LOVE for the Environment

Saturday 29 May 2010

by: Dan Brook, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

All we need is LOVE.

There are many things and we can (and should) do to preserve and protect our environment if we want to preserve and protect life on Earth. Reducing consumption of resources, reusing products and materials, and recycling what can no longer be reused are all critical to being more sustainable. However, the most important personal thing we can each do for the environment is to fall in LOVE: Local, Organic,Vegetarian/Vegan Eating. (Vegetarians don't eat any animals; even better, vegans don't consume any animal products, including eggs and dairy.)

There is consensus amongst the overwhelming majority of the world's scientists, environmentalists, governments, major corporations, and many others that climate change in the form of global warming is, by far, the most important environmental problem facing life on Earth. Carrying reusable bags, changing to energy-efficient light bulbs, saving water, and driving less are all very good things to do, yet they all pale in comparison to the cool effects of LOVE.

None of these or other positive actions prevent us from doing others, and we should try to do everything we can to live more sustainable lives. However, eating has a much bigger personal impact on the environment - as well as our health and the health of animals - than anything else most of us ever do.

Here's some LOVE!

Local

Think globally, eat locally!

The average item of food in the U.S. travels approximately 1500 miles from production to consumption. By eating locally and seasonally, you're reducing your food miles, the amount of distance your food has to travel from farm to table, thereby cutting down on the amount of oil consumed and greenhouse gases emitted. Being a locavore cuts down on traffic and the need for energy-hogging refrigeration, both of which contribute to global warming. These are all benefits for the environment. And any benefit for planetary health is also a benefit for our personal health.

Eating locally means eating fresher and healthier produce, eating fruits and vegetables that are in season and grown in your region. Fresher produce maintains more of its nutrients. That's not only healthier and tastier for you and your family, but also better for your region's economy and ecology, supporting local farm families and the local economy while preserving biodiversity and building community. The easiest and most fun way to eat more local is to shop at farmers' markets, where seasonal produce is abundant and, according to sociological studies, people tend to be more social. Packaging, plastic water bottles, and chemicals, for example, are not local. Specifically, pesticides are almost always not local, so eating organic is also vitally important.

Organic

Don't panic, just go organic!

Organic agriculture means farming without the hazards of synthetic pesticides. Quite simply, agricultural chemicals are toxic and deadly, as is their intention. Author Sandor Katz states that, "Agricultural chemicals kill - and not only plants and insects and worms and birds and fungi and the vast universe of soil organisms; they kill people as well." Claire Cricuolo, both nurse and chef, relates that, "When you buy organic, you help to promote biodiversity and cut down on the pesticides that pollute our soil, air, and water. You also support natural systems that will ensure the integrity of our farmlands for future generations."

Organic methods produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, using only one-third the petroleum as chemicalized crops, while sequestering more carbon dioxide in the soil, thereby being another powerful way to help stem global warming. As with local produce, organic produce also tends to have a higher level of nutrients, studies show, and may be tastier as well. Eating organic is not only healthier for consumers, but is also healthier for farmers, neighbors, animals, insects, and the soil, as well as everyone and everything downstream. Many chefs and other foodies also believe that organic foods taste better.

Another big bonus to eating organic is knowing that you are not consuming any genetically engineered products with their unknown potential personal, public, and environmental consequences.

Alan Greene, M.D. affirms that, "Every little move towards organics is worthwhile." The most effective ways to become more organic is to (1) "Switch out foods you eat most often", (2) "Replace the worst offenders", and (3) "Shop locally, eat seasonally".

Vegetarian/Vegan Eating

Go vegetarian/vegan and no one gets hurt!

It is increasingly clear that eliminating, or at least sharply reducing, the production and consumption of meat and other animal products is the single best thing people can do for human health, animal suffering, worker safety, and environmental sustainability.

The editors of World Watch, an environmental magazine, concluded in the July/August 2004 edition that, "The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future - deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease." The November/December 2009 issue of World Watch stated that recent evidence and new calculations reveal that the livestock industry is responsible for 51% - a majority! - of greenhouse gases. Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct when she states that at the root of almost "every great environmental complaint there's milk and meat."

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize laureate along with Al Gore, and head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, states that the mass production of meat is a major factor contributing to global warming and that, "The single [most effective] action that a person can take to reduce carbon emissions is vegetarianism." We ignore or deny this critical yet simple information at our individual and collective peril. LOVE is the most powerful antidote, by far, against global warming!

We also need LOVE for our invironment, the environment inside of us. Vegetarians live six to ten years longer, on average, than those who eat meat. Vegetarians have much lower rates of heart disease, cancer, and stroke - the three leading causes of death in the U.S. - as well as more protection against diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, hypertension, gout, kidney diseases, and even Alzheimer's.

What you eat on a daily basis is actually more important than what you buy, save, recycle, or even drive. Eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) is like packing old light bulbs, single-use plastics, styrofoam, hormones, antibiotics, tar, toxic chemicals, chainsaws, SUVs and other deadly clunkers into your pantry all the time. Get the junk out of your pantry and diet! Get the junk out of your community and environment! Get the junk out of your body! LOVE yourself and your family!

If you're not ready to fall madly in LOVE, it's OK to flirt with it. LOVE doesn't have to be all or nothing and it doesn't have to be all at once. You can play with your food, but make sure to have fun.

LOVE can also stand for Living Opposed to Violence against theEnvironment. We can stop the violence in the world by stopping the violence on our plates. More LOVE means more peace, inside each of us, within our families, and around the world, for this and future generations. Besides being more compassionate toward animals and much healthier for you and your family, as well as lifting your spirit and boosting your energy, LOVE can help save the world by preserving and protecting our precious planet.

As they say in the 12-step programs, it's about "Progress not perfection." What path are you on? In which direction is the Cupid's Arrow of your life pointed?

Spread the LOVE!

Sagittarius Full Moon, May 27, 2010

Get ready to step into the Fire!

This full Moon in Sagittarius fires up the mind with creative inspiration while Uranus' entry into Aries hours after the full Moon will bring the fire to you in a big way.

Once Jupiter, the ruler of Sagittarius, enters Aries on June 6^th and then joins Uranus on June 8^th, the flames will grow even brighter and hotter. Fire is dangerous as well as beautiful. You have to know how to work with fire. So become a fire-keeper and learn how to serve the sacred fires of Life.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Prayers from Chief Arvol Looking Horse

A Great Urgency

To All World Religious and Spiritual Leaders

My Relatives,

Time has come to speak to the hearts of our Nations and their Leaders. I ask
you this from the bottom of my heart, to come together from the Spirit
of your Nations in prayer.

We, from the heart of Turtle Island, have a great message for the World;
we are guided to speak from all the White Animals showing their sacred color,
which have been signs for us to pray for the sacred life of all things. As I am
sending this message to you, many Animal Nations are being threatened,
those that swim, those that crawl, those that fly, and the plant Nations,
eventually all will be affect from the oil disaster in the Gulf.

The dangers we are faced with at this time are not of spirit. The
catastrophe that has happened with the oil spill which looks like the
bleeding of Grandmother Earth, is made by human mistakes, mistakes that we
cannot afford to continue to make.

I asked, as Spiritual Leaders, that we join together, united in prayer with
the whole of our Global Communities. My concern is these serious issues will
continue to worsen, as a domino effect that our Ancestors have warned us of
in their Prophecies.

I know in my heart there are millions of people that feel our united prayers
for the sake of our Grandmother Earth are long overdue. I believe we as
Spiritual people must gather ourselves and focus our thoughts and prayers to
allow the healing of the many wounds that have been inflicted on the Earth.
As we honor the Cycle of Life, let us call for Prayer circles globally to
assist in healing Grandmother Earth (our Unc¹I Maka).

We ask for prayers that the oil spill, this bleeding, will stop. That the
winds stay calm to assist in the work. Pray for the people to be guided in
repairing this mistake, and that we may also seek to live in harmony, as we
make the choice to change the destructive path we are on.

As we pray, we will fully understand that we are all connected. And that
what we create can have lasting effects on all life.

So let us unite spiritually, All Nations, All Faiths, One Prayer. Along
with this immediate effort, I also ask to please remember June 21st, World
Peace and Prayer Day/Honoring Sacred Sites day. Whether it is a natural
site, a temple, a church, a synagogue or just your own sacred space, let us
make a prayer for all life, for good decision making by our Nations, for our
children¹s future and well-being, and the generations to come.

Onipikte (that we shall live),

Chief Arvol Looking Horse
19th generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe
(Wolakota.org)

Beyond a Left-Brain Rational Scientific Kind of Thinking

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Pink Flower

Magic there was in human thought at one time, and spiritual awareness. But it was the magic of a prior age and the scientific revolution of a few centuries back divorced itself from that magic. But ultimately that was OK if a bit brutal because dry left brained science eventually rediscovered that magic. Magic has now been rediscovered by left brain science and so you might say that science has gone past itself and circled around back and found religion. Well actually it is a lot better than that.

Religion, though it contains an element of spirituality, is also a bit superstitious. It knows things but it does not know how it knows and can get a bit into belief in magic that goes a bit off sometimes. People who distrust science and believe in religion exclusively and never want to know the how of things, can be dogmatic judgmental puritanical and hypocritical. They believe essentially in a religion that does not transcend science but precedes it in excellence.

But then dry science came along and seemed at first to fix all that. But it too had its limitations. It works not by over-emotional and sometimes emotionally negative thought processes but in a way that puts a push/shove force-oriented 3D Newtonian-physics and machine-god and god-of-entropy on top of everything. That is one tiny step past old hocus pocus religion. But it deifies God's creature, the 3D universe, and throws God out.

What is needed is a synthesis of both old type science and old religion. And that synthesis is alive in a culture that lives on the periphery of the present center-stage dying culture. The remote beginnings of that new cultural synthesis began to show its face when science discovered the fourth dimension and its physics, quantum physics.

The fourth dimension is bigger and more inclusive and so is closer to God than the third dimension. Studying it allows one to get past Newton's rather mechanical god of left brain, find-the-ghost-or-soul-in-the-body-by-carving-it-up-and-killing-it, or analytical pieces parts dissection. We do it in knife happy and pill happy medicine, and Monsanto-happy gene manipulation and Russian roulette with the planet's genetic code. And we do it in too many ways of western thought, we do it with our analysis-happy thinking that rarely senses wholeness.

We have created a better way to think since that kind of science, but alas, in the broad realm of culture in general, we still see the old 3D machine god of the movie Clock Work Orange. We see merely analytical thinking in so many places in this dying culture. The philosophical implications of 4D physics has not translated itself yet to be a cultural phenomenon. And so we see the old deification of science leaving its heavy footprint on people's way of thinking and of living. That heavy footprint stomps the third world and the environmnet and all that can not stick up for itself.

When the scientists first discovered the magical quantum inner subatomic world they were amazed. The old laws that said that all results are a mechanical downhill thrust predetermined by the former step of push or causation or logic were suddenly, in 4D physics, transcended. The behaviors of things in the subatomic realm is not entirely causal. There is an element of free will and magic.

You and I know that we are not billiard balls merely bouncing off of one another. Humans do not just do a passive or simple reactive response to each other that is mechanically predetermined. We have an element of free will in our actions. Insurance salesmen know that despite that that it is still statistically true that X amount of accidents will happen on average on any given day.

And that is how things work on the subatomic plane. On average things obey statistical laws in 4D but beneath that there is a freedom that the 3D world does not have except in miniscule amounts and that working very slowly. Things in 4D obey statistical laws and leave the door open for more and that at great speed.

You and I are not fated to have an accident because of statistics. There is an element of free will involved in our actions beyond statistics. And that is true of all actions on the subatomic plane. One might say that actions on the subatomic plane respond extremely readily to the non-causal push of thought. Thought with free will in it. Electrons and protons act that way. They appear to have a mind of their own or do at the very least respond to mental push, extremely readily, a thing you do not see in 3D.

Even though things in 3D work much more slowly the miraculous is none-the-less common. In everyday reality in human endeavor we can find inner miraculous workings of things that are impossible to explain. Humans do not live entirely in this 3D machine universe of pure cause and effect. If we did we could not take ourselves to task to do more.

The mystery is that this inner 4D world is right here. And although it is within 3D it is a vaster world. The 3D world exists downhill of it and as a special case of it. One would think that therefore that 3D would exist within 4D but paradoxically it is the other way around. Or it seems so since this is the world of the subatomic and seems smaller.

When the holy men tell you to "go within" they are not talking metaphorically. They are talking about going in your awareness to the fourth dimension, a broader dimension paradoxically inside the third dimension. There is more light inside a black whole than outside and more room in there too as things in there are denser. That fact of physics of the subatomic 4D world is of the same kind of paradoxical reality. That is how this universe is made.

Ultimately science is not antithetical and contradictory to religion but both are part of a larger whole. And spirituality, and a spiritual kind of science, is the greater whole that includes them. Our current western world culture is only beginning to discover that kind of magic.

1 | 2 | 3

The Sacred Apology to Women from Astarius Miraculii

Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull of what you really love.
It will not lead you astray.

~ Rumi ~

(Essential Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks)

Building the World We Want: Interview with Mark Lakeman

Interview with the co-founder of the City Repair Project, a Portland group that helps neighbors turn public spaces into gathering places.

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by Brooke Jarvis

posted May 12, 2010

Following "intersection repair" by local neighbors, the corner of 33rd St. and Yamhill in Portland, Ore. is now better known as Sunnyside Piazza.

Photo courtesy of City Repair

“That’s public space. Nobody can use it.”

That was one Portland city official’s response when Mark Lakeman and his neighbors first began building unauthorized gathering places in their neighborhood in 1996.

To Lakeman, an urban designer, this seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of public space. Together with his neighbors, he formed the City Repair Project, a volunteer-run nonprofit that set out to change the way Portlanders think about the places where people come together.

They started by reclaiming their own intersection, and were eventually organizing neighbors, building benches, and painting streets throughout the city. The goal, as City Repair’s motto puts it, was no longer just to preserve public space, but, by recognizing its character and identity, to transform it into Place: “inhabited, known, and loved by its residents.”

At the end of this month, City Repair will host its eighth annual building convergence, a ten-day festival hosting workshops and neighborhood improvement projects around the city. City Repair’s projects now include Depave Portland, which removes unnecessary asphalt to make way for urban gardens, and Upcycle Market, a monthly event where people get together to swap skills and supplies. Groups around the county are trying out City Repair's methods in their own neighborhoods.

And Portland itself? The city now sees public space—and neighborhood building projects—quite differently. Not long after City Repair was founded, the city passed an ordinance allowing neighborhoods to build gathering places in street intersections.

---

Taking Back the Streets
A photo essay of City Repair projects

Brooke Jarvis: You called your organization City Repair—in what way are cities broken?

Mark Lakeman: For most of the history of humanity, we lived and worked in the same places, integrated, and everything we did would deepen our relationships to each other. The greatest product of that way of life was our cultural cohesion and our stories—we weren’t isolated the way that we are now.

But our cities and places are no longer ours. We’re not building our own places; we’re not designing them to fit our own needs. Our lives are zoned like we’re a resource to be managed. We're housed here, and then this is where we work in order to pay for the housing we barely get to live in. Mixed use here. Monocultural use here. Parking garage. Maybe a waterfront here. Park. Park. It doesn't add up. None of them are really whole.

So many of our phobias and issues come from separating the pieces of our lives. We’re less connected to the people around us, and we’re less connected to our work: the fruit of our labor goes into a landfill so that someone can buy a boat. It's the stupidest possible vision, and it plays out in terms of the holocaust of our creativity and of our experience of being alive. It's unfathomable how inefficient it is, and how painful.

Putting the public space back where it's supposed to be may not sound like a huge change, but it has a profound effect on the social culture.

I studied design, and for a while I was working on these big corporate design projects. They were very typical—in the cultural atmosphere they created, in the way they would impact the people that would work there. They weren’t inspiring or creative; they didn’t let people come together; they didn’t encourage people to do the work that would make them happy and make their communities better. I wanted to live in a world that was an expression of who we are.

Brooke: You started with a place that most of us don’t really think of as a place at all: the intersection of two streets. Why not change the places people spend time, like homes, parks, or offices?

Mark: Exactly. Why don’t we spend time in intersections? When I discovered I didn’t want to work on those typical design projects, I decided to look for something else: different patterns, a different perspective on what was possible. While I was traveling, I saw, over and over, that people's gathering places occur where their pathways come together and intersect. The idea of the crossroads is really ancient, of course; it pervades indigenous societies. It’s also a fundamental principle of urban design in modern societies, except it’s often obscured and denied. You're trying to control modern people, to keep them moving, not to let them gather like they would in a village.

When I came back from all these village-based cultures, I walked into the neighborhood where I grew up—a Roman-grid neighborhood, very typical in America, with straight, imposed lines but no gathering spaces—and I'm like, "The piazza is not here, where it's supposed to be."

In America, our great archetype is the main street, which is not really a center. It's just a flow. It's a movement corridor, and you have to yell across the street because there isn't a place in the middle. There isn't a social commons that you can attain and occupy.

10 Courageous Things You Can Do to Build Community

Putting the public space back where it's supposed to be may not sound like a huge change, but it has a profound effect on the social culture. Everybody needs it even though they don't know it's missing. I knew that from visiting other societies where it was present, where there is cohesion and vitality and integrated families and community structures. We know that Americans are more lonely and isolated than ever before, but we don’t realize that the absence of cohesion in American communities is totally related to the absence of places where people can actually build that.

Brooke: But if you can’t redesign the whole neighborhood, what do you do to change an intersection built for cars into a place where people can build community?

Mark: At our first project, the neighbors who lived around the intersection came out on the weekend, painted a design in the street, built all these structures around the corners—a bench, a lending library, a 24-hour tea stand, a children’s playhouse, a kiosk for sharing neighborhood information—and turned it into an interactive social space. And boom!

That was years ago. Share-It Square—that’s what we call it—is one of my favorite projects because I live right there, I get to see its evolution. Since then people have built saunas, put in gardens, helped each other paint their houses. Americans move every four to seven years, and that period of time is visibly lengthening right around that intersection because people want to live there. Families are clustering around it, having kids or bringing their kids, so there are more children—and more shared childcare, and more adults interacting with kids on the street.

Sometimes people living there disagree about what they want to do, and they wonder if that's imperfect. I think it's beautiful. People are learning about each other, and working things out. Sometimes it's a bunch of steps forward and a few steps back, and every step back is OK. It's like you're just setting foot a little bit more solidly before you take another step forward. It's wonderful.

Brooke: Did the city, and other authorities, feel the same way?

Mark: At first, everybody was telling us that we had broken the law, but once they saw what we’d actually done, they wanted to figure out how to do it again. The mayor saw it, and she's like, "You need to tell me what you've done, because I can see that it's good, but I don't understand.” The city had established all of these goals for livability and sustainability and walkability and safer streets and safer kids, but getting there was another story. You can't achieve those goals unless you do what we did. All the solutions to all those goals can only be generated by people right where they live, finally having power together.

The power of what we do is we start with the idea and the belief that we can make it happen.

There’s so much we need to change, but I really don’t think it's going to be all that hard. We just need to say, "There's nowhere to sit around here? Well, we need to create some places to sit. People aren't talking? Then we need gathering places." You look at the problem of a particular place and you address it. People start to get excited; the void starts to get filled. The projects are small, but they keep coming as revelations.

Brooke: So what did you say to the mayor? What had you done that was different from what the city did, trying to accomplish the same goals?

Mark: The city has a different method. People generate goals for their neighborhoods, which go into reports and onto shelves. And they sit there long enough that people forget about them. But the needs are still unmet, so they fundraise and they meet and they generate new goals—and those go into a report on another shelf.

The power of what we do is we start with the idea and the belief that we can make it happen. If it has a social basis, if your primary goal is to build networks and relationships, then you attract all the other forms of capital that begin with the social. That's the magic. That's the key.

After everything you see on TV or in politics, you would think that asking a group of Americans to sit down and work out something like this would be difficult. But it's not. People sit down for a potluck, and maybe that very evening they start talking about what they want to do. This year, we're going to reach a total of over 200 major sites and almost 300 little projects that have been built.

Brooke: Do you have any favorites, among the projects you’ve worked with?

Mark: Some of them are really simple things. Like, there's this wonderful intersection that has a painting of an oak tree, in honor of a tree that used to stand there. Everyone called it Ruth’s tree after their neighbor, who had planted it when she was a little girl. When she was in her 90s, she died. Shortly after, the tree fell over into the intersection. So the community comes out and paints this huge effigy of the tree, right there.

Then there’s the T-Horse, which is a mobile tea house—it travels around to different neighborhoods in Portland, and wherever it goes people gather to drink tea, or play Frisbee, or whatever. It’s a vehicle with enormous wings, so it really entices people out.

The Memorial Lighthouse is also beautiful. It's a solar-powered pillar of cob that glows at night, decorated with bicycle wheels and mosaic stained glass. It was built in memorial to a bicyclist who was killed there, by a truck. His mother and friends would bring flowers and gifts and leave them in the place where he died, and his mother would come and mourn him, just sitting there on the sidewalk. Finally the neighbors asked if one of the corners of the intersection—a corner of a person's yard—could be turned into a memorial to him and a place for his mother to sit. So this beautiful celebration of his life was created. He was a bicycle activist, so there's a strong bike theme.

And every one of them is as dear as that. When that one was built, a lot of us realized that up to that point there had not been one public memorial to any of the people we lived with in our community—they were all to dead presidents or wealthy people. So that one project not only turned a tragedy into a permanent celebration of someone’s life, it helped uncover all of these issues about inequity and political power. I don't know of one project that hasn't done that.

Brooke: As neighborhoods come up with their own projects, what is City Repair’s role?

Mark: It’s really upending the model I was taught—to be the author of someone else's project, the designer. What we do now is take calls for help. These days we convene dozens of neighborhoods at once—there are maybe three dozen projects happening around Portland right now. Our main role is facilitation, taking people through dialogues about fundraising or outreach or ecological design, teaching skills that communities can use on their own.

The focus that we have them constantly keeping in mind is that they're not building stuff. They're building relationships. How they treat each other is the most important thing, and what it looks like doesn't matter at all.

Brooke: It seems kind of telling that even when people recognize what’s missing and have great ideas about ways to fix it, we still feel powerless enough that we reach out to groups like City Repair for help. Why do you think we need that catalyst?

Mark: I think it’s a confidence issue. We hear so often in the media that we’re inadequate: Americans only have 15-second attention spans, or are more polarized than ever, or this is how often we hurt or kill each other. We see this as portraits of who we are and we believe that we’re not capable of working together. After what we’ve done with City Repair, I totally know that it can be very different.

City Repair in Action
Video: Portlanders build the neighborhoods they want.

But it’s not surprising that some people need a little bit of help to confirm their suspicions that we're good, or that we can be. Just to feel good about being human needs a little confirmation.

The same is true for our sense of our own power. It's always felt so absurd to read in the paper, "Here's something wrong, here's something wrong, here's something wrong"—and know we all feel helpless to do anything about it because we have to get back to work. That's the work. Every American neighborhood is characterized by this absurdity: There are children being victimized or there's domestic violence, but at the beginning of the day we get ourselves all ready and we go off to do something that we often don't even respect or enjoy. And at the end of the day we haven't addressed these bleeding concerns in our communities.

When did we stop believing we had a say in our own reality? What if someone asked you at the start of your life, "Where will your power reside? Will it be in you or someone else?" Given that choice, everyone would say, “Me.” And what would you do with that power? "Wow, I would help the world," is what a whole lot of people would say. If that were how we answered that fundamental question, our world would be so different. The beautiful thing happening now is that dozens and dozens and dozens of people saying, "Yes, I have my power," and then creating these physical expressions of what it actually looks like.

---

Brooke Jarvis interviewed Mark Lakeman for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Brooke is YES! Magazine's web editor.

Interested?

• People Taking Charge
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  If we believe there is nothing more urgent than building a just and sustainable world, maybe we simply need to start building it, beginning wherever we are. Meet the ordinary people who are both the creators and the beneficiaries of free spaces.

• The Village Building Convergence
  Video: For ten days in the summer, Portland neighborhoods become places where anything's possible.
  

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

The Journey

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Dream Work)

The Whale Said "Thank You"

If you read a recent front page story of the SF Chronicle ,
you would have read about a female humpback whale
that had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.
She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps
that caused her to struggle to stay afloat.
She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body,
her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the
Golden Gate ) and radioed an environmental group for help.


Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so
bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her.

They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.

When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous
circles.

She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time,
and nudged them, pushed them gently around...she was thanking them.
Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.

The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were
following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate
to be surrounded by people who will help you get untangled
from the things that are binding you.

And, may you always know the joy of giving and receiving gratitude.

I pass this on to you, my friends, in the same spirit.

Taurus New Moon 2010

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Taurus New Moon 2010

The New Moon in Taurus occurs on Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 6:04pm Eastern/9:04pm Pacific time at 24* Taurus. We are living in the midst of the Garden of Delight days (in the Northern hemisphere) are getting warmer, plants and trees are flowering, life is good. More than anything else, Taurus loves the peace and security of these beautiful days of May.

Taurus the Bull is an ancient constellation, one of the first imagined by our ancestors as they looked to the heavens. Known in ancient times as The Bull of Light, the Taurean Mother Goddess takes the creative phallic energy of Aries, the spark of life which animates matter and the mind, and embodies it as the power, grace, fertility and strength of the Bull. Taurus is the Mother's response to that first creative spark of the cosmic fires of life, making it blossom here on Earth.

The Bull has been an important mythological and astrological symbol since the age of Taurus, from approximately 4,000 to 2,100 BC., the age of the builders of the Pyramids andStonehenge. The cow-headed goddess Hathor was worshipped during this age as a goddess of fertility, joy and love. The Egyptians believed Taurus symbolized the perpetual return of life, and they identified this time of year with Osiris, the promise of eternal life. They believed the celestial Bull incarnated as the Apis Bull and associated it with Osiris and the Pharaoh, sharing its qualities of a courageous heart, great strength, virility, and fighting spirit.

The Persians also worshipped the Bull and their god Mithra, the protector of Truth, was the god of cattle, wide pastures and the waters that nourished them. In sacrificing the Bull, Mithra offered this potent life to his followers.

In Crete, they trained their priests and priestesses to be bull dancers, leaping and twirling over the bull's horns to claim the power and agility and strength of the bull. The great bull leapers of Crete learned to dance with the bulls. They learned how to express power, balance and skill in the ways of the physical world. That's the Taurus lesson.

Later during the age of Aries, warrior societies counted bulls as a major source of wealth, power and potency. There are stories of the famous bulls of Ireland - the Brown Bull of Ulster and the White Horned Bull of Connaught and the wars fought over them. Bulls are still sacred inIndia.

Power, peace, wealth, security, Spirit incarnate, the perpetual renewal of life, these are the gifts of Taurus. How will we use them?

Another image for Taurus is the Garden, from its association with Venus/Aphrodite, Inanna, Ishtar, Hathor and the Tarot Trump, The Empress. These goddesses of Heaven and Earth, love and sexuality, fertility and joy all share the Garden as their landscape of choice. These gardens are places of green growth and peace, joy and beauty; the Garden welcomes us as a shelter for our Spirits. The Garden celebrates both the beauty of the Earth and the beauty of human sexuality.

Taurus asks us to reclaim our bodies and sexuality from the frivolous and the pornographic.Taurus knows Sex is Sacred. Taurus tells us that our body is the temple of our Spirit. How conscious are you of your body, your instincts, your senses? Now is the time to let them awaken, just as the Earth is awakening from its winter sleep.

As we imagine the beauty, peace, completeness, and joy of the Garden, we have to understand it within the context of the upcoming cardinal T-square between Pluto, Uranus and Saturn, the planets of the 60s revolution. We have arrived at the point where we have to fight for our vision in the next few years. So spend time imagining how this eternal Garden might begin to incarnate for us.

Pluto in Capricorn is at the apex of this T-square, and this planet of transformation will transform our culture and our lives, whether we like it or not. But we can't get rid of something if we don't know what to replace it with. We have to have a vision for the future. We've got to get ourselves back to the Garden, as Joni Mitchell sang.

Within this context, the transformation of the culture will not go forward unless we develop a sense of our independence and unique purpose (when Uranus and Jupiter go into Aries in June) while at the same time standing firm for fairness between people and groups (Saturn in Libra).We are called to become revolutionaries, holding the vision of the Garden as one of beauty, peace and cooperation, instead of death and power and destruction.

In this next stage of the 60s revolution, we are called to expand our sexual, social, environmental and artistic freedom to the next level. And we need to do it right. The forces of fear are strong. The old forces of domination, wealth and power are fighting back. But we will progress. New life always wins out over what is old and decaying.

So how can we engage in the fight if we stand for peace? The answer is: We need to become Earth Warriors.

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On the Oregon Coast

On the Oregon Coast

For William Stafford

The waves come - the large fourth wave
Looming up, thinking, crashing down - all
Roll in so prominently that I become small
And write this in a cramped script, hard to read.

Well, all this fury, prominent or not
Is also hard to read, and the ducks don't help,
Settling down in furry water, shaking
Themselves, and then forgetting it within a minute.

Remembering the fury, it is up to us, even
Though we feel small compared to the loose
Ocean, to keep sailing and not land,
And figure out what to say to our children.

~ Robert Bly ~

(Meditations on the Insatiable Soul)