Archive for June 2010
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I wanted to make a unique contribution to the cosmos, but then I got swamped by emails. Oh, well.
"We need rapid political change in a way that we have never really seen before." --Bill McKibben, April 23, 2010 http://www.350.org/
Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis,
From "The Fate of The Earth," a talk given in 1986:
"We now know that we're alive because the earth is alive. Unlike Mars, or the moon, or Venus, or the other planets in our solar system, we're a water planet. Seventy percent of the earth's surface is salt water. That's why the earth is alive. Its a fluid planet. But in our old cosmology, we call these fluids oceans. We name them . . . Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic. They're places. They're things. They're 'it's...
You swim in them, you fish in them, you sail in them, you own them. You own home fronts on them. And if your cosmology is such that those are just places, then it's very logical to dump wastes there, including our very lethal wastes.
But now we're beginning to understand that the oceans are the actual fluids of the planet. And everything that lives has the ocean in it. The oceans are not oceans. They are one single salt water system which flows through everything on the surface of the earth that has life in it. That's why things are alive–maple trees, bananas, or you. If we took you to the chemistry lab and had you analyzed right now, regardless of your size or weight, you would be seventy percent salt water. And it's the same salt water as if flowing through the oceans. The rest of you would be the minerals that form the crust of the earth. We're the earth, with consciousness, with soul, with spirit. We're the earth in a new form. But we are the earth! And now we understand that these fluids within the oceans are in us.
Because the oceans become the clouds and the clouds become the rain and the rain becomes the corn. And we eat the corn. And we get our minerals and our salt water replaced. And we cry the ocean. We excrete the ocean. We are just beginning to realize that the oceans are alive because over this long, painstaking process toward life, they became a community of millions of varied species and organisms, all of which are a fabric and a community of life. They are totally interdependent, all essential for each other's existence and for the well- being of the whole earth so that it can function and constantly maintain the oxygen needed by everything that lives.
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Planet Ocean You might not know this from the media's coverage, but the Gulf of Mexico is actually connected to all the other oceans on the planet.
"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."
--Charles Horton Cooley
The Network of Spiritual Progressives is having a powerful and prophetic gathering in DC this weekend, June 11-13.
Come check me out on Saturday night, June 12, 7:30pm. I'll be performing poetry as part of the Evening Plenary with Bill McKibben and others.
INFO HERE
DC Conference: Strategies for Liberals and Progressives for the Obama Years
Creating "The Caring Society": A Progressive Alternative to Tea Party Extremism and Corporate Domination of American Politics and Culture
This shoe is 1000 years older than the Great Pyramid. History is the ultimate trip.
The history of the universe is the craziest thing ever, and human history is a mind-blowing part of that.
A group of archaeologists from UCLA and Ireland have just announced the discovery of the world's oldest leather shoe, described as "an exquisitely preserved, 5,600-year-old woman's size 7 lace-up," found "in a cave in Armenia," (LA Times, June 10).
The shoe dates from the Copper Age, the time of "the first cities, the first kings, the first axes, the first beauracrats, the first international trading system."
Inside the cave, along with the shoe, they discovered "winemaking apparatus complete with grapes and three human heads preserved in jars."
Say what?! That's raw.
History is wierd.
And raw.
And real.
History never fails to fascinate.
The future is a poem inside our pen.
From Bob Herbert's column in The New York Times, May, 29, 2010:
"The oil companies and other giant corporations have a stranglehold on American policies and behavior, and are choking off the prospects of a viable social and economic future for working people and their families....
It's not just a cozy relationship [between oil companies and the federal government]. It's an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.
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"The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human--at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience."
--Thomas Berry, who passed one year ago today.
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