Solutions Magazine and Good News

I think it's so easy to fall into despair these days - it's important to not concentrate on fatalism, but to be aware of the many, many "soulutions" that address our environmental, social, and spiritual crisis.  That's what gives energy to hope, and to transformation.  Here's a few journals I subscribe to that I felt like sharing - Solutions Journal, and Earth Portal News, both offering information about green energy and other good news.  I love this article about possible future urban "farms" - imagine picking your own salad as you head for the checkout counter.  Wonder if they'll have cherry tomatoes and bell peppers?

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from Earth Portal News:

Agropolis: The Future of Urban Agriculture?

Posted on September 16th, 2010 

 

Environmental News Network: Last week at the Nordic Exceptional Trendshop 2010, held in Denmark, one presentation  took urban agriculture to the next level. A collaboration with NASA, you might even say it launched urban agriculture out of this world, and into the future.The idea is called Agropolis, a combination grocery store, restaurant, and farm all in one building, employing the most advanced technologies in hydroponic, aeroponic, and aquaponic farming.
As it stands, Agropolis is still just a mere idea, with little more than some cool graphics to back it up. But regardless, Agropolis ushers forth a new wave of thinking about urban food systems.The team behind the Agropolis concept proposes that this new generation of store would be an ecosystem  unto itself, a finely tuned orchestra of parts in balance, that would not only be totally environmentally sustainably and friendly, but also just plain producing the freshest food around.

But what would all these innovative, NASA-inspired state of the art hydroponics and other high-tech solutions look like in practice? According to the vision of Agropolis, a customer would walk into a store that is covered in green. Vegetables growing on the walls as far as the eye can see. And below the floors one would see tilapia swimming, working in tandem with vegetables in an aquaponic system. You would buy a tomato that was literally just picked, from a plant that you can see in front of you. The store would bring a whole new meaning to local, and one-up the notion of hyper local, since all the food available to eat or buy would have traveled zero miles from the farm to the store. At most, just a few steps.

It all sounds grand, and more than a little space-age. But the challenge given to the team that came up with Agropolis wasn’t entirely outside reality: Create a farm without relying on arable land. As the Earth’s healthy soil and other resources dwindle, it may not be out of the realm of possibility that a system like Agropolis be needed, particularly in urban areas. And while urban agriculture has come a long way, incorporating all kinds of creative and innovative ideas and technologies, in order to make it work on a large and global scale it may be time for something as futuristic and high-tech as Agropolis.

Rumi

Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and right doing,
there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down
in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language
- even the phrase "each other" -
do not make any sense.

From The Essential Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks.
© Copyright, 2004, HarperSanFrancisco.

I woke up this morning to find the word "raukkadessa" floating  in my mind, between sips of coffee.  The word came from a song on  Beyond Love (Sami Records, 2004), an album by my friend Kathi Huhtaluhta.  Kathi  lived in Finland  where she studied "Yoik" traditions of Sami chanting.  She told me her song, Raukkadessa, derived from a word she learned while there, which meant "beyond love".

Meaning, beyond the pairs of opposites, beyond loss, conflict,  history, and the constructs of personality and culture, beyond even our temporal experience of love, "there is a field".  

Prayers for the Dying

"Form is Empty, Empty is Form" Detail (2009)

Of life's Spring

may we drink deep

and awake to dream

and die to sleep

and dreaming

weave another form

a shining thread

of life reborn

~~Starhawk
"The Weaver Song" from the Spiral Dance

I posted this earlier, and then felt a bit too "exposed", so I withdrew it.  But I feel that was not really right, and so I'm posting it again, and offer again my gratitude to the people who so kindly offered comments at the time.

In early 2009 I did a series of works dedicated to my brother I called "Prayers for the Dying".  I've been wanting to write about my brother again, and don't really know how to do it. I wish I could give him, and others like him, a voice.

Maybe the reason to write about this story is to demonstrate how very important it is to re-examine our understanding of death.  All the research and  interest in NDE's (near death experiences), mediums,  Michael Newton's "Life Between Life" work, even TV shows like "Ghost Hunters" contribute to changing attitudes to what death is,  and hence, to what life is as well.
 

In 2008, Glenn had a brain stem stroke, and since then has as been in a  persistent vegetative state, which means that he is fed by tubes, breathes  by tubes, and cannot respond to others in any recognizable way.  His doctors have told me that there was no brain activity, and no hope of recovery.  Glenn did not have a living will.  Because my mother  has traditional ideas about  "god's will", I can't remove life support.  The only other surviving member of my family is a brother who agrees with my mother.   Glenn lingers in a vegetative state, and I am unable legally to assist my brother to pass.  I know I step into an ethical hornet's nest when I say this. 

One of the ways I've dealt with this has been assisting a number of charities that work with children in Glenn's name, something he would appreciate.


The last decade of Glenn's life, he became  depressed, and isolated.  He was a gun collector, and after his stroke, I  took half of his collection and sold them, donating the money to a charity for children as a way of transforming the negative energy that the guns represent.   The rest, at my other brother's insistence, were locked  in a closet, and he kept the key (the house is retained for his and my mother's use). 

This past spring they weren't in town, and I did an "energy cleansing" with my friend and while "sageing"  I noticed that the closet door was cracked open.  I'd never seen it open before, since my other brother was adamant that I "leave Glenn's things alone".    I looked inside, saw some guns and other memorabilia.  I  did not remove anything, and shut the door, which locked and I can't, of course,  open it again.

In retrospect,  think that closet opened because Glenn wanted me to take the contents and turn them into charity, as I did before.  I wish I had.  My friend noticed the phenomenon as well. 

"The Heart Sutra" (2009)

One of the reasons we did the "cleansing" was there have been many such experiences  in that house, and I've never been comfortable having to stay there.

One of the most striking was last winter.   I was alone in the house, reading,  when suddenly I heard a bell, kind of like a Tibetan brass bell, right beside my ear!  I was so startled I got up and walked around, trying to find out where the bell  was,  but no luck.  Within an hour of that strange occurrence, a friend called, inviting me to go to a talk given by a local energy healer.   Which is how I met Kate,  who works as a medium here in Tucson.

I arranged for a meeting, and we met in a quiet cafe, where Kate informed me that Glenn was with us (!) -  and then told me things about him that seemed  accurate.   She said that Glenn, and others like him, are often out of the body, and she encouraged me to go talk to him at his bedside, and tell him he can let go. Last summer I went away for a while, and when I returned  I saw Kate again.  She told me  Glenn had "crossed over".  I don't know what that means, as he remains physically in a vegetative state.  But I remember the bell - and the encounter with the medium certainly gave me comfort.

 

I don't see spirits, although I pay careful attention to synchronicities in my life.  I don't know what to make of this, but it's given me a better capacity to deal with the situation.  I hope what Kate said is true, but I can't really know.

Meanwhile, I pray to Tara, Goddess of Compassion, for my brother, Glenn, and I'm going to sponsor another child for him.  I know he would be pleased.  

"Transformation Reliquary" (2009)

 

 

Waters of the World

© Photo by Cathy Frischknecht & Christian Bollmann

"O fountain mouth, giver, you, mouth, which
speaks inexhaustibly of that one, pure thing,—
you, mask of marble placed before
the water's flowing face..."

from Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainer Maria Rilke 

 There is a wonderful ritual  we used to do at Reclaiming's Witchcamp called the "Waters of the World".  We would begin the week long event with a ceremony in which participants brought vials of water, gathered from throughout the world as those gathered were.  Each would empty water into the Chalice, naming the place from which the water came.  I remember the profound sense of gratitude, and the presence of the Holy, as I poured my little vial of water from the beloved Rio Grande into the Chalice.

The theme for this year's Glastonbury Goddess Conference is "Celebrating the Great Mother of Water ", and I will return from Glastonbury with a vial of water from the Chalice Well there.......a personal pilgrimage that I've longed to make for many years.

Freddy Silva, a world renowned researcher of crop circles, believes that the concentration of crop circles in the ancient sacred geomantic sites of southern England  is also about shifting or "raising"  the energies of the water tables there, which in turn flow into the ocean, impacting on subtle levels the entire world.

She is our universal Mother, the source and beginning of life.  We grow in Her amniotic waters and are born, we weep and our hearts open, we are "baptized" in Her waters and offered a new life.  And like children, which we really are, we take Her for granted, rarely noticing the great Mother who nourishes us.

When I was a teenager, I used to devour any science fiction I could get my hands on.  A child of the '50's, we grew up with "The Bomb", and a universal mythos of the End of the World at the hands of the inevitable military mind.  I still think "On the Beach", with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, is one of the most powerful movies ever made, and I remember well the terrible message Ray Bradbury told with his "Martian Chronicles".

Anyway, there was a story I read (I have no idea who the author was, and would love to find it again) in which "The Bomb" had happened, and an astronaut had the misfortune to be be the last living human being.  He saw it happen while orbiting the Earth, and landed to a desolate and barren world.  He begins to walk, and as he walks he hears voices  talking to him, calling to him.  He sees, through blowing dust,  his wife, his children, his friends, his dog, all just ahead, beckoning  images of everyone he's ever loved, calling to him urgently to hurry, to meet them somewhere in the distance.  At last, about to die from radiation, he finds himself standing on a beach, the waters of the ocean lapping gently against his ankles.  What called to him  was Mother Ocean, and as the story ends our desolate hero sinks, finally at peace,  into the water.  We're left to imagine that She will use his life, and the cells in his body,  to begin again.

 Pretty extraordinary story, considering it was written in the 50's, long before Gaia Theory, Women's Spirituality, or even Ecology!

I never forgot that story, although all of the Andre Norton I once read is long, long gone.

I know that I often sound rather apocalyptic, but I don't really feel I am.  I think, in this time of transformation,  we're being given a chance to grow up,  and become co-creators, instead of exploiters, of life.   In the face of so much loss, so much fear, it will be hard to hold that hope.  But I have a deep kind of faith in the adaptability of the human spirit, and beyond, the evolutionary mind of nature, of Gaia.

Holy Mother of Waters, I Praise You!

From The Huffington Post (6/20/2011)

If the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world's oceans aren't curbed, a mass extinction unlike anything human history has ever seen is coming, an expert panel of scientists warns in an alarming new report.  The preliminary report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) is the result of the first-ever interdisciplinary international workshop examining the combined impact of all of the stressors currently affecting the oceans, including pollution, warming, acidification, overfishing and hypoxia.

 According to the report, three major factors have been present in the handful of mass extinctions that have occurred in the past: an increase of both hypoxia (low oxygen) and anoxia (lack of oxygen that creates "dead zones") in the oceans, warming and acidification. The panel warns that the combination of these factors will inevitably cause a mass marine extinction if swift action isn't taken to improve conditions.

"The 6th Extinction" (2007)

The report is the latest of several published in recent months examining the dire conditions of the oceans. A recent World Resources Institute report suggests that all coral reefs could be gone by 2050 if no action is taken to protect them, while a study published earlier this year in BioScience declares oysters as "functionally extinct", their populations decimated by over-harvesting and disease. Just last week scientists forecasted that this year's Gulf "dead zone" will be the largest in history due to increased runoff from the Mississippi River dragging in high levels of nitrates and phosphates from fertilizers.

A recent study in the journal Nature, meanwhile, suggests that not only will the next mass extinction be man-made, but that it is already  underway. Unless humans make significant changes to their behavior, that is.

Travis Donovan

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/20/ipso-2011-ocean-report-mass-extinction_n_880656.html?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl2|sec1_lnk3|71953

Anima Sanctuary Update

 "A steady stream of elk have been driven east across our Anima Refuge by the alarming smoke."

"Given the steady eastward progress of the Wallow Fire and absence of rain in the near future, I have to avoid denial and accept that we likely have a scary 70% chance of our land being burned out.  This is NOT to say that I am resigned to such a fate, we will oppose it in every way possible.  Nor are we fatalistic about it.  As we teach in Anima, the only thing that is hopeless, is the person unwilling or unable to hope."

Jesse Wolf Hardin, from his Blog (6/20)

I am sorry to report that things are not looking good for Anima Sanctuary.  Here in Tucson it's a roaring 112 degrees, bone dry, and no sign of the monsoon season.  Still praying for these dedicated and courageous people.

“Considering what I get from the work that you and your family do… I wish I could have given more.  All your hard work is not for nothing. You live in the wilderness, at the complete mercy of nature’s whims.  You’re not a martyr, and I can’t tell you how much I respect that…. You are raising awareness, inspiring and enlightening people, even in the face of the destruction of your home. I don’t know what it feels like to have the prospect of your home being destroyed, and not only that but a place that you’ve put blood and guts into restoring… But if the fire hits your canyon, it will not kill the spirit that runs through it. It can be built again. And you’ll have hands to help.”   -Rebecca A.

The Summer Solstice

Wishing the blessings of the Solstice to all!  May we all "dance the Long Dance" together this sacred day.

The world is
not with us enough

O taste and see

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

 Denise Levertov

I am a lover
Of the steady Earth
And of Her waters.
She says:

“Let the light be brilliant,
For those who will cherish color.”
What if there be no Heaven? She says:

“Touch my Breasts - the fields are golden.”

Her Songs are all of love, lifelong.
Every blue yonder,
Her brass harp rings.
Unlettered, in Her rivers
Our cherished sins
Drift voiceless in Her clouds.

She will rust us with blossom
She will forgive us
She will seal us
with Her seed.

Robin Williamson
("The Song of Mabon", 1985)

Fires, Anima Center

This has been a grim June for me - I am, frankly, exhausted.  My mother is in the hospital, and the smoke of fires from the worst fire season in Arizona history lingers in the air of Tucson. If you've never seen a forest fire, or the devastation left behind, it's an experience impossible to describe.  Few environments are as fragile, contrary to appearances, than the water poor Southwest, and what is happening now is very much about 100 years of human misuse and misunderstanding of this frail landscape.

Years ago I created a Samhain ritual called "Litany for the Lost", to honor the loss of extinct and endangered species and their landscapes.   We always speak of loss in human terms - but we are ensouled in the entire world, the entire eco-system.  Deforestation, destruction of land from the vast cattle industry,  water diversion for urban areas inappropriate agriculture (which results in salinizing the land, leaving it completely barren).........most people don't know that since 1895 we have lost 90% of the riparian areas in Arizona. (http://www.cpluhna.nau.edu/Biota/riparian_degradation.htm)   .

Who weeps for these Lost Ones?  I used to hike in the Chiricahua Mountains, and that's where I heard the story of the Thick Billed parrots that were indigenous to the area.  Imagine, parrots flocking in Arizona!  It turns out that virtually the entire subspecies was wiped out in one day by a group of "sport" hunters. Just try to imagine that...... Not even their ghosts remain for memory to enjoy now.  No one even knows that brightly colored parrots once flew there, nesting among the Cottonwood trees, a long lost flash of green and red.

I know I'm ranting, but it's time for a "Wailing Wall" that includes All Beings of the Earth.  The loss of so much life, not just human life and property, in these fires is soul loss for all of us.  It is a tragic irony that more of that loss may soon be the beautiful Anima Sanctuary - "Anima" means "soul or spirit" in Spanish.

My forthcoming trip to Glastonbury seems increasingly like a distant mirage. I hope I will, indeed, have that long awaited chance to stand by the Chalice Well.  Meanwhile, friends who may read this blog, forgive me if I have little to write at present.

One of the blogs I subscribe to is Gaian Voices, by Earth Activist Susan Meeker Lowry.   She comments on the fire rapidly approaching the Anima Sanctuary better than I could, so I take the liberty of copying from her recent blog entry here.

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"The Wallow Fire is now officially Arizona's largest wild fire that has made its way into New Mexico. What you may not know is that this fire is fast approaching the Anima Center, threatening not only the handbuilt cabins and living quarters, but also the wild plant sanctuary, and all the restoration work of decades.

Wolf is a long-time friend and colleague. I first met him many years ago when he came to Montpelier, VT where I was living at the time. He interviewed me for a publication called "Talking Leaves" about my work, Gaian Economics. We found ourselves to be kindred spirits in many ways, though our lives were very different. I believe that Wolf had already found himself at what is now the Anima Sanctuary, then called Earthen Spirituality, though I could be mistaken. In any case, he was alone and gave himself totally to that place, committed himself to it forever, as one does one's spouse, and began the long and arduous task of restoring and reinhabiting the canyon. Loba arrived next, then, more recently, Kiva Rose and her young daughter Rhiannon.

So much has happened through the years. Native trees planted and flourished, native herbs returned, on their own and with help, along with species of animals, insects, birds. Today the place is vibrant with life, a true Sanctuary and sacred place honored and loved. It has sheltered wounded human beings who were, in their turn, loved and healed. Kiva Rose brought her love of the healing plants and her innate ability to hear and understand them, and find both new and traditional ways of making medicine. It's amazing to me how quickly and magnificently she has grown and matured into a real powerhouse of knowledge and compassion (and I'm sure it amazes her at times as well).
Though I have never personally visited the Anima Sanctuary, I feel as though I know it well. Not only through the many pictures I've seen on the website and also shared through the pages of Gaian Voices, but because of my connection to these wonderful people..................knowing that these wonderful people were there, doing such transformative work, sharing their love and energy with those who visited, and then the world at large through the internet, and workshops and conferences, was/is important to me.

And now it is threated by a raging fire started by careless campers. The way the media reports this fire and its path of destruction is also very troubling, focusing on the resort towns and homes that have been burned, as if that's all that matters, with not a word (that I've heard anyway) about the loss of wilderness, the death of all the critters, plants, insects, birds many rare and endangered perhaps now, thanks to the fire, extinct. Did you know that this fire is burning so hot that the soil in many places has become sterilized? It will take many, many years – generations – for the land to regenerate.

Kiva Rose mentioned sitting in a cafe listening to fire fighters talk about how the forest will resemble a moonscape. I can't imagine. And yet not a word. Only that a few homes were lost and therefore the fire, now the largest in AZ history, hasn't caused as much damage as the fire that had been the largest until now because not that many buildings were destroyed. How angry that makes me!

So, now Wolf, Loba, Kiva Rose, and a contingent of committed friends are doing everything they can to prepare their home and Sanctuary to withstand the fire at least so that when they return (if they have to evacuate, they will return and begin again) there is something left. They have done clearing around the cabins, cutting much loved trees, limbing others, bring sand up from the river to blanket the ground, packing belongings, burying tools. They have managed to purchase a water pump strong enough to pump water from the river to the buildings so they can wet them down. As I type this the fire is about 5 miles away, the canyon fills with smoke. Rest assured they will leave if they have to. But they will return. As Wolf said in a recent fire update, you don't abandon a loved one because they have been disfigured. You stay and love them anyway.

As you can imagine, these preparations, and the restoration process to come, cost money, which is in short supply. A fund has been set up for donations. I've sent what I can. Not as much as I'd like but it's something. Please, if you can possibly do so, click the link and do the same. The money will be greatly appreciated and put to excellent use. And whether you can help financially or not, please send your good energy, your prayers, your visions of healing and protection – whatever works for you.
Thank you!"

Here's the link: http://animacenter.org/donate.html – and while you're there you can sign up to receive updates and other info from Anima.

(with thanks to Susan Meeker Lowry)