Category: Adventures in Permaculture

Saturday Refreshment / Thought ~ by Walt Whitman

Of persons arrived at high positions, ceremonies, wealth,
scholarships, and the like:
(To me all that those persons have arrived at
sinks away from them, except as it results to their
bodies and souls,
So that often to me they appear gaunt and naked,
And often to me each one of them mocks the others, and mocks
himself or herself,
And of each one the core of life, namely happiness, is full
of the rotten excrement of maggots,
And often to me those men and women pass unwittingly
the true realities of life, and go toward false realities,
And often to me they are alive after what custom has served them,
but nothing more,
And often to me they are sad, hasty, unwaked sonnambules
walking the dusk.)
from Leaves of Grass, 1891-92 Edition

Pay It Forward Through Music / Hell Bent by Kenna

submitted by Gabrielle Price

I started a music project back in 2008 called The Road Home.  Our motto was ‘pay it forward through music’ – which I aimed to do for two national music charities.  The economy took its toll on my grassroots project and it has been on the backburner, waiting to be reborn with the net radio station along with The Refreshment Center – News You Can Use broadcasts.

Music and the arts alone have their own profound messages to be paid forward and as a music appreciator I want to continue to do that where I can.  So I present this wonderful song by Kenna, “Hell Bent” – with one of the more amazing videos I’ve ever seen. It is  a beautiful mix of stop-motion claymation and colorful animation, how our infinite growth society has bought and sold our happiness.

Don’t sell out your bliss.  We have a long way to go.

If you would like TRC to reach it’s goal of providing “News You Can Use” as well as “Paying It Forward Through Music” – please consider a Paypal gift or a purchase in Gabrielle’s Zazzle Pro Photo Gallery.  Thank you!

Who Am I To Farm? Excerpt from The Permaculture Handbook

“The emergence of garden farms is at hand. Under the pressure of necessity as unemployment rippled through the economy, millions of North Americans turned to gardening or expanded their gardens in 2009 as evidenced by a 40% increase in vegetable seed sales.  Urban homesteading is spawning its own literature as energy descent forces more and more households to adapt in place.  With income constrained and energy and materials shortages looming, the only resources capable of filling the gap in livelihood are imagination, information, and knowledge, in particular a deeper understanding of the material cycles and energy flows of nature.  For that understanding, we look to permaculture, a language derived from the patterns of the world around us.”

Read more about Peter’s new book just uploaded at Permaculture Activist. 

 

Who Am I to Farm?
by Peter Bane
from issue #82, GROWING STAPLE CROPS • NOVEMBER 2011, excerpted from Peter’s new book: The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country.

Guest post : To Undo The Folded Lie

by Phil Rockstroh

A stammered truth is more resonate to the heart than a well-told lie; unfortunately, an habitually dissembling mindset will view the situation in reverse.  All too often, our internalized system of viewing an unfolding event will determine our take on it.  If the institutions (e.g., familial, governmental, mass media) that have influenced our method of perception are themselves compromised by internalized biases, then a type of carnival funhouse mirror effect is in play (both on an individual and culture-wide basis) whereby distortions reflect distortions that, in turn, reflect those distortions…ad infinitum.  Reality is made grotesque, and gross distortions are perceived as reality.

This is why it is essential to develop a method of viewing that includes the heart, the gut, and all of one’s senses.  A lie only fools the mind; in contrast, truth reverberates throughout one’s entire being.

“All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie.” – W.H. Auden

A truthful remembrance will free imprisoned ghosts from their torment (They will be bestowed with heart-felt feeling (i.e., remember their humanity) and therefore be reborn.)–while shallow, self-serving dissembling will raise an army of mindless zombies.

Only 41% of the population of the U.S. believe in the verifiable reality of global climate chaos.  The institutionalized, thus internalized, lies of the corporate/consumer state – the usurping of the innate longings of the human heart and replacing them with consumer desires – have not only left consumerist true believers bereft of the ability to honestly process information but have rendered them unable to locate the source of their own suffering.  It is impossible to sate empty appetite by more empty consumption.  The hollowness at the core of the consumer state can only be remedied by an awakening of the heart.

How does one take this course of action?  The answer is neither recondite nor inaccessible: by the time honored methods of grief and gratitude.  Fortunately, our lives give us ample opportunity for practice.

Apropos: Grieve for our abuse of the flora and fauna of this living planet into which we were born, and grieve for the suffering we bring to ourselves by these callous actions…for the abuse and neglect that we inflict upon the earth we heap on ourselves.  As long as we believe it is our birthright to exploit the planet, then we will continue to believe it permissible to ruthlessly exploit one another.

In short, when we demean the world, we demean ourselves by the same methods.  There is no need for a vengeful god above to punish us for our transgressions…we’re doing just fine on our own.  To trudge through life devoid of the warmth bestowed by a compassionate heart, is to divest one’s self of soul…to not be fully alive within life.  And that is an awful form of punishment: to construct, in the area within yourself where your heart should be positioned, a dungeon where you have become both the torturer and the tortured–all ordered by a merciless king (your willful mind untempered by the counsel of your heart) who lords over the wasteland of misapprehensions that you have mistaken for the whole of existence.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.

He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.

Public Service Announcement / Kurt Vonnegut

Excerpt from the full article: Cold Turkey

 

FEATURE for “In These Times” » MAY 10, 2004

 

 

[VIsual added by TRC]

 

My government’s got a war on drugs.  But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.
One, of course, is ethyl alcohol.  And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41.  When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.
Other drunks have seen pink elephants.
And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs?  They invented algebra.  Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before.  You think Arabs are dumb?  Try doing long division with Roman numerals.
We’re spreading democracy, are we?  Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”
How ungrateful they were!  How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.
So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich.  That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget.  Hail to the Chief.
That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity.  We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.
Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.
About my own history of foreign substance abuse.  I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge.  I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable.  It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again.  And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes.  I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight.  But two is my limit.  No problem.
I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes.  I keep hoping the things will kill me.  A fire at one end and a fool at the other.
But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match.  That was when I got my first driver’s license!  Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.
And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.
When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those.  Cold turkey.
Can I tell you the truth?  I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?
Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.
This appeared in Crossing the Rubicon in 2004 but it is originally from a book by Richard Duncan, called The Oil Crash and You in 2001.
Kurt Vonnegut, the legendary author, WWII veteran, humanist, artist and smoker, was an In These Times senior editor until his death in April 2007.  His classic works include Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle, among many others.
Indiana will forever be proud to call him a native son.  RIP, Kurt.