Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Fwd: from commencement speech by david foster wallace

GrittyPretty just sent me this amazing excerpt:

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

You need a square

GrittyPretty and I are always daydreaming about moving to a farm within a bicycles' ride of an old town square with a clock tower. The absence of such important public, pedestrian spaces in our communities is awful: Not just because we feel their absence like a gaping whole in our hearts, like something lost, but because it denies us an important space to engage one another - to share our desires for our communities:

From: Discovering Urbanism
All the tweets and texts flying through the airwaves have not changed the fact that a physical place, a public square in the most literal sense, will always be a necessary stage for any kind of action...
..."The government of Hosni Mubarak could shut down the internet. It could shut down cell phone service. It could force Al Jazeera, which has been providing superb coverage of the events in Egypt, to close its Cairo bureau. It could arrest journalists and seize their equipment....But the streets of Cairo themselves have been the medium that has carried the message of the Egyptian people

http://images.travelpod.com/users/jonathanashleyr/1.1275348904.photo_1.jpg

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Huntsman: the greenest GOP presidential hopeful?

Although I'm not a Republican, pretty much anything I hear from Gov. Herbert makes me deeply miss our old governor.
From: Grist - the latest from Grist
Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is looking like the most climate-cognizant contender for the Republican presidential nomination. In fact, he downright looks like a climate hawk...
... Huntsman said he found it "enormously frustrating" that Republicans had not been working toward a national climate policy. "We would not need the Western Climate Initiative if it were not for the foot-dragging nature of Congress," he said. "If Republicans had identified this problem earlier and tackled it aggressively, we would all be working together...

Building an Earthbag Dome

From: No Tech Magazine
Earthbag dome
"Domes are the strongest form in nature... The feeling inside is magical..."
Step-by-Step Earthbag Building Instructable. Via Make

Monday, January 31, 2011

absent public places

Here is an interesting point raised about the fact that in the US, we have phased public squares/pedestrian plazas out of public planning in favor of superhighways...
"...To pluck a story from the Christian tradition, when an injured Jewish traveler was lying along the side of a road, it was the Samaritan, his sworn ethnic enemy, who decided to lend a hand. This scene was Jesus' response to the question "who is your neighbor?" We may like to think of ourselves as similarly generous, but we forget that the Samaritan had to actually walk past the injured man in the first place just to be presented with the dilemma.
 
...this can't happen if we don't build places to facilitate these interactions."

does our tech make us happy?

It's true... my bike does make me happier than my car did. And though I prefer an express bus to a car commute, I'd rather be on my bicycle. -if only I could cycle 45 miles in an hour... Although, if this list is right, I need to be thinking about getting a horse ( since I don't think that sailing up and down the Jordan river would quite work).
..."In this age, 'judging technology' means one of two things: reviewing a particular tool for how well it satisfies the consumer, or doing deep thinking about Technology as a whole. I don't think there's any such thing as 'technology'. Every tool, every system of tools, every use of every system of tools, is a different animal. And instead of judging a clothes dryer for how well it dries your clothes compared to another clothes dryer, we should also judge it for how it affects the meaningfulness of your life, the society it is part of, and the rest of life on this planet."
...here are the preliminary results for the more common transport means:
  • sailboat 85 - 74,
  • horse 79 - 70
  • bicycle 77 - 63
  • private jet 58
  • airliner 45
  • passenger train 44 - 30
  • automobile 25
Note that energy use and ecological damage are not the only criteria.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Butterflies

Rethinking the way we live in the world, re-envisioning a world that provides a happy life for all children, and sending out butterflies to promulgate the dream, and show others the doorways to possibility.

From: The Great Change

"... say your electricity came not from a dirty coal-steam plant but from algae that grew in a wetland cell that treated the effluent from your kitchen and bathroom? Suppose that once you had wrung out the algae mat for its rich gardening nutrients, you separated the oils from the biomass and refined those into fuel for your car. Then you took the leftover biomass and fed it to a pyrolyzing stove, which cooked your meals, heated your house, made your electricity, and left you not with ash but biochar — recalcitrant carbon ready to enrich your garden for the next 1000 years, staying out of the atmosphere all the while. Cool food, cool fuel, cool waste treatment, cool climate.

 ...From San Pedro you go up the Columbia Branch of the Rio Grande in a cedar dug-out poled by a dory man. The site is 2 miles (1 hour) up river at a shallow bend with tall stands of bamboo on the starboard shore.

...This is where we choose to teach permaculture. The place is its own best instructor.

...You could live quite comfortably on the breadnuts, avocados, corn, bananas, coffee, fish, beans and all the rest. You could drink from the river, although Chris harvests water for the kitchen from a spring farther uphill.
We are hosting introductory permaculture trainings outside CancĂșn through January, in Spanish, but for those interested in getting the whole design methodology at one location, in English, we direct you to our course in Belize. If you want to eat local organic food, sleep in dorms powered entirely by renewable energy, and bathe in a sparkling pure river, please contact Chris or visit his web site."



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