Category Archives: Ethos

What will come of this? 

Year 2222
200 winters away
How many generations will have passed?
What will I&I enjoy in life? What of one's own ways will continue?
What lessons will I&I have learned?
What challenges will I&I face?

What will I&I have of the essential gifts to sustain oneself? Wood, water, air, soil, energy?

#TreesAreTheAnswer #WeAlreadyKnow #Hózhó

One Branch of Many

A heartfelt comment on diversity from a non-speaker with autism:

Why do you think people like us were made, were born

Mankind expresses itself finely in variety
We are one branch of many on a long lots-of-leaves diverse and wonderful beauty tree

I know that each leaf has a value and meaning to the life in itself. So our mission is to prove it. We have launched out of the door. I am wondering and looking forward to what outside the door looks like.

via the Wretches and Jabberers movie

Make your community a better place ?

If you could do one thing to make your community a better place what would you do?

via J.T. @ https://www.facebook.com/jerome516/posts/1082094282191807

This is a great question Jerome, thanks for sharing it and your thoughts.
I would prioritize healthy, equitable agroforests through urban and rural landscapes. Trees that can help meet people’s basic needs (fiber, fuel, food, farmaceuticals, fun, +), in public parks and sidewalk green spaces, in yards, serving as bountiful fences, and texturing our agricultural landscapes, diets, and cultures. Acts of restoration, relinquishment, and resilience which ripple mass reforestation and good health.

Much love to the trees that have been with our northern climate ancestors who I’d hope to see in my area: hazelnuts, birches, maples, honeyberries, chestnuts, acorns, hickories, walnuts and pecans and that whole fam, elderberries, willows, spruces, and so many more.

More specifically, if it needs to be one single thing: cultivate a cooperatively-owned tree crop processing facility that can be used in the community and potentially as a regional hub, to help people meet their basic needs using trees. Areas of primary interest would be:

  • food (for biocultural restoration),
  • fuel (to heal fossil fuel addiction), and
  • fiber (to build resilience in the face of social environmental, and economic disturbances).

Interested in this also? Let’s talk and collaborate, let’s walk and exacerbate our own nuttiness, let’s squawck and walk the talk and elaborate on a way to initiate … do great or forsake. People ate acorns for millennia before they ate candy corns. Let’s make it happen.

Album playlist: Nate – Make It Happen

Predation & Evolution

I poem I originally shared July 15, 2014:

wild cat catching a fish

SPLASH
FIGHT
BITE
All was alright in the world, as I was moving toward the light
Looking for some food so I’d sleep well through the night
And awaken another day
My mouth becomes open
!!! Woah I am awoken !
I spread my wings and make like a cross
Then my world is tossed – tension to release; anticipation to closure; potential to kinetic
So,
It is written
Now I make like the moss (gratitude to the roots, foundations of the Kingdom)
Growing slowly through the churning fires of Time
Now at the turning of the rhyme, I ask:
Have I eaten or been eaten?

Slow and steady thoughtstream

Lessons from sleight of hand and spirituality: take it slow, do it smooth.

Slow gives the appearance of smooth

Smooth gives the appearance of speed

Speed gives the appearance of magic

via paraphrasing from R.I. sleight of hand magician

Slowing down thoughts is one of the most effective methods for changing negative habits of thinking. As long as the mind is working furiously, it’s not possible to stop it; it’s not even possible to make a turn. But when you are able to see thoughts going by in single file, you can recognize them and say, ‘Hey, you’re no friend!’ You can choose not even to say hello to a negative thought, and its power to agitate you will be completely lost. This is how we learn not to identify ourselves with our thoughts, which means we have the power to pick and choose which thoughts to think.

via Eknath Easwaran, from chapter 9 of “Like a Thousand Suns,” vol. 2 of “The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living

Visions of Love, Gardening with Theurgy: An Imaginative Practice to Empower Plants

Plants are people that participate in our world in wondrous, mutualistic ways. Plants serve as the foundation of our human lives, in so many ways, grown by Solar rays of a very high Source. Plants bridge us and the Sun. How can we serve plants? A mystical practice, known as a type of theurgy, is one way to empower plants to give greater gifts as they go forth in life, using the power of human mind to imagine and visualize colors and light.

Definitions of theurgy tend to be vaguely described, as hints of it seep out from the mysticism of various traditions. Definitions often include compelling or querying supernatural beings and deities. I offer this definition based on my learnings and experiences on alchemy:

Theurgy is the mental animating of matter, so to bring out more of matter’s inherent qualities and potential capacities, without imposing a state or process on the matter that is not in harmony with its nature and natural laws of cause and effect [1].

There could be a lot to unpack here, but I will leave that to your own inner and outer inquiries. I raise this work to share an ecological application of it. Based in imagination, it is the use of visualization and color to enliven objects with their vital three-part nature.

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Can industrial technology save civilization from industrial civilization?

Industrial-scale green energy (including distributed small-scale technology developed at industrial-scales) is more of the same industrial, fossil-fuel addicted rise to heights out of the bounds of first principles. We need appropriate technology at appropriate scale to succeed in the water-food-energy nexus.

Documentary on “green technology” and the dissonance of many modern environmentalists..:

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