Charles Eisenstein: A Convergence Of Crises

The present convergence of crises––in money, 

energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, 

politics, the environment, and more––is a 

birth crisis, expelling us from 

the old world into a new.

 
― Charles Eisenstein,  

From Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society 

in the Age of Transition

 

Farmer Wants a Revolution: How Is This Not Genocide?

And excellent and vital article. ― Molly

Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food.

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The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.

Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.

The tree is probably a lot older than 400 years. Rod told him that when the old women walked their favourite songline tracks they carried seeds of their favourite food and resource plants, and sowed them at spirituality significant camping places. His front garden was one such ceremony place – there would have been a grove planted, and the women had stripped the bark from the tree to make bags and material. This old tree represented a connection to country “deeper than we can imagine, and linking us indivisibly with the natural world”, he writes in his book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth.

Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. More than that, it underlines a direct link between soil health and human health, and that the chemicals used in industrial agriculture are among the causes of modern illness.

“Most of our cereal crops, the soybeans, the corn, are all predicated now on the world’s most widely used chemical which is glyphosate [Roundup],” Massy says. “There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system. Its main effect is on the human gut and our entire immune system.

“When you look at the As – autism, ADHD, all the other auto-immune diseases – their take off is a 95% correlation to these chemicals being introduced. The evidence is that it affects the gut and the immune system, though it is not the sole factor, and it is a complex thing. But it is that gut that drives our whole immune system, it is our second brain.”

He says that when you spray insects with insecticides you kill off the predators so you have got to have more powerful chemicals next time because the pests come back stronger.

Massy is among scientists who believe we have entered a new geological epoch, the life-threatening Anthropocene, where human impact has permanently altered the Earth’s geology and sustaining systems, causing ecological destruction and extinction of species. “It is the greatest crisis the planet and humanity has ever faced,” he says, sitting at his kitchen table in country New South Wales. “It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial.”

Please continue this article here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/23/farmer-wants-a-revolution-how-is-this-not-genocide?CMP=share_btn_fb  

 

Personal Reflections On an Ever Widening Circle of Caring and Compassion

While Thanksgiving has come and gone yet again, the practice of gratitude that nourishes my daily life remains. As does my deep caring and compassion for an ever widening circle of life.

For many years when I was younger I was mostly oblivious to those beyond my immediate friends and family. I was also largely cut off from any depth of awareness and experience of connection and intimacy within myself and with others. Experiences in my childhood had taught me that it was not safe to trust and to be in the world in an open-hearted and vulnerable way. And out of that fear arose walls that I had unconsciously built around my heart. Many of us do this.

Gratefully, and after many years of being on a path of healing and gradually letting go of my protective armor, today I am able to understand what Thích Nhất Hạnh meant when he stated that "we are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness." I also hold deep appreciation for the wisdom of John Muir who said, "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." Indigenous peoples are also among those who have long understood how it is that we are all connected and all related.

With each passing year I am mindful of shedding yet more layers of disconnection, fear, shame, separateness, illusions, ignorance, and inner and outer isolation. As these shifts continue, my perspectives also continue to evolve and grow more expansive. I get it how the ripples we send out into the world truly matter. Our smiles matter. Befriending ourselves and opening to grief and gratitude matters. Listening to the Earth matters. Looking into the eyes of the homeless person on the street corner rather than turning away matters. Mindfulness and breathing and vulnerability matters. Growing our heart muscles stronger and stronger matters so that we can allow into our being the immensity of the beauty, love, joy, and sacredness of life and the depth of the pain that we may carry along with our other human brothers and sisters and that of other beings.

E.E. Cummings was absolutely right on when he said that it takes a lot of courage to grow up and become who we truly are. It takes courage to be vulnerable, to be conscious, to experience love and loss, and to be in our bodies consciously with our eyes and hearts open.

This Thanksgiving brought me to a new place of envisioning a more expansive way of honoring and blessing and giving thanks. This vision is inclusive, excluding no one. While abundance is woven through my life, there are so many who do not have that experience. All I had to do was drive to our oldest son's home for the holiday celebration and see the tents of those who do not even have a home. And my heart weeps. Because today my heart is open. And each year that I grow older, my heart opens even that much more.

While I do not know what the future will hold for myself, my loved ones, and life on this beautiful Earth Mother we share, I have these glimpses into what is possible. And it seems that those possibilities for a world which cares for all begins with each and every one of us rooting into a path of heart, whatever that may look like, and experiencing ever greater compassion for ourselves and for other beings. Because we are indeed all related, all connected, all matter.

Radhule Weininger, MD, PhD. wrote a beautiful book called Heartwork: The Path of Self-Compassion - 9 Practices For Opening the Heart. Here is a "heart that cares for all" practice or prayer excerpted from her book that feels deeply appropriate and needed in these times...

May all beings be happy.

May all beings be safe.

May all beings be free.

May my longing be to contribute to the 

well-being and freedom of others.

May I receive the support to make this happen.

May wisdom, compassion, and abundant

generosity manifest in my actions.

 Bless us all ― Molly

E.E. Cummings: Once We Believe In Ourselves

We do not believe in ourselves until someone 

reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, 

worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred 

to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves 

we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous 

delight or any experience that 

reveals the human spirit.

 

― E.E. Cummings

California’s Little-Known Genocide

This is painful, traumatic, and horrifying. And we absolutely need to know our true history. Reparations and resolution is not possible and nor is it possible to learn and heal and transform history’s lessons as long as the truth is hidden, unknown, minimized, or denied. ― Molly

In 1850, around 400 Pomo people, including women and children, were slaughtered by the U.S. Cavalry and local volunteers at Clear Lake north of San Francisco. 

 

 BY ERIN BLAKEMORE

“Gold! Gold from the American River!” Samuel Brannan walked up and down the streets of San Francisco, holding up a bottle of pure gold dust. His triumphantannouncement, and the discovery of gold at nearby Sutter’s Mill in 1848, ushered in a new era for California—one in which millions of settlers rushed to the little-known frontier in a wild race for riches.

But though gold spelled prosperity and power for the white settlers who arrived in California in 1849 and after, it meant disaster for the state’s peaceful indigenous population.  

In just 20 years, 80 percent of California’s Native Americans were wiped out. And though some died because of the seizure of their land or diseases caught from new settlers, between 9,000 and 16,000 were murdered in cold blood—the victims of a policy of genocide sponsored by the state of California and gleefully assisted by its newest citizens.

Today, California’s genocide is one of the most heinous chapters in the state’s troubled racial history, which also includes forced sterilizations of people of Mexican descent and discrimination and internment of up to 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. But before any of that, one of the new state’s first priorities was to rid itself of its sizeable Native American population, and it did so with a vengeance.

California’s native peoples had a long and rich history; hundreds of thousands of Native Americans speaking up to 80 languages populated the area for thousands of years. In 1848, California became the property of the United States as one of the spoils of the Mexican-American War. Then, in 1850, it became a state. For the state and federal government, it was imperative both to make room for new settlers and to lay claim to gold on traditional tribal lands. And settlers themselves—motivated by bigotry and fear of Native peoples—were intent on removing the approximately 150,000 Native Americans who remained.  

“Whites are becoming impressed with the belief that it will be absolutely necessary to exterminate the savages before they can labor much longer in the mines with security,” wrote the Daily Alta California in 1849, reflecting the prejudices of the day.

They were assisted by the government, which considered the so-called “Indian Problem” to be one of the biggest threats to its sovereignty. The legal basis for enslaving California’s native people was effectively enshrined into law at the first session of the state legislature, where officials gave white settlers the right to take custody of Native American children. The law also gave white people the right to arrest Native people for minor offenses like loitering or possessing alcohol and made it possible for whites to put Native Americans convicted of crimes to work to pay off the fines they incurred. The law was widely abused and ultimately led to the enslavement of tens of thousands of Native Americans in the name of their “protection.”

This was just the beginning. Peter Hardenman Burnett, the state’s first governor, saw indigenous Californians as lazy, savage and dangerous. Though he acknowledged that white settlers were taking their territory and bringing disease, he felt that it was the inevitable outcome of the meeting of two races.

“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected,” he told legislators in the second state of the state address in 1851. “While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.”

Please continue this article here: http://www.history.com/news/californias-little-known-genocide?cmpid=FACEBOOK_FBPAGE__20171116&linkId=44822114