today i walked down the 80 blocks to a park just to get my legs warm and stretched out, add a little sweat to my brow and enjoy the feeling of living. it worked.
i caught a glimpse of mount rainier in the sunset as it hung, a pure pink behemoth, over the top of a building. it was absolutely beautiful. it's the sort of sights that makes you smile at how insignificant things can make you believe so deeply in the perfection of the living planet.
i've been trying to keep myself sane by reading the past month or so. i think i've now surpassed 2000 pages for the month, which is something i'm pretty proud of.
it's starting to turn ever so slowly back to fall here. the days are becoming surely shorter and i'm enjoying the changes. it's really beautiful just to feel the earth changing in its own slow ways as you go about your many little facets of life.
it's a beautiful world we're killing here.

a short follow up

a few posts ago i started to deal with a problem that has us all looking for answers: human civilization is destroying the world, what is the way to stop it. perhaps it would be more accurate to say what is a way of putting a stop to all this destruction, since i'm sure there are many out there.

it has been put into my head by "ishmael" that our culture is one that, from its very beginning some 10,000 years ago has been opposed to nature. we are the masters of this world, the only intelligent life on it that we know of, and we may do with everything as we please. the earth is our gift from the gods, whichever you may believe in.

think for a moment if you will, just to humor me, about what you envision the life of a hunter-gatherer to be.


i don't know about you but i see this naked man running through the forest trying desperately to catch food for his family to eat. i see a man beset by beasts that would kill him and near the point of starvation. don't you? but this isn't the case. check with an anthropology book and you will find that they are well fed and have much more leisure time than we in the "civilized" world do. they also don't have the rates of crime, abuse, drug addiction or suicide that we developed peoples have. they are, in short, as well fed and much, much happier with their lives. true, they starve like everything else if food becomes scarce but because our diet is so richly varied they are the last to feel the pinch. still, living off the land means that we can only eat what the land provides.

the second thing to think about is the Book of Genesis. really, don't groan or begin to recite why you don't believe (i did this, i'll freely admit.) just look at the book. the Bible was written by farmers for farmers and yet the Book of Genesis has a great many confusing things that don't make sense in the context of the rest of the work. if farming is the great revolution we believe it to be in this culture, why is it looked at as a turning away from God himself in Genesis? it's like the Soviets decrying the evils of Communism. the truth of the matter is that it was written by the Semites, who would become the Jews, upon their first contact with the farmers from the Fertile Crescent. and where the Semites practiced strict population control, a must since they could have only so many sheep before the land was over-grazed, the agrarians reproduced out of control. take the story of cain and abel as an example. cain, who is a farmer, slays his brother abel, who is a shepherd. this is what was happening to the Semites at the hands of our cultural forefathers. they were being slaughtered so that we could continue our population growth and till more of the earth. Another interesting point is that Adam means "man." when they spoke of the sons of Adam they were talking about mankind, with themselves and those from the north being the two brothers. Man ate from the forbidden tree and was cast from the Garden, where he ate easily and food was plentiful. Sound like you could apply that to man cutting down the trees to farm the land and build a civilization? it does to me. and the Garden sounds an awful lot like the forests plied by aboriginal peoples the world over. they live off of the land, off of the Garden. No wonder we can't find it!

at any rate, i've realized why this modern life feels so awfully out of sorts. Because we are not following the laws that make the world work and have made the world work for millions of years! we have removed ourselves from evolution, exempted ourselves from the rules and made our own. we have committed the greatest act of arrogance ever conceived of; we have taken the power of the gods, the power of life and death, into our unable hands and have wielded it. and now, in a scant 500 generations we have taken the web of life to the point of collapse with our foolishness. it's time to drop the ball on farming and factories and our entire way of life and live from the land like everything else. when we do, we will allow for other great intellects to come about. we will be the father of the intellectual revolution of the natural world! but only if we stop being a virus upon the land and give up our pretensions of godhood.
we must not be gods but men of the earth.

"I take the subway uptown. I think, Have I given up anything by living with another person? Has there been a trade-off? Always, there is a trade-off. And the answer comes to me instantly. I have given up a certain degree of freedom. The ability to plow through my life with utter disregard for the thoughts and feelings of other people. I can no longer read a magazine and throw it on the floor.
"In exchange, I get unlimited access to the one person I have met in my life whom I automatically felt was out of my league. My favorite human being, the single person I cherish above all others. This is the person I get to share the oxygen in the room with.
"And for this, I will happily scrub the toilet. And I won't make fun of anybody who drives an SUV. Unless, of course, they really deserve it. And I'll try to let things happen. Not always feel like I have to control everything.
"With the exception of those things I can control, that is, with my mind." Augusten Burrough.


so, i've been tagged to tell eight things about me...that are interesting or otherwise edifying. and now, the Rules:
We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. I am a motorcyclist. Being on two wheels has weedled its way deeply into my blood and perhaps has even affected my genome. It will not leave until I no longer breathe. Also, I have a love for motorcycles older than me or inspired by those older than I am.

2. I believe in the power of people to heal themselves, even though I have little evidence to scientifically prove my view. I figure it just makes sense that the body wants to heal itself and fails only because we have failed to feed it the correct things. As a result, I'm studying to be a naturopath in order to make sure everything that is needed is present for the healing process.

3. I believe that there may be a God but that most folks have it completely wrong by assembling a face and personality for that force. We cannot even begin to comprehend what our creator is in our own paltry lifetimes, so just enjoy the greatest thing there is, existence.

4. I can spend a comfortable night in any environment around the U.S. because I was a scout and learned all those types of skills. I can be at home on a snowy mountain or a lowland desert.

5. I have this one specific person I adore more than each and every breath I take.

6. I absolutely love roots music. folk, country, bluegrass, blues, jazz and rock make my world go round. i enjoy music from the world over but those that are from home are my favorite. i feel like i might feel bad but it's how everything is, aye?

7. I have resigned myself to the idea that we are going to end the world. Or spend way too much time, labor, money and lives later on fixing all the things folks refuse to change for their children's sake, much less for the sake of their grandchildren, unborn or not. It makes me very sad to say this. It makes me feel like a failure but I am part of the problem, very much so, and very little part of the solution.

8. I believe that the purpose of government is defined very clearly in the preamble to the Constitution and that when it works we all have life, liberty and happiness. But when it doesn't we have modern America and Germany before World War II. Ideology in any form robs the follower of individuality and calms the mind so that you don't have to think any longer. That is a great part of why #7 is on this list.

and with me this will die because i have very few friends here on the blogosphere and would feel weird asking anyone but sumo to do this thing.

nothing all that new to report other than the fact that i cut 6-7 inches of hair off my head and look like a respectable human and not a shepherd dog. life is great, but that makes it boring to everyone but me, too.