerks.

For those of you unfamiliar with Michael Pollan, he is an author of a number of books that researches and explains the Industrial Food system in this country. In October, he wrote an open letter to the then undecided winner of the 2008 presidential election, offering advice on food policy and explaining just how important that policy is for us as a society.

Even more recently, Michael Pollan was interviewed on Bill Moyers Journal. Each segment is roughly 23 minutes long. Pollan is a great author and journalist, and also a great speaker... he gets his points across without pontification or conjecture.

I highly recommend watching the interview, or at least, reading his open letter.

Michael Pollan on Bill Moyers Journal

The Food Issue- Farmer in Chief

Michael Pollan's website

From James Howard Kunstler:

wodandis and bluedolfyn , I'm a little jealous of you two:

http://www.anthroposophy.org/RS-Social-Theory.html

And I miss Oregon. You two as well... I hope you've both kept well!

Amazing.

If you've been reading my last couple of entries, you will know that one of my favorite emerging ideas right now is the Creative Commons license. As we're witnessing may institutions from the old paradigm crumble away, it's one of the new ideas out there right now that really displays how we can reinvent, or at least evolve, the way our civilization functions. While I am certainly no expert on the matter, it seems to me that copyright law is one of these institutions that will cease to exist in its current form just a few years from now.

Copyright Law, as it traditionally has existed, is an institution of dominance, much like every other institution within our culture. Someone creates something, then sells it to someone else. Art becomes monetized, thus devalued and degraded. (Hey, there's that quote from William Blake that I like so much again... Art degraded, imagination denied; war govern'd the nations.) The Creative Commons License, on the other hand, offers a variety of options the artist has as to how his work can be used by others. In fact, it encourages collaboration and co-creation. (I'm not going to get into the details here. If you want to read more about it, go to the Creative Commons website.)

So, I've been working on a little project. I've taken some musical tracks from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts, and mixed with a segment from a Terence McKenna talk from the Psychedelic Salon podcast, both of which have Creative Commons licenses. A While ago, I sent a link to Lorenzo, the host of the Salon, to download it and give it a listen if he was interested. Well, he liked it, and he played it on the latest episode of his podcast. (Which I have to say, was pretty cool. Listening to it on the podcast that inspired it was kind of a psychedelic experience in and of itself!)

Now putting together this project was interesting. I was taking music from a band I've grown up with, albeit a recent album, and combined it with something that has been a tremendous resonance for me recently. It was almost somewhat of a reconciliation with my past-self; using the positive and strengthening aspects to the armor I wore back then and weaving them with what I have found to give me energy presently.

So, for anyone interested, you can download a high-quality MP3 of my project here. The Terence McKenna dialogue is taken from Psychedelic Salon Episode 146: The Importance of Being Human. It's actually from the end of the talk, but it seems to stand on its own as well.  This is also a work in progress. I'm working on putting together different parts of the talk with different tracks from Ghosts. I'm actually having a lot of fun doing this, and I'm glad I'm able to share it with people.

This past weekend, woodwoman15 , my brother-in-law, and myself were at Playa del Fuego, which is a regional Burning Man event. I've never been to the actual Burning Man, the cost of such a trip has pretty much set it outside the realm of consideration for me, but the wonderful thing about Burning Man is that it's more of a concept than a fixed, sedentary event. Regional burns have emerged all over the country, giving all sorts of folks like myself the opportunity to take part in such an event who would otherwise be unable to spend a week in the Nevada desert during the waning days of Summer.

Playa del Fuego (PdF for short) is held on a piece of land that is owned by a Vietnam Veterans Motorcycle Club south of Wilmington, Delaware. It's a fraction of the size of Burning Man (I believe about 1,000 people at PdF as opposed to an upwards of 40,000 at Burning Man) which makes it a little less daunting for people who aren't fond of very large crowds, and it's not in the middle of Death Valley, which while being an experience in and of itself, I can certainly understand why people might want to avoid spending a week in one of the most inhospitable climates on the planet. I'm not sure I'd want to, even. Still, it was large enough that you could pretty much walk around the entire weekend, and for a first-timer to the event, say to yourself: "Well, that's something you don't see everyday" at least every 15 minutes or so.

I had heard enough about PdF (and Burning Man) to have a general idea as to what to expect, but it's not until you are actually in the experience that you know what the impact will be for you. One of the most overwhelming and ubiquitous aspects of the experience for me is how, during the event, the clothing we wear simply by being embedded in our culture simply dissolves away. Concepts such as social class simply do not matter; the people you see wearing elaborate costumes (or quite possibly nothing at all) could very well be lawyers, accountants, janitors, teachers, programmers, politicians, unemployed drifters, or any of the other myriad occupations we generally use to define one another. However, these divisions do not exist here. Not once in all the conversations I had with people did the question "What do you do?" emerge. It was irrelevant, because "what we do" was already being expressed. There was no reason to hide who we were, and what we do out in society did not matter.

Speaking of wearing nothing at all, there were certainly plenty of people walking around wearing nothing, or simply intricately applied body paint or other such revealing costumes. The thing was, however, for the most part, it wasn't about being sexual or deviant. It was about simply being free and comfortable. It occurred to me that generally, in our culture, when you see someone with whom you are not in a relationship naked, it involves something based around sex, whether it's a pornographic film or magazine, or simply a sex scene in a movie. But at PdF, after the initial impact of "hey... that person is naked... and so is that person, and that person too," it becomes as natural as any other common event that happens on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, PdF certainly has a very sexually charged atmosphere, but it isn't tied directly to the unclad people. Sexuality, much like everything else at PdF, is not a product. It's part of an archaic, perennial element of our humanity.

While there are certainly many artists who come to PdF and create amazingly elaborate pieces of art, it's the spontaneous creation and participation that was tremendously amazing to me. My brother-in-law and I happened across a camp of people who were sitting in a circle drumming. Without any hesitation, someone handed me a drum and offered us a place to join. My brother-in-law was simply using a tin cup and tent spike. Now, I don't think I've actually pounded on a drum since 6th grade music class. With the exception of playing the viola through Junior High School, I have never had any real musical training. For all I know, the person who offered me a drum was musically trained at Julliard. Once again, this concept which, within our culture would be a very divisive boundary, did not matter. We all sat around in a circle and just drummed; at one point, another person happened along who had a flue and saxophone, and he joined in, too. No one was being judgmental, it was a spontaneous moment of participation and co-creation.

Like Burning Man, nothing is bought or sold at PdF. Gifting and trading, instead, are the concepts that reign. There are always people making food, providing coffee or tea, handing out random items such as lighters, necklaces, or pieces of art. One of the first things I did upon arriving was to stash my wallet in my bag. I certainly wasn't going to need it, and quite honestly, having ID and money on my person made me feel a little awkward. You also don't need to worry about your belongings being unattended. Civic responsibility and communal effort are also two tenants of the event. People are working together and looking out for each other. While there are indeed mediators and rangers who make sure any conflicts that might arise are dealt with and to make sure anyone who might over-indulge are safe, these things happen on a volunteer basis, and the hierarchal structure of the event is very loose. There isn't any security, nor is any needed. Serious problems that would call for a person to be removed from the event are few and far between. Everyone is ultimately responsible for themselves, yet as a family or community should, people are also looking out for each other. No one is left to go hungry, or unsheltered, or to be left passed out on the cold, damp ground. Everyone here is family.

All in all, PdF was a very profound experience for me. For me, it was an example of what has been referred to by Terence McKenna and others as The Archaic Revival. It was proof to me that humans could indeed exist in a way that encourages and fosters community, cooperation, self-expression, love and creativity as opposed to the values which dominate our culture; competition, classism, hierarchy, materialism, and monetization. Leaving the event, I felt a profound sense that I had released a tremendous amount of karmic baggage. The masks and clothing we wear in society, and the scripts we're meant to follow, become very cumbersome indeed, and the release was more than welcome.


Driving home, we spent about 20 minutes passing open fields and farms, till we got a little closer to civilization, and the inevitable roofs of the cookie-cutter suburban homes appeared over the horizon. "Ah, there it is," I mentioned to my wife and brother-in-law, "The American Dream. I knew it was around here somewhere." Now, as I type this, I'm trying to figure out how to assimilate my experience with the knowledge that I must now re-establish myself into the embrace of The Weaver. While yesterday's hot shower and last night's sleep in a warm, soft bed were certainly much welcomed creature comforts, how soon until I once again begin to take them for granted? How do I take what is now part of my past, the felt presence of immediate experience which has now been relegated to the domain of memory, and return to the "real world" of alarm clocks waking me up before my body says it's ready, giving my energy to a career I scarcely care about, keeping my feelings and desires to myself, and following a script-of-acceptability when I encounter all the people with whom I interact, whether co-workers, neighbors, or family members? I'm starting to feel a sense of foreboding, as if I'm about to walk into a burning building, knowing full well that the flames will no doubt consume me. But I suppose these are parts of the trials we set for ourselves before coming into this incarnation. Better to know for certain that the world I envision, the world that my heart and intuition have always told me is possible, the world that the poets and musicians and authors and philosophers I have followed have eluded to, really does exist, than to bang my head against the wall wondering if I'm just being naive, foolish and juvenile.

But a valuable lesson was learned this weekend. Life is indeed art, every aspect of it. And it's that concept that will keep the despair at bay. So, back into the dream I go, for now. The real world will still be there, residing in the domain of imagination, awaiting my return.

I just came across this tidbit of information on boingboing.

First, some words from Dr. Ron Paul:

Being that today is the autumnal equinox... here's a little Blake to tantalize the imagination...

To Autumn
by William Blake

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain'd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

Richard Wright, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, has died.

Remember when you were young,
You shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes,
Like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire
Of childhood and stardom,
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!

You reached for the secret too soon,
You cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night,
And exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome
With random precision,
Rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

... there is a breath of fresh air. I'm so glad that these guys are still out there reminding us that an ultimatum is far from a choice.



I've been saying for a while now that unless every candidate from every party is fairly represented in the debates and the media, then the democratic process upon which this country was supposedly founded ceases to exist. The two from the major parties should be demanding that every candidate be included. That they do not should speak a thousand words to us, no matter which side of the fence we are on.

"The less of two bads is not good enough for the American people." -Ralph Nader

Best quote I've heard from a Presidential Candidate in a long time.