A few weeks ago, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee voted overwhelmingly to add another $25 billion to an already inflated Pentagon budget request by President Biden of $715 billion. It is not my point to debate whether the military of the largest armed force in the world needs more Read more
Sustainability is about sovereignty, service in cooperation with each other and the natural world, and a spirituality that understands connectedness. For humanity, it is also about being kind. Kindness is defined as the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. Being kind is doing intentional acts that help, it involves voluntary Read more
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – this is a well-known phrase from the United States Declaration of Independence. I doubt the founding fathers of the new United States in the 1780s envisioned a time could occur when the government would conspire with corporate interests to cause a loss Read more
If you are still debating whether to get jabbed or not, my advice, DON’T. It will not be any surprise to regular readers of my blog that I think something more serious than the Covid (C-19) pandemic is going on. My reasoning for this is in this blog post. I Read more
“We seem to understand the value of oil, timber, minerals, and housing, but not the value of unspoiled beauty, wildlife, solitude, and spiritual renewal” Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes). We live in a global societal system (or systems if you want to separate further) that seems to dwell on the Read more
“If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve the people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only ONE thing: you can better yourself” Leo Tolstoy. I Read more
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it” Robert Swan At the core of everything, as I said in several posts recently (Coming Back into our Sovereignty {March-June 2021}), is our individual sovereignty. Do you seek to be told what to do, or Read more
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” ― David Graeber. I saw a cartoon this morning that showed lemmings as a flowing crowd leaping off a cliff. One was trying to push back against the flow Read more
Throughout the Earth’s long history of life, there have been 5 mass extinctions due to cataclysmic conditions. (A mass extinction is usually defined as a loss of about three quarters of all species in existence across the entire Earth over a “short” geological period of time. Given the vast amount Read more
I was again looking over The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent who really does have fascinating insights into how humanity has historically created our worldviews and the cultural norms we take for granted (see earlier post Cultivating a Flourishing Future 3 – Manifested New Perspectives {November 2018}). Lent shines a Read more
We live on an amazing planet full of teeming and diverse life forms with replenishable resources we can use to give us wonderful lives. Being spiritual means to care for the planet, because if we do, it will nurture us as well. But we cannot go on as we have Read more
Think about our global economic system. Who and what does it serve? It’s a human construct yet it has a life of its own and we are all but servants (or slaves) to the wants and needs of this system. Despite illusions that we make the decisions concerning the economy, Read more
“Most people do not have the willingness to break bad habits. They have lots of excuses and they talk like victims” Carlos Santana. We have this story that is shared by all our modern cultures, but not the indigenous ones, which we just ignore because we can call then primitive Read more
Back during the Roman times, soldiers were often paid in ‘Salt’ (it is the Latin origin of the word salary), which they could barter for other goods they wanted. Salt has an intrinsic value and has multiple uses besides spicing up your food – one of its primary uses for Read more
“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, that you can walk with Love and Reverence” Henry David Thoreau. Sovereignty is about having the right to choose what you do, and I might add, the willingness to do so. You may not like the choices but when you are sovereign being Read more
“One of the ways that humanity is controlled and contained is by manipulating us to live vicariously through the ‘cool,’ the rich, the famous. This is fundamental to predatory marketing constructs. The more identified we are with someone else’s (allegedly) amazing life, the more disidentified we are with our own. Read more
“The Problem isn’t a lack of money, food, water or land. The problem is that you’re given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind” Bill Hicks: The Mind Unleashed. I was reading one of the many Read more
Your beliefs are just thoughts that you keep thinking. Yet, they are so entrenched in most of our psyches, that we take them to be literal descriptors of who we come to think we are. This is how we are conditioned to be the people we think we are. Wherever Read more
“How do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you are in the matrix?” Tristan Harris (Center for Humane Technology) I seem to be unusual when it comes to my electronic joy. Friends try to contact me via my cell phone (phone, text, email, etc.) and more Read more
“It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship Read more
I have talked how our reality is shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. This is also about how we use specific words to describe our reality. “The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; Read more
When we watch movies about wizards and witches, they are always making things happen by casting ‘spells’ using strange ancient magical words in arcane languages. Yet, the reality is that all Words, in whatever language, have power. All of us wield this power every day with impunity not recognizing the Read more
“One way to pick a future is to believe it is inevitable” Richard Bach. I find it amazing that most people I talk with really want a better world that is sustainable and harmonious with the natural world, and also where everyone lives in unity and harmony. Yet, in the Read more
“The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic duty. That is why term limits should make it impossible Read more
“We must be careful not to believe things simply because we want them to be true. No one can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself.” Richard Feynman. A question I have asked often of my readers is, “do you want to thrive or simply survive?” And if Read more
The problem with industrial farming is that it is a one size fits all kind of situation, but different areas with different ecosystems and microecosystems do not really lend themselves to that mentality. In the last post, I mentioned that large scale agriculture will still be needed in the future, Read more
Most people do not associate food with their sovereignty, but it is one of the most crucial freedoms we have. For most people it is a simple process of going to the grocery store, but stop and think about the process that controls the food you find on the shelves. Read more
So, what is personal sovereignty? Plain and simple, just being you, or more the you would want to be if you were not busy running in the proverbial rat race. Being you is being part of something beyond yourself without losing your individualism and being mindful of all life. The Read more
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Janis Joplin – You got nothing left to lose…you can leave it all behind for its the anchor that holds you down…from being free. For many decades the consumer dream, driven by a deeply flawed economic system, has been captivating. But Read more
If this past year of 2020 (and continuing in 2021) has taught us anything, it should be that we need to become more self-sufficient as individuals and as communities that live in the same area. What does seem to have happened though is that we have fallen into using big Read more