Now is the Time

Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child's training wheels
To be laid aside
When you finally live
With veracity
And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy
Whom the Beloved
Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,
Why do you still
Throw sticks at your heart
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time for you to compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.

Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred.

 'The Gift - Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master'
translations by Daniel Ladinsky

[This comes from my friend, Tad. Thanks, Tad!   As non-uplifting as it is, it is very worthwhile to share...]

From Planet Drum Foundation:

Climate Report #5 from Copenhagen

David Simpson is a long-time Northern California bioregional pioneer and community leader based in the deeply rural Mattole River Valley of Humboldt County. Having written about and performed theater pieces with his partner Jane Lapiner on the subject of climate change in many places for several decades, David went to the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark  to participate in whatever ways seem appropriate. It’s “Mr. Bioregion Goes to Copenhagen”.

Copenhagen and the Nature of Power
Report #5
December 17, 2009
By David Simpson
To readers. Please forgive the tardiness of this essay. I think you will find it still quite relevant even though the COP 15 has been declared officially over as of about 3 PM today when UNFCC Director, Ivo De Boer, gave his last press conference. He did what he could to paint a happy face on a sobering event, portentous in its lack of success. A concluding report will follow.

There was an eerie quiet Thursday morning in the area of the Bella Center
where participants of COP 15 first enter. Right across from the expansive
coat check area are the booths and tables that NGO’s occupied as late as
yesterday where bright displays had told of their various missions
throughout the world–protecting ecosystems, forests, indigenous peoples,
communities. Some offered new processes or products that could help
communities achieve sustainability, others financing concepts to make
idealism work. Overall, these organizations represented the incredible
breadth, dedication and diversity of citizen-run efforts to overcome the
threat of climate change.

This morning, though, they were unmanned, the photo displays, the
brochures, the bright statements of decades of accomplishment in
protecting or renewing some precious aspect of the great planet
puzzle-Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Climate Action Now, on and on….All gone.

Some of the places still had bits and pieces of their displays in place,
half-taken down, half packed to go, their crews probably waiting for
permission to reenter after the event was entirely over. Many others
were barren except for simple white signs with this message printed
on them, “Civil Society Has Been Removed. How can they decide
about us without us” All were untended. It was a ghost town of good
intentions that offered mute testimony to the nature of power.

It seemed especially egregious in light of the fact that it has largely been the work of these non-profit warriors who over many decades have fought against abuse and corruption and brought to the world’s attention the damage being done to our mother planet. Govern-ment has been involved for the most part only after citizens and civil society initiatives have forced them into conscientious action,

One could too easily jump to the conclusion that now, when there are huge
amounts of money at stake in a vast potpourri of market-related
potential-ities, the big boys in the dark suits have moved in, shoving aside
the foolhardy idealists and dedicated activists, especially since these same
activists have shown clear common cause between environmental urgency
and the plight of people in the poor nations who are helpless before the
onslaught of a warming planet, the sacrificial canaries in this coal mine of
blind power.

One thing is for sure, The event has lost a good deal of its color, literally.
The displays and the very clothing, mostly informal, worn by the civil society component were filled with color and ethnicity. The spectrum that meets the eye at the Bella Center has been reduced. In these closing days black–as in black suits–had come to dominate.

The black suits, though, have not yet indicated that they can succeed.
There is considerable doubt that an agreement can be reached at all now
or if it can that it will have any teeth to it. It seems that the process, at least
in the minds of many of the developing nations, has been hijacked by an
elite core of some 25 or so nations led by the US.

After experiencing the small draft of the desolation that blew through
these empty booths, we forged on to the pressroom for the next blow to
good cheer. It was delivered in an impromptu press conference held on
a stairway in the media press center where the press congregate was
assigned to work. US Senator James Inhofe had made a more or less
spur-of-the-moment trip to Copenhagen, intended to last all of five hours.
Inhofe is a fiercely conservative Republican from Oklahoma for whom
climate change is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated against the American
people–by the environmentalists.

He had come for only five hours, he said, and his ambition was simple;
to disabuse as many of us as possible of any notion that something binding
could come out of Copenhagen. If it did, he said, “it would be rejected by
the American people.” And if that wasn’t sufficiently disabusive, he added
that “there was not a chance in the world that the US would be passing any
climate legislation” anytime soon.

Pressed for reasons for his stand, he cited the fact that China, which holds
a huge amount of American debt, was not, as an Annex 2 (developing)
country, obligated under Kyoto to achieve specific levels of emissions
reductions while the US, had it actually signed on, would have been. He saw
China’s recent commitment to reductions in “carbon intensity” as
unverifiable and untrustworthy.

In my first ever press conference question, I asked Inhofe if China were to
come up with a credible plan for significant greenhouse gas reductions as
well as a way to accurately monitor and verify the cuts, would he support
America making its own commitment to cuts. He humphered and
fumphered, sweat a little and finally said he probably wouldn’t. So much for
reason. The press corps openly reeled and then laughed. It was almost
refreshing to see a real dinosaur amidst the extreme modernity of the
Bella Center. Several reporters told me later that they hadn’t quite realized
up until then what Obama was up against.

Meanwhile, like the heartbeat underlying and sustaining the body as a
whole, the delegates of the Parties carried on their negotiations in the
backrooms and side tables scattered throughout the great Center. One
can only imagine the actual work getting done. A lot of it has to do with
drafting acceptable language about a whole slough of issues in sufficient
detail to represent what the Parties feel and that is not perforated with
too many loopholes.

Hillary arrived and stepped right into an afternoon press conference to
hang out the US flag, She’s quite a study–very good at manifesting
America’s casual style of power. She delivers her message with complete
assurance which would be far more impressive if it were tied to consistency
and leavened with a little modesty.

The Secretary lay down for the first time the elements of a new Obama
plan. It included some things that no doubt Senator Inhofe would take
great pleasure in slashing. But he needn’t have worried. The Obama/Clinton
Plan seemed to be right out of Inhofe’s playbook. Blame it on the Chinese
even though you’re not really going to offer the world much anyway,certainly not in legally binding language.

The most interesting thing that the Ms. Clinton seemed to be putting on the
table was a commitment by the US to “join with other countries to mobilize
financing amounting to $100 billion a year by 2020″, but only if everyone
signed on right away and only if recipients agreed to thorough monitoring
and verification of use of funds and their successful applications. (Since,
as far as I know, the US has never shown willingness to compromise its
sovereignty to allow monitoring by third parties on its soil, what we seem
to have here is a “My Way or the Highway” kind of deal.)

Note that the Secretary of State did not commit the US alone to this
amount. (In fact, the only specific figures she seemed to be committing
the US to were emissions reductions at levels of about half of what science
indicates is required.) It is highly unlikely that she or Obama are still going
to be in office anywhere near 2020. So it is an easy promise. It should be
said, though, that this was the first time any Annex 1 Party had even
mentioned a figure high enough that it could actually offer real help to the
poorest nations.

As the day wore on, one head of state after another held forth at the
Plenary. Brazil, Iran, Mexico, South Africa, Israel…They continued for
quite a while,  carrying on about how grave the danger was and the
great sacrifices their governments were already making or preparing
to make in response.

France seems to be playing a quiet but treacherous role. Sarkozy, by all
appearances, charmed or maybe bribed the Ethiopian Prime Minister,
Meles Zenawi, into coming on board with the great powers. Zenawi, as
leading negotiator for the African Group had been up until this intervention,
antagonistic to the agenda of the large nations. Chants of “sell-out’ were
heard the next day outside the Bella Center from a team of close to 50
African demonstrators.

At the end of the day, on the Metro heading to our Copenhagen home,
(made available to us by a wonderful family related to close friends in
California) I ran into Bjorn Lumborg, the  well known Danish business
academic, thinker and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001),
and Cool It (2007). He claims that his earlier repute as a major greenhouse
skeptic (one who has doubts about the science of climate change as well
as its human origins) is entirely unearned.

Lumborg is open and friendly and had made himself available for interviews
in the Media Center over several days. He has a clear position now and is
extremely deft at fielding criticism of it. For him, this UNFCCC process so
many are now agonizing over is a waste of time and money. The cost, even
if we could come to basic agreements as to how to proceed, will be huge in
terms of meeting the needs of the poorest nations, and forgone productivity
from emissions cuts and other expenses. Better to direct a lesser amount
of money at research and development of new technologies. When asked
about the risks of putting all our eggs in the technological basket he retorts
that the known methods of combating climate change are just as or even
more risky. He is both persuasive and simplistic in his understandings of
nature and for both reasons he is dangerous.

I did share one perception with Lumborg, though. No matter what we do
now, even in the best case scenario, there is going to be a significant
climatic lag period before positive responses occur. We are already well
into that period as our small island, lowland and African brothers so
poignantly inform us. This is the reason why there is so much talk at
COP 15 about adaptation and financing it.

For Lumborg, though, the fix both for the lag period and what follows is
geo-engineering. One example-a massive form of cloud seeding that
would establish a high altitude aerosol layer capable of reflecting sunlight
back into space and thus keep us cool.  One of the projects being
developed by his think tank/company, the Copenhagen Consensus Center,
happens to promise to do just that. (Lumborg’s Center has been backed
financially by Denmark’s conservative political party now in power.)

There is big money–potentially very big–involved here. One might be led
to conclude that Lumborg has a conflict of interest large enough to reflect
his intellectual position harmlessly back onto space. He runs from interview
to interview wearing a tee shirt, blue jeans and sneakers but one detects the
black suits waiting in the wings. Can the climate withstand the enormous
speculative surge which the attempt to provide technological fixes is on the
verge of precipitating?  Will the benefits of those technologies provide both
return on investment and survival for beleaguered people of the global
south, the island states and low-lying countries?

Some grave questions on the relative power of self-interest, compassion
and the simple desire for survival must soon be answered.

Planet Drum Foundation | P.O. Box 31215 | San Francisco | CA | 94131
–

This is powerful, eloquent and deeply humbling… watch on. We are living on only a speck of dust in the grander universe. It is all that we have.

The Pale Blue Dot

Honoring the Nature Energies – A Fall Closing Ceremony at the Sacred Garden

Somehow, it seems only right to share this on December 21, the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Our region (Baltimore and the Mid-Atlantic) received more than 20 inches of snow over the weekend and it’s starkly beautiful outside. The trees and buildings have all been softened with cushiony snow draped all over them. And the remaining tall dried stalks of flowers are angled in odd directions rising above the snow in my back yard.

If there were not 20 plus inches of powdery snow in my yard, I would go out tonight with sacred tobacco and smudge and bless the gardens in my yard in an end of season blessing of deep gratitude to them. But my boots are not high enough to trudge through the snow to do this. It will have to wait until the snow melts down a bit more.

I should have done this earlier in the season but in truth, I never finished putting my gardens to bed this season. I ran out of time before I left for New Zealand for three weeks on November 19^th. There are even about 25 pansies in little four inch pots that I shoved on top of my compost pile just a day before the blizzard hit last Friday. The ground was too frozen to put them in and I did not want my snow shovel hitting them where they were sitting on the sidewalk once the blizzard was over.

I’m not too proud of not finishing my garden beds this fall but time collapsed in on me and before I knew it, I was on that plane. Thus some weeds never got pulled nor stalks cut in the perennial fall schedule of putting plants to bed. But there is still early spring to catch up on some of these tasks.

I was also remiss in not yet going out and thanking the Nature Energies in my area for all of their wonderful help and support this season too. And I feel doubly bad for this.

At least we did have such a ceremony at the Sacred Garden at Jasmine’s house back in early November. This was good and right and honorable considering that it was her yard and her Nature Energies that we were honoring. (Not that it makes it any different for myself and my allies here in my neighborhood! They are surely just as important…)

A number of us gathered at Jasmine’s during the first weekend of November to do a final fall cleanup of plants and weeds. We also harvested a goodly amount of kale, chard and some late peppers, onions, rosemary, and lots more calendula blossoms (to dry for smudge).  Part of the day’s effort was also to pull out the remaining rotten tomato stalks that had been hit by the tomato blight that ravaged the region, including our Sacred Garden. While the Nature Energies did all that they did to contribute to a bumper crop of basil and peppers and other herbs (including HUGE calendula blossoms), they could not hold off the fungus spores. Alas. This was a large disappointment to us. (Interestingly, the heirloom tomato in my front yard never got hit by the blight. Surely because no one else near me was growing any tomatoes in my city yard?)

When we finished for the morning, Jasmine came and gathered us at a higher point in her yard that overlooks the whole vegetable garden. She walked out with her king-size abalone smudge pot already billowing smoke and we circled behind her as she faced the garden and blew on the embers to encourage the smoke to waft down the yard and around the garden.

Then she called on the Creator and Earth Mother to give our blessings and from there all the Nature Energies who had played any role small or large, the multitude of them, in supporting the bounty of our garden and the beauty that it had provided. The vegetables, the flowers, the vines of moonflower and only-so-perfectly named Heavenly Blue Morning Glory that graced our gate to the garden, so much so that the weight of the heavy vines collapsed the makeshift trellis above the gate!

She called to all of the Nature Energies, not by individual names, but as a group to express the blessings. I could feel the energy around us swirl a little as we stood there and listened to her call out to them. The smoke from her weighty smudge pot billowed out and around her into the yard. A deep gratitude came from all of us standing there as we silently listened to her words and took in the blessings of the smudge and her words. And surely the Nature Energies took up the smudge as gifts from us and danced with it up in the air above our heads. I could feel this.

Jasmine blew further on the smudge pot until the embers started to wane to worn out shards of charcoal and we bowed our heads to acknowledge our respect and gratitude to the garden and our friends in the spiritual dimensions who took it upon themselves to support our efforts.  And then it was complete.

Jas turned around and gave us one of her twinkle smiles, and said: “That’s it! Short and sweet!” A couple of us laughed a little and then we followed her trundling back into the house.

But I lingered a little on the lawn. There was a palpable difference in the feeling about the yard and garden. There was a sense of completion and closing that only good ceremony could bring forth. More than anything, there was a sense of rightness to the whole yard. Jas had started out the spring with a private ceremony to opening up the garden and this time she allowed us to be there with the closing. The season had come full cycle of birth and growth and death or dormancy. We had harvested what we could, given gratitude and now it was time for rest. For inward winter quietude.

And my yard, I can feel that it is not complete yet, that full cycle and sense of deep honoring. There is a slight itchiness there that I have felt before when I have not done the appropriate blessing with the Nature Energies to seek their permission to break the soil in the spring. Not as strong a dissonance but a slight one. Therefore I need to bring forth the smudge and tobacco for my honoring. Perhaps tonight I will go out on my porch that is not so deep in snow and say my prayers and honor the Energies of the garden. For indeed. I am deeply, deeply grateful to them. They will know my intent and that is the important truth.

THANK YOU!

Tree Magic – The Annual Cycle

It is only right to honor solstice in a sacred way. And this clip invites us to do so. It’s stunning and complemented by Enya’s music. Trees are the Standing People in most indigenous people’s view of the world. May we honor the trees around us and all the magic they provide us!

Fantastic.  Greg sends along this DIY FYI:

“Good news is that I truly out did myself this year with my Christmas  decorations. The bad news is that I had to take him down after 2 days. I had more people come screaming up to my house than ever.Great stories. But two things made me take it down.

First, the cops advised me that it would cause traffic accidents as they almost wrecked when they drove by.

Second, a 55 year old lady grabbed the 75 pound ladder almost killed herself putting it against my house and didn’t realize it was fake until she climbed to the top (she was not happy). By the way, she was one of many people who attempted to do that. My yard couldn’t take it either. I have more than a few tire tracks where people literally drove up my yard.”

[got this in an email just now.... some people are just too creative! ;~)]

Are Americans a Broken People? – BlackListed News

A friend just sent this link to me and it is rather unsettling to read it and find so much of it true. What kind of motivation will kick us in the butt to be more proactive and demonstrate more and be more vocal to our politicians. Have we so succumbed to the powers that be and their suppression of us. Are Americans so socially isolated? This is disturbing reading.

I’d like to think I’m not one of those so broken, but have I become passive? There is certainly more that I could do. Day by day… Make those calls to my elected officials. Support strongly what I believe strongly about. And more… Food for thought on this cold winter day.

The Mid-Atlantic Seaboard braces for a blizzard in two days and I just discovered this headline of a volcano that is spitting and sputtering and threatening to blow in the Philippines. Those poor people have been hammered by natural disasters this year. My prayers go to them… Seems Earth  Mother is rocking and rolling a bit…

This is the Mayon Volcano in the Philippines.

i drink it up

i go to the sea

to drink it up

til I bubble over

soul sweet taste of

ecstasy.

12/6/09

Gillespie Beach, New Zealand

Mare

The muse came over me as I was leaving (via the dirt 12 km road) Gillespie Beach on the West Coast of the South Island. This beach is just beyond the town close to Fox Glacier. It’s a remarkable shoreline in that there is no sand really but stones that cover the whole beach. Stones that are beaten and worn and kissed by the waves incessant movement. I could have brought the whole beach home with me. The stones were so lovely and their wave-worn smoothness and highlighted striations are remarkable. I sat there on a large driftwood log next to the waves and picked through the stones at my feet. And blessed out. It was difficult to leave.

Several pounds of them did make it back with me, regardless. ;~)

Fake vs Real: Which Christmas Trees are Greenest?

I just read this piece on the Care2 website. They have a quite good selection of environmentally related articles. It’s a bit sobering to think of the environmental costs of the plastic option for the Xmas tree.

Personally, I forewent the Christmas tree presence in my living room when my second cat was still a kitten. I just knew that she’d jump on it and take it all down, glass balls and all. And that would have really upset me. So I’ve been hanging all my glass balls and other colorful twinkly ornaments on wide gold ribbons that adorn my doorways and windows in the living room and dining room.

The fun aspect of hanging them is that there are no trees cut nor plastic produced for my need to celebrate the birth of Christ (never did get that association anyway). Plus I leave the colorful ornaments up all winter to give me some fun cheer while it is so grey and somber outside. Then when the first bulbs poke up from the ground come late February and some inkling of vibrant colors return to my yard, it’s time for me to shed my house of the interior vibrancy. It’s a delightful seasonal shift that I’ve been celebrating for years.