2/26/2014

We Are Old Earth


"We are unknowledgeable in our individual selves, it is the whole-Earth part of us that contains immense knowledge. Over the generations of human life, we have come to discern small parts of that knowledge, and humans house this internally. The way we act in our human capacity has significant effect on the Earth because it is said that we are the hands of the spirit, in that we can fashion Earth pieces with that knowledge and therefore transform the Earth. It is our most powerful potential, and so we are told that we are responsible for the Earth. We are keepers of the Earth because we are Earth. We are old Earth."
Jeanette Armstrong - Okanagan

2/21/2014

Super Power



"There is another super power here on earth. It is an unnamed movement, it is far different and bigger and more unique than anything we have ever seen. It flies under the radar of the media, by and large. It is nonviolent, it is grassroots, no armies and no helicopters. It has no central ideology. A male vertebrate is not in charge. This unnamed movement is the most diverse movement the world has ever seen. The very word "movement" I think is too small to describe it. No one started this world view, no one is in charge of it, there is no orthodoxy. It is global, classless, unquenchable and tireless. The shared understanding is arising spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions and cohorts. It is growing and spreading worldwide with no exception. It has many roots but primarily the origins are indigenous culture, the environment and social justice movements, those three sectors. The subsectors are intertwining, morphing, enlarging. This is no longer or simply about resources or tractions or injustice. This is fundamentally a civil rights movement, a human rights movement,  It is the coming world." - Paul Hawken

2/11/2014

REGARDING LOVE



"How few understand what love really is, and how it arises in the human heart.  It is so frequently equated with good feelings toward others, with benevolence or nonviolence or service.  But these things in themselves are not love.  Love springs from awareness.  It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or she really is here and how and not as they are in your memory or your desire or in your imagination or projection that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this person, or this person as the object of your desire not as he or she is in themselves. The first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as it truly is.  And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your desires, your prejudices, your memories, your projections, your selective way of looking ...a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong into good actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism.  When you set out to serve someone whom you have not taken the trouble to see, are you meeting that person's need or your own? -  Father Anthony de Mello

2/08/2014

Dreamtime



Wade Davis spent time in the Northern Territory of Australia, working on a film with the Aboriginees on Dreamtime and the Songlines. He reports from his time there: "I must tell you of the Dreaming. Spent a month in the Northern Territory. Here's a copy of the note that I sent back in week three, from a sat phone at a waterhole 200 miles east of the road in Arnhem Land. “These are and were a people with no notion of linear time. Theirs was one of the great experiments in human thought. The notion that the world existed as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of humanity was to maintain through ritual activity the land precisely as it existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation. The logos of the Dreaming were constancy, balance, symmetry.  In the moment there is deductive logic, on a hunt for example, when the men pay attention to signs with a perceptiveness that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. But in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning. Had humanity followed this track, it is true that we would have never placed a man on the moon. But we would most certainly not be speaking of our capacity to compromise the life support of the planet. I have never in all of my travels been so moved by a vision of another possibility, born literally 55,000 years ago. This world is so amazing. The realm of the modern is just the floss. The ancient rhythms resonate in ways we can only imagine."

Change


2/05/2014

Fitful Influences


We with our lives are like islands in the seas, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves.... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. Our 'normal' consciousness is circumscribed for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond leak in, showing the otherwise unverifiable common connection.
-William James - the father of modern psychology

Hurt others; hurt ourselves


All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One.
Wallace Black Elk



Plausible


The idea of a universal Mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory; at least it is in harmony with it. 
-Sir Arthur Eddington

2/03/2014

Empathy


Do the Hard Things


To be successful in life, you have to do the hard things.
  • You have to make the call you’re afraid to make.
  • You have to get up earlier than you want to get up.
  • You have to give more than you get in return right away.
  • You have to care more about others than they care about you.
  • You have to fight when you are already injured, bloody, and sore.
  • You have to feel unsure and insecure when playing it safe seems smarter.
  • You have to lead when no one else is following you yet.
  • You have to invest in yourself even though no one else is.
  • You have to look like a fool while you’re looking for answers you don’t have.
  • You have to grind out the details when it’s easier to shrug them off.
  • You have to deliver results when making excuses is an option.
  • You have to search for your own explanations even when you’re told to accept the “facts.”
  • You have to make mistakes and look like an idiot.
  • You have to try and fail and try again.
  • You have to run faster even though you’re out of breath.
  • You have to be kind to people who have been cruel to you.
  • You have to meet deadlines that are unreasonable and deliver results that are unparalleled.
  • You have to be accountable for your actions even when things go wrong.
  • You have to keep moving towards where you want to be no matter what’s in front of you.