The Perfect Machine

There are lots of things swimming around in my head today, so let's get started.  Fresh.

I pause.  Where to start?  Uh-oh.  I freeze.  Could it be?

Writer's block?  No!

Maybe.  I'll just have to try and write through it.

Got something in the mail yesterday advertising this year's Bioneers Conference in October.  Really do love that organization.  They're inspiring and informative.  They provide vision and tutelage in these days of dire conditions and underwhelming mainstream information.  They complement the movements that they feature and endorse.  It's a wonderful thing.

I'm sensing that I am going to be working on my books a lot in the coming months.  Both my picture book, that I'm  now considering as less of a children's book and more of an adult story perhaps.  I don't know.  But it is still enticing me to look at it and work on it.  I want to do more work with the illustrations, make them "pop" more.  And I'll take the copy that I made to my college reunion to get some more feedback from friends and colleagues. 

I'm also feeling myself ramp up towards writing about Greece more.  I've started a compilation file of many of the blog posts that I've done and am looking to go through and expand on things.  Writing about doing this is part of the project, too.  Making myself accountable for my brainstorms.

I'm seeing things come together for me.  I am settling into a rhythm.  I can sense a new dawning of production and creativity.  I can feel myself sprouting new limbs, fresh wings.  I am transforming into the being that I want to be, the angelic temple with fortitude and moxie.  I am coming of age, awakening from my slumber.  I am bringing forth the tools to build the temple.  I have bricks and mortar and sweat.  I have mud and guts and strength.  I bring a fountain that sustains, flowing as a river.  I am finding my way.  I am creating with the creator.  I am lifting me up and stretching my lengths.

I will be heard.  I will be read.  I will write and draw and create.  I will find the answers to my questions.  I will find the path that leads me home.  I will make the perfect breakfast.  I will drink my fill.  I will turn water into fuel.  I will my way into my future.  I make my world, my reality.  I bring it up out of the ashes and blow off the dust, and thrust it into the water to the sizzling sounds of its baptism.  It emerges still warm, fresh.  Anew with purpose.  The perfect tool.  The perfect machine.

That's me.  The Perfect Machine.  Making it perfect, one step at a time.  I will walk this perfect journey to the house that holds my ideal.  I will make the trip through the rain and the heat.  I can endure, and I will.

This too shall pass.  It will lead me to the promised land.

Occupy San Jose and Other Acts of Activism

There's been a flurry of activity in my life this last week.  I've had appointments, impromptu acts of activism and altruism, and I've had a bunch of caffeinated beverages.  And a few beers.  But what else is new.

I went downtown to San Jose where the Occupy protest was being staged last Friday.  I helped out, met some folks, bought a few supplies, and talked at length with one of the participants.  He was very interesting.  Probably in his sixties, he's a wanderer of sorts, networking for people and getting things done.  He said that he was fired from his job just the other day, and that he'd been spending too much time down at the occupation.  He asked me what my story was.  I told him that I'm unemployed, that I quit my job to deal with my life as a citizen diagnosed with a mental illness.  He asked if he could pray for me, so I said sure.  We bonded and shook hands.  He seemed to be a genuine and nurturing individual.  He told me he might have some leads on a job for me.  So I'll keep him in mind.

We went back on Saturday and dropped off some water that we had left over from Suzy's high school reunion.  They were appreciative, even though I gave it to them in a red fabric Wells Fargo bag.  Suzy pointed this out to me as not the best move.  Still makes me giggle a bit.

I also attended, sort of, a conference via webcast over last weekend.  It was the Bioneers conference that I had hoped to attend, but it was just too expensive.  So I watched it online for free!  Do check out the video presentations at the Bioneers site, while they have them up for free (Go to www.bioneerslive.org and click on the video archives to get a list of the presentations).  Lots of amazing work being done out there in the world, and these are some of the purveyors of activism and ingenuity.  I highly recommend Paul Stamets, Gloria Steinem, and many others.  It's a mind expanding experience.

Also, I went with my buddy Mary to Berkeley to visit a couple salvage companies.  The first was Urban Ore, a huge warehouse filled with recycled parts and parcel for redoing your home kitchen, bathroom, or back yard.  It was really overwhelming.  There were so many parts and pieces, it was kind of like a thrift store crossed with a junkyard.  They had record albums and books, doorknobs and cabinet pulls, lampshades and electrical boxes, doors and windows and toilets and sinks.  The second place we went to was  Ohmega Salvage.  It was a bit more organized, a lot smaller scale, and a lot more expensive.  One of the most interesting things that they had was a stack of chunks of what appeared to be a gymnasium floor.  You could get 17 square feet of floor, finished on the top with the clear, shiny polymer, for about $320.00.

What you would do with that, I don't know.  Maybe a nice coffee table?

This weekend takes us to Relay Committee Academy in Gilroy.  In fact, I need to be up in about six hours to get going to that.  So I shan't be long here.  But it should prove to be fun.  We'll be honing our skills in fundraising, motivating, and just plain having fun.  And there will be bagels, I'm told.  I foresee no downside.

We'll be in touch, blog friends.  Onward to the euphoria of life!  Bring forth the learning and the change that you wish to have in this life.  You must be the change.  Bring it.

Best of luck to y'all.  Mighty changes.

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

"I wouldn't call myself a proponent of [internal combustion engines], I just believe that if something works (cost effectively), keep doing it. I'm all for alternative fuels and sources of energy/power it's just that none that I've dealt with or read about are cost effective. I hope this changes someday, but for now fossil fuels are what makes the world go around as they say."

" You do have a valid point-- I would be the first to break the exhaust line in the vehicle if it pointed inside ...I truly believe that our need for something better ,faster and fancier has lead us to the point that the environment has been critically damaged and we have caused ourselves illness because of it."

"Another idea: Instead of moving forward, you can move backward. There are many answers around us, or things from our past, that still have great value today. We don't have to innovate new things. Think of the bicycle, for example. When we say we need to innovate, we are really saying "we need our scientists to create solutions," which makes us helpless. If we say instead, "what has already proven to work and how can I use that?", we allow ourselves to find our own solutions. It's empowering!"
 

"How many could really go back to old world ways of life? Would you give up all modern technology?  I personally could live in the country near woods and water ...ride horses down the road... but that is not the world we live in...we live in the days [where having] something more than your neighbor makes you better...who is to say a new technology in the auto/transportation industry would not add yet another chemical that could cause cancer?  [I'm] just a simple girl that would love to go back to basics and stop thinking about competing in this modern world of new and more is better."

Man, good discussion, folks.  Yes, bikes are a good alternative, but their application is limited mostly to individual use.  That is to say, not many trucking companies are gonna be breaking out the bikes to get their work done.  I doubt FedEx has a bike fleet.  Should they?  Maybe, but it wouldn't solve our energy problems.  We need more innovation because there are better answers out there.  The fact that we are discussing this acknowledges that there is an issue.  We need to innovate our thinking.  And that's not to say that we need to create something new with new chemicals and further manufacturing that degrades the environment even further.  We can work along with nature.  Nature has been doing things in ways that are sustainable, waste-free, and beneficial to all life for billions of years (depending on your beliefs about it...) Mimicking what nature already does successfully is the objective of the work of people like Janine Benyus.  By observing what nature does to survive, cooperate with other species, and democratically exist in a competitive environment, we can find the models and the practical applications to bring forth and apply to our reality.  We can teach ourselves to live in ways that are truly in balance with our environment.  And right now, our culture is one that is out of balance and in danger of destroying itself.


So in a sense, I'm saying yes to looking backward-- but farther back than the bicycle.  Let's go back to finding our priorities.  To making the conditions conducive to life.  To growing our own food instead of having it trucked or flown in from all elsewheres of the world.  We need to localize our food production, get to know our local farmers.  But now I'm getting out there on another tangent.  Forgive me that.  I speak what comes to mind.  But living with organic foods grown within walking distance from your home would do a lot to combat some of these issues of environment that we're talking about.  


The issue is much more complicated than I've been able to outline here, but I'm trying.  And that is more than we are wont to do these days, as we discuss certain subjects with only the choir, if you know what I mean.  I would love for this to grow into something greater than I have even imagined yet.  But that is up to you, dear reader.  We've got work to do, for sure.  What say we Keep On Truckin'?

Innovating One's Way Out

We need innovation.  In how we do things, how we talk to each other.  How we deal with our problems.

It's a matter of thinking the unthinkable and making it alright.  Not finding fault.  Not assuming you know what somebody's argument is before they make it, or making it for them.  There's need for more compassion.  To be less quick to judge.  To hear people when they talk, and empathize with them.

I'm inspired to write by an exchange of events that occurred on Facebook.  I shared something that I thought was an interesting parable, and what I received was some judgements from the "other side," that automatic dichotomy that pervades our cultural conversation these days. 

I was inspired to paraphrase something that I heard Amory Lovins say, characterizing the struggle to afford new technologies and innovative ways of dealing with our problems of today.  He asked how clean a car you would buy if the exhaust was plumbed into the cab of the car instead of pointed out at pedestrians.  You'd probably want a clean green machine-- one even cleaner than the hybrids of today.  I felt that the question made you think of the situation differently-- to see the danger in the exhaust as a problem that isn't solved by plumbing it to the outside of the vehicle.  That only defers the problem.

But the responses that I received were from the perspective of a proponent of combustion engines.  While I don't disagree with most of what they said-- that if you take care of your vehicle, it can have low emissions and be better than a gross-offender, and that the trucks of today are powerful and do a lot of work that needs to be done to keep our current economy flowing nicely, among other things-- their comments were turning away from the issue that I felt the question was raising.  It is good to take care of your vehicle and slow the emissions of green house gases if you can, but that is not solving the problem.  Our decision to burn fossil fuels and create these byproducts doesn't happen in a vacuum.  We need innovation to find even better ways to deal with these problems that our current ways of living have created.  To look at the situation and say that what we have is good enough is to settle for our very destruction.  We are all connected, and our actions bring forth circumstances that we all have to deal with. 

I don't dismiss what the individuals had to say, I just think it was directed at an argument that I didn't make.  So what can we do?  Well, I say we need to keep trying to make things better.  Innovate.  Move forward.  Do what we have to do, but don't settle for what is now.  There is more to learn, more to be taught to us by the forces of nature, the great innovators.  That's why I like the work of the Bioneers so much.  They're finding the answers to problems of the day by looking at how nature innovates.  And then trying to copy or mimic nature.  The work of Janine Benyus is exciting and blows my mind.  And the applications are astounding.

I'm gonna try and catch the Bioneers conference one of these days.  Next one is coming up is this October.  We'll see.

Give a Little, Save a Lot

Received a gift today from an old friend.  So now I share it with you.

I've been following the Bioneers movement for a few years now.  They sent me a solicitation for support letter that included this audio.  I'm inspired by the people featured in the special audio "show" that is nicely produced and professionally presented.  I wish I had some extra cash to send their way, but I don't.  At least, not at the moment.  Such things can change.  I am hopeful.

The people featured are citizens who are part of a revolutionary movement to save ourselves from ourselves.  There is so much wisdom and intellect in what they are doing.  Please check out the link-- it's about an hour and it's packed with great information, fun stories, and even some good music.  I highly recommend it.  I will listen to it more than once, I do believe.

You can also check out Bioneers.org for more great stuff.  Enjoy.