10 Things I Learned From People Who Survived Cancer

10 Things I Learned From People Who Survived Cancer

27th February 2015

By Lissa Rankin MD

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

When I interviewed women who had survived breast cancer for my art project The Woman Inside, I noticed that they all shared one remarkable thing in common.

They had all faced down death and decided to live every day like it might be their last. And then they all beat cancer.

The more interviews I did, the more I noticed that these women were living differently than most of the people I knew who had not been diagnosed with cancer. Here’s what I learned from those survivor women. Learning these lessons changed my life, and I hope they’ll change yours.

1. Be unapologetically YOU.

People who survive cancer get feisty. They walk around bald in shopping malls and roll their eyes if people look at them funny. They say what they think. They laugh often. They don’t make excuses. They wear purple muumuus when they want to.

2. Don’t take shit from people.

People who survive cancer stop trying to please everybody. They give up caring what everybody else thinks. If you might die in a year anyway (and every single one of us could), who gives a flip if your Great Aunt Gertrude is going to cut you out of her will unless you kiss her ass?

3. Learn to say no.

People with cancer say no when they don’t feel like going to the gala.  They avoid gatherings when they’d prefer to be alone. They don’t let themselves get pressured into doing things they really don’t want to do.

4. Get angry. Then get over it.

People who survive cancer get in your face. They question you. They feel their anger. They refuse to be doormats.  They demand respect. They feel it. Then they forgive. They let go. They surrender. They don’t stay pissed. They release resentment.

5. Don’t obsess about beauty.

People who survive cancer no longer worry about whether they have perfect hair, whether their makeup looks spotless, or whether their boobs are perky enough. They’re happy just to have boobs (if they still do). They’re happy to be alive in their skin, even if it’s wrinkled.

6. Do it now.

Stop deferring happiness. People who survive cancer realize that you can’t wait until you kick the bucket to do what you’re dying to do. Quit that soul-sucking job now. Prioritize joy. They live like they mean it.

7. Say “I love you” often.

People who survive cancer leave no words left unspoken. You never know when your time is up. Don’t risk having someone you love not know it.

8. Take care of your body.

People who survive cancer have a whole new appreciation for health. Those who haven’t been there may take it for granted. So stop smoking. Eat healthy. Drink in moderation. Maintain a healthy weight. Avoid putting toxic poisons in your God Pod. Get enough sleep.

9. Prioritize freedom.

People who survive cancer know that being a workaholic isn’t the answer. Money can’t buy health. Security doesn’t matter if you’re six feet under. Sixteen hours a day of being a stress monster is only going to make you sick. As Tim Ferriss writes in The 4-Hour Workweek, “Gold is getting old. The New Rich are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.”

10. Take risks.

People who survive cancer have faced their fear and told it to go to hell. They know life is for living. Fear is powerless. And joy lies in taking risks. So go sky diving if you want. Bungee jump. Hang glide. Spend your savings.  Live like you might die tomorrow.

Are you doing these things? Or are you waiting for cancer to test out how much you want to live?

Don’t wait for cancer, my love. Don’t tempt the Universe that way.

Be brave enough to live NOW.

Unapologetically and fearlessly living for today,

New HARES website!!!!

A couple of my gal pals & I recently kicked off a new venture & website which we hope will be of use to our community & anyone interested in living a more resilient, self-sufficient lifestyle.

Website address is:
http://www.hermannarearegionaleconomicsustainability.com

I just sent out an announcement for this site & I really hope this site is well utilized & received by those I sent the link to & any others that are interested in the subject matter.

I am very grateful to be a part of this local community. Considering I am relatively new to the area (less than two years), I am repeatedly moved by the comradery of those that have welcomed me into this area & their 'inner circles'.

We hope to pick up some ads from some local businesses too. At $5 per year, the price is definitely right! We shall see if this is successful or not!

Boy & Bear Southern Sun jam session!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eudkqrrr-hg

Great jam by a great Aussie band! How many bands can jam like this nowadays?!

7 Deadly Sins

From:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-20/7-deadly-sins-america

7 Questions Every Woman Needs to Ask Before Her Next Birthday

7 Questions Every Woman Needs to Ask Before Her Next Birthday
Because answers to life questions come so much more easily when you accept the risk—and reward—of looking at the hard stuff.

By Leigh Newman

1. "What's my go-to spiritual practice?"

This is a trick question. By asking it, what you're really saying is: "I need one. Now." For the night you hit a pothole in a creepy, dark mountain town and blow your tire. For the day you come home and find the freakishly huge tax bill. And, yes, even for the afternoon when you're looking out the window and witness a sunset the miraculous, oft-forgotten color of orange sherbet.

Maybe your practice is a gratitude mumble just before bed. Maybe it's a 10-minute-long meditation in your husband's closet, where nobody—not even the toddler—can find you. Maybe it's going to church. Maybe it's an idea that you hold inside you and repeat to yourself, like this one from Eckhart Tolle: "Stress is wanting something to be the way that it isn't." Because if you give up on hoping there's some way for a tire that's already lying in tatters under your car to reassemble before your eyes, you don't have to scream at everybody, "Be quiet! Mommy's freaking out!" 

You accept the tire is gone—and look for a spare.That is the thing about spiritual practices. Yes, they are about your spirit, but your spirit includes your mind, your mouth and your ability to focus sufficiently on how to operate a jack.

2. "How would my relationships change if I resolved never to lie again?"

"We have all been liars," says Sam Harris, PhD, in his book Lying. "And many of us will be unable to get into our beds tonight without having told several lies over the course of the day. What does this say about us and the life we are making with one another? How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you?" 

Harris, by the way, is a neuroscientist and a philosopher. Perhaps the best response to these questions is his own—"It's worth finding out."

3. "What's in my zombie bag?"

As advised by government experts, your bag might contain canned food, a flashlight, a dust mask, a wrench and a hand-crank radio. But it is slightly more likely that you're worried about a hurricane or a flood than you are zombies. The sort of crisis you might fear, however, is not important for this discussion. What is, are the contents of the bag. 

So many of us worry that we don't know ourselves well enough. We wonder why we can see others so clearly but we can't see ourselves. A zombie bag will not completely solve this existential debate. But it will help. We are who we most are in times of crisis. 

For example, I live near a river. I have one thing in my zombie bag. It is a raft, which I will inflate, drop out the window, jump into, call for my kids and husband to jump into, also, then paddle us all to safety in. In my husband's zombie bag are copies of our birth certificates, social security cards, credit reports and the deed to our house. This is who he and I are in everything we do, state of emergency or not. He has the common sense. I have the dreamers-only plan of action (which includes our leap into the raft from the third-floor window).

4. “Have I found a graceful way to deal with the stumbles of others?"

You have gotten older, true, and one of the benefits is that you know a little more now than you did before. It can be hard (read: maddening) to listen to a third-grader smugly inform you that the world was formed by two meteors crashing together. Then again, it can be hard (read: maddening) when your mother pronounces wok as wolk, the w-cousin of yolk. Have you found a graceful way to correct them? By graceful, I mean kind. And by kind, I mean showing them another way to look at it, such as, asking a question like, "Wok? Huh. I always said wok, you know, like pock?" 

But this is only necessary if you're worried the person will stagger around the world with the misinformation glinting like spinach between the teeth. The highest level of grace, is going without the correction—letting the minor, glaring error flow over you and out of you. You know what the third-grader means, after all: two asteroids, one big bang, the world began, how amazing, wow!

5. "What would happen if I wrote down the story of the person who harmed me?"

In other words, "What do you know about this person?," wrote the very wise man who invented the question above. "If you do not know them, what can you find out about them? What do you have in common?" 

Even if you were to only find one way in which the two of you are similar, even if you were to understand only one fact about their lives, even if you were to waste an afternoon writing down this meager biography—might it take you just a smidge closer to finding the humanity in that person? Perhaps this is why Desmond Tutu wrote this question in The Book of Forgiving.

6. "How much discouraging, exhausting work have I done toward attaining happiness?"

We all want to think that if we take our vitamins, write in our journals and smell a few tulips, we'll be happier (all true methods of joy-boosting, even the last one). These things help. They do! I'm a fan of doing them. And yet...lasting happiness usually requires more effort. It means giving up lunch with your friends to go to a therapist. It means not watching TV with your husband at night and instead talking about whether you should move or not and why the two of you disagree so emphatically about it. It means sitting at a computer until midnight, looking for a job that you love instead of one you simply don't loathe. 

It's discouraging, exhausting work, at times. It can even get brutal. But it is part-time work. You slog along, you feel better, the slogging feels less like slogging and you may even have to do less of it (because you've done the work that works). Unhappiness, on the other hand, is 24/7. You don't get to do it for an hour a day and knock off. You do it in the morning, afternoon and at night. It feels usually like you can't even quit. But you can. It just takes...some difficult, exhausting work toward attaining happiness.

7. "Do I let myself feel the pleasure of stealing?"

In his new book of poetry The Moon Before Morning, W.S. Merwin writes about watching the flowers open at dawn, like "pink coral in midair," and then sitting at the breakfast table, reading, which makes him feel as if he's stealing this moment from something else that he should be doing. We all feel this, don't we? We take a weekend morning to daydream in bed or to listen to a new piece of music—and then the worry or guilt starts, that we should be buying groceries or figuring out what's really going on with that weird sound coming from the washing machine. 

But to Merwin, "the pleasure of stealing is part of it." In other words, he is thinking of the stealing as a joyful act. Because, ladies and gentleman, it's time we are stealing, not eyeliners, gold or candy. We ought to let ourselves feel that long-lost, gigglish feeling of taking something without asking—even if what we're taking is time, and whom we're taking it from is ourselves.

Stress is wanting something to be the way that it isn't

Eckhart Tolle: "Stress is wanting something to be the way that it isn't." Stumbled onto this quote today & thought this quote was worth pondering.


How often do I try to "swim upstream", fighting the current, trying to make something happen that, for whatever reason, just does not happen? Probably still too often.


I can remember writing a short story with the title of "swimming upstream". Was a short blurb about my thoughts when the ex & I sold some cattle we had, when I went back into the military. Was a very difficult & trying time for me. Had created & was enjoying what I considered the 'perfect' life for me, only to have it all radically change due to 911. Much churn, very similar to how one would be reacting if they were trying to swim upstream. And, just as one would expect in a similar situation, much effort was exercised, for naught. But there were many lessons learned because of this experience.


However, to my personal credit, I do believe that I am getting much better at not resisting whatever comes my way.


I am learning that we each have to walk our own paths.


I have learned that no matter how obvious the solution to another person's problem may be to me, they will view this same issue in a completely different way. (AND I've also learned to be less judgemental, because of this.)


Most people claim they want others to be completely honest with them. They don't.


Most people claim they are completely honest with others. They're not.


If you have something you don't want someone else to mess with or use, they will gravitate toward this item every time!


There are more takers than givers in the world.


I am my best friend & will always be there for myself.


Anyway, enough profound thoughts...There is a school of thought that every experience comes your way to teach one something. And that every person that comes into your life is there to do the same.


I hope I can relax & flow like a river more often. Maybe I can view the events that occur in one's life to be a deliberate training ground.


In the end, does it all really matter? I think not.

Post Carbon Society And Transition

Post Carbon Society And Transition

http://peakoil.com/generalideas/post-carbon-society-and-transition



The Industrial Society or the Carbon Society

The present social system that we are living is called Industrial Society. It began with the Industrial Revolution (1760 -1830) in the West and was followed by social revolution in various countries – Holland, France, England and the USA, ending the age old feudal society and ushering in a capitalist society. Later, similar revolutions followed in many countries in the West and in Japan in the East. In the twentieth century, many socialist revolutions occurred, notably in Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. All of them had two things common – ushering in an industrial society (whether capitalist or socialist) and ending the feudal society.

However, capitalism spread in other countries too – mainly through colonialism, but without effecting a similar social revolution. These countries are generally known as Third World countries, which includes India too. In the absence of a social revolution, it did not unleash the people’s energy as they continued to suffer from poverty and lack of education and good health care. On the other hand, many traditional low energy technologies and ways of living are still active in these societies.

The material basis of industrial society has been coal, oil and many other minerals. These are generally known as non-renewable resources because, unlike plant and animal resources, these are fixed in quantity under the earth and as we take them out, their stock keeps on dwindling. Among these, coal and oil are the most important because they represent concentrated sources of energy. Hence industrial societies can also be called carbon-based societies.

Peak Oil or Depletion of Non-Renewable Resources

When half of these non-renewable resources are taken out of the earth, a peak of production occurs and the production keeps on falling and the price keeps on increasing. Of all these resources, oil is the most important because it is central to the running of a modern industrial economy. With Peak Oil, at first the price of oil rises because the demand is greater than supply. This ushers a crisis in the capitalist society, leading to a recession. When recession occurs, demand falls and the prices also fall and the economy starts shrinking. Production statistics indicate that Peak Oil appears to have occurred in the year 2008, leading to a rise in oil prices.

In 2014, we saw a sharp fall in oil prices, followed by fall in the prices of other commodities, especially metals, which could be early signs of a global recession. It should be kept in mind that periodic crises are endemic to capitalist societies and not caused only by depletion of resources, but other factors including economic and political competition. However, unlike earlier recessions, this recession accompanied by Peak Oil and depletion of other non-renewable resources strikes at the very basis of capitalism. Many believe that this can lead to an end of the capitalist era.

The Post Carbon Society

Today, among people who have been concerned with Peak Oil and other non-renewable resource depletion, it is clear that the present system cannot go on. As Einstein said ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.’

If the capitalist era ends what will replace the present system? To begin with we can start with what cannot go on.

1. No alternative energy source can replace the petrol and gas which run our trucks and cars. That’s because all alternatives give electricity (wind, solar, nuclear etc.). There is no viable design of a truck that can run on electricity. Today, transportation is so basic to global capitalism that its breakdown alone can cause the system to collapse.

2. No alternative energy can generate the amount of energy we are using now.

3. The implication of the above is that ‘globalisation’ is no longer possible.

4. The present level of consumption will result in unacceptable level of global warming and ecological degradation.

5. The solutions attempted in the last seven years have resulted in greater inequality which is increasingly opposed by the people of the world.

Based on the above, we can state a broad outline of what to expect. We can provisionally term it as a Post Carbon Society. This society will have the following main features:

1. Equality

2. Scaling down of the use of resources – particularly energy

3. Local self-sufficient economy

4. Ecological restoration of the present degraded ecology

5. A value system or ethical base which is more cooperative and less competitive than the present society

6. There will of course be many other features depending upon what political system will replace the present system and the specific country or ecological region.

Transition

While the goal may be relatively clear, the road to reach it is not clear. We will have to have a period of transition between the present system and the goal we have outlined. During the transition there will be certain amount of suffering. The amount of suffering will depend on the type of the society.

There appear to be three kinds of societies in the world:

1. Socialist societies or societies with command economy

2. Capitalist societies which had an anti-feudal revolution

3. Capitalist societies which did not have an anti-feudal revolution

Socialist societies or societies with command economy.

As a rule, the socialist societies followed a path of development similar to the capitalist societies. Cuba was no exception. But in 1991, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced problems similar to the problems we are facing due to Peak Oil. Cuba’s oil supply was cut. Cuba ushered a ‘special period’ and in five years they successfully solved the problem. However, these five years were tough and people did suffer a lot. In the video, Power of Community this story is told. While there is much to learn from Cuba, each society will change from where it is just now. Other socialist/command economies when faced with the crisis may follow similar path as that of Cuba.

Capitalist societies which had an anti-feudal revolution

In capitalist societies, a movement called ‘Transition Towns’ started in the year 2005. It is a grassroots network of communities that are working to build resilience in response to Peak Oil, climate change, food insecurity and economic instability. Transition Towns is a catchword for environmental and social movements founded upon the principles of Permaculture, which originally denoted ‘permanent agriculture’.

Today, Permaculture has come to mean a whole life system encompassing various strategies for people to acquire all those resources, including access to land needed to evolve self-financing and self-managed systems to provide for all their material and non-material needs, without depleting, polluting and destroying the natural resources of the biosphere. The Transition Towns movement is an example of socio-economic localisation.

There are over 400 communities recognised as official Transition Towns in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Italy and Chile.

Central to the Transition Town movement is the idea that a life without oil could in fact be far more enjoyable and fulfilling than the present: “by shifting our mindset we can actually recognise the coming post-cheap oil era as an opportunity rather than a threat, and design the future low carbon age to be thriving, resilient and abundant – somewhere much better to live than our current alienated consumer culture based on greed, war and the myth of perpetual growth.”

Transition Town movement is a high knowledge based movement and assumes a sense of local democracy. It seems to be spreading in the capitalist countries. However one is not sure how they will address the problem of control of resources by the big capitalists, because in the final analysis the resources are finite and we are already overdrawing from the carrying capacity of our planet.

Third World

The characteristic feature of a Third World society is, as we said in the beginning, one where an anti-feudal social revolution has not occurred. However, there is a lot of variation in different countries of the Third World. In many countries, these social changes have taken place in various degrees with a lowering of poverty, increase in education and health care. The most promising situation appears to be in Latin America, where many new kinds of socialist experiments are going on. Many countries in South East Asia too have made good progress, while in South Asia Sri Lanka and Bhutan too have made significant progress. The worst scenario countries probably are in Africa and in South Asia. Basically wherever there has been investment in health care and education, more grassroots democracy, the society is better prepared for change.

India

India presents a mixed scenario. Certainly, we are not as badly off as some of the countries in Africa or even Pakistan. But on the whole, it is not a very optimistic scenario either, what with two third of the people living in poverty and one third in a permanent famine situation. Our education and health care scene too is equally dismal.

While there are large scale protest movements going on against new capitalist projects, few of them have a programme of social change. They are mainly aimed at stopping projects that affect people and loot their resources. Then there are large ethnic and identity movements, including movements for smaller states. They too do not have a programme of change.

The Maoist movement is certainly a movement for change, and in coming years when the present system weakens, they may succeed to some extent. But it depends to what extent their programmes meet the needs of the day or matches the goal we have outlined above.

There are several grassroots programmes – both community-based and those initiated by NGOs which have elements of transition and which to some extent have goals similar to what we have outlined above. The Pune NGO Kalpavriksha has documented many of them and there are several of these videos available on YouTube. Transition movement can be built only on the basis of what people have already achieved. But our comments on Transition movement, ‘that it does not address the problem of control of resources by the big capitalists’ applies here also. Below I will discuss some of these initiatives in the Deccan region.

Deccan

Several organisations and communities have been carrying out experiments with varying degrees of success in the last 25 years or so responding to the crisis they have been facing. What we have to do is to see to what extent they are moving towards the goals we have stated above, learn from them and lend our support to similar projects according to our skills and aptitudes. Below, we will discuss a few of them and see what has been possible. In each case, I have given reference to a YouTube video, so my descriptions are very brief.

NGOs
1. Deccan Development Society in Medak Distict in Telangana has developed a very inspiring model of Public Distribution System based on local production of millets. They have based their work on Women’s organisations known as ‘sanghas’.

2. M.V. Foundation in its Natural Resource Management Programme have done similar work. They work in Ranga Reddy district which is a ‘rurban’ district around Hyderabad. Here there was a problem of people migrating to the city and leaving the land fallow. They have also worked with women, got some government funds and organised organic farming and regenerated agriculture and restored the ecology to a significant extent.

3. Zero Waste Management in Vellore. This is a very good urban programme on solid waste. The waste is segregated at source, collected and at the centre, the biodegradable part is composted and the non-bio degradable part is further segregated, cleaned and sold to industry. It is a low tech, economically viable project. Similar initiatives but with different organisational approach are coming up in Pune and Bangalore.

People’s Initiatives

1. Ralegaon Siddhi, 2. Hiware Bazar and 3. Menda Lekha

The first two are in the water scarce district of Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. The approach combines water harvesting and regeneration of agriculture with peoples organisation and strengthening of Panchayati raj. They also combated ‘social evils’ and managed to have a sort of moral regeneration. In Menda Lekha, the focus is on using the new Forest Rights Act which gives power to tribals to own their forest.

In all cases, both NGOs and People’s Initiatives, there has been a significant improvement in the quality of life of the poor, including in economic life. They have used political organisation – women sanghas, used newer pro-people laws like Panchayati Raj as well technical inputs from NGOs – particularly in watershed management and re-introduction of local crops.

For every one of these success stories, there are several others where the success is limited for a variety of reasons. I am sure there are some 100 examples like that in the country. It is up to us to help them with whatever skills and aptitude we have.

Concluding Remarks

So what does ‘Transition’ mean in India? The examples given above meet many ideas of Transition except that of scaling down of energy use. While urban India can and should reduce energy consumption, rural India does not consume much as it is (though, here also I think the phenomenal increase in the use of motor cycles can be reduced).

The important thing lacking in these programmes is a lack of awareness of the impending crisis. The other thing that needs change is the value system: “our current alienated consumer culture based on greed, war and the myth of perpetual growth”, as the Transition Town people put it. It is here that a group like Peak Oil India can play an important role. It can show:

1. The development model, that the mainstream is propagating and many believe in it, is no longer working anywhere in the world. Not even in the West, where it is not only failing, but hundreds of experimental initiatives are actually going on to prepare for an alternative.

2. There are several initiatives in India too that can lead us to a transition and that we should enrich it with the awareness of the world situation and a different value system and help it to spread to newer areas.

We can best do it by using videos and lectures, both about the world situation and about our own initiatives. I have listed some videos below which I think groups in Deccan especially can use.

frontierweekly.com

There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood

February 11, 2015 

From: http://prayforcalamity.com/

“He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.”


― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

In Theodore Kacynski’s manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” he lays out many premises concerning the existence of man in relation to technology and technological societies. One of these premises is that modern people in technological societies are afraid of death because they have never lived. They have not used their bodies, minds, and souls to their full potential, and thus even in old age, feel like they are yet to begin. Kacynski writes about the primitive man who in his sixties, having seen the successful life of his child and feeling the weariness in his muscles and bones, does not fear, but welcomes his turn to sleep. Where these intuitions were passed on, cultures of indigenous peoples were able to form warrior societies whose success rested on the fact that individual braves had no fear of death. They viewed themselves as one with their people and their land, both of which were timeless, granting them strength of conviction when the situation called for it.

When we hear of people dying in our culture, such news is often quickly followed with statements about the unfairness of one dying so young. Even a fifty-year-old heart attack victim will generally be granted laments and declarations that their passing was too early. While of course the loss of a loved one is saddening, there does appear to be a trend throughout this culture that seems to speak of death as if it is not the ultimate outcome of every life. Death, like the environment, is but another inconvenience to be conquered by our cleverness.

In this culture, there is language of “rights” concerning life. It is said that individuals have a “right” to life, meaning then that death is some violation against the individual. There are even those who would like to extend such rights to animals. No one, according to modern people enculturated by the dominant dogmas, is supposed to die. Ever.

Of course, every living being is only so for a limited time. Death and birth are two phases in the same biological process, and where there is the latter, inevitably we will come to the former. What I find so maddening, is that this culture, so lacking in its ability to confront death, let alone to create and support the psychological and emotional infrastructure to deal with death, is such an efficient bringer of death. How a people so vocally dedicated to peace and the preservation of life can then unflinchingly create nuclear and biological weapons, institute economic castes which immiserate the majority to establish the privilege of the minority, and daily exterminate upwards of two hundred species is possibly the grand irony of our time.

The mind reels.

—

When just last month, the study “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” was released, it got a lot of traction across the internet. The study, prepared by eighteen scientists from various international universities, grabbed headlines by claiming that human civilization had crossedfour of nine environmental boundaries.

Of course such studies digitally shared from hard drive, to hard drive, to hard drive have never served to accomplish much in the way of real world action towards deindustrialization, and likely this one was and will remain no different. The trend seems to be that alarming data confirming that human industrial civilization is driving the global ecology to ruin, likely even to the near term detriment of this very civilization, only ends up spurring on those who believe that human industrial civilization can be done in a less harmful way, perhaps with the addition of more solar panels or the subtraction of capitalist motives.

Those who dare argue that civilization, and industrial civilization in particular, is the root cause of the destructive habits which are bringing all living beings to a point of potential collapse or extinction, are routinely dismissed as extreme. Such critics, before dismissal, are reminded of the dominant culture’s primary directive; “We cannot go backwards.” Suggestions that we must, in order to maintain a survivable habitat, drastically reduce reliance on industrial methods, products, and infrastructure are waved off as impossible, insane, or even genocidal. Defenders of the dominant culture and systems of industrial civilization claim that such reductions in technological application will axiomatically mean reductions in human population, and thus are off the table. These claimants are either oblivious to the fact that “going forward” with the methods and practices of the dominant culture would be at least equally genocidal, if not more so, or they harbor a quasi religious belief that human invention will save us from every single problem caused by previous scores of human invention. Always ignored is the clear fact that so called “going forward” will mean an increase in human population before the ecosystems which support them collapse, meaning there will be more humans to die when drought, famine, sea level rise, resource scarcity, and every other calamity currently rising to crescendo ultimately manifest in a symphony of systemic failures that existing political, technological, and economic structures are incapable of mitigating

And then there are the non-human genotypes that most defenders of the dominant culture refuse to ever enter into their calculations.

When someone refuses to acknowledge a solution to a problem because it will indirectly involve death – even when the solution in question is attempting to select fewer deaths sooner as opposed to a great many more deaths later – this person is inserting hidden premises into the discussion, the most obvious of which is that people alive now have the right to exhaust the health of the land which people not yet born will need to rely on in the future. If upon the suggestion that we must globally act to deindustrialize in order to prevent overwhelming climate catastrophe, a person floats the counter argument that such deindustrialization will result in a reduction of currently available medical technologies, and is therefore an unacceptable proposition, this person is inserting into the discussion a premise that the lives of those who would no longer have access to the medical technologies they require are more valuable – this is to say, they have more of a right to survival – than the lives that will be lost – human and non – when industrial civilization fails and brings down with it the functioning ecology of the planet.

Such premises, to me, seem insane. A patent refusal to acknowledge the bare reality that all life, including human life, requires as a foundation a healthy and viable habitat is either obstinacy or a shameful level of ignorance. Claiming that one group of humans has more of a right to survival than others, or that humans have more of a right to survival than the rest of the web of life, is doubly insane.

At the end of it all, defenders of the status quo are not defending life, they are defending lifestyle. Proponents of the dominant culture and its myths of progress are really arguing for their own comfort, of both body and mind. Changing nothing presents no difficult ethical questions or messy physical conflicts. Going forward is the easy choice. This fact alone should ring alarm bells.

—

Why is death so unacceptable? If we cannot come to grips with death, then we will find ourselves collectively at an impasse where no necessary action will be taken, and industrial civilization will continue unimpeded on its course devouring forests, wiping out species after species, washing away topsoil, and rendering the oceans a lifeless acidic soup of plastics in various stages of photo decay. Somewhere buried in all of this is yet another premise; that to elect the death of even one is unacceptable, but to remain passive while existing systems dole out death to many is forgivable. Human agency seems to be the determining factor. The people who own and operate chemical plants that cause regional cancer clusters in children are forgiven. The death of one million pinpricks is too diffuse to assign blame. On the other hand, to intentionally kill the CEO of such a chemical company would be an outrage. It would be a tragedy. People on TV would say he died too young.

The dominant culture not only protects those high on its hierarchy, blurring lines of responsibility for the actions they take in the name of progress, but it also blinds every day people from the realities of just how it is they come to have the things that they do. Major systems of production and distribution that segregate individuals from the sources of their food, their clothing, the materials that built their homes, the fuels that power their cars and gadgets, create an illusory sense of existence. If a person perceives that food comes from a grocery store, gasoline from a pump, shoes from an online retailer, it is reasonable to believe then that this person’s perceptions have been skewed into believing that nothing must ever die for us to consume whatever we want in whatever quantities we desire. As long as the blood is on someone else’s hands in some other land far from sight, then there is no blood at all. It is this willful blindness to the day to day functioning of industrial civilization on the part of the world’s wealthier populations that allows a people draped in slave made textiles who are kept fed by the mechanistic rape of stolen land powered by stolen oil to stare up with their doe eyes and without a hint of irony ask, “But why do they hate us?”

So it is that so often we hear the claims of “green” capitalists who declare we can have our planet and kill it too. We are to shut our eyes and believe that solar panels, electric cars, fair trade mocha lattes, soy burgers, iPads, internet service, and all of the pills and processes in a modern hospital all just manifest from the ether. The rainforests clear cut, the oceanic dead zones caused by agricultural run off, the open pit mines, the oil spills, the nitro-tri-fluoride and other greenhouse gasses, and all of the whips and prods physical and not that herd about the masses of humans who do all the lifting, stitching, assembling, dismembering, and dying to bring such wonders to our shopping carts just don’t add up to dry shit.

That is how the dominant culture deals with death. It hides it. And when it can’t hide it any longer, it calls it “business.”

—

Various indigenous tribes have been able to maintain steady populations. In fact, for millennia, a handful of commonplace practices aided in keeping a tribe or band’s numbers in check. Breastfeeding infants until they were four years old helped prevent mother’s menstrual cycles from resurging, thereby keeping birth numbers down. The use of abortifactant herbs also helped women in the event of untimely pregnancies. When a group’s population was at a point where another child would bring great hardship, some tribal people would turn to infanticide. Picture the heartbreaking scene, as a mother lays a newborn infant on a cold hillside to freeze as the sun sets on a winter day. On the other end, tribes would at times decide not to work to heal ailing elderly members, and instead would begin ceremonial death rites when an older person fell ill.

This is the cultural imperative I am interested in. The ability of a people to confront the hard reality of their lives, and to make the soul wrenching choices that they must make in order to survive is not present in the civilized paradigm, not when it comes to allowing death. This is a delicate topic, to be sure, but one of necessary import as the world now hosts almost eight billion people, while conversely non-renewable resources are consumed at increasing rates, and the ecology is pushed beyond the breaking point.

Cultures that accept the inevitability of death create ceremonies and social forms for processing death. This is not to suggest that these people do not feel the pain of loss when a loved one passes, but rather to highlight that they develop a maturity surrounding death. They can talk about it. They can incorporate it into their survival strategies. They do not treat it as a cosmic betrayal of the individual’s right to exist for seventy-five years before a midnight expiration in a beach condo in Florida. Most importantly, cultures that make room for death do not become locked into a suicidal social paradigm, refusing to veer in their direction because doing so would result in the death of some, even when going forward would result in the death of all.

In my last essay I spoke of needing a new cultural ethos in order to prevent the wanton annihilation of the Earth’s life giving systems. This psychological and spiritual evolution must include maturity in the matters of death. Culturally, we must not shun death from our view, for when we do, we push his presence beyond sight, but not beyond efficiency. Beyond the hedge where death lurks ignored by modern man, he does his work still, and he plots against those who believe they have banished him with their cleverness. He plans a great party indeed.

—

My daughter is nearly a year old. She is my connection to the future, as my parents and ancestors are my connection to the past. I love her to my core, each cell in my body resonating with an urge to guard her, protect her, and to see to her survival. I think about the emptiness that would devour me if she were to die, so I do have a sense of the gravity concerning that which I have written. I look at my little girl, and the truth of life comes to me plain as the new day: we cannot banish sorrow. Heartache is the handmaiden of joy. The history of our species is the history of finding the strength to endure when it seems that all is lost, and when we see no reason to go on, feeling that the ground holds us still.

The complex problems we face require sober, adult analysis, but here and now we lack the methods and ceremonies necessary to act as a mature culture. Our unwillingness at all levels to confront uncomfortable realities has made dangerous adolescents of us, as our orgy of consumption and self aggrandizement has pushed the planet to the brink. There are tasks which demand our collective attention, and undertaking them, while necessary, will not be without consequence. There are few good options on the table before us. Meeting such difficult questions head on, with humility and grace, is the mark of greatness.

It is time to ask, “who are we?” and “who do we want to be?” As we stand right now, we are a belligerent cult of ego, drunk on the self, screaming our greatness as we charge forth trampling everything underfoot. We have a lot of work to do, and not nearly enough time to do it. Death rides whether we call for him or not.

the greatest prison

Glimpse into the future-The Lesson of Greece: Only Collapse Makes Real Change Possible

From http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

The Lesson of Greece: Only Collapse Makes Real Change Possible

February 5, 2015

When the illusion that the Status Quo can fulfill all its promises to everybody dies, the Status Quo starts the terminal slide to effective collapse.

Of the many lessons we can learn from Greece's difficult path to rejection of debt-serfdom, the most important is perhaps the most obvious: no real change is possible until the Status Quo can no longer fulfill its promises, i.e. it effectively collapses.

The collapse of the Status Quo has two distinct features: the process is highly variable, and the process affects the social classes in different ways.

The process of collapse is neither sudden nor smooth.Things do not necessarily cease to function overnight; rather, the decline to effective collapseoperates much like energy states in physics: systems decay and then drop to a lower energy level, where they are stable until further decay causes the next drop to an even lower level.

Pension payments provide a ready example. The pension payment is reduced, and the recipient tightens his/her belt and gets by. The next reduction (either outright or via inflation) forces drastic changes in consumption, and subsequent reductions reduce the pension to a supplement that cannot possibly support a retiree, much less their family.

The pension is still issued, but the promise of a pension that could support a household at a modest level of consumption has collapsed. Though the system for issuing pensions still exists, it no longer fulfills the original purpose.

In this sense, the collapsed pension system becomes much like thephantom legions of the late Roman Empire: the paymasters and officers still received the legion's pay, but there were no real soldiers; the legion was a bookkeeping entry in a skimming operation, not a fighting unit.

The financial Aristocracy (i.e. the kleptocracy) in Greece avoided much of the pain of debt-serfdom. What's the point of running things if you can't distribute the pain to others? I addressed this is Greece at the Crossroads: the Oligarchs Blew It (January 27, 2015).

The powerless classes were stripmined first. Bamboozled into voting for the Kleptocracy in previous elections, the powerless lower classes felt the brunt of austerity for the simple reason the kleptocracy knew there would be no blowback, as long as a few shreds of swag were being distributed.

This highlights the critical role of complicity in maintaining a corrupt, venal and parasitic kleptocracy: the passivity and silence of recipients of social welfare are bought very cheaply, as these classes will fear the loss of the miserable coins tossed to them.

This fear is a potent form of financial terrorism: any resistance or protest might trigger the loss of the reduced social welfare benefits, and so the powerless choose to remain powerless rather than rise up and take the risk of bringing down the parasitic kleptocracy.

The statist bourgeoisie (a.k.a. state-funded upper middle class) were the last to lose faith in the kleptocracy, for the simple reason that their share of the swag was sufficient to maintain the facade of middle-class comfort. It was also enough to sustain the illusion that the kleptocracy's abject kow-towing to the Lords of the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would magically become a winning strategy for Greece, rather than a one-way ticket to permanent debt-serfdom.

When the kleptocracy lost a significant percentage of this top 20%, they sealed their fate. When the state apparatchiks, institutional functionaries, professionals, small business owners, etc. finally lose faith in the the Status Quo, the Status Quo is doomed, though it can stage a rear-guard action by brutally suppressing this class (see Venezuela for an example of this doomed defense of a failed Status Quo).

In the U.S., the top 10% are doing very well, the next 10% are getting enough to sustain the illusion that they may yet recover their former status and wealth, and the bottom 80% have been bought off with social welfare or the promise of social welfare. Some variation of these percentages are in play in Europe, China, Japan and the emerging economies that haven't already imploded.

When the illusion that the Status Quo can fulfill all its promises to everybody dies, the Status Quo starts the terminal slide to effective collapse.

Unfortunately, no real change in the social order or power structure can occur until the effective collapse of the Status Quo has taken down everyone but the kleptocrats, their high-ranking apparatchiks and the piteously delusional.

How can you mend a broken heart

It may feel impossible, but you can make it through.

By Iyanla Vanzant

Sometimes our tendency in relationships is to think of ourselves as passive observers—to forget that we are active participants. So when things go awry, we make the cause external. He hurt me; this happened to me; my heart was broken. But broken hearts happen through us, not to us. They're the result of how we make sense of what has unfolded.

If your heart is broken, here is the good news, beloved: People can correct or heal what they are ready to acknowledge, accept and release, and you don't need anyone else to mend your broken heart. But here is the not-so-good news: People can correct or heal only what they are ready to acknowledge, accept and release—and no one else can mend your broken heart.

So while it may feel as though the other person holds the key to feeling better, the truth is that you do not need his or her presence, input or permission to heal your own broken heart. You are responsible for yourself. Which means you have work to do.

First, become aware of the heart of your hurt. Ask yourself what you needed and did not get, what you wanted and did not ask for, what you knew but chose to ignore. 

Next, choose to feel better. Say to yourself: I want to be more loving in every aspect of my life. Remaining hurt does not make me more loving. Remaining angry does not make me more loving. Insisting that I am right and they are wrong does not make me more loving.

Finally, let it go. Rather than tell yourself again and again the sad story about what happened, get clear about who and how you want to be from now on. Ready yourself to show up to the world in a different way. Chances are that the people involved in your situation are convinced they are right. In fact, you may be the one holding on to that belief. When you feel yourself clinging to this idea, shift! Focus instead on asking for what you need and want that will support you in being the person you now choose to be.

To truly feel better, you must be committed to moving forward—you must make the first move, take the first step and do what is required, no matter how difficult. Give yourself permission to do this work. Give yourself time to do this work. And know that you simply cannot feel this bad forever—and that no one has ever died from a broken heart

Read more: http://www.oprah.com/inspiration/Iyanla-Vanzant-How-to-Heal-a-Broken-Heart#ixzz3Qd9JPdBk