Tag Archives: adapt

AND FOR MY LAST ACT

What if this was my final act?
This moment, this action
What’s happening at this breath?
Reading this post?
Well, at least you’re not listening to an Exxon advertisement
If that is the kind of thing you’re exposed to

How we spend our time is affected by the systems around us
Where we are, when we are, much of that beyond us
Under the stars
Here now
Spinning mightily on this big beautiful blue planet

Evolving alongside fellow lifeforms,
It does appear we have some choices within our purview
For if this was my final act,
It was I who chose to be typing at this moment, isn’t it?
Chose in that it arose in my clothes and genes and experiences
And it will be I who lives with, and ends with, that moment
Each moment a new beginning, potentially
Moment to moment
To momentum and beyond

(What’s the best next step?)
(What’s the f(x)?)
With love

What if this was my final act?
Practicing qi’gong, East or West
Perhaps singing a song
Or listening
~ ~ ~
שְׁמַע
~ ~ ~
Taking It All In
One Self
Actualizing
Actual I’s in the vicinity of
Temple

Peace, peace, peace, One Love

Cyborg Puzzle (breathe easy)

A puzzle was presented
I joked and said, “fitting as we become cyborgs, I can’t help but want to ask the Internet”
My better half belittled and implored, I need not ask the Internet everything, strangers on the web
I had for decades, perhaps 25 years of my life now conversed and befriended strangers on the Internet
(That was when it was “dangerous” to do so, as if our collective Internet use isn’t dangerous group psychosis)

I pointed out the Internet as a great source of info that can improve us and our lives
An incredible source of information-nutrition
Perhaps ChatGPT is a fast food joint
But there are richer food sources
Is Reddit like the hazels, with sprouting subreddits and coppiced threads? Renewing
Is there a walnut of informationin the wilds of the Internet? StackExchange anyone? Some enriching kernels of wisdom, tho some nuts are tough to crack
Anyway, I agree, I do not need to ask the Internet everything. I don’t. In fact I make (imperfect) effort not to use the Internet in excess, setting rules and reflecting.
Just a joke, as we head into cyborgdom.

But then
I walk out the door to continue some outdoor chores, forest garden tending, world-relationship mending,
Outside being one essential way I maintain my humanity in a dormant indoor information age.
When I return from activities in the Less-Built Environment,
I enter my home, walk through 3 rooms to go to my bathroom,
Enjoy modern plumbing, I wash my hands and I see in a factory-made mirror, upon my modern self:
A headlamp hanging from my neck – electronics, LEDs, stretchy headband and plastic case and batteries.
I see headphones round my neck, use-full,
Sleek and wireless and connected to a supercomputer in my pocket connected to
The Internet

Goodbye past
Hello future
Present don’t be harming me
Hoping for harmony

Think fast
Savor every dash
Forever everlasts
In the moment
(Breathe easy)

A Journey About What Matters

Look around
Your immediate surroundings and select an object

What is it, how is it interacted with? By you, by others, by the ambient space, by invisible forces

Where did it come from? Before it was where it is now, where has it been over the past day? Over the past weeks and months and years?

“Here
Now”

From whence did it come?
From what origin or source?
Before it is what it is now, what was it? What would you have called it before it reached the state in which you’d call it as you do now?

What is its relationship with The Source?

This one thing, how is it divisible or degradable, and how does it aggregate, enlarge, and accumulate if at all? 

Let’s find its constituent parts and ways. Ways and means and matters…

Before this object joined you here
Before you ever met it
Where was it?
Imagine being with this object in the moments before you actually met it
Can you track its momentum backwards?
What was its path over time? Its physical steps through space en route to you? Its transformations? Its self-becoming?
What is self actualization?

Does it breathe?
Did it come from China?
How many places did its original materials come from, Earthling?
How many beings involved in its becoming?
How much love? I ask with thanks.
How much hardship? I&I ask with sorrow.

If we follow the object back, through its steps in spacetime dimensions we’re familiar with,
It probably came to us from an interaction with a human, or from itself in the wild…
Of the humans involved, the supply chain from cradle to current-condition to grave could be very short or very long, in space or in time

<4×4 table labeled distance and duration
columns=space, time; rows=short, long; examples TBD>

Step by step
What’s the best next step?

Be Here Now

===

Mission: optimize for resilient sun-to-life ratio
Minimize harm

This transmission brought to you by a mind picking up litter, detritus, debris
Wearing 3M gear to clean up toxins originating with Big Chem in the first place
Legacy legacy legacy, feeling like a disgrace
Our world sour and what’s it like to be displaced? O habitat
O the grief
O the mass extinction
O the habitat
I give thanks to the Source for the Present
For Home
I try
I participate
What’s the best next step?

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 thread that was posted 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: What are the chances of catastrophic natural disasters? Practically certain. What about the collapse of safety-critical systems? Very likely. Could humanity go extinct? Possible but not probable. Many systems we rely on for basic safety and well-being (e.g. food, housing, medicine, water, wood, ‘waste’, wildlife, social systems) are in the process of collapsing and some will fail. The way to adapt to these realities, 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 →

O Sol, InsPHIre I

Sunday: It is all about our unique individuality and what we do with it.

“All that survives of these solar hymns are an altered version of Proclus’ Hymn to the Sun, and the 9th hymn in the Nomoi … the Sun is ruler of the other planets, and with them governs all terrestrial things. …The theory of prayer with which Pletho introduces his hymn is remarkably like the theory of magic behind Ficino’s astrological music; Pletho addresses the gods thus:

‘May we carry out these rites in your honor in the most fitting manner, knowing that you have no need of anything whatever from us. But we are molding and stamping our own imagination and that part of us which is more akin to the divine, allowing it both to enjoy the godly and the beautiful and making our imagination tractable and obedient to that which is divine in us.’

Pletho’s hymns and rites, like Ficino’s do not aim at any objective effect on the deity addressed, but only at a subjective transformation of the worshiper, particularly his imagination.” -(p.61)

Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella by D.P. Walker

via Mark Stavish of the Institute for Hermetic Studies

Visiting a neighbor’s fire

Though the work is easier together, we spread out in the darkest time of year to cozier burrows, diffusing the weight of winter, lighter on the land.
Though it is dark, we are warmed to know there are familiar others nearby. Our struggles are tied up together, and while one faces scarcity, someone else has more than enough to share, so that we may survive together and work together in brighter times.

So it has been through the ages. So it is still in little ways in overdeveloped places where big systems eclipse mutual aid: we turn to neighbors for power during long outages, for tool shares, for relationship. So it is still in big ways in underdeveloped places where small systems are made sufficient by human relationships: cooperating to cultivate land, to maintain infrastructure for basic needs, for relationship.

The lessons of the seasons proceed before us, though we may be distracted by a house on fire, our own or our neighbors.

May we be there for each other, so that we may all meet our needs, in mutual benefit with the sources of that sustenance and satisfaction. May peace be upon you.

Continue reading →

Deep Ecology Links

A running tab of some beautiful deep ecology links:

Breathing with trees http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/breathing.htm

Where does gold come from http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/gold/havellan.htm

Council of All Beings http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/coab.htm
Briefer description: http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/council.htm

Think Like A Mountain text: http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/TLAM%20text.htm

Hazelnut Happiness: Prose Proposing Corylus Seedlings as a Close Ally in Love and Life

The amazing abundance of trees from seed. Reforestation happens through a range of approaches, and from seed is one of the simplest, cheapest, and most time-tested of ways. It comes with pros and cons, the bad including relatively high loss and diversity of traits (such as shell thickness or fruiting time, which industrial operations seek consistency in). In such chaotic times diversity is good. This low-tech approach embraces loss en route to life. Life of the critters enjoying these trees & their seeds along the way, life that comes with the space and legacy of endings, life from letting life be as it will. Seed is a powerful source of sustenance, survival, and succession toward better local adaptation for chaotic futures.

Hazelnut seedlings growing in air-prune box nursery

Like the idea of trees and long-term improvement, enjoyment, environmental restoration, and if needed, sustenance? Hazelnuts are a tree you can trust to thrive easily and be enjoyable company. Measuring  in at 18ft high and 15ft across, these beautiful bushes have been at the heart of our ancestors’ lives for many, many millennia. Food; some of the healthiest fats available to us. Fiber for homes and many essential crafts. Fuel as both coppice1 firewood and as-energy-dense-as-coal residues (shells and husks) for burning (is that true? nearly2).

Hazel is a gift in social resilience as well. A folk hero. How do all the gifts hazel offers sound as renewables, compared with other strategies for food, fiber, fuel, health and wellness? Fossil fuels and  ‘renewable’ energy that depends on mining and toxic processing at industrial scales is degrading the foundations of life: water, soil, air, weather, ecosystems. How about a hedge of hazels instead?

How about a biocultural renewal? A deep adaptation? A relational agriculture that reciprocates and enhances nature’s gifts rather than degrading them.

Continue reading →

A Vision of Renewal Amid Ignorance of Collapse

Societal collapse is underway in the U.S. yet ignored by many. Fossil fuels enable this ignorance while exacerbating the problems: propping up leaders en route to authoritarianism, oppressing far-away people, catalyzing capitalism’s promise of seamless resets with no reckoning of past costs while facing a future of unceasing growth.

Is America really collapsing? How would Americans know? Scientists might, as in Deep Adaptation. Survivors of past societal collapse might, as in the following two articles.
– https://gen.medium.com/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-there-ba1e4b54c5fc
– https://www.newsweek.com/im-holocaust-survivor-trumps-america-feels-germany-nazis-took-over-876965

What is a vision of renewal? The Leap, a progressive campaign promoting the Green New Deal as a needed-transformative step that avoids eco-fascism or worse, offers this:
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/01/naomi-klein-message-from-future-covid/

There is no future emergency for which we must prepare.

We are already here—with every dystopian element, every means of revolution. The horrific consequences of our time and its beautiful potential are unfolding everywhere. We are resisting the end of the world by proliferating new worlds. We are becoming ungovernable—unbeholden to their merciless law, their crumbling infrastructure, their vile economy, and their spiritually broken culture.

We violently stake a claim in happiness—that life resides in our material power, in our refusal to be managed, in our ability to inhabit the earth, in our care for each other, and in our encounters with all forms of life that share these ethical truths.

https://inhabit.global/

Starchy Perennial Plant Ally: Sunchoke

A long term steward of the northeast, Sunchoke aka Earth Apple aka Jerusalem Artichoke aka Helianthus tuberosus. This plant is a sunflower species with a starchy, potato-like root that propagates itself (usually easily) from year to year.

In the video below, Ben Falk harvests and discusses a 400sq.ft. area that grows sunchokes year after year, with minimal maintenance, while building soil. This year’s harvest offers 90lbs of starchy “J-choke” tubers, leaving some in soil to regrow the patch for next year’s harvest. He notes using them as pureed soup after some slow cooking, as well as pickling and lactofermenting them. I have only had them a few times. When I cooked them I cut them thin and stir fried them, cooking them for a while and adding other veggies and seasoning into the mix. They are dense plants and feel like a good staple, able to significantly help mitigate ‘the hunger gap’ as Ben says regarding strains on food supplies and ecology. I look forward to growing, harvesting, and cooking more of this perennial plant ally.

I give thanks.