GOING DOWN

The stories are making me cry. I read a series of stories published by The Huffington Post. The system has failed. Most of us don't really care that the big banks are in trouble or being bailed out. My friends are in agreement that the car companies should go down and start over. Let a new organization with a heart for the survival of the world run transportation. Stop it! Just STOP IT!!!

What the rescue plan should be about is how to survive while we figure out how to go on. Do we just double up and live with each other while houses are abandoned and become scrape offs? Maybe all companies that hold loans should be allowed to go down and the loans should all be forgiven. From there we could start again. Or even offer say, $50,000.00 of loan forgiveness for each adult American and then let those who have no house or car buy what they can with the $50,000.00.
That is probably way too far out of the box, but come on. Just pretending that things will go back to the way they were is much more far fetched.

Sick to Death of Politics

Sick & Homeless

If you've already voted
studied the twisted
deceiving language
of amendments and propositions
trying to trick gentle
people into voting for
something they are against
tired of the tired phrases

did you know that squeaking
by with minimum payments
losing sleep in the crunch some
filthy wealthy robber barons
have designed to take the
little that's left us by manufacturing
what we call money but that no
longer stands for anything
but greed we need change
all right Obama, change you've
never dreamed of maybe change
almost none of us have dreamed of

well Martin had a dream and they
killed him as soon as he started
talking about economic justice
far from the comfortable rhetoric
of white liberals who love
counting their coup
walking over the dead bodies
of the sick and unemployed
my question is not do we need
change, but why have we not
taken to the streets in rage
dumped the suits out of their
gilded cages and taken our sick
and homeless selves into our own arms?

The Alchemy of Abundance

For the last few days, I have been doing some guided meditations with Rick Jarow called The Alchemy of Abundance. I don't know what it is about them, but my second sight and connection to the Universe has been greatly enhanced. What I like most about the experience is that it is guided but not instructed or dictated. There is some genuine Alchemy going on in this work. Dream master Jeremy Taylor
says that Alchemy is the art of making gold out of feces. That is surely a leap. He says that saying it was being made from base metal made it more acceptable, but the reality was more base!

There is a lot of "baseness" going on in our world today. Lot's of raw material for gold I guess. At any rate, I recommend checking it out. It seems to be doing some transformation of what is base in me. Sweet dreams. JJ

Annette Covatta Turns 80

If you don't know Annette, you are poorer for it. There is a wealth to her life that enriches those around her. I went to Google just to see what would come up and there was a richness to the references there too. After 5 pages I was still getting amazing stories of her work in Music, drama, as a leader in her order, and as a superb teacher of enlightenment through her workshops that open and heal. She is a Catholic nun with a twist. She embraces deep spirituality in the many forms that she finds from Hindu wisdom of India where she visited, to mystics of her own faith such as Hildegard of Bingen and contemporary Matthew Fox, a priest who was dismissed from his Dominican Order in 1992 for his major work in Creations Spirituality.

For me, though, it is her warm, loving but very real presence here and now that makes me feel whole and embraced just being near her. If we have a saint among us, it is Annette and yet she is so much more than a canonized relic, she is a vibrant, gifted living reflection of the divine here with us. Don't get me wrong, Annette does not carry some garb of sacred aloofness. She is just Annette, with her humanity intact. Sister, we love you.

Financial Permaculture

Two aspects of the growing alternative culture in the world that I love are alternative economy and Permaculture. I rarely just copy a long piece from another blog, but recently I have discovered Catherine Fitts of solari.com and she is an amazing woman with deep experience in the system who had put herself on the line to create alternatives. Here is her amazing post on Financial Permaculture.

Financial Permaculture

Catherine and Daily Musings,

July 12, 2008 at 8:07 pm

If we look at a community as a financial ecosystem with financial sustainability as one of our goals in achieving overall sustainability, one of the questions we should ask as we reduce waste is “who gets the benefit of that waste reduction?”

In classic market language, if we improve efficiency, whose expenses go down or time is saved or risk is reduced and whose equity increases as a result? In every community, we have financial capital - whether investment dollars or philanthropic dollars - leaving the community for investment elsewhere or for investment in large enterprises that use it to come and buy up our communities.

Who and what will attract that capital back locally and do so in a manner that ensures the successful safety and performance on those dollars? And if it comes back to be invested locally, who gets what as a result? The more we can make our waste reduction attractive to existing local capital, the easier it will be to sequence progressively more waste reduction. The more we can make our local purchases interested in supporting the enterprises funded with our local capital, the easier it will be to generate the performance we need to affirm our local capital and to retain and attract the human capital that could make this all go.

So one measure of the success of a community-wide permaculture development should be an improvement in local investment performance as a result of progressive shifts in a portion of locally controlled and managed capital out of investment in large corporations (such as the financial stocks where they have been losing a great deal of money) back into the local investment system.

Creating this positive loop of attracting local investment capital and eventually regional investment capital is critical to the overall development. The usual alternative is to use government funding and some foundation and philanthropic grant making. These sources depend on borrowing (or capital gains which may be sourced from companies dependent on government contracts, purchases and subsidies which are dependent on borrowing) which is dependent on military force to sustain. Such funding brings those energetics and central controls to bear on a local development.

Sustainability calls for financial sustainability that is not dependent on centrally engineered funds but rather generates from tangible, value-added flows grounded in peaceful, free economies.

If you have time, check out her many free articles about what is really going on in our financial and governmental cultures. Happy reading. Just one more thing. If you want to watch a wonderful video about our connection to all of creation go to http://newparadigmdigest.com/
You may want to turn the hooky music off, but it's an amazing story. Jude

Time for Retreat

I don't even like the word, but find myself here silent and away from all my family and friends listening to who Rumi call The Friend. It's been a while since I left the sound of the world and
took a trip inside. Not going to write too much, just want to stay in touch, repeat that the beauty of the earth is deeply abundant right now. Tiny tomatoes, zucchini threaten their abundance that has people locking their cars in our small town. Lettuce, spinach, huge blue potato plants put out blue blossoms and who knows what will show it's stuff soon from the corn which has begun to tassel and the beans putting out flowers. I am grateful. That is mostly what I know this gorgeous day in July.
JJ

Guns and Roses

It turns out, guns are for Killing Yourself!
Now that's truth in advertising, which of course would kill the gun business instead of the gun buyers. According to Salon.com: "Suicides accounted for 55 percent of the nation's nearly 31,000 firearm deaths in 2005, the most recent year for which statistics are available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." One of my youngest son's best friends shot himself with a gun. What a horror that he had the gun available during a time when he was so young and in a deep depression.



Now for the good news. Humm, well let's see. The garden is growing by leaps and bounds. Tiny new re-plantings are coming up and there are blossoms on the jalapenos. We are swamped with beautiful greens of all sorts, and the cilantro has already created a batch of salsa. Say nothing of those amazing garlic spates from which we created the most amazing pesto. Got some rhubarb at this week's farmer's market and plan on making some strawberry rhubarb custard pie, something I haven't had for years.

More good news is that my novel is breaking through again enough that I think it will be finished by the end of the summer at least. I'm thrilled and anxious to get it out into the world and start on my next project.

Love in time of globally warmed summer. JJ