The Elixir

Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had read in conveying the very quality
of life as we live it from moment to moment, but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly,
insisted on mediating it through what I still would have called the ‘Christian mythology.’
– C.S. Lewis

Guarded optimism

My premise is that the U.S. economy is going to collapse, that this process has already begun, and will run its course over a decade or more, with ups and downs here and there, but a consistent overall downward direction. I neither prognosticate nor wish for such an outcome; I just happen to see it as very likely. Furthermore, I do not see it as altogether bad. There are some terrible aspects to the current state of affairs, and some wonderful aspects to the post-collapse environment. For example, the air will be much cleaner, there will be no traffic jams, and people will have plenty of time to devote to their children and to people within their immediate community. Wildlife will rebound. Local culture will make a comeback. People will get plenty of exercise walking around, carrying things, and performing manual labor. They will eat smaller and healthier diets. I could go on and on...

— Dmitry Orlov

Amends to Nature

 I have loved colours, and not flowers;
Their motion, not the swallow’s wings;
And wasted more than half my hours
Without the comradeship of things.

How is it, now, that I can see,
With love and wonder and delight,
The children of the hedge and tree,
The little lords of day and night?

How is it that I see the roads,
No longer with usurping eyes,
A twilight meeting-place for toads,
A mid-day mart for butterflies?

I feel, in every midge that hums,
Life, fugitive and infinite,
And suddenly the world becomes
A part of me and I of it.

— Arthur Symons

What is hope?

It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word. It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual. . . . So let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. That is the secret discipline. It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.

— Rubem Alves

Legacy of Aldo Leopold

Before Rachel Carson founded a revolution, in an era when ‘progress’ was rarely questioned, Aldo Leopold promoted a aesthetic culture of the land and an ethic of conservation.

‘We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.’
— from A Sand County Almanac

A new film describes his life and work.

‘We reached the old wolf in time to see a fierce, green fire dying in her eyes.  I was young then and full of trigger itch.  I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise, but after seeing the green fire die, I saw that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.’

Bach in Brazil

Villa-Lobos wanted to translate Bach’s contrapuntal style into Latin rhythms.  The result was a series of 9 works which he scored for various combinations of piano, cello and orchestra.

Listen to Miudinho, from the Bachianas Brasileiras #4 of Heitor Villa-Lobos.

Morning poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

~ Mary Oliver ~

A lot of my readers say their job lacks excitement

Are you bored at work?  Tired of the same old same old?  Looking for a more exciting way to put food on your table?  Well, here’s a suggestion for one way to make a living:  These Bororo tribesmen from Cameroon  approach a pride of lions sharing their fresh kill and spook them with bright colors and big sticks, just long enough to cut a prime slice off the carcass.

An account of one particular incident where local villagers were caught stealing meat from a lion kill has been published in the African Journal of Ecology.

Large predators, such as lions, spotted hyenas, African wild dogs and cheetahs routinely steal fresh kills from one another, a behaviour known as kleptoparasitism...the practise of [people] stealing lion kills may be more prevalent than thought.

‘From interviews with Bororo herdsmen, we have learned that it is a common habit among this tribe to chase away lions from fresh kills, with sticks or with fire,’ says Hans de Iongh of Leiden University.

— read more from a BBC News story

Columbus discovered America

It is now more than a century since the learned French sinologist Deguignes set forth, in a very ably-written paper in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres’ (vol. xxviii., 1761), the fact that he had found in the works of early Chinese historians a statement that, in the fifth century of our era, certain travellers of their race had discovered a country which they called Fusang, and which, from the direction and distance as described by them, appeared to be Western America, and in all probability Mexico. When Deguignes wrote, his resources, both as regards the knowledge of the region supposed to have been discovered and the character of the travellers, were extremely limited, so that the skill with which he conducted his investigation, and the shrewdness of his conjectures, render his memoir, even to the present day, a subject of commendation among scholars. Few men have ever done so much or as well with such scanty and doubtful material.  The original document on which the Chinese historians based their account of Fusang was the report of a Buddhist monk or missionary named Hoei-shin (Schin or Shên), who, in the year 499 A.D., returned from a long journey to the East. This report was regularly entered on the Year-Books or Annals of the Chinese Empire, whence it passed, not only to the pages of historians, but also to those of poets and writers of romances..

— from the preface to a book called Fusang, by George Leland (1875)

Wikipedia says:
   The American hypothesis was the most hotly debated one in the late 19th and early 20th century after the 18th century writings of Joseph de Guignes were revived and disseminated by Charles Godfrey Leland in 1875. Sinologists including Emil Bretschneider, Berthold Laufer, and Henri Cordier refuted however this hypothesis, and according to Needham the American thesis was ‘stone dead’ by the time of the First World War.

Distinguishing Wealth from Wellbeing

Imagine a world where the metric that guides our decisions is not money, but happiness. That is the future that 650 political, academic, and civic leaders from around the world came together to promote on April 2, 2012. Encouraged by the government of Bhutan, the United Nations held a High Level Meeting for Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm. The meeting marks the launch of a global movement to shift our focus away from measuring and promoting economic growth as a goal in its own right, and toward the goal of measuring—and increasing—human happiness and quality of life. Some may say these 650 world leaders are dreamers, but they are the sort that can make dreams come true. The meeting began with an address by Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley of Bhutan, where the government tracks the nation’s “Gross National Happiness”:

“The time has come for global action to build a new world economic system that is no longer based on the illusion that limitless growth is possible on our precious and finite planet or that endless material gain promotes well-being. Instead, it will be a system that promotes harmony and respect for nature and for each other; that respects our ancient wisdom traditions and protects our most vulnerable people as our own family, and that gives us time to live and enjoy our lives and to appreciate rather than destroy our world. It will be an economic system, in short, that is fully sustainable and that is rooted in true, abiding well-being and happiness.”

— from YES magazine

How to stop judging

We look with contemptuous self-satisfaction at the obese woman loading her supermarket cart with potato chips.  We cluck at the wanton self-disrespect of so-and-so’s promiscuous sister, and shake our heads in censorious disapproval at the latest statistics for marital infidelity.

In juding others there is a sense of self-affirmation, a self-image built from ‘I would never do that’.  In that statement is coded a profound lack of unconditional self-acceptance, and the secret dreat that, Yes, I would in fact do that, or even the shameful knowledge: I have done that before.

When you put yourself fully in another’s place, imagine what it is like to be them, and feel what they feel, there is no possibility of judgmentality.  Others will sense that, and trust you, and be amazed that you know things about them they have never told you.  Herein also lies humility, a sincere humility arising simply from an understanding of the fact: ‘I would surely do as you do, if I were you.’

— Charles Eisenstein

Do not tell yourself that you shouldn’t be judgmental.  You’ll tie yourself up in knots, because when you
 dig down into what shouldn’t means you will very likely discover an implicit judgment of judgmental people.

Rivertalk

is whatever comes along,
practice always here while we

keep on shore, all the time
saying we want to get wet.

But the river has ways
of sound and light, ripples

and waves that tell us:
don’t be so serious, rumble in

where nothing is finished or broken
and nothing asks to be fixed.

~ Jeanne Lohmann