These are some of the people and ideas that are inspiring us …
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“Yes, it looks bleak. But you are still alive now. You are alive with all the others, in this present moment. And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart. And there’s such a feeling and experience of adventure. It’s like a trumpet call to a great adventure. In all great adventures there comes a time when the little band of heroes feels totally outnumbered and bleak, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings or Pilgrim in Pilgrim’s Progress. You learn to say ‘It looks bleak. Big deal, it looks bleak.’
~ Joanna Macy
Joanna Macy: On how to prepare internally for WHATEVER comes next
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A beautifully challenging film… About our HOME.
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A new story told by the finest of tellers . . .
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“Climate change isn’t actually a problem. It often gets treated that way in our mainstream discourse, as if it’s merely a troubling negative side-effect of a drug that we all agree is beneficial, but not only is climate change a symptom of a much deeper problem, it’s also a symptom of a way of life that few of us are really happy with anyway. This becomes especially apparent once we have glimpsed the possibility of a world that could be so much more.”
http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-future-belongs-to-the-most-compelling-story/
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What makes us Human?
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Practicalities… LAND
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A little bit of ‘Mac Medicine’…
“The Children’s Fire is part of the Earth teachings of the elders of ancient America. It was a reminder of the first promise: No law, no action of any kind, shall be taken that will harm the children seven generations hence.” Embercombe
How can the Children’s Fire be a guiding principle for life?
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“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
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KANYINI.
The film, “Kanyini” tells the story of the Stolen Generation: A generation of Aboriginal children who were taken from their Indigenous roots, in an attempt to assimilate them into mainstream white Australian Culture; The separation of children from their land, their family and their belief system in order to make them “civilised”. In the film Bob Randall describes being severed from 5 roots in this civilisation process. He describes these roots as connecting him to his sense life, his sense of belonging – this is Kanyini:
– Belief
– Land
– Family
– Psyche
– Spirituality
To become civilised, he had to be severed from these primal sources of connection.
The painful, and ugly, uncomfortable reality of the film Kanyini is part of the shadow that we have to both acknowledge a take responsibility for, and to feel and identify with, in order to move more freely through space and time.
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It’s time to draw a line in the sand.
Deeply moving talk by Tim “Mac” Macartney
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“Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary.
When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.”
John O’Donohue
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“Imagine we are the last people on the planet and climate change has happened and we decided to write up the history of humanity and put it in a capsule so that if human life emerges again they won’t make the same mistakes, one of the things we would probably conclude is that those who historically deem themselves to be civilised and need to civilise the uncivilised – that is the indigenous peoples of the world – we would conclude that the people who were most civilised were the indigenous peoples of the world. ” Full Article
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John Trudell… Taking Responsibility
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Kate Tempest, Truth Teller. ‘Stop crying. Start buying’ – ‘Europe Is Lost’:
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“When a people are colonised, one of the first moves is to get rid of the poets, to get rid of the songwriters, to get rid of the people who are carrying the soul of the people… so I think its really important that we sing ourselves into community again, and that we tell the stories that will really get us through these times”
Margot Henderson, Bard. wetheuncivilised, A Life Story
“Our decision to value above all else comfort, convenience and a superficial view of happiness, has led to feelings of disassociation and numbness and as a result we bury our grief deep within our subconscious.
The consequence is not only a compulsion to consume even more in an attempt to hide our guilt but also a projection of our hidden pain onto the world around us and at the deepest level, the Earth itself.”
http://www.theguardian.com/…/grieving-pathway-destructive-e…
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“City walls were built as a physical boundary for the inhabitants, to protect them from the vile hordes outside, but they were also a kind of moral boundary, dividing the city dwellers from the devilish chaos of nature beyond, which was, quite literally, uncivilised. (Civilised comes form civis, a town dweller)”
Wild, an Elemental Journey, Jay Griffiths
“The city represents law and order (the word police derives from greek polis. “town”), while the “villains” dwell in the lawless nature outside. The word villain (a middle English variant of villain, “peasant”) once meant a rustic, and the root of the word is in villa – originally the word was merely a simple description of where someone dwelled. The word gradually shifted, coming to mean criminal.”
Wild, an Elemental Journey, Jay Griffiths
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“”Nature is,” as Henry David Thoreau understood so well, “a prairie for outlaws.” Those who go into Nature become, of necessity, uncivilized… the word “civilized” comes from the Latin civilis, meaning under law, orderly… Civilis itself comes from an older Latin word, civis, meaning “someone who lives in a city, a citizen.”
Those who go into wilderness, into Nature that has not been tamed, are no longer under (arbiturary) human law, but all encompassing, inevitable law of Nature. They go out from under human law. They are no longer citizens, they are not orderly, they are not civilized – they are outlaws. When you go into wilderness, something happens, something that civilization does not like.”
The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in Direct Perception of Nature,
Stephen H. Buhner
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that has.”
Margaret Mead
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Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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“It has to be conceived as an attitude, and ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are […] is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us… and an experiment of possibly going beyond them.”
Foucault
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“There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men [and women] of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence […] The alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation[…] In other words, I’m about convinced now that there is need for a new organization in our world. The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment[…]“
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963
“This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men [and women] do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963
