Green Living, the bad news!

I am not sure if it is because I am now a grumpy old man or if other’s share my view but I believe the various crisis that we are now experiencing, both financial and ecological are caused by human kind’s shallow spirituality caused by the growth of desire for ever more stuff!
With that said I thought it would be a good idea to visit other peoples green blogs to find out how they were living the green lifestyle so I could read and comment, hmmmm big mistake!!
All I could find was blogs selling green living, from soap to electric vehicles, admittedly there were some good blogs that consisted of regurgitated news on the subject but they themselves are supported by the advertising revenue that often looked quite dubious. (I am not speaking of green sites, just blogs)
I wanted to read what the people who have actually gone green had to say, I am not saying they are not out there, I just couldn’t find them, maybe the Google gods of search engines don’t value them, who knows.
So what does green living mean to you? Are you happy you can go online and buy it?
Of course you will not be buying an actual green way of life, you will just be buying into the same old ego success painted green.

Green living is living a sustainable life, so what standard of life would that be?
Well roughly, if you take the average USA citizen and reduce their standard of living by three quarters this reduction would not be quite enough to be sustainable, if you live in the UK and halved your standard of living, again this would not be enough to be sustainable, based on the whole world population having the same standard of living.

So what is one to do if one wants to not only live a green life but promote the benefits of a green lifestyle?
Well governments haven’t got a chance, no government is going to be voted into power on the bases that it is going to massively reduce your lifestyle.
Which unfortunately means most if not all the rich western governments are lying to their people when they talk about economics and growth.
So who really wants to sacrifice their lifestyle to return the earth to it’s natural colour.?
Well I do, and if you care to read on maybe you will as well.

It is not possible to sustain growth to a greener world, a greener world requires sustained shrinkage, in fact it is probably no longer just an option. If we cannot embrace sustained shrinkage it is likely the economic and environmental changes we are experiencing will force it upon us.

The fear of loss is greater than the loss you fear.

I believe the key to a green life is to seriously consider striving for heart success, the success of doing the right thing and not the ego success, the success of turning a blind eye to the right thing in order to have stuff and power.

We need to do more and use less but most of all we need to get out of the race to have the trinkets that say who we are and realise that all they say now is actually how spiritually shallow we are. To me wealth is not wrong but the trappings of wealth, for me, represent exploitation, somewhere along the line someone and something was exploited.

You cannot buy a green life, you have to live a green life as a whole.
Becoming a vegetarian (says the meat eater but I am trying!) is a wonderful example of doing more and using less, it takes planning and thought to eat well and be a vegetarian.
Any example I give you will be about making more effort and using less resources, that is the easy part, the hard part is to change peoples perception that success, real success, is not how much power and money you have or that you have a marble top kitchen, or the Ferrari parked outside.
Real success is sharing one’s wealth to resource others in your community, this is heart success, it is the key to the mindset that will help create a green life and combat the alternative which is the stealing by force of other’s precious resources, the darker alternative future.

For instance let us look at house wall and roof insulation, why haven’t all the houses built in the western world in the past 30 years had super insulated walls and roofs integrated at the design stage?
It is not because of cost or design factors it is because you can’t park insulation outside, or wear it to a party or show it off to your friends, unlike the success of double glazed windows which can be shown off that don’t save anywhere near as much energy as the unseen insulation
Green living is fun and I admit this post appears to be removing all the fun away from a green lifestyle but I am just trying to be real.
Now if your idea to go green is to buy an electric bike as an addition to all your stuff then you are not really helping anything other than your own ego, but if you buy the bike as a tool, an alternative means of travel it will give you the heart success I speak of, so much so that even on a cold wet evening sat at the traffic lights as the guy in the Ferrari pulls up next to you you may actually feel sorry for him!!

Nature vs Nurture, Environment vs Self

 

Can we change? Can we really change our selves and/or our environment for the better or is our fate and the fate of the earth set in stone?
There are so many questions, are we the product of our genes?
Can our happiness and success be ruined for ever by a lack of nurture?
Can we nurture our selves back to happiness and success?
Is it too late to nurture nature back to life?
How much does our environment impact on our selves?
How much does our self impact on nature and our environment?

The WWF Living Planet Report  (16/10/2010) key finding was -
‘Humanity’s demands exceed our planet’s capacity to sustain us. That is, we ask for more than what we have.’

If the scientists are correct the rising sea levels, destructive weather, dying out of species and loss of bio diversity are all the by products of human over consumption.
We need to change but is that possible? Let us take a closer look at the above questions.

Are we the product of our genes?
 Well yes we are, to survive we require certain things and our genes have within them the blueprint to create our ability to function in our environment. But that basic blueprint is the foundation on which we create ourselves, it is not ‘just’ what we are.
Can our happiness and success be ruined for ever by a lack of nurture?
 Yes, I believe one who has never been nurtured or has never nurtured themselves will never believe in their right for happiness and success and the destruction of their self will impact on their environment in a destructive way.
Can we nurture our selves back to happiness and success?
 Yes, I know we can, I believe The Map is just one of the many different methods available to open that path up. There are hundreds of free self help blogs where people have detailed their own paths back from the shadows of their demons.
Is it too late to nurture nature back to life?
 No, The WWF report’s one uplifting finding is that in countries that had previously destroyed much of their bio diversity, mainly the western world, that during the period their report covers there has been a 30% growth in some bio diversity.
How much does our environment impact on our selves?
 When I qualified as a nurse for people with learning disabilities (mentally handicapped people) it was at the time of the closing down of the institutions under the Care in the Community scheme. People who had lived in institutions all their lives who had been ‘managed’ by being tied to their bed and left in their own waste were suddenly moved to lovely houses, had their own bedrooms, received quality care, and were able to access the rest of the community, cinemas, bowling alleys, a pub lunch etc etc. So how does one take a damaged human being reduced to an existence of a caged animal, who in one case I know of had bitten off fingers of his previous Jailers/carers and return them to humanity? The answer is nurture them, teach them, value their existence, support good behaviour, withdraw support during bad behaviour (as opposed to punishment). The proof nurture works can be found in the care in the community system, in which one can also find the proof that if one can improve one’s environment one can beneficially impact one’s life.
How much does our self impact on nature and our environment?
 Here, in my opinion is the key to the future, understanding that each and every one of us has an impact on nature and our immediate environment, if we can learn the art of living with less consumption the more we can expand the self. Consuming stuff has become the norm to prop up who we are, but that outer show of stuff just detracts from our ‘self’, Why? Well if consuming stuff really made us happy why does one need to consume even more stuff the next day?
The art of nurturing a life consuming less is the way to expand the self and positively impact on your environment. It is doing what you can and with a little bit of luck will help to turn down the earth’s thermostat.
I believe what ever has happened in the past we can change our self and our environment for the better. It just takes the will to try.
Our fate is not set in stone, we have choice.

DIY Incense Powered Meditation Timers

Many people who meditate begin their meditation by striking what is often referred to as a Tibetan Singing Bowl.
The Singing Bowl Meditation Timer is made from recycled wood and ‘powered’ by an incense stick. When cotton from the rear bobbin is wrapped around the striker and pulled into the relevant timing slot the incense burns down, cutting through the cotton, releasing the striker that strikes the singing bowl, signaling the end of 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 minute session of meditation.
The idea is not new, some of the first clocks were powered by incense, this is a copy of an ancient Chinese incense powered clock.

 Front view of singing bowl meditation timer and incense set up for meditation.

 Rear view of singing bowl meditation timer showing the bobbin of cotton that can be removed when empty to rewind  new cotton of your choice.

 The Tibetan Singing Bowl Meditation Timer is hand made from recycled wood therefore the thickness of the wood can vary from timer to timer, the timer shown here is made from an old pallet.


Tingsha Meditation Timer

The meditation timer works by wrapping cotton from a bobbin at the rear of the timer, through the appropriate slot (to give the time required) pulling one tingsha away from the other. An incense stick is placed in the hole of the base which automatically rests on the taught cotton.
To start the meditation period one can move the left tingsha to strike the right tingsha to create the required sound.

When the incense stick burns down, the cotton breaks and the tingshas clash making a wonderful lingering ring to mark the end of the meditation period.

The Life Giving Spring Water Of Jorox

The weather has prevented me from working lately, so I decided to take a walk around our hamlet Jorox with my camera and bottle of home poured spring water. On previous walks I have seen a pair of Spanish mongoose, a toad as big as a small football and recently a family of Ibex, of course the best sights I see are only when I have left my camera behind! So you will just have to take my word for it!
At the top of Jorox is this unremarkable hole in the rock covered in a concrete ‘prison’ structure. As you can see it is a spring, a spring that supplies the whole of Jorox with spring water for drinking and irrigation.

Yes we drink that! Straight out of the mountain, as did the Jorox cave dwellers over 30,000 years ago. Jorox has many caves in which evidence has been found to link humans living here from the Palaeolithic period, sharing the cool clean spring water with Sabre Tooth Tigers and Woolly Mammoths.
Later on in human development, long after the Sabre Tooth Tiger had disappeared the Muslim Moors drank  this spring water, and cut water channels in the Jorox hillside rock to irrigate the land.
 After the Moors were removed by the Catholic Spanish, mills were built along the Moorish irrigation canals to capture the power of this spring to mill locally grown grain.
 During the time of Franco milling grain here was illegal, a proud Jorox ex resident who keeps his old family mill like a museum told me the grain was brought by the noble Andalucian Mule along secret tracks at night and milled in secret as if it was a drug.
There is only about twenty houses here now, and only two other houses are lived in the whole year.
This spring, the source of the river Jorox has been supporting life here since before history and throughout the history of man, it has seen species come and go, and possibly a few ice ages and still it flows all year round giving life.
In the centre of the village is a Catholic shrine, lovingly tended while the spring is ignored and left alone encased in its ugly concrete prison under a road bridge, no one goes there to give thanks or receive its healing secrets, well not any more but how different it may have been.

“The earliest known undisputed burial of a shaman (and by extension the earliest undisputed evidence of shamans and shamanic practices) dates back to the early Upper Palaeolithic era (c.30,000BP) in what is now the Czech Republic.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic

As I stood next to the spring in the rain I could imagine early humans drinking the spring water, revering this gift from the earth. From the dark underworld as if from nowhere this never ending source of life flows out to daylight.
Historically Pagans see water as a portal to the Other-world and a source of wisdom and healing.
In a way, Brigid, the Celtic Goddess associated with healing wells and spring water is a bridge between the Catholic faith and the shaman-ism of pre history. St Bridget is the Catholic equivalent.

“On February 1 or February 2 Brigid is celebrated at the Gaelic festival of Imbolc when she brings the first stirrings of spring to the land. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians and some Anglicans mark the day as the Feast of Saint Brigid; the festival is also known as Candlemas and Purification of the Virgin” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigid

When the Catholic faithful tend our little shrine on Candlemas I will walk on to the spring and stand a while by an unbroken link to humanity’s beginnings. Imbolc is a time of purification, I will wash in the spring waters and meditate on what I would like to grow in the coming year for me my family and this earth.

My Homemade Music

Indian psycho

 G3

Sweet sounds





Hope you Enjoy