Gardening, etc.
- Rob Paterson on how one woman is crowdsourcing a garden
Phil Cubeta hits a home run with a lament for what lies at our collective centre:
As you can tell, this post is not about venture philanthropists per se but about language. What saddens me is the impoverishment of our ways of talking about our shared lives in community with one another. To see the languages of love withering, or sequestered behind closed doors, while the language of money thrives in all venues is a cause and symptom of a decline in the moral imagination. We have become people for whom the master metaphor is finance, even as the markets have failed us. This does not bode well for life among the ruins. What will those who think only in money be like when money has become worthless?
So happy that Tom has started using a posterous site to share his thoughts with the world. He’s been writing great stuff lately:
We are geniuses at impacting the world while preventing impact on ourselves. As we solve our lives into greater and greater separation from the built-in learning mechanisms of evolution, nature has to stretch further and further to heal itself, to get us to pay attention, to stop treating feedback as a problem and see it as an increasingly urgent invitation — indeed a demand — to change. Yet still we go further and further out on the limb, brilliantly resisting nature’s limits and messages.
Our separation from nature — or should I say, our separation from reality as it really is, in all its fullness that is so hard for us to grasp — has now reached global proportions. Reality’s feedback is now coming in the form of increasingly extreme weather, emptying oceans and aquifers, cancers arising from an environmental chemical soup so complex we can no longer track the causal links any more, new diseases that won’t respond to antibiotics and can span continents and seas in hours on jets, and small groups and networks with increasingly powerful destructive technologies at their disposal.
We are rapidly moving into a realm where problem-solving becomes obsolete, if not downright dangerous — especially at the global level, especially when we are trying to preserve our systems, our habits, our identities, our protections and privileges. Because these challenges are not primarily problems to be solved. They are realities to engage with, to come to terms with, to learn something from about who we are in the world, to be humbled by and creatively joined. Yes, joined. Because inside the realities of today are profound lessons about who we need to be next, individually and collectively — about the cultures, technologies, stories, and social systems we need to create and move into. We won’t learn those lessons if we see these realities as merely problems to resist or resolve — or worse, to make another war on. We need to see them as embodying the precise information we most desperately need to take in right now.
via Six Degrees of Separation from Reality – Tom-Atlee’s posterous .
A couple of men with megaphones tilt at artificial order to reveal the beauty of free humans. Sometimes free speech can be annoying or not what you expect. It can seem a little uncomfortable or a little strange. When I watched this for the first time I have to admit that I felt a little stressed, but I realized that in simply talking through a megaphone, peacefully and standing in the chaos they were creating, these two guys are revealing an edge inside me, a limiting belief that, when I let it go, makes it possible for me to experience delight.
Enjoy it.
via Mark Groen.
My friend Dustin Rivers is locked in a perpetually generative inquiry:
…what are the next steps to become liberated?
The best questions are the ones we ask ourselves, and require us to act differently once we come to an answer. “How do I contribute to the things I complain about in my community?” is an example of that. I speak of liberation; the action of becoming free from constrain or oppression or control. Most Settlers will not think of Indigenous peoples in Canada as ‘needing’ oppression. That’s mostly due to the discourse on indigenous issues moving away from the root of the cause, into more a colonial mentality direction. I seek to look deeply into the root of the problem, and to see the 55”²000 ft level of awareness of our context as Indigenous people.
If we do live a truly indigenous life, it is in spite of the temptations, the desires, and the allure of colonial model of existence. The truth of the matter is, indigenous way of life is beautiful. It is not savage, it is not backwards, it is not ‘stuck in the past’. It is something we as Indigenous peoples must identify as a great thing, despite the systemic racism society that says our ancestors are inferior to modern day society.