There's something to be said for Kitchen Table Wisdom - you know, like in the old days when people sat around the kitchen table after a meal and talked about life, the universe and the meaning of it all - as well as the gossip doing the rounds in town...

Well, that's what this place is - a place to share common wisdom, thoughts and feelings about things important and unimportant, that bring us joy, laughter and happiness and that trouble, sadden, confuse and anger us ...

What I write here is what's 'real' for me. It won't always be PC or 'nice'. We're missing out on true connection and chances to grow and change because there's too little authenticity, too little honesty, too much holding back what we really feel and mean.

Welcome to my world...

I used to have a copyright claim here, but I've removed it...

Ideas don't belong to anyone -

they come to those who are receptive and are to be used for the well being of all...

I find images and movies and music all over the web

and I use them to accent/expand on my thoughts and understandings...


If you feel you have experienced or received something of value in reading my posts,

please consider either:

Giving a Koha/Love Offering Here - Donate with WePay

or paying it forward to those who need

material and emotional/spiritual sustenance in this world...


Thank You


As You Think, So It Is - Your Beliefs Create Your Reality

If your Reality isn't Working for You, Create a New One!

Life Unlimited!


Namaste

(the Divine in me, recognises and honours the Divine in you)

Sahila




Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Hard Labour...





... transition - the hard labour phase, just before actually giving birth...

And where is our monetary economy in all of that? 

Smart Money

From our cashless past, author Charles Eisenstein finds future solutions

By Rosette Royale
Assistant Editor

Want to know how to make more money in 2012? Easy. Monitor your holdings so you can sell losers and buy into big trends. Stop diversifying your investment portfolio, since owing too many funds ensures mediocre results. And don’t fall for below-average price/earnings multiples and price-to-book values because cheap stocks can be a recipe for disaster. Sounds like great advice, huh?

Perhaps it is, if you subscribe to Forbes Magazine. After all, those were the top three tips in its 2012 investment guide, which appeared in the same issue as its list of top 20 private companies in the U.S. (In case you’re wondering, agribusiness giant Cargill, with estimated sales of $109.6 billion, was No. 1.) All this and more can be gleaned in the magazine’s year-end special edition “The 20 New Rules of Money.”

These days, most people would agree our society needs new rules for money. Foreclosures, student loans, living wages, double-dip recession, tax-and-spend, bust-and-boom, bull market/bear market, debt ceilings, trade deficits: We’re awash in a world where money seems to rule our lives. But what if that could change? What if our concept of money changed? Author Charles Eisenstein wondered the same. So he researched old and new economic theories and wrote a book. He called it “Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in an Age of Transition.”

With a clear and compassionate tone, Eisenstein describes how our troubled relationship with money has caused our economic system to teeter like a blindfolded behemoth balancing on stilts made of chopsticks. He ties our concept of a mark, a yen, a buck and a pound to the unparalleled scarcity many experience. And he relates how so-called rational philosophies of money have endangered our planet.


But he doesn’t stop there. Eisenstein proposes ways to find stable footing. Some notions, such as replacing debt-bearing interest with negative interest, sound preposterous while others, like local and gift economies, sound naïve.

Eisenstein practices what he preaches: all the thought-provoking information in “Sacred Economics” can be read for free online at: realitysandwich.com/homepage_sacred_economics.


His prescriptions for how to achieve a healthier economy, and the evidence of why these ideas could work, are so well-reasoned, they might convince Warren Buffett to give up his $39 billion Nebraska home. Or at least allow some of us to move in with him rent-free.

Eisenstein made a few stops in the Seattle area in early January. A few days before his arrival, we chatted by phone. In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about what money is and isn’t, the notion of the sacred, the gift of cell phone cameras, the Occupy movement and how we can create a revolution founded on love.

I’m going to start with a very broad question: How would you define money?
You know, almost any definition of money gets you into trouble. The only one I usually work with is it’s an agreement among human beings that gives value to something. Sometimes I also define it as a kind of magic, the embodiment of a story we use to create things in the social realm. It’s a way to coordinate human activity so you can define roles between different people.

You know, the usual economist’s definitions of money — a medium of exchange, stored value, unit of account — those are more about what money does, not what money is. But I think that to even say money is a thing leads people into error. People have all kinds of different definitions about what money is, but it’s really not a thing: It’s a relationship.

You used the word “story.” How do story and money relate to each other?
When I talk about a story, I’m talking about a system of interpretations or a system of meanings that tell us what’s valuable or what’s real. Anything that you want to do in this social reality depends on convincing other people to do it, or bringing other people along with you to do it. The way that we communicate with other people is largely through symbols — words, numbers, books — and money is among them. Let me give you an example.

You want to build a house. Why is the cement truck going to show up on Tuesday morning with cement for the foundation? That would be an insane act if there weren’t the story of the house that includes schedules and contracts and lists of materials. The story of the house includes money as part of it, because the agreements that give money value are part of our cultural stories, the story that we call America. There is no objective thing that is America. A squirrel runs back and forth across the border all the time and doesn’t know whether it’s in Canada or the United States, because this thing only exists because of the shared agreements, interpretations, meanings. Money is like that, too. It’s attached to other stories that create our whole civilization.

The title of your book is “Sacred Economics.” So how do you define the sacred?
It’s not something that has this extra-material spirit imbued into it. That’s an obsolete understanding. We know something is sacred when we can see its uniqueness and its relationships. So you might have some special object that your grandmother gave you that’s sacred to you — say it’s her wedding ring. It might be identical to another wedding ring made of the same materials — the same width, same weight and everything — but to you, that one is special. It’s sacred because it came from your grandmother. It has all kinds of other associations, the same way we can see a giant sequoia or some huge tree as sacred, especially if that tree is where you had your tire swing as a kid, and it’s connected to other people and beings you’re connected with. But when the tree has been cut down and converted into board feet, sent to a lumber mill, and then you buy those boards at Home Depot, those aren’t sacred anymore. It becomes a commodity. It doesn’t matter, generally speaking, where it came from. It has no more history; it has no connections.

And our whole economy has become commoditized and ruled by money, which also has no history. It’s valuable, no matter where it came from, no matter what horrible things happened to make that money, whether your friend gave it to you as a present or whether you stole it from your worst enemy, it still has the same value. And that’s very different from the things that human beings used to live with. Everything that you lived with a few hundred, a few thousand years ago was either made by yourself or someone you knew very well. So we lived in a much more intimate world. And so that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about sacred.

How can we heal this disconnection and alienation living in a monetized world where almost everybody we interact with is a stranger? You go to the store and interact with strangers. A stranger made your house, your clothes, grew your food, sang your songs. That is a profound aberration, historically speaking. I know your newspaper is distributed in large part by homeless people. In a way, people who are poorer in money are richer in community, because they don’t live as much in this standardized, commoditized world.

In the intro you said your book is going to describe “a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy.” So, please, please, please tell me, what kind of economy, what kind of money will create a more beautiful world?
That takes some doing. That’s why I wrote a whole book. But people, understandably, have a very negative impression about money and what it does. That’s because money is responsible for a lot of horrible things. And in the book I ask, “Why?” Why have we agreed to make it a force for evil? Why have we agreed that you can get paid a lot of money cutting down forests, but you can’t make a lot of money planting forests? Why have we agreed you can get a lot of money by forcing people off their land and onto plantations that are unsustainable, but there’s not a lot of money in permaculture? Why did we set it up that you can make a lot of money opening liquor stores in the inner city, but you can’t make a lot of money teaching people to garden in the inner city?

So I investigate: What is it about money that makes it a force for evil? The answer’s not really that simple, but one of the big things is that it’s created through interest-bearing debt, which means that essentially there’s never enough: We’re always in competition with each other, whether we want to be or not, and money is always scarce. There’s always more debt than there is money, and everyone, generally speaking, is under pressure in some way to pay off debts. And this also drives endless economic growth.

[The book] sets up some of the solutions of what money would look like if it didn’t have interest. There’s about six or seven main pillars of the vision, and one of them is negative-interest economics, one of them is internalization of external costs, another is localization, another is peer-to-peer and gift economics.

So let’s talk about a gift economy. How would it work?
It’s already happening, actually. One way is through couch surfing or Craigslist. People using the Internet often will just offer something they don’t ask money for. When this is done in a community, this strengthens a community, because you see that what you give is going to people who are also giving to people that you know, and eventually it comes back to you. And the more that you enter into gift relationships with people, the more you come to depend on each other. You don’t get this independence you have when you have a high income — “I don’t need anybody, I can just pay people for anything I want.” Now you actually need people. So it can happen locally, just like in old-time small towns, or it can happen globally. A lot of things we used to pay for are now becoming free because of the Internet. Music, for example: It was free a hundred years ago, because everyone sang their own songs. Then it became intellectual property. But now you don’t really have to pay for music if you don’t want to, and the amount you do have to pay is less and less, even if you scrupulously abide by all the laws.

I write all my books on open-source software: People make it and put it out there as a gift. Journalism happens largely for free, when people use their cell phone cameras, like when people got pepper sprayed at UC Davis. That news was not found by a professional journalist paid to be there. So that’s part of a gift economy too.

What it means is we’re able to satisfy more of our desires and needs without money. And that means there is less need and potential for economic growth. And that means that the money system is going to continue its crisis, because the money system [needs] growth.


But some say it’s illegal to just get music you want to hear. Or that it’s really great to have professional journalists because they know journalistic ethics.
I don’t think we’ll necessarily see the demise of professional journalism, but probably a shrinkage in its extent. A lot of things that professional journalists did are now being done democratically. Maybe the way they are compensated will be different.

To say that you’re compensated: That says you don’t really want to do your work, so we’re going to make up for it by giving you money. Economics says that it’s good that we have scarce money otherwise people wouldn’t have any motive to work. But I can tell just by talking to you that even if you were a billionaire, you’d still be doing this work, because you like it. I imagine you don’t get paid a huge salary.

Oh, I’m a millionaire.
You’re not doing it for the money. Almost no one who’s doing really great, exciting, dynamic things is doing it for the money. We can have a vibrant, productive, wealthy world without having to induce people, through money, to do what they don’t want to do.

One of the other pillars you mentioned, negative interest: How does that work?
The hardcore economics approach is that you institute a liquidity tax on federal reserved deposits. Today, part of the economic problem is that banks have vast reserves, but they’re not lending them out to businesses that will make productive investments and hire employees. They would rather keep the money at low interest in a very safe investment than lend it out. But if holding that money came with a penalty, then they would be happy to lend it out, even if they weren’t going to get a positive return on that investment. And this is a proposal that’s been floated by some pretty heavyweight economists. It’s not a half-baked idea, but it sounds like a half-baked idea.

For hunter-gatherers, possessions were a burden. In early agricultural societies, if you stored up a lot of grain, it would get eaten by rats and go bad. So if you were a super competent farmer and fabulous hunter: How do you stay wealthy? In early societies, you gave away as much as possible. You created this reservoir of gratitude in your society. So then if you broke your ankle and couldn’t farm or hunt, there’d be lots of people who’d like to take care of you, because of all the contributions you made. So in those societies, wealth came through giving.

The reason was you couldn’t hold onto wealth. If you tried, it would decay. And that’s a law of nature. Everything returns to its source. But money is different: You can hold onto it in perpetuity and it’ll grow all by itself. It’s very different from grain, from meat, or pretty much anything in the natural world. And that’s pretty much the vision we’ve created between the human and natural realm: We think we humans can operate under different rules. So to make an economy more aligned to logical principles, we have to make money align with logical principles. It has to decay. And then wealth will no longer be a matter of how much can I control or how much can I keep for myself, and I’ll only share it if you give me even more. And if you don’t, I’ll sue you.

You have this YouTube video called “The Revolution is Love” about Occupy Wall Street. I can imagine what you mean by that title, but what kind of revolutionary love are you talking about?
First, let me say, Ian McKenzie came up with that title. He’s a filmmaker from Vancouver, so I want to give credit where credit is due.

Usually, when we think of revolution, we think of bringing down the bad guys. And there’s a lot of that, even in the Occupy movement — the stuff about the 1 percent and greedy bankers and corporate executives. And the idea is that these awful people are in charge and “If I were in charge, I wouldn’t do those things.” So it’s very judgmental.

But in the rare occasions where a revolution is successful in bringing down the powers that be, what happens is a new 1 percent materializes and perpetrates the same atrocities, maybe in a different way. The judgmental mentality that says, “I’ll never do that” is wrong. If you were in that position, you would, because those positions and those institutions have their own logic. And I think it’s important to remember, even among the bankers, even among the corporate executives, those are divine human beings, too, who really want to do the right thing, who want to participate in the creation of a more beautiful world. And when we look at the system and other people with those kinds of eyes, we’re moved to different strategies and different kinds of actions. I think that people who would otherwise be our opponents would be a lot less defensive, if we’re not coming from “You guys are awful,” and “We’re going to tear you down,” and “What’s wrong with you?” but rather to come with the attitude of “I know this isn’t really working for you either. You’re not meant to spend your life maximizing market share. You’re not meant to profit off of the degradation of other human beings. That’s beneath you. You’re better than that. And maybe you’re afraid to leave your position behind, and you’ve been bedazzled by the fake promises of monetary wealth. But we see that you’re waking up from that.” Because I don’t think there’s any hope in overcoming the powers that be with force. They’re much more powerful in terms of force. A deeper revolution invokes the power of love.

I think “We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. But occasionally I say, “We are the 100 percent. We are all of us.” It’s all of us together. We all have to figure it out together. I think everybody’s coming along in this transition.

This transition?
Well, we’re facing a transition. All of our systems, all of our institutions are breaking down. It’s not just money: The ecosystem, medicine, education is in crisis, the criminal justice system, politics is paralyzed. So we’re facing a multitude of crises, and I see them as a birth crisis. We’re in a transition into a very, very different world, a very different civilization. You can describe that in a lot of ways, but one of the ways is a civilization that is no longer seeking to defeat or conquer or transcend nature. We can’t escape the effects of our actions on the planet. We have to devote ourselves to the well-being of all beings. That’s at the core of it. We’re kinda rejoining the community of life. 

~ Real Change News - Smart Money Interview


For myself, I am searching for the way to live in alignment with the notion of a gift economy, with a moneyless society grounded in a resource-based economy.   It is possible and people are starting to do it in different places around the world.   The Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project are exploring these ideas.   Robert Theobald put forward the notion of having full unemployment and all people being paid a guaranteed basic income.   Buckminster Fuller talked about us having all the resources and technology we need to no longer have to compete for anything... that the future was the age of collaboration...




ALL THIS IS POSSIBLE NOW...

 WE JUST HAVE TO WANT IT

AND TO MAKE IT HAPPEN




Just Say No!...


My grown kids worry about my homeless/moneyless situation;

They want to know why I just can't/won't play THE GAME...

Because THE GAME is toxic and kills...

My soul demands that I refuse to collaborate and enable THE GAME, and to do what I can to interrupt, if not end, it;


I bear witness to, and call out, its sociopathic cruelty - NOT IN MY NAME - and I pay a material price for that...

And the price we all pay for playing THE GAME is much higher than the loss of physical comfort and "security"...

In this case, just saying "NO", abstaining, is really the only strategy we have that will work in ending the madness...

 

Post Script:
I've had a lot of response to this post, particularly from older women who are in the same situation, walking the same revolutionary path;

We've turned our backs on security to push for change;

Our souls want/need to help heal the world, for all the other beings on the planet, and for our children and grandchildren... 

“The world will be saved by the Western woman.”
~Dalai Lama
Vancouver Peace Summit, 2009



Friday, February 17, 2012

The "It's Not Valentine's Day" Post...



...where I say "I love you" and "thank you" to life, the planet and all the wonderful beings I share this reality with...

Sending out love and respect for all the people - known and unknown - who are passionate about, and active in, creating a better world for all...

Sending out love to my children - Ellen, Sarah, Callum and Connor...

Sending out love to the two men with whom I brought those children into the world...

Sending out love to my family of origin, especially my sister and her husband and son...

Sending out love to my family of choice - those kindred spirits who love and support me as we walk our pathways in tandem for long or short parts of the journey...

Sending out love and saying "thank you" to all the human angels who have come into my life, for brief moments or for years...






Monday, February 13, 2012

Love (And Common Sense) Prevails...



Washington State has seen the light and today Governor Chris Gregoire signed into law the right for same sex couples to get married...


The law comes into effect on June 7th, and anti-same sex marriage bigots have until then to get the required number of signatures on a petition to take the issue to a November referendum...

I'm confident the law will stand...

I guess some people might see this as opportunistic...

AND...

I'm an ordained, non-denominational minister and a shaman...

If any gay and lesbian couples want to get married now that you can, it would be my very happy honour and privilege to facilitate your ceremony/ritual...







Saturday, February 4, 2012

Operator? Information...




... get me Jesus on the line...



LYRICS:

Operator
Give me information
Information
Give me long distance
Long distance
Give me heaven...

(Two, three)
Operator
Information
Give me Jesus on the line
Operator
Information
I'd like to speak to a friend of mine
Oh prayer is the number
Faith is the exchange
Heaven is the street
And Jesus is his name
Operator
Information
Please give me Jesus on the line

Operator
Information
Won't you tell me why
Tell me why
Operator
Information
Don't try to tell me
What number to call
My mother used this number
When I was very small
And every time she dialed it
She always got 't call the
Operator
Information
Please give me Jesus on the line

Operator
Information
Please hurry if you can
Oh Operator
Information
Please connect me
With the man
Don't worry 'bout the money
You know I will pay the charge
Just give me on the line
I'm callin' from my heart
Operator
Information
Please give me Jesus on the line
Please give me Jesus on the line

Won't you please -
Give me Jesus
Give me Jesus on the line

Yeah!

S'il vous plait: in alphabetical order: attorney, brakes, clients, ferry fares, food, fun, haircuts, household expenses, car insurance, legal shield, paperwork help, phone, tyres (4), van maintenance and window repair...
Merci beaucoup...



If Once You Have Slept On An Island...





... You'll never quite be the same;
You may look as you looked the day before
And go by the same old name.

You may bustle about in street and shop,
You may sit at home and sew,
But you'll see blue water and wheeling gulls
Wherever your feet may go.

You may chat with the neighbors of this and that
And close to your fire keep
But you'll hear ship whistle and lighthouse bell
And tides beat through your sleep.

Oh, you won't know why, and you can't say how
Such a change upon you came,
But - once you've slept on an island
You'll never quite be the same.
~ Rachel Field











Thursday, February 2, 2012

Did You Know...


... that the capacity to 'endure' is VASTLY over-rated?


Enduring this drama...

Someone said to me that other day, that my job right now is to simply 'endure'... and that she marvelled at my capacity to endure... that she didn't know how I was holding it all together...

AND everything that needs to be done is turning into an epic challenge, with seemingly endless roadblocks and obstacles and U-turns...

Holding the reality that a wish to go back to Australia with the boy, has a real chance of turning into me losing custody of him, as his father attempts to paint me an unfit mother...

And what judge - the henchman of the oligarchs - would think me otherwise, looking at our financial and living situation, at my views and choices on "educating" the boy, at my philosophical and political views, at my activism?

What to do to head that off without legal help, without completely turning myself inside out for the system...

What will I do to keep custody of the boy?

What principles will I cave on?

Will it be enough to simply withdraw my Intention to Relocate Notification?

Is that still possible - or have I let things go to far?

And I have to face this - tomorrow... 

Am not 'prepared' in the legal sense because I have no energy or desire to play this game - I just want to go in there, speak my truth and have that accepted...

I'm full, feeling desperate, overwhelmed, on the back foot, confused, bewildered, alone, panic-stricken... 


And yet, I am not the clouds...

I am the always-present sky through which the ever-changing clouds of my emotions form, reform and evaporate as they pass across the sky...


This too, shall pass...

I surrender...

What will be, will be...

(and no, that doesn't mean I give up - it means I give up my desire to control the process and the outcome, I let it unfold...)



 

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

CRASS: There Is No Authority But Yourself...


... punk is not my thing, nor is heavy metal, nor is rap....

AND... when I listen to the lyrics and the thoughts/ideas underpinning them, then punk, heavy metal and rap definitely speak the same truths I have come to understand via other paths...




LYRICS:
You talk about your revolution, well, that's fine
But what are you going to be doing come the time?
Are you going to be the big man with the tommy-gun?
Will you talk of freedom when the blood begins to run?
Well, freedom has no value if violence is the price
Don't want your revolution, I want anarchy and peace

You talk of overthrowing power with violence as your tool
You speak of liberation and when the people rule
Well ain't it people rule right now, what difference would there be?
Just another set of bigots with their rifle-sights on me

But what about those people who don't want your new restrictions?
Those that disagree with you and have their own convictions?
You say they've got it wrong because they don't agree with you
So when the revolution comes you'll have to run them through
You say that revolution will bring freedom for us all
Well freedom just ain't freedom when your back's against the wall

You talk of overthrowing power with violence as your tool
You speak of liberation and when the people rule
Well ain't it people rule right now, what difference would there be?
Just another set of bigots with their rifle-sights on me

Will you indoctrinate the masses to serve your new regime?
And simply do away with those whose views are too extreme?
Transportation details could be left to British rail
Where Zyklon B succeeded, North Sea Gas will fail
It's just the same old story of man destroying man
We've got to look for other answers to the problems of this land

You talk of overthrowing power with violence as your tool
You speak of liberation and when the people rule
Well ain't it people rule right now, what difference would there be?
Just another set of bigots with their rifle-sights on me

Vive la revolution, people of the world unite
Stand up men of courage, it's your job to fight

It all seems very easy, this revolution game
But when you start to really play things won't be quite the same
Your intellectual theories on how it's going to be
Don't seem to take into account the true reality
Cos the truth of what you're saying, as you sit there sipping beer
Is pain and death and suffering, but of course you wouldn't care

You're far too much of a man for that, if Mao did it so can you
What's the freedom of us all against the suffering of the few?
That's the kind of self-deception that killed ten million jews
Just the same false logic that all power-mongers use
So don't think you can fool me with your political tricks
Political right, political left, you can keep your politics
Government is government and all government is force
Left or right, right or left, it takes the same old course
Oppression and restriction, regulation, rule and law
The seizure of that power is all your revolution's for
You romanticise your heroes, quote from Marx and Mao
Well their ideas of freedom are just oppression now

Nothing changed for all the death, that their ideas created
It's just the same fascistic games, but the rules aren't clearly stated
Nothing's really different cos all government's the same
They can call it freedom, but slavery is the game

Nothing changed for all the death, that their ideas created
It's just the same fascistic games, but the rules aren't clearly stated
Nothing's really different cos all government's the same
They can call it freedom, but slavery is the game
There's nothing that you offer but a dream of last years hero
The truth of revolution, brother................... is year zero.





Shit-brained Thinking...






"We have to create culture...

Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR...

Create your own roadshow... 

The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y... 

This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking... 

That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears... 

and we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral... 

'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.'... 

And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game... 

You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." 
~ Terrence McKenna