"One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires ...causes proper matters to catch fire...Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.

If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times."

~Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"Welcome 2013... please be kind. Lend your healing power to those with hurting hearts, failing spirits and ailing bodies. Help us to embrace change while committing to empowering ritual and honored traditions. Allow us to understand the importance of making mistakes and push us to reach beyond our comfort zones. Teach us to recognize and nurture our individual gifts and how to best cultivate and celebrate the talents of those around us. Provide us with tools to create in better and more meaningful ways and eliminate our need and desire to destroy. Remind us to turn off the television, our cell phone, notepad, computer and game-boy and tune into the wonder of authentic dialogue, real conversation and heartfelt laughter. Give us permission to grieve fully, and cry and care too much. Remind us to express our feelings and shower the people we love with crazy acts and acknowledgements. Teach us that sentiment is a good thing. Allow us to see with the eyes of a child and soak in the joy and mystery of the first snow fall, the beauty of the stars, the playful call of mud puddle and intrigue of a potato bug. Tell us to make ourselves a priority and help us find the time to slow down so we can feed our spirit, nourish our soul and exercise our bodies. Help us savor the moment...relish the now...even when it is hard and challenging. Give us the strength to take a big, juicy and messy bite out of the year that stands before us. Welcome. So glad that you are here." -Jodi Kirk (a friend of a friend on facebook)

"I am standing on the sea shore. A ship sails and spreads her
white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.
She is an object of beauty and I stand watching her till at
last she fades on the horizon, and someone at my side says:
‘She is gone.’ Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all;
she is just as large in the masts, hull a spars as she was
when I saw her, and just as able to bear her load of living
freight to its destination.
The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not her;
and just at the moment when someone at my side says;
‘She’s gone’ there are others who are watching her coming
and other voices take up a gland shout,
‘There she comes’, and that is dying."

“If the success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?” —Buckminster Fuller

"Nothing is more difficult than to practice goodness within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared to individualism, competitiveness, and cynicism. But it can be done. We can be patient with ourselves and others as we all confront a changing world. We can empathize with resistance to change; there is some clinging to the ways of unsustainability within each of us. We can include everyone in the challenge; everyone will be needed. We can listen to the cynicism around us and pity those who indulge in it, but refuse to indulge in it ourselves. The world can never pass safely through the adventure of bringing itself to sustainability if people do not view themselves and others with compassion. That compassion is there, within all of us, just waiting to be used, the greatest resource of all, and one with no limits." — Donella Meadows

Been feeling somewhat angry at the world. Or, a lot. But yesterday helped--catching up with some awesome ladies. And my quest prep has been grounding and immensely powerful too. And, duh, backpacking with Carolyn=incredible. Lots to think about. Lots to write about, but most of that is going to be private for now.

But I do wish to express my anger and frustration at this moment, just to get it out of my system. Consider yourself warned.

So... basically... here's the thing: I am fucking sick of (mostly) old (mostly) white (mostly) males running the world! FUCKING SICK OF IT.ARG


So, as you can probably tell, the green building code symposium went well.
I mean, I guess I am getting used to being the youngest person at those things, and being surrounded by grey-haired people in fat-suits...er, fat people in grey suits...er suits with phat grey hair (...not judging, just noticing) [Am I gonna lose potential jobs over this?]. And I am getting used to hearing them talk about merely reducing our utter destructiveness in a business-polite fashion in their business-casual vernacular/clothing blabitty blah blah bull. Needless to say I bit my tongue a bunch but couldn't stifle a few loud exhale sounds that probably made some bushy, grey caterpillar-eyebrows cock their butts in the air (or their heads, but its really hard to tell anyway). But hear-you-me, I would have spoken my mind if I wasn't volunteering or representing the Guild by association.

Like, "um, excuse me... you don't want to put a better code into law because then people who are always pushing the boundaries would somehow suddenly find it acceptable or beneficial to shoot for the lowest standard? and even if they did, the lowest standard would call for much more efficiency across the board which would be better in the long term anyway because we wouldn't have wasted all the resources making more shitty buildings. i mean, its not like we've been waiting for years for everyone to jump on the already super green-washed (with '100% natural' soap) bandwagon of 'sustainability.' and you are saying we shouldn't create laws that mandate 'green' building because then it won't be cool anymore? might that perspective be because the success of your company/paycheck depends on your 'green-building' offerings being on the cutting edge, which wouldn't be the case if better building practices became the mandated standard?"

Once again, it was a dog-fight between the private and public sector...
So why not both? Why not market-based incentives AND regulatory solutions? WHY WHY WHY? I think I understand. It's all about money. But it sounds like this:
"Because I am a man, and don't understand the meaning of compromise" "NO! I am a man and I have all the answers, but they are better than yours" "I am man! HEAR ME ROAR! in my suit. and tie. and... beer belly..." "oh! and I am a woman and I have an opinion too! but it's still based off this bullshit reality of market economies and what is or isn't feasible in our ridiculous government system. but i know how this part of the world works because i have been working in this unfortunate field since the dawn of the dinosaurs. RAR!"

Okay, okay. I'm not being very fair at all. They genuinely care (probably). They donated their time to spend at this thing, and have dedicated their lives to trying to contribute to a more beautiful (?) world, and they are doing it in the ways they know how.

But it doesn't help if you get in the way of people who are doing the things that make the difference. And if you live in a bubble of relative security, ignorant or ignoring-ant of the actual real-life physical/emotional/metaphysical/hubalal impacts of the things you are talking about.

I know. I know. It's too complex (aka time intensive, aka expensive) to consider everything. We are all just doing our best. Hopefully for the common good, but it's hard to tell sometimes, especially when one of the presenters was like "yup, i was in the regular old building design business and i moved to green building when it became profitable."

in the meantime, all these old people in my life are telling me "that's just how people are, we need to take advantage of it by creating incentives and propaganda etc." so shoot. i guess i better just call that acceptable. (*retch*) but its effective! i know it. (*retch*) 

would you believe me if I said I DONT I DONT KNOW WHO TO BELIEVE? or what to do? or... who I am...

and on that note:

"What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?” -CG Jung

"What happens if we choose entertainment over humanity? In Collins's world, we'll be obsessed with grooming, we'll talk funny, and all our sentences will end with the same rise as questions. When Katniss is sent to stylists to be made more telegenic before she competes, she stands naked in front of them, strangely unembarrassed. “They're so unlike people that I'm no more self-conscious than if a trio of oddly colored birds were pecking around my feet,” she thinks. In order not to hate these creatures who are sending her to her death, she imagines them as pets. It isn't just the contestants who risk the loss of their humanity. It is all who watch."

"how long into the future will your way of life have consequences?"

the facility. wayy too much like resident evil. (unearthing/distorting things that are best left underground or pure)

we can't just design our way out of everything.

"a fire so powerful it can never be extinguished"

dear people, stop making shitty decisions that destroy hope for life on this planet.

"Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. That's love, love is the expansion of the self to include the other. And that's a different kind of revolution. There's no one to fight. There's no evil to fight. There's no other in this revolution."
~ Charles Eisenstein

and broken things
like hearts
and banjo strings.

-------------------------

"That book uses a term for one's social clout with another based upon the 'weight' of a person's shadow. it amounts to showing one's intentions reduces the impact he or she desires, and therefore the weight of their shadow is reduced. high social interaction is then termed to a chess game of ones intentions versus how they wish to appear and the significant they wish to hold with that person. this idea just struck a deeper profundity with me tonight. we cast doubt about ourselves to hide the more simplistic nature of our acions and being, but by showing others the reason for casting our shadows we can hopefully allow them to lower their doubt-filled appearances in an effort to see the human shadow for all its worth. this notion is counter to human interaction in which we typically start with simple principals and hope to find a measure of greatness buried within. they're both fun thoughts to entertain and i thought you might enjoy toying with whether you are casting greatness to be boiled down to simplicity, or simplicity to be refined to greatness."

"....not an escape from reality, but a magnifying glass held up to it"
Jay Michaelson

"It's important that we learn to see the good intentions in each other, always."

"All through my childhood, I felt certain that something extraordinary--absolutely amazing and out of the ordinary--was going to happen to me. The world seemed bursting with a secret that nobody would divulge, and someday this tremendous mystery would be revealed. Simply because they were older, I assumed that all adults had passed through this portal into the miraculous essence of existence, although they never spoke about it. As I approached adolescence, I begun to suspect that my deepest hopes were going to be unfulfilled. By the time I went to college, I had realized, to my horror, that "maturity" meant accepting constraints and being bound to a limited career path, rather than blossoming into a deeper dimension of possibility and wonder. This was a painful shock.
I now suspect what I felt is a nearly universal disappointment for young people in our world; I was yearning for initiation into a culture that had abandoned it....
Personally, my youthful sense of being cheated of some deeper potential melted away once I discovered shamanic practices as an adult, and explored visionary states of consciousness in traditional ceremonies... Through this work I restored the primordial connection to the sacred that I had lost after my childhood, as well as my original sense of wonder, and this was tremendously healing and empowering. Through my own shamanic journeys, I realized that modern culture was facing an initiatory crisis on a global scale. We have created a planet of "kidults," perpetual adolescents trapped by material desires, with no access to higher realms and little sense of purpose or moral responsibility...
As Westerners, each of us has to follow a personal path to recover the numinous for ourselves, shedding our self-limiting beliefs and narcissistic complexes in the process."
-Daniel Pinchbeck, "Toward 2010: Perspectives on the Next Age"


"from my point of view the only breakdown was the delusion that I was in control of my life. All the walls -- of identity, ambition, and security, of any illusion that I knew who I was, or where I was, or that I had any clue at all what was happening in life -- all of this collapsed like an obsolete civilization and permitted eternity to course through me as never before. Insofar as apocalypse derives from the Greek apokalyptein, meaning "to unveil," this was some version of my personal apocalypse, and since apocalypse is the etymological antonym of hell, which derives from the Latin helan, meaning "to veil," the only thing to mourn was the liberation from my own illusions." -Tony V, Reality Sandwich website

hope. and

"May your days dare delight with your dreams"

and talking with an old friend about new old ideas.

the mighty oak tree was once a nut like me"

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming."

"Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul."

"it was a musical thing and you were suppose to sing or dance while the music was being played."

"man always kills the thing he loves" -Aldo Leopold

"She's amazing. If you don't believe me check her skeechbook!"
-Tyler, impersonating Nelson.

"What?! I like T-Pain!"

-Tyler

"The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt."

-- Frederick Buechner