Personal Journal for 2006
( To make it easier for those of you that decide to follow my progress, I am writing this journal with the most recent posts at the top so you don't have to troll down for pages to get to the latest. However, if you want to read the thread of my journey, I suggest that you start at the bottom and work up).
( To make it easier for those of you that decide to follow my progress, I am writing this journal with the most recent posts at the top so you don't have to troll down for pages to get to the latest. However, if you want to read the thread of my journey, I suggest that you start at the bottom and work up).
May 7th 2006
How can I express my sadness? I WANT to believe there are kind men working towards peace. I know that there are some in my life. I know that there are a lot more out there somewhere. But what I see and read belies this. I see, in main, male politicians taking us to the brink of nuclear destruction, male soldiers going off to kill each other, male religious leaders suppressing women's rights, male hoons roaring around wasting precious resources like petrol, ripping up fields, and smashing things. I see mainly male criminals filling our jails, raping our women, beating their wives and molesting their children. I see boys in punch-ups, drunk on the streets. I am crying inside. PLEASE, please do something to stop it. Please men, open your hearts to all that is around you. See the pleading in our eyes not as weakness, but as your only hope. Take your sons aside and teach them how to love the life that is so precious to us all. And look again at what is really important in your own lives.
Women are not without blame. We turn blind eyes to what is before us. We do stop ourselves from speaking out in fear for our own lives. We buy the produce, marry the rapist, blame the girl-child. We curry favour for a nice dress, and a good home quietly never asking where the money comes from. We do that. We do it from thousands of years of fear, but like all victims, we perpetuate the problem by resigning ourselves to it. We must stop and say NO MORE. We must decide what is an acceptable standard in our world and refuse anything less.
But what I want to say is that all that I have written does not make me a man-hater. It makes me a woman who welcomes any indication from the male population that things are changing so that I can live in peace beside and with them. I am sick of living with 5000 year old fear. I want us to get over it and get on with the new. And if that's not possible, for the whole experiment that is the human race to start afresh. But surely there is a way before it gets to that. Please tell me there is. It would be such a waste.
May 6th 2006
There have been several things coming up for me lately. Where to begin. I was walking on the sand flats where I live when a young guy in a beaten up old car started roaring towards me doing wheelies and donuts in the sand. It always make me so angry to see that. There is no thought given to the life that exists under those wheels, or the sound that it makes when you want some peace. The sand becomes compacted and devoid of life after awhile and the grease slicks turn nature into a raceway. Then I got to thinking that I will be really glad when peak oil puts paid to lots of the 'boy toys' of this world. 4 wheel drives, boy racers, dirt bikes, speed boats and noisy dirty ports (like the one opposite the flats).
Then it occurred to me that it's not all bad. Petrol has enabled a great deal. Cars have been beneficial to me. So my train of thought went on to the subject that what makes things bad is abuse. When anything is abused, it becomes destructive. Medicine can heal and kill. I can enjoy a beer, but if I allow it to take me over, it destroys my life. Money is the same. It's not the root of all evil. The way people become addicted to it is the problem. Even good things can destroy us. Love for instance, when it becomes an obsession, destroys both the one who is loved and the one giving it. And things become abusive when we no longer have any control over the way we use them. And that's called addiction. If only we could see where the addictions are in all our lives. We all have them. That's where we need to start to work on ourselves, addressing the imbalance and bringing whatever it is we are addicted to back on to a functional level in our lives.
This is true on the global level as well as the personal. That's always the case. But unless we address our personal addictions we will never redesign a world that is not based on the fulfillment of them. At the moments that is the way it has become...a massive shop for the 'hits' that we all need daily. I have a suspicion that once we attempt to address what's going on underneath the addictions, we will see that we all feel lonely. We have forgotten that we are all here together. We have forgotten that the same substance makes us all. When we remember that, we will cease to feel like needy children. We will begin to pull together for a better world. That's my hope anyway.
April 1st 2006
April 1st 2006
If someone said to you at the beginning of your life, "just stand here and hold this or the world will end", I wonder what your reaction would be? Would you stand there dutifully wondering if you had been sold a bag of straw and someone was laughing their heads off as you stood there holding this? Or would you do it for a while and then see all the other wonderful things you could be doing instead... like having a career, making money, being famous, having a great relationship? Would you get tempted to put it down and move out of that space into some other? Would you get really angry at whatever it was that asked you to stand there and hold that? Maybe you would be tempted to put it down and move just to see if the world really would come to an end. You may do so and find nothing dramatic happened and as a result believed that you had been 'had'.
But what if gradually, without you noticing, while you were off having the great relationship or the fabulous career, the world was indeed slipping silently into oblivion because you abandoned your post? What if, even after your death the slide was still continuing, that could have been avoided had you have maintained the place you were asked to, and held onto what you had been given? You would never know maybe that it could have been different. That you had that power.
Well you have been asked to stand in a place. That place is your life, your existence. And you have been asked to hold something...your 'Self'. And if you don't, the world is just that little bit worse off for not having had you do so. If enough of us forget who we are and are coaxed away from our life's purpose, I suspect the world will end. Conversely, if enough people find themselves, maybe it won't. But we will never know either way. What would you rather do with your allotted time here? Me? I'll choose to hold the space as best I can. It's the least I can do.
February 23 2006
I don't know what has caused the distance of time between this entry and the last I made in Sept last year. It felt like I had nothing to say. It wasn't due to the lack of process. Maybe it was the lack of desire to share it. Certainly I went through a time of not feeling like anyone was truly interested and though the stats said differently, I wondered if anyone was reading all this. Was I doing it for the phantom reader or for myself?? I guess, if I am honest, (and there is no point in being otherwise) it was for both. Was that OK? I feel now that it is important for me to take the opportunity to say what's in my heart, whether anyone's listening or not. If I was the last person left alive on the Planet it would still be important to me to send my feelings and thoughts out in the ethers. It's what humans do!
Tonight I watched the final episode of "The State of the Planet", a David Attenborough documentary www.bbc.co.uk/sm on the threat to the biodiversity of the Planet caused by human activities. I can almost hear you groan "not more of the same old fear mongering stuff!" In one way that's true. We never like it when confronted with the consequences of our own actions and the responsibility inherent within that, do we? I know it gives me pause. What came out of this for me, along with more grief, was the stark realization of the deep causes of this issue. It was so stark that it made me wince.
What I saw was that, despite all the good work in reconciling human behavior with the needs of an ailing natural world we have tried to divorce ourselves from, more is needed. We can change the human energy consumption over to renewable fuel. We can institute more sustainable forms of food growth. We can vote for Green politics, becoming conservationist in our attitudes towards endangered species. All of this is good, but its not enough.
How I came to this conclusion was David's final scenes, where he showed Easter Island as an example of what can happen when humans 'over-graze' their habitat. He talked about the cutting down of the last trees making it impossible for the Easter Islanders to build canoes in which to go fishing. This was supported by the archeological records of the miden showing how the Islanders diet changed, to the exclusion of fish, mammals and vegetation that would no longer grow through lack of rain, (always a side affect of treelessness). What David didn't say, that I happen to be aware of, is how the Easter Islanders supplemented their diet in the event of this shortage: they turned to cannibalism!
It occurred to me then, that no matter what we do, unless we self-regulate our species growth, nothing else will work. Try as we may, if more and more people continue to reproduce 2 or 3 offspring, in less than 100 years, the planet will have double the amount of people. Already it cannot support it's currant rate of growth. The programme clearly stated this. More people require more resources which requires more land to be devoted to our needs. This leaves less and less land, as the population continues to grow, for the growing of food, let alone the retention of other species and life forms. In not that many years the largest resource on the planet will be other human beings. Will it take that long for the message to sink in that they are the only thing left in enough abundance to eat? I think not. Easter Island tells us more about human nature than David's documentary was game to say. It boils down to this (excuse the pun). We must self-regulate to save the human race as much as to save the other species we currently live amongst.
For many years now I have been teaching myself the ways of indigenous people, in search of my own indigenous nature. This search has revealed that there was a time when it was held to be honorable to know when it was time to die for the good of the community. Nomadic tribes people relied for their survival on their ability to move with the weather, and the herds. When elders reached the stage that they could no longer contribute, and began to weigh heavy on the tribes survival, they chose of their own accord to walk out into the desert and die. It was done with courage and dignity. They were honoured for it. When people were too sick to carry on, or were mortally wounded, they wanted to be left behind, where their flesh and bones could nurture the natural world that they knew fed them and from which they also came. The Waitaha people of New Zealand knew how to use herbs to prevent pregnancy when drought or travel made it impossible to feed a larger population. I know that the indigenous people of Mexico used the yam in the same way. Our dolphin relatives still know how to be sexually active but reproductively controlled.
We of later generations have lost this ability to self-regulate as we have listen to social mores that have told us that reproduction was the only way to be a 'man' or a 'woman'. We have believed that our honour and self-esteem depended on, and came only from, reproduction, not from appropriate regulation of our patterns. We have in even more recent times come to see death as the enemy to be conquered without concern for what happens if we do indeed defeat it. What, to some extent, was stimulated by compassion initially, has become empty achievement. Or was it more a desire to defeat death through fear of final judgments of unattainable heaven, or all to easily reached hell? Ultimately, what 'natural' death did naturally, we have ended up doing unnaturally through war, and violence. But not very well. We still cannot bring balance to our race whilst we revere life but not respect death.
So here it is. As I see it, there are only two real solutions to the problems that face our species as we run out of everything the planet has to offer. We must allow natural attrition to prune our numbers as it always used to. And we must 'chose' to limit our population growth.
Woh! Now I have hit the two most controversial issues of the human race, bound to bring reactions from most of us. But it comes down to this: are we willing to make personal sacrifices for the survival of the species, or will we insist on our rights until the very last of the species is consuming each other for lack of anything else to eat? What will the last human eat when the second last one has gone?? Will that be a relative of yours? What are you willing to do now so that does not occur?
What am I willing to do??? Well reproduction is not my issue having never had children and being way too old to do so now, but death is. Am I willing to go with dignity when the time comes without recourse to miles of resources to give me a few extra years of dubious health? I don't know but I hope so. I would feel much better about myself knowing that I went with timely dignity. I have certainly had my share of medical resources to keep me alive to date. I hope I have repaid that in some way as I have offered all I am to my community, both human and otherwise. When I have no more to give and when what I take reaches the point that it is damaging those that come after me, let me take my leave. A few generations of self-limiting reproduction from the young and fertile and the choice of a sane and honorable death from the old and infirm could turn this world about.....and upset economic growth! I state my case!
I don't know what has caused the distance of time between this entry and the last I made in Sept last year. It felt like I had nothing to say. It wasn't due to the lack of process. Maybe it was the lack of desire to share it. Certainly I went through a time of not feeling like anyone was truly interested and though the stats said differently, I wondered if anyone was reading all this. Was I doing it for the phantom reader or for myself?? I guess, if I am honest, (and there is no point in being otherwise) it was for both. Was that OK? I feel now that it is important for me to take the opportunity to say what's in my heart, whether anyone's listening or not. If I was the last person left alive on the Planet it would still be important to me to send my feelings and thoughts out in the ethers. It's what humans do!
Tonight I watched the final episode of "The State of the Planet", a David Attenborough documentary www.bbc.co.uk/sm on the threat to the biodiversity of the Planet caused by human activities. I can almost hear you groan "not more of the same old fear mongering stuff!" In one way that's true. We never like it when confronted with the consequences of our own actions and the responsibility inherent within that, do we? I know it gives me pause. What came out of this for me, along with more grief, was the stark realization of the deep causes of this issue. It was so stark that it made me wince.
What I saw was that, despite all the good work in reconciling human behavior with the needs of an ailing natural world we have tried to divorce ourselves from, more is needed. We can change the human energy consumption over to renewable fuel. We can institute more sustainable forms of food growth. We can vote for Green politics, becoming conservationist in our attitudes towards endangered species. All of this is good, but its not enough.
How I came to this conclusion was David's final scenes, where he showed Easter Island as an example of what can happen when humans 'over-graze' their habitat. He talked about the cutting down of the last trees making it impossible for the Easter Islanders to build canoes in which to go fishing. This was supported by the archeological records of the miden showing how the Islanders diet changed, to the exclusion of fish, mammals and vegetation that would no longer grow through lack of rain, (always a side affect of treelessness). What David didn't say, that I happen to be aware of, is how the Easter Islanders supplemented their diet in the event of this shortage: they turned to cannibalism!
It occurred to me then, that no matter what we do, unless we self-regulate our species growth, nothing else will work. Try as we may, if more and more people continue to reproduce 2 or 3 offspring, in less than 100 years, the planet will have double the amount of people. Already it cannot support it's currant rate of growth. The programme clearly stated this. More people require more resources which requires more land to be devoted to our needs. This leaves less and less land, as the population continues to grow, for the growing of food, let alone the retention of other species and life forms. In not that many years the largest resource on the planet will be other human beings. Will it take that long for the message to sink in that they are the only thing left in enough abundance to eat? I think not. Easter Island tells us more about human nature than David's documentary was game to say. It boils down to this (excuse the pun). We must self-regulate to save the human race as much as to save the other species we currently live amongst.
For many years now I have been teaching myself the ways of indigenous people, in search of my own indigenous nature. This search has revealed that there was a time when it was held to be honorable to know when it was time to die for the good of the community. Nomadic tribes people relied for their survival on their ability to move with the weather, and the herds. When elders reached the stage that they could no longer contribute, and began to weigh heavy on the tribes survival, they chose of their own accord to walk out into the desert and die. It was done with courage and dignity. They were honoured for it. When people were too sick to carry on, or were mortally wounded, they wanted to be left behind, where their flesh and bones could nurture the natural world that they knew fed them and from which they also came. The Waitaha people of New Zealand knew how to use herbs to prevent pregnancy when drought or travel made it impossible to feed a larger population. I know that the indigenous people of Mexico used the yam in the same way. Our dolphin relatives still know how to be sexually active but reproductively controlled.
We of later generations have lost this ability to self-regulate as we have listen to social mores that have told us that reproduction was the only way to be a 'man' or a 'woman'. We have believed that our honour and self-esteem depended on, and came only from, reproduction, not from appropriate regulation of our patterns. We have in even more recent times come to see death as the enemy to be conquered without concern for what happens if we do indeed defeat it. What, to some extent, was stimulated by compassion initially, has become empty achievement. Or was it more a desire to defeat death through fear of final judgments of unattainable heaven, or all to easily reached hell? Ultimately, what 'natural' death did naturally, we have ended up doing unnaturally through war, and violence. But not very well. We still cannot bring balance to our race whilst we revere life but not respect death.
So here it is. As I see it, there are only two real solutions to the problems that face our species as we run out of everything the planet has to offer. We must allow natural attrition to prune our numbers as it always used to. And we must 'chose' to limit our population growth.
Woh! Now I have hit the two most controversial issues of the human race, bound to bring reactions from most of us. But it comes down to this: are we willing to make personal sacrifices for the survival of the species, or will we insist on our rights until the very last of the species is consuming each other for lack of anything else to eat? What will the last human eat when the second last one has gone?? Will that be a relative of yours? What are you willing to do now so that does not occur?
What am I willing to do??? Well reproduction is not my issue having never had children and being way too old to do so now, but death is. Am I willing to go with dignity when the time comes without recourse to miles of resources to give me a few extra years of dubious health? I don't know but I hope so. I would feel much better about myself knowing that I went with timely dignity. I have certainly had my share of medical resources to keep me alive to date. I hope I have repaid that in some way as I have offered all I am to my community, both human and otherwise. When I have no more to give and when what I take reaches the point that it is damaging those that come after me, let me take my leave. A few generations of self-limiting reproduction from the young and fertile and the choice of a sane and honorable death from the old and infirm could turn this world about.....and upset economic growth! I state my case!
