What Do I Have to Offer?

Dinner last night with friends. Encouraging to find they are seeing some of the same things I am: people are awaking to accept and promote the idea we're screwed and need to change. It is coming from many different sources now and coming faster.
Complaceny and fatalism arise...and I suggested we need to turn to and work within our local communities, to rebuild our true social networks which reliance on the Nanny State has decimated and replaced with dependence on the Federal Govt, debt-based 'prosperity' and consumerism. FB and G+ are faux social networks.

This is not a short term fix. This requires a fundamental change in how one sees the world and lives in it. We take back our freedoms and rights we've given away in exchange for 'security' and entitlements. There are no entitlements. There is no security. The Nanny state is bankrupt financially, morally and ecologically. Where will Food, Energy and Water come from? Especially Water?  It is time for change. Those of us who take action will  have the advantage. The new world will be created by those who show up.

The rest will find it happens gradual, gradual, gradual, suddenly. They'll wake one morning to find the world changed and ask: "Where was I? How did this happen?  I was told the America Dream would save me. Reliance on the Government would save me. Abdicating my responsibility and action would save me. Working hard would save me."
Don't say you weren't warned.
Nothing will save us except ourselves. Thinking, learning, being open to new ideas, avenues and ways to live.
I find this an exciting time: We are being bombarded daily with cues, reminders and pointers to awaken and change. In some places it is subtle. Some not so much. We are being invitied every single moment to shift and live differently. This has always been the case, yet seems to have a greater urgency lately.
Reminds me of an old story:
A man is leading his mule to the market and as he crosses a small stream the mule stops and refuses to cross.
The man begs, pleads, prays, bribes, pushes the mule. All to no avail. The mule won't budge.
Another man comes along and asks what is wrong. The first man replies "I cannot get my mule to move no matter what I do."
The other man picks up a huge branch lying by the side of the road and hits the mule square in the middle of its forehead, HARD. He then takes the mule's lead and says "come along" and walks the mule across the stream easily.
The first man asks "How did you do that? I beg, pleaded, flattered, bribed, prayed, pushed, but nothing worked."
Second man: "Sometimes, you first have to get their attention."

I'd rather avoid that branch, thank you.

To change requires thought, reflection and action. I see people all the time say they want change, as long as they don't have to do anything differently or take action. I find this odd. It doesn't work like that. If you want things to be different, you have to make them different. Talking about it is one thing. It's a start. But action is required. You actually have to take responsibility, make a choice and act. Erich Fromm says people would prefer to submit to authoritarian rule than choose to exercise freedom and authenticity. I have only to look within my own life and see where I do that. Excellent, fertile ground for change.

It is a matter of priorities.
There is abundant time.
There is abundant resources.
When we act out of fear and complacency we create what we fear the most.
All the opportunity and resources we need are here and have been all along.
We have the opportunity to rebuild the world as we want it. We have always had that opportunity and many are taking advantage of it. Again, the world belongs to those who show up an act.

When taxes go through the roof in a final last-ditch effort to steal your hard earned money to support the Nanny state, redirect your money to the .01%, and bribe the unproductive masses with handouts, food stamps, other state largess, faux health care, crap made in China, Multimedia TV and movies, will you be ready for the coming shift?

I close with the question: What skills do you have in an agrarian economy? What do you have to offer of value besides gracing us with your presence? I subscribe to the idea this is about exchanging my best effort and value for yours.

Think about this. Even if all the above never come to pass in our life time, how much richer will your, ours and my world be. How much better will be the world we pass on.

Peace, inspiration and love to us all.

Happy Independence Day

I take this time to share with you some thoughts about what it means to me to be a US citizen, and a citizen of the world.
For many years I have been focused on inner transformation. I was not unaware of the problems facing us, but I relegated them to a back burner. Some parts complacency, some parts fatalism, some parts wanting to see it all collapse to force us to be humans again.
A few weeks ago I read something that catalyzed me. A shift occurred. It seemed as though for the last few years I've 'been on hold' waiting for something to focus on: the outer transformation.

Now something has come alive. I feel renewed, committed and ready to bring the power and light of my own inner transformation to begin transforming the outer.
An old and dear friend likes to say "Reciprocity is absolute." I've never really gotten that until lately. And so I reach out my hand first in friendship.
I am asking myself: What can I do to make a difference? to be the change I want to see in the world. And I accept the answer to the question: "What is wrong with this country and this world? I Am."
I am tuning into what is going on, what is being done, how and why and to whom. Reading, learning, educating myself.
I am turning onto what I am feeling called to do from my own internal compass. What actions to take and where to focus my energies.
I am dropping out of old outmoded patterns of thought, beliefs and behaviors, as well as the complacency and fatalism that have been there for so long.
I wonder if this is how our founding fathers felt: excitement, energy, promise and, yes,  some fear.
So with a renewed sense of citizenship, patriotism and commitment to my friends, neighbors, community, state, country and world, I reach out to my fellow citizens and patriots.
Lets take back our country. Lets rebuild our country anew as the old husk bankrupts and dies around us.
We are all in this together.
There is so much more that unites us than that which divides us. Not competition, but cooperation. Not at the point of a gun but willingly, freely and with a sense of the Oneness that unites all of us living beings.
We must hang together, or we will assuredly hang separately.
Happy Independence Day.

Disposable Food for Disposable People

 I've been food and nutrition conscious since I was 10, when on a fishing trip I 'caught" a wild tuna and watched it thrash itself to death and simply could not eat it at dinner that night.

At 15 I turned strict vegetarian (for yoga) and had to cook for myself as my father "refused to make two meals." So I began to read and learn about nutrition. I started with the Veggie's Bible: Diet for a Small Planet. I learned about protein complementarity. I learned we eat so much meat in this country as a way to get rid of the huge surplus of corn and grain we developed after WWII with the introduction of nitrogen (petrochemical based) fertilizers. It takes 7 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of beef. A great food sink - a way to solve the over abundance. Prior to 1945 Americans did not eat red meat more than a couple times a week, unless very wealthy.

I have had times when I did eat meat- as part of an inner transformation I did eat meat for a while.
But, I stopped eating turkey right after having a personal encounter with a wild turkey (the bird, not the bourbon).
And since then when I see live fish or crabs at the market the image comes back and I simply cannot bring myself to eat them. I saw pictures of pig gestation pens, what is done to baby calves and how animals are slaughtered (see below). I feel connection to other living things and do not wish to bring extra harm to my fellow animals. and I am not OK asking someone else to do that which I cannot bring myself to do.
I've read recently that plants may be sending signals to each other, indicating possible consciousness, but I have to draw the line somewhere. I'm not a breatharian (people who live on light and air).

So now I am back to being a vegetarian. Eggs, OK, in moderation. And then they are organic, free range…Maybe a clam, mussel or scallop now and then. A shrimp here or there. But very infrequently. I don't do it out of convenience or make the decision lightly.

A few years ago I watched the movie Food, Inc. I knew about industrialized farming and had driven past miles and miles and miles of abused, gross cattle land (piles and piles of manure which liquify after rains and runoff into rivers and streams further polluting our water). The movie made quite an impression.
Interestingly, one is not allowed to film inside commercial slaughterhouses. Some video was shot secretly and the images are raw, to say the least.
What struck me, besides the inhumanity of how the cattle are processed (they can hear the sounds and screams of fellow cattle being killed. This stress releases extra hormones into their bodies which humans eat and causes all manner of side-effects, higher aggression being one of them, but I digress) is what happens to the low-paid, typically migrant, 'unskilled' workers who do the butchering. They loose fingers, hands, are maimed and get minimal health coverage. Many are illegal aliens, most are simply poor, uneducated or this is all they can do to feed their families.
And it struck me:
Disposable food.
Disposable people.

Food is 'engineered' in laboratories for 'mouth-feel' - deliberately created with high levels of sugar-salt-fat to directly stimulate the pleasure centers in the brain to make us want more, yet actual nutritional quality is low. So therefore we need more. Artificially flavored and colored.
Did you know that if you ate better quality food, you would actually need less of it?

Our topsoil is all but gone. 97% of our food is grown in sand using petrochemical based fertilizers. We have to use harsher and harsher pesticides as the plants have less and less naturally occurring resistance to disease and pests. And our yields are diminishing. So we have to increase our production as yields decrease, costing us more.
We are the first organism on the planet to create food at will. This was made possible by plentiful, cheap oil. What happens when oil begins to run out?

How aware are you of:
How much food do you consume each day?
Where it comes from, how it was produced?
What chemicals, additives are used?
The effects of these chemicals on your body?

Did you know corn is grown below cost using US subsidies (your taxes) - and so corn syrup and high fructose syrup are in almost everything.

Have you ever eaten something you have grown yourself? I learned to be an organic farmer a couple years ago and the difference is amazing. Eating something I grow in my own garden tastes better and is arguably healthier for me and changes my relationship to that which keeps me alive. I live in a condo now, but still manage to grow vegetables and herbs in pots on the balcony.

Seems to me People and Food and Education and Life-style were designed to serve the industrial engines of the industrial age. Consumer-based-Cogs in a machine. Replaceable, disposable and cheap. And my internal transformation is now expanding into an outer transformation. Part of that is an expanding awareness of food, my relation to it and desire to simplify.


I read the labels of my food closely.
I buy organic, not just for food quality, but it's the price I pay for rebuilding our topsoil.
I support Community Sourced Agriculture. Get most of my food at farmers markets or organic markets that support local gorwers. Or grow it myself.

Lastly, I don't eat anything (e.g. ingredients)  my grandmother would not recognize as food*.

To quote Michael Pollan: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.



*Note: I'm human and make occasional exceptions, and sometimes simply cannot know.
I am making a larger point.