Category Archives: Ethos

Sol dialed: remembering mortality with grave stones and grave stories of near death

A friend shared a beautiful tombstone with a sundial and it served as a prompt to remember death. The sundial “says to those of us above ground: this is the “last hour to many – possibly to you”. What would you do if this was your last hour, day, week, month or year? Hour/day seems easier to conceive of. Nice to have a little advance notice and time to think about it eh. Just shooting the breeze a little… Maybe phone up loved ones, tell em what they need to hear good and bad, and make them brave. Whatever one is generally too chicken to do/say. Chickens are almost certainly less cowardly than most humans. Go out in the street/digital town square and loudly try and share whatever seem like the best ideas you learned in this life for this struggling humanity to find joy in one another and the earth; good luck guys. If it’s a whole year obviously stop as much as possible doing anything that isn’t EXACTLY what you want to be doing; differentiating one’s existence as a part of creation from any limited or misjudged human notions of what one should do...”

And to that I replied:

Thanks for this important message. Wise words. The idea that the goal before dying is to find the best ways to give everything away – that hits home.

A year? Probably adding to the list, write a book of aphorisms/wisdoms/educational autobiography and share it most goodly.

A day? For sure say hey to my loved ones and homies. Deuces

An hour? Oh there’d be hard feelings. Hugs and squeezes. A note of the nearly dead. Some sort of meditating to tune the star ship.

I had a few near death experiences, one intense one when on a trip with the professor I think we met via. Homeboy [WW] swam and saved my life, but for some time I didn’t think I’d be saved, as I was facing death in a slow but fast way. Slow enough to notice, fast enough not to tell a soul, as I got dragged further and further away by rip current at a remote coast on the Pacific. I tried all the things to remedy the situation. And then I tired. Wave after wave, it’s daunting, nature is so vast and exhausting, its flows so relentless and big. What would I do if I had moments left to live? I’d sorrow for the suddenness and shock with which I’d hit the hearts of those who’d miss me. I’d long to tell some folks my heart, mainly just that I love them dearly. I’d take deep comfort in knowing who already knows that love and it needs not saying. I felt no concern about stuff or unfinished projects, beyond the impact it’d have on those I loved.

It comes down to relationships. And the preciousness of breath.

Breathe easy frend

Halloween pollenticks – sticky seeds of futures

(A short essay – tl;dr vote harris walz, minimize harm, which ‘worst’ you want to be making the best of with our precious time?)

Happy Halloween. I’ve come out of months long social media posting break to offer something scary for you. Trigger warning: political opinions, environmental catastrophes, collapse of safety critical systems.

Dear many friends who see that things cannot go on as they are,
The supply chains too brittle,
The relationships too strained,
Many of you plan a 3rd party vote in this most polarized presidential election of “the most powerful nation in the world”, or you might even be following RFK’s lead, or you might skip it altogether for any number of defensible reasons.
Many of you, dear friends, I see sympathize with a kind of accelerationist approach
Accepting how bad things are and responding with willingness for it to get worse, just to break out of terrible trajectories – is that minimizing harm? WIth all the harm caused by the hour in the over-developed world…
The sooner this self destruction grinds to a halt, the safer, some say
That’s the gist of conclusions I’ve heard from more than one thoughtful, experienced and educated person – active environmental stewards, tactful business people, balanced martial artists, all kinds of folks
I write this mainly to you, accelerationists and “never status quo”ers, especially those in swing states

This perspective is understandable. The status quo is very bad, and it is adapting very poorly overall to immediate catastrophes hammering away at itself and then some
Habitat loss, resource depletion, biodiversity catastrophe…the heavy grief of wars, of power abuses, I cannot even speak it, and yet overshadowing it all is -an extinction crisis-
The disregard for life
My heart is heavy. The world is heavy. And the systems that sustain us are, … It is hard to fathom or accept
Most of you reading this live better than most animals *ever* in terms of basic needs and safety and freedom and potential and
Yet we are struggling, in astonishing debt despite ¿ever?-growing profits, in chronic illness, in an alarming fertility crisis!, inoculated ¡¿forever?! with microplastics and >forever< chemicals
Depressed, anxious, angry, outraged at the systems that
…
What sustains us?

What sustains us?

This question has burned before me for a long time
What sustains us,
And how can we reciprocate?

OK
Let me get to the point, to why I do this emotional labor to try to establish some same pageness, for you to at least entertain if not accept

I will vote for Harris Walz, not because I want them as president, or want to validate and further a severely broken 2-party system, the DNC, etc etc
But because I do not have a workable alternative to this democracy-esque experiment
And not because I can accept the horrors of investment in the military-industrial complex,
Or petrochemicals,
Or over-development,
Or disrespectfully degrading rather than lovingly regenerating that which sustains us
I cannot accept that
But if I must face that
If we face these realities, and if we have a finite amount of time before safety critical systems fail under their many strains
Then what is in my power to really refuse is doing anything that could hasten or exacerbate harm
Using what little time we have, struggling under a politic that is actively agitating, suppressing environmental regulation and investment, violating women’s rights, taking an isolationist nationalist and what else *ist path to destroying the world that sustains us
A world that begets many worlds, vs. a world that devours and homogenizes
I cannot vote in any way that risks obstructing deep adaptation
And the only choice this election season that puts my puny power against 4?+ years of Trump, is the democratic ticket
I’ll do what I can to keep a chaos agent from making it harder to deeply adapt and build alternative safety-critical systems, /while we still can/
The more time we buy, the more harm we can minimize, before the next storm, the next fire, the next pandemic and supply chain collapse and
What is it that sustains us, and how do we relate to it?
We have so much important work to do
I cannot waste time and attention on a power hungry pedo friend of Jeffrey E and corporate cosmophagia
I cannot accept wasting the time we have with this historic level of capacity, of ways and means as a whole, historic
When we need more than ever to build capacity
Forestablishingaliveablefuturity

Continue reading →
Northern lights of Jupiter shown from Juno spacecraft, 2021

Jovial present potential

“There is no limit to what one can do who does not care who gains the credit for it.“

via https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/21/doing-good-selfless/

“All the Power that ever was or will be is here now.“

via https://bota.org/resources/index.html

There is immense possibility in the present. Ultimately we are guided by a mixture of drives and inner voices, and what we are capable of is greatly expanded by the consciousness of limitlessness and wholeness. May oneself be guided by love of oneself and one another, and by the light and life that calls up. “Peace, peace, peace, One Love”

Oak seedlings growing in arboreal adaptation research by Michigan Technology University (https://www.superiorideas.org/projects/adopt-a-tree)

The Adapters Movement, in summary

Adapt in place, live in the here and now, and truly make the world a better place whether times are good or . . .

This post summarizes the defining features of ‘The Adapters Movement’. I hope this post fills a gap, offering a healthy framework to respond to the critical time we are living in. As it becomes clearer that many systems we rely on will not suffice or survive in the future, I hope this and similar movements will serve as popular and robust alternatives to inaction or to isolationist (and sometimes extremist) forms of preparedness and survivalism. Let us lessen, not worsen, inevitable harm.

This movement was first introduced to me in the form of a long, winding post by a widely appreciated blogger Ross Raven aka Category5 on Permies.com: C5 Defines The Adapters Movement – Acceptance and Triage. Permies is the world’s largest permaculture forum (or so I’ve heard from them), and this Permies post was being discussed in an online community of the Deep Adaptation movement (which I introduce below).

I read the long thread introducing The Adapters Movement over a few days, and I found a lot of gems in it, representing the best of the ‘prepper’ and ‘survivalist’ movements, while explicitly revising many of those movements’ most off-putting and self-destructive problems. To help make the Adapters movement more accessible, I am sharing this relatively-short write-up introducing it and outlining its key themes. A heads up about what’s ahead: This post prints as four pages, which is much shorter than the many essay-length posts in the original Permies.com thread that this intends to summarize.

A little more context. This ‘Adapters Movement’ fits the wisdom of Deep Adaptation well. Here is Deep Adaptation in a nut shell: Many systems we rely on (e.g. food, housing, medicine, water, wood, ‘waste’, wildlife, social systems) are in the process of collapsing and some will fail. Human extinction is possible but not probable, and so we need to adapt to minimize harm. The way to adapt, according to the Deep Adaptation movement, can be summarized with the “Four R’s framework for inquiry“:

  • Relinquish what we need to stop to avoid more harm
  • Resilience is a priority for what we have that we need to preserve
  • Restore what we need from the past to live in ways that remedy and reduce harm
  • Reconcile relationships to remedy and reduce harm

With that introduction, here is a summary of key points I took from that long Adapters movement post linked to above. I hope this helps inspire and clarify paths forward that are well adapted to grow bright, solarpunk futures out of collapse and change.

Continue reading →

On crafting: use of technology in Amish lifeways

Reflecting on How the Amish Use Technology: Community members’ relationships to smartphones or the internet reflect local values and nuances of group identity by Lindsay Ems, 2022 June 7

“Throughout the industrial age and now in the information age, the Amish have adhered to the long-standing tradition of making as a primary form of work.”

…

“Thus, in contrast to an economy in which purely rational logic drives buying decisions, in this case spiritual, political, and ideological motivations guide buying decisions and determine the economic success of a proprietor.”

Crafts have so many co-benefits. Creation: offer and receive the gifts of inspiration.

World eater, world propagator

Dichotomies

conventional & organic
degenerative & regenerative
degrading & restoring

I like the last pair because they feel difficult to green wash. Take any feature that is necessary for the systems that support us, and see if it is being restored/enhanced, or if it is being degraded. Water quality. Soil fertility. Biodiversity.
Alas, if there is a will there is a way, and all of these terms will be “greenwashed” to some extent, making environmentally degrading acts seem restorative.

And by what means is the greenwashing motivated and manifest? Who done it? Some words commonly attributed to the complex system in question, which degrades essential qualities while feigning friend of fundamentals:

The man
The system
Capitalism
Neoliberalism
Globalism
...

These terms too are not perfect. Each has assumptions and complexities, they lack precision and can be tricky. Then I read something which shared a term so precise, so empirical, it could not be misconstrued or exploited:

The cosmophagous world: that world which devours all other worlds to feed itself.

cosmo-
From Ancient Greek κόσμος (kósmos, “universe”). 
-phagous
From Latin -phagus, from Ancient Greek φάγος (phágos, “glutton”), from φαγεῖν (phageîn, “to eat”).

And what is the alternative to devouring other worlds? To multiply, to propagate, to support many worlds. Consider, as you go about the polarized and dissonant world, whether this dichotomy fits: some ways grow themselves by devouring other worlds, while other ways grow all by propagating many worlds.

Sheep inhabiting a woodland edge, with forest and meadow to graze, at a diverse silvopasture farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

I think of this as I visit small farms and see the countless worlds that are hosted there: the worlds of the orchard and of the pasture, the worlds of the meadow flowers and of the insect colonies which enjoy them, the worlds of the varieties of people who are part of the community affected by the small farm, and the worlds of the countless communities which have other small farms of their own.

That world catalyzation is a stark contrast to the vast monocrops, moonscapes, and mines producing homogenized ways of life, wherein one world grows larger while the others are whittled away.

May this be a high-level guideline, leading us toward Earthbound mutualism rather than parasitism.

I end with an excerpt from the text that introduced me to this concept of cosmophagy, and with a wish that you will celebrate and support the many worlds we coexist in as One.

Power is inseparable from the capacity to be affected. We find potentialities in our shared sensitivity: that sense of urgency that pushes us to seek new ways of living — to want to change this world; that feeling of belonging that pushes us to act, and likewise to risk everything. How can we unleash these potentials? The paths suggested by the existing order — call it what you will, Empire, capitalism, colonial modernity, white supremacy, the cosmophagous world — aim to capture the affects that make life worth living.

Neither sinners, nor victims: we inhabit climate change. We see that this period of disillusionment with centuries of misdirection is also one of infinite potential. Each of us have within us the remote possibility of stemming the tide of the catastrophe. By organizing pessimism, the fundamental affect of the times, and giving it a creative consistency, we can hope to bring about other worlds. But first, it is essential to make a break with this one. We did not choose to be thrown into a world that seems doomed to its own destruction, but we can decide to continue it or break free from it.

via “Re-Attachments: Toward an Ecology of Presence” by Dispositions Collective (2021 Jan 29) @ https://illwill.com/re-attachments

Storied Pasts

https://www.lionsroar.com/magical-emanations-the-unexpected-lives-of-western-tulkus/

“If I died in a month would I be satisfied with my life, and the answer was ‘no’.”

“I don’t have to be a reincarnation. It’s not the most important thing. If my existence has meaning, it’s because I’m doing good in this world—I’m helping people. I don’t have to be a tulku in order to do that.”

“We don’t need all those complications,” he says. “We’re all humans. We’re all struggling. We’re all learning from each other.”

“Yesterday, I was talking to one of my tulku friends who is in New York, happily driving for Uber.”

Storied Selves

Highlights generously provided by a YT commenter:

– We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives.
– To tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance.
– Stories are the way we make sense of our lives.
– The way we narrate our lives shapes what they become.
– Change, even really positive change, involves a surprising amount of loss.
– What would happen if you looked at your story and wrote it from another person’s point of view?
– Life is about choosing which stories to listen to, and which ones need an edit.
– There’s nothing more important to the quality of our lives than the stories we tell ourselves about them.