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Phila's Hope Blogging. Now, more than ever.

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My Life Needs To Change

Damn. I wrote part of a pleading this weekend.

/hat tip to ina in comments at Eschaton.

Bill Gates v. People Under Bridges v. Salmon

Thank You!

What Government Is For

Pronoia

PRONOIA THERAPY FOR BEGINNERS

1. During an intense half-hour rant, complain and whine about everything that pains you. Get a sympathetic listener to be your receptacle if possible, or simply deliver your blast straight into the mirror. Having emptied all your psychic toxins in one neat ritual spew, you'll be able to luxuriate in rosy moods and relaxed visions for a while.

2. Locate or create a symbol of your own pain. Mail it to us at the Angst Incineration Crew, P.O. Box 150628, San Rafael, CA 94915, USA. We will then conduct a sacred ritual of purification during which we will burn that symbol to ash. While this may not banish your suffering entirely, it will provide a substantial amelioration which you will be able to feel the benefits of within a month.

3. Eat a pinch of dirt while affirming that you are ready to kill off one of your outworn shticks -- some idea or formula that has worked for you in the past but has now become a parody of itself.

4. Using crayons, paints, scissors, glue, collage materials or any other materials, create a piece of large-denomination paper money, good for making a payment on your karmic debt.

5. Kick your own ass 22 times.

6. Brag about yourself nonstop for 10 minutes. Record it so you can listen back to it later.

7. Perform a senseless act of altruism, for instance by giving an anonymous gift or providing some beauty or healing to a person who cannot do you any favors in return.

8. Deliver a concentrated stream of praise about someone, either to that person herself or to anyone who will listen. Extra credit: Force yourself to think a kind and loving thought about someone you don't like or from whom you feel alienated.

9. Conjure up an imaginary friend and have an intimate conversation with him and her for at least 15 minutes.

10. Build an altar devoted to beauty, truth, and love in one of the ugliest places you know.

11. With a companion, watch a blank TV while making up a pronoiac story featuring plot twists that are rife with happiness, redemption, and good times -- yet not boring. You may either speak this tale aloud or write it down.

12. Compose and perform a ceremony in which you get married to yourself.

13. While making love, imagine that your physical pleasure is a carrier wave for a spiritual blessing which you beam in the direction of some person you know who needs a supercharged boost.

~Picture found here.

The Quan Yin Sisterhood

NTodd's talking about this new study, that I love, finding that -- duh -- our happiness is connected to the happiness of those around us.

[H]appiness is contagious -- and . . . people pass on their good cheer even to total strangers.

. . . "Whether you're happy depends not just on your own actions and behaviors and thoughts, but on those of people you don't even know."

I was thinking about how much it amuses me to have confirmed by science what mystics and witches have always known: we are one. It's all just god pouring god into god. That fact explains what's been fundamentally mistaken with so much of what what's been going on in America since the days of Ronald Reagan: the odd notion that I can be happy while others are suffering and homeless, the Gordon Gecko, "greed is good," I've got mine, if I'm off in my McMansion or my Esclade I'll be happy no matter what's going on in your life ethos. And, yet, surprisingly, the people in the McMansion with the steam shower and the granite counters and the wine cellar are often -- unhappy. And we wonder why that is, how that could possibly be.

If happiness is "contagious" what do you think misery is? Only connect.

Then this morning I was listening to this podcast by Thorn Coyle and Medusa. It concerns the very human need to grieve when we are confronted with death. The whole podcast is worth listening to, but beginning at about 49:25, Medusa explains an image that she received during the Loma Prieta earthquake, of the Dead being able to use the tears of the grievers as the River Styx upon which their souls must travel. She says it's difficult for us to "hold the grief of a large number of people passing. . . . It does affect all of us. It is a disturbance in the force, Luke, when a lot of people pass at the same time and it is hard for them to be grieved because there are so many of them . . . . It's important that we hold that and we try and help in that process and I don't know exactly what that looks like, but I'm aware of it." Medusa and Thorn describe how grief can crack us open and give us compassion for the whole world.

And I thought immediately of Quan Yin, the Bodhisattva/Goddess who "hears" the cries of the world. (One of the Goddesses who has visited my dreams, Quan Yin came to me as an incredibly hip older woman with a younger lover/adept when my beautiful DiL was carrying G/Son. Quan Yin, in her house built like an indoor garden, assured me that a child of compassion would be born and then I pulled the tarot card that told me he'd come a bit earlier than the doctors predicted. The universe often laughs both at and with me. I return the favor.) Com-passion -- feeling the passions of others in common with them -- doesn't necessarily mean that we "fix" another's problems. It means that we acknowledge that we have a connection with everyone else, with those who are grieving, and with those, even those now "gone," who need to be grieved. It's so important to hear, to listen, to acknowledge the tears of the whole, entire world. (It's overwhelming work, but it's important work.) I cannot be separate from you. You are not separate from me, not even in your grief. Your happiness will ribbon into my life and light it up and your grief will affect me and season the flavor of my days.

A witch's job is to help to turn the wheel. Each of us finds our own way of putting our shoulder to the wheel. Certainly, not everyone is called to the work of Quan Yin, the work that Medusa has not yet envisioned, but is aware needs doing, the grieving for strangers who pass in numbers so large that they do, in fact, cause a disturbance in the force. And yet, it is work that needs to be done.

As our planet goes through Her death throes, that work is going to need doing with increasing strength and increasing frequency. And someone must grieve for the plants, the species, the planet Her Ownself. Where will we find the professional mourners that Thorn discusses? What would their training look like? How will these doulas of the second birth sustain themselves? How must we all change our practices at Sahmein and the Winter Solstice to do this work?

Tonight, I am v happy. And that, in itself, it turns out according to science, is important work.

It's all real. It's all metaphor. There's always more.

And, speaking of disturbances in the force and large groups who need mourning . . . .

Picture found here.

What He Said

Here, Obama Campaign, This One Is Gratis. Get Way Behind The ERA.

Barack Obama has run an amazing campaign and he certainly doesn't need my advice.

But reading my good friend Sinfonian today, agonizing over what Hillary Clinton can do to advance the more deserving man's cause, (ahem, as if, were positions reversed, anyone would worry over that), I got to thinking. And I started thinking that there's one thing, beyond the blindingly obvious, that Obama could do to help us older women voters cozy up to the idea of, gee, one more time, supporting the man.

Obama could come out strongly in support of the ERA.

I mean, really, strongly in support. I'm biased, but I think this is a brilliant idea.

What got me to thinking of it was that I was listening to a radio news story about McCain on the Ellen DeGeneres show, trying to equivocate on gay marriage, and I was wondering, does anyone really think that gay marriage won't be the norm in, say, 30 years? I was trying to think of even one movement such as this where the conservatives were able to completely turn the tide. American independence. An end to colonialism throughout South America and Africa. Birth control. Loving v. VA. Lunch counters. Slavery. Environmental laws. And, then I thought, as is my wont, about women. Women won the right to vote a while back, but are still waiting for passage of the ERA. And, bam, it hit me. The Obama campaign has a serious problem with women, esp. we older women who watched the ERA bloom and fade. He needs to show as he really, really, really hasn't yet ("You're likable enough," "Absent" on choice votes, "Sweetie," a campaign full of men and based on his being a "committed xian" who is "called to serve") that he gets it. Serious backing for the ERA would go a long way for this grandmother.

So, don't listen to me. I'm only an old woman with a fat checkbook, an extensive address book, some weekends this Summer to spend handing out leaflets, and a house and garden made for entertaining. Don't address my concerns. It's better to make fun of me on blogs and make me feel even more disaffected from my own political party.

No, it's not.

The ERA. An idea whose time is now. Mr. Obama?

Imagine

What If?

Good Thinking

[Nature on Earth continually cycles itself through the use of energy, which comes] from outside the system in the form of perpetual solar income. Not only does nature operate on "current income," it does not mine or extract energy from the past, it does not use its capital resrves, and it does not borrow from the future. [Designers must begin to use these same principles.]

. . .

[Discussing a day care center built for the City of Frankfurt:] Because of the solar hot-water collectors, we asked that a public laundry be added to the program so that parents could wash clothes while awaiting their children in school. Because of advances in glazing, we are able to create a day-care center that requires no fossil fuels for operating the heating or cooling. Fifty years from now, when fossil fuels will be scarce, there will be hot water for the community, a social center, and the building will have paid back the energy "borrowed" for its construction.

~William McDonough, Centennial Sermon: Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Feb. 7, 1993~

A Building Lovely As A Tree?

From this month's VF article on Cradle to Cradle design:

Jefferson . . .wrote to James Madison in 1789. “They were deciding the term of the federal bond,” says McDonough, “and Jefferson’s conclusion was that a federal bond should have a term of only one generation. And his logic was this: The earth belongs to the living. No man may, by natural right, oblige the lands he owns or occupies to debts greater than those that may be paid during his own lifetime. Because, if he could, then the world would belong to the dead, and not to the living.”

McDonough discusses the Industrial Revolution and notes that:

Consider looking at the industrial revolution of the 19th century and its aftermath as a kind of retroactive design assignment, focusing on some of its unintended, questionable effects. The assignment might sound like this: Design a system of production that

• Puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year
• Produces some materials so dangerous they will require constant vigilance by future generations
• Results in gigantic amounts of waste
• Puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved
• Requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly
• Measures productivity by how few people are working?
• Creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burying or burning them
• Erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices

Does this seem like a good design assignment?

Even though none of these things happened intentionally, we find this "design assignment" to be a limited and depressing one for industries to perpetuate — and it is obviously resulting in a much less enjoyable world.



And, of course, McDonough's discussion of building buildings as lovely and safe as cherry trees in bloom reminded me of a poem:

Joyce Kilmer. 1886–1918

119. Trees

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

How Shall I Live My Life: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization By Derrick Jensen

Environmental author and activist Derrick Jensen has a new book, due to be released this Friday, March 28th. How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization, includes interviews with David Edwards, Thomas Berry, Jan Lundberg, Steven Wise, Carolyn Raffensperger, George Draffan, Kathleen Dean Moore, David Abram, Vine Deloria, and Jesse Wolf Hardin.

The blurb at Amazon says: Derrick Jensen discusses the destructive dominant culture with ten people who have devoted their lives to undermining it in this collection of interviews.

Whether it is Carolyn Raffensperger and her radical approach to public health, or Thomas Berry on perceiving the sacred; be it Kathleen Dean Moore reminding us that our bodies are made of mountains, rivers, and sunlight; or Vine Deloria asserting that our dreams tell us more about the world than science ever can, the activists and philosophers interviewed in How Shall I Live My Life? each bravely present a few of the endless forms that resistance can and must take.

I've pre-ordered my copy and hope to post a review early next week. I'm especially delighted to see Jensen including neo-Pagan* author Jesse Wolf Hardin. Jensen's concept of the Earth and our relationship with her has long struck me as fundamentally Pagan.

Meanwhile, have you read As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial, yet? If not, why?

*I'm not a huge fan of the term "neo-Pagan." Are today's Jews "neo-Jews" or today's Catholics "neo-Catholics"? Are today's Hindu's "neo-Hindus"? Hardin's wikipedia description lists him as neo-Pagan, and I believe that's how he has described himself, so I use the term here. It's all just the Goddess pouring the Goddess into the Goddess.

Art found here.

Nonna, What Did You Do To Stop The Iraq War?

My dear and v. creative friend, K., sent me the following information. March 19th will be, sadly, the fifth anniversary of George W. Bush's boneheaded decision to start killing a lot of people. You know, the decision in which we all, to one degree or another, acquiesced. I didn't riot in the streets, and I should have.

Resacralizing The Earth

It's always true, but today Jason's Wild Hunt is even more worth reading than usual.

The term: "resacralizing the land" gives me goose bumps, makes my eyes go wide, and sends my Youger Self into a Springtime Tizzy.

Let's do it!

My New Name For A Blog

What Lunea Said.

Somewhere, in one of Starhawk's books, there's a several-paragraph description of the life that I imagine that I was meant to lead, a few paragraphs that changed my life and gave it purpose and named its directions, a description of a woman who makes confections going down to the docks in the afternoon to see in the boats, in a culture that honors mothers and women and the divine feminine. Lunea reminds me that that world is out there, possible, beginning to take shape.

Way down, below the ocean, where I wanna be, she may be.

I was at G/Son's b/day party today. Every one of the ethnically-diverse fathers at the party, from my amazingly gorgeous, brilliant, kind, hard-working, fantastic writer of a good Son, to a guy who works for a local sports team, to a computer guy, to the guy who lives next door to Son and DiL, every one of them was a 100% more involved and caring and great dad than any of the men with whom I grew up in the 1950s. Every one of them was changing diapers (I do not believe that my father ever, in his entire life, ever, changed the diapers of even one of his five children), running after their toddlers while their wives chatted, filling plates for their children, refereeing squabbles over sharing. They give me hope, they do, these young men. Their own sons will be -- so different.

This is my will. So mote it be.

The Fifth Sacred Thing

The Fifth Sacred Thing detailed not only a multi-cultural, multi-faith community that works, but showed also some of the priciples behind why it works. And in the face of the kind of adversity that could wipe out a whole section of the population, the priciples of selflessness, true Oneness with the Earth and all its creatures, and the mentality that EVERYTHING is sacred saves this community. And many people feel these principles are not just fairy tales to tell children, but true and real goals we can aspire to. We could live in peace and joy and balance someday. And when I am feeling a little helpless and scared in the world we live in, I remember this novel of hope and once again put one foot in front of the other.

More here.

Perspective

And, yet, it's this planet that I love.

/hat tip Doug.