Bioregional Animism

Rebuilding Sustainable Indigenous Communities

2011-10-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

Dreaming New Mexico

2011-09-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

Peter Warshall: Dreaming New Mexico from Bioneers on Vimeo.

Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures (Science Across Cultures: the History of Non-Western Science)

2010-10-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

It's Coming Back Around Again!

2010-10-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

Kiss the Earth

2010-08-25T18:20:00.000-07:00

Kiss the Earth with Emigdio Ballon from Bioneers on Vimeo.

Weird Nature - Peculiar Potions

2010-05-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

Entrainment Transformation Principle

2010-05-05T07:09:00.000-07:00

"A physics phenomenon of resonance, first observed in the 17th century, has an effect on all of us. Entrainment is defined as the tendency for two oscillating bodies to lock into phase so that they vibrate in harmony. It is also defined as a synchronization of two or more rhythmic cycles. The principle of entrainment is universal, appearing in chemistry, pharmacology, biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, astronomy, architecture and more. The classic example shows individual pulsing heart muscle cells. When they are brought close together, they begin pulsing in synchrony. Another example of the entrainment effect is women who live in the same household often find that their menstrual cycles will coincide.

Discovery of Entrainment.

The history of entrainment is linked to Dutch scientist, Christian Huygens in 1665. While working on the design of the pendulum clock, Huygens found that when he placed two of them on a wall near each other and swung the pendulums at different rates, they would eventually end up swinging in at the same rate. This is due to their mutual influence on one another."

The process of Entrainment has been noted in transpersonal psychology and has been worked with in neoshamanic circles as well as in work with the manipulation of consciousness by various means. Entrainment is indeed universal "appearing in chemistry, pharmacology, biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, astronomy, architecture and more." It is a phenomena within nature, and a common one at that... synchronization and synergy are also ways of looking at the product of Entrainment. Entrainment can be consciously produced via many practices spiritually, and it would be my argument that many animist practices of altering consciousness are aimed at some sort of Entrainment in general.

Doing this practice as described above aids one in getting a much deeper understanding of bioregional animism. Being able to feel the land as part of ones self and to be able to feel that the land feels you as a part of its self is basically the root experience of Bioregional animism. I created this practice in the hope that more people would be able to actually feel and experience bioregional animism out side of it just being an idea for them.

Click to read the practice described above . . .

Coyote's Guide

2010-05-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

A long, long time ago, maybe two hundred thousand years ago, and in a few places still today, the native people who lived off their land schooled their children – but they did it invisibly. Our ancestors’ children didn’t go to school. School surrounded them. Nature was a living teacher. There were many relatives for every child and every relative was a mentor. Stories filled the air, games and laughter filled the days, and ceremonies of gratitude filled mundane lives.

This Guide passes on this method of invisible schooling, so that people will connect with nature without knowing it. They’ll soak up the language of plants and animals as naturally as any of us learned our native language. Do you remember learning to talk? Probably not. Spoken language happened around you all the time, and allowed you to experiment with words, make mistakes, and every single day grow vocabulary. Mentoring with the language of nature happens just the same. With stories, games, songs, place-names, animal names, and more, you invisibly and subtly stretch your students’ language edges.

The invisible school of nature proves to be more than just effective, it is also fun, healing, and empowering. Like the Coyote whose methods at first seem unorthodox or even foolish, in the end, it works better than anyone could dream.

Click to Read More

Nican Tlaca Civilizations and Accomplishments

2010-04-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

Our true Nican Tlaca heritage is something we should learn about and be proud of. We as Indigenous Peoples to this continent have a great history.

Tlazocahmati to Olin Tezcatlipoca, Nelyollotl Toltecatl and all of Mexica Movement who all made this video possible. Mexica Movement is leading the way towards Liberation for Our People. Visit their website at www.mexica-movement.org . Some of the pictures in this video were taken from the Anahuac Mural, a project of the Mexica Movement.

Visit the Anahuac Mural site at www.anahuacmural.org .

Aztlan Underground Decolonize

2010-04-25T22:45:00.000-07:00

Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

2010-03-11T08:04:00.000-08:00

Comic books and Animism?

2009-11-04T16:57:00.001-08:00

Excerpts from an interesting post on comic books, animism, magic, saints and super heroes, psychology, history, alchemy, and Catholicism, by Jules Evans @ The Politics of Well-Being

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[This is an edited version of the first chapter of a book I wrote but didn't get published, about how modern animation, and particularly superhero comics, have their origins in animist beliefs that were pushed out of the mainstream by first the Protestant Reformation and then the Scientific Revolution. These animist beliefs may have been suppressed and discredited, but they remain in the folk consciousness, and give rise to cultural phenomena like our love of superhero stories.]

. . . Superheroes are a flight from the rationalism of the modern world, from what Max Weber called the ‘Iron Cage’ of rationalism in Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism. Part of that rationalism, as Weber noted, was the bureaucratization of modern life: the welfare state, the NHS, the web of government agencies and regulations through which the modern individual must try to find their way. The superhero was born in the 1930s, during the New Deal, which was the greatest increase in the size and power of state bureaucracy yet seen in politics.

Superhero myths express a longing for a simpler kind of politics, for an earlier age, when the people felt a strong emotional bond to a charismatic warrior or prophet.

Weber defined the charismatic leader as akin to a superhero, in that the charismatic is “endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These as such are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as divine in origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.” We remember that charis means gift in Greek, so it’s not so far from the Greek or animist belief that superheroism is granted as a gift by the Gods or the spirit world.

In a century of mass movements, mass production, mass employment – a century of the masses in other words – superhero myths celebrated acts of individual heroism. They hark back to tribal times when an individual could make a difference to the future of the tribe, could ‘save the day’. The heart of superhero myths, like other heroic narratives, is the trial by individual combat, the wrestle, the boxing match, the fighter-pilot dog-fight, the Western duel.

As Weber noted, the modern bureaucratic state asserts a monopoly on violence, while we long to escape from this cage, to indulge our pre-civilized desire to beat up, torture and kill our enemies. Comics give us an outlet for this bloodlust. They release the wild man from the iron cage. . .

. . . So superhero comics are imperialist, jingoistic, anti-democratic, anti-civilization and devoted to the worship of uninhibited violence and (in manga) frequently rape as well. They come from the same dark, tribal and irrationalist part of the psyche that led to fascism.

But we can’t say that comics created this part of our psyche. Perhaps they help us become more aware of it. Indeed, the present generation of comic book writers is very much aware of the amoral and even fascist strains in superhero myths, and they consciously explore them. The costume and character of Judge Dredd, for example, was consciously modelled on Franco-era Spain, although this, and the fascist tendencies of Dredd himself, did not seem to put readers off. “The more fascistic we made him, the wilder the readers went”, notes Dredd’s creator, Alan Grant.

Jamie Delano, creator of Hellblazer, has said that comics “are shining a light on the beast which crouches in the corners of our minds, giving us a chance to both recognize it and oppose it”. This is true of the most conscious hero myths – they make us aware that the demon the hero is fighting is actually a manifestation of his own psyche, a reflection of himself. This point is made in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, in the famous scene where Robert De Niro stands in front of a mirror and says ‘you talkin’ to me?’, practicing playing the heroic vigilante to his own reflection. The point Scorcese or writer Paul Schrader seem to be making is that this particular violent ‘hero’ is fighting his own shadow, his own demons, projected onto external figures.

We see a similar exploration of the hero myth in Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, which to my mind is the greatest hero myth we have in our culture. At the beginning of it, Oedipus the heroic slayer of the Sphinx and saviour of Thebes is trying to discover what evil lurks in the heart of Thebes. As the play carries on, Oedipus realizes that in fact he himself unconsciously committed the crimes he is investigating. He is the monster he is seeking, the shadow he is pursuing. When he discovers this awful and humbling truth, the chorus says:

“Some demon of the night,
Some destructive impulse in man, prowling
Silently around you, waiting its chance,
Has sprung with inhuman strength, howling
At your throat.”

And yet Oedipus’ true heroism is that he doesn’t project these demons onto others, and then blame them for his mistakes and suffering. He takes responsibility for them. He says: “I’m the one / Who must bear the guilt and the punishment / And the shame. And I must bear it alone.”

While the rest of us run from our demons or project them onto others who strike us as strange, alien or threatening, Oedipus has the moral courage and self-awareness to confront his demons, to endure their wrath, to endure the loss of everything he has. And yet this submission, this annihilation of his ego, leads to a transformation.

By the second play in the trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus, the demonic spirits that tormented him are placated, and become his helpers, granting him magical powers. He becomes a shaman-hero, in touch with the chthonic spirits, able to see the future and to read the signs of nature, and his body has magical powers to protect the city where he is buried. So the hero goes from being a demon-slayer to the integrator of the daemonic.

Why do we need such heroes? Civilization, as Freud told us, forces us to repress or hide the primitive aspects of our self – the violent, the sexually uninhibited, the wild.As we hide or repress these parts of us, they become demonic and hostile to our conscious selves. They attack our realities, trying to gain expression and release. Our selves become divided and at war, like Jekyll and Hyde.

At a simple level, comics, like dreams, provide an outlet for that which is forbidden by civilization. Manga, in Japanese, means “irresponsible pictures”. Comics take us to the forbidden underworld – that’s why so many superheroes live in caves, like the Batcave, and why comic book stores like Forbidden Planet in London are so often underground themselves.

The underworld is home to demons and monsters. But, if Jung is to be believed, it is also the source of our divinity, and home to powers and forces that we have forgotten, and to spirits that guide us on our journey. Joseph Campbell wrote: “the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves…There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.”

Campbell suggests, rightly, that the highest hero myths provide us with a map for this journey. They “carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self”. And a crucial part of that discovery is the confrontation with our daemonic self, the parts of us we have hidden or left behind in the progress of civilization.

We must confront the Unconscious, recognize it, take responsibility for it and integrate it, if we are to continue on our journey to enlightenment. Campbell writes: “The hero…discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh.”. . .

. . . in Princess Mononoke, the world of humans has become out of balance with nature. The spirits of nature, no longer heeded or respected by humans, have become demonic, and try to attack and destroy human civilization. The nature spirits are led by a magical warrior-princess called Mononoke. The only person who doesn’t try to fight the spirits is Ashitaka, a warrior who has been wounded by a demonic boar. He sees that the nature spirits are just trying to restore the natural balance, and that they are necessary for the flourishing of life on the planet. He risks his life trying to intercede in the battle between civilization and the spirit world, and though the humans’ city is destroyed, a new and better civilization is born, one which will perhaps be more in harmony with the planet.

The superhero, in these films, is like the Romantic poet or the tragic hero. They are the heroic intermediaries between civilization and the spirit world of nature that humans have left behind. They are seized, possessed, by spirits, who drag them down to the underworld. The hero manages to overcome this challenge, this death of the ego, and to make peace with the spirits.

He or she then returns to civilization, as the ‘master of both worlds’, helping us to accept the daemonic parts of us that we feared, helping to re-connect us to the spirit world, bringing the conscious world into balance with the unconscious, and thus protecting the conscious world (or the City) from destruction at the hand of demonic or unconscious forces. And this re-connection to the spirit world is also a re-connection to the world of nature. As Coleridge put it, the poet (or hero) helps overcome “the enmity of nature” – that feeling that our civilized selves are fake, inauthentic, out of touch and even at war with our deeper nature.

This old belief in the possibility of an animist relationship with the spirits of nature has been rejected from the mainstream of Western liberal, rationalist and capitalist society. And yet we find it, like a diamond in a junk shop, in the cheaply-printed pages of superhero comics, through which is expressed the longing, as Michael Chabon puts it, “truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke one’s head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond”.

So superhero comics can turn up a lot of nasty parts of the psyche – nationalism, tribalism, sexual violence, moral simplification, the demonization of enemies. They speak to a primitive part of the psyche, which often feels itself at threat from invisible forces that it does not understand and before which it feels helpless. At their most basic level, they can appeal simply to the longing for violence and domination which civilization forces us to repress.

But higher forms of the medium can do more than this. They can help us to recognize, accept and transform the darker parts of our psyche. They can make us feel re-connected to our selves and to nature. Our divinity, Jung suggested, lies waiting for us in the dark underground of our souls, if we have the courage to descend there.

The artist, in this model of art, is the real superhero. He or she has the courage to descend to the depths, like Orpheus descending to the underworld, in order to re-connect us to the spirit world, and thus to our divinity.

This belief in the artist as superhuman medium between the mundane and the spirit world goes back to the earliest human art, to the idea that the shaman drawing a picture of a buffalo on the side of a cave would somehow win the favour of nature spirits for the tribe’s next hunting expedition. Shamans, as we’ll see, are artists as much as they were priests or doctors. They go into trances, become hosts to spirits, and then sing, dance, declaim verse and paint pictures. . .

. . . When the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing scientific revolution pushed animist and magical beliefs to the sidelines, this belief in the magical power of art was also marginalized. The polite eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope might describe the spirit world in his poem, The Rape of the Lock, but his description is reduced to little more than an amusing literary device.

The Romantics, however, passionately resurrected this idea of the artist as spirit-vessel in their rebellion against the rational and mechanistic world-view of their era. The poet, in the works of Coleridge or Wordsworth, was a man possessed, seized by the spirits of nature and made to act as their conduit, their lightening conductor, in order to communicate their message to mankind. Or the artist was a sorcerer who created Golem-type animated figures, like Dr Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Gothic fantasy.

The last gasp of this exalted view of the artist in European culture was probably in the 1920s, with modernist artists like Kandinsky or Duchamp, both of whom were influenced by alchemical or shamanic ideas, and with modernist writers like TS Eliot or Antonin Artaud. But the anti-democratic and often pro-fascist stance of some of the key figures in modernism helped to further discredit the view of the artist as some sort of exalted emissary from the spirit world.

As our idea of art has become less and less exalted over the last century, so our conception of the poet or writer has calmed down, until the writer is now, in the modern mind, simply a peevish and vain man trying, like the rest of us, to get paid and get laid.

But at the margins of culture, below the radar of mainstream literary culture, the comic book artist rebels against this mundane and commercial view of art, and reclaims the exalted conception of the artist as shaman. Thus Alan Moore, one of the most famous writers in comics today, said in a recent interview: “I think that artists have been sold down the river… I think that over the last couple of centuries, Art has been seen increasingly as merely entertainment, having no purpose other than to kill a couple of hours in the endless dreary continuum of our lives. And that’s not what Art’s about, as far as I’m concerned. Art is something which has got a much more vital function.”

Moore takes the view that European art, up until the last two centuries, was profoundly influenced by magic, and even in the last hundred years some of the best art was connected with occult beliefs. The artist communicates with the spirit world, and connects mundane society to that world. Comics, he suggests, are resurrecting this old tradition.

He is himself a practicing sorcerer, seeing himself as in the tradition of scholarly magi like John Dee and Girolamo Cardano. Like those figures, he believes he has been visited by spirits from other dimensions, including by a snake god called Glycon that he connects to the Greek snake-god Aesculapius. In this, again, he is connecting to an old tradition in European culture – Sophocles also believed he was visited by the god Aesculapius in the form of a snake.

Other comic artists are also practicing magi – Alejandro Jodorowsky, for example, who wrote the cult comic series The Incal, is also a practicing tarot magician and healer. And the idea of the artist as shaman or spirit-conjuror is very much alive within comic narratives. The father of the modern comic is considered to be the German artist Rudolph Topfer, whose works including a graphic re-telling of the myth of Dr Faustus, who sells his soul to the Devil in return for superhuman powers.

Another of Goethe’s stories of spirit conjuring, a poem called the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, was a main influence on Disney’s Fantasia, where the sorcerer Yensid (Disney backwards) has extraordinary powers to channel spirits into household objects and make them dance at his command.

We see the neo-Platonic idea of the artist as a being possessed by spirits in the first ever issue of Spiderman, in which we see the writer Stan Lee sitting at his desk in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, with superheroes leaping around his head and resting on his shoulders like spirit familiars. The comics writer Neil Gaiman has also repeatedly explored the idea of the artist as someone who channels or makes pacts with spirits from other dimensions, in his comic series The Sandman. And the tradition has its most recent addition in the figure of the artist Isaac Mendez, who goes into a trance and paints the future in NBC’s Heroes.

So there’s a strange situation where comics, supposedly the irresponsible child of the ‘serious’ arts, is actually arguing for a more dignified and exalted conception of the arts than exists in the cultural mainstream. The comic artist, at least in their own conception, has a crucial role to play in our society, in connecting us to the spirit world that we left behind some two and a half centuries ago after the Protestant Reformation. We may not literally or consciously believe in these animist beliefs anymore. But the success of comics and superhero myths in the last 70 years shows that, whatever we say publicly, these myths still resonate powerfully in the folk imagination.

Read the whole post @ http://www.politicsofwellbeing.com/2009/10/everything-is-full-of-gods.html

Humans in the Upper Rio Grande

2009-10-04T20:03:00.000-07:00

Discover New Mexicos Puye Cliff Dwellings, a historic National Landmark, uniquely owned and managed by the Santa Clara Pueblo Indians, descendents of the cliffs ancient inhabitants.

Originally broadcast on New Mexico PBS station KNME.

Aztlán and Bioregional Animism?

2009-09-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

What place might the larger bioregion called Aztlán play in Bioregional Animism for those of us living here? Am I mistaking what I consider my bioregion for what is actually a watershed? Do different disciplines call use these names interchangeably? Either way, I think you know what i mean.

What issues might Aztlán bring up or/and address concerning cultural, ecological, spiritual, political, economic, and other relevant issues?

Mexamerica is a single bioregion, and trying to cut a boregion in half takes a massive amount of energy. Such an expenditure of energy cannot be sustained forever, and when that energy begins to fail, the bioregion will quickly reassert its wholeness.
- http://tobyspeople.com/anthropik/2007/06/nine-nations-mexamerica/

What threatens the invasive culture’s dream most is the fact that a syncretic culture is already developing in the bioregion. Mexican culture had already achieved much of the bioregional syncretic ideal by mixing indigenous and Spanish elements to create a new, creative whole; that it is now so quickly absorbing the invasive culture of Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles testifies to the power of the Mexamerican bioregion, and the previous success of the Mexican culture as a syncretic experiment. And what better symbol could there be for the Mexamerican culture than the image of Our Lady of Guadelupe, patron saint of the Americas? . . .

. . . A binational, bilingual, bicultural region is not stable; the real problem agitating so many closeted white supremacists, lurking behind the “border fence” squabbles and the question of “immigration reform” is the understanding that the invasive culture is horrifically unsustainable. Mexican culture has already set a high bar for syncretic, adaptive culture in the Mexamerican bioregion, having incorporated Spain’s invasive culture long ago. Now, it is beginning to incorporate America’s invasive culture. What the gringos are afraid of is precisely the truth: when a sustainable, syncretic culture does eventually emerge, it’s going to have far more in common with the indigenous cultures before the invasion. They still eat the tortillas invented in ancient Teotihuacan. The Virgin of Guadelupe became a superficial mask for Tonantzin. The old gods of Mexamerica are still the Catholic saints venerated by Chicanos today; and it is not a secret continuity. It is understood, and even celebrated. The virulent racism reflects the growing awareness that the invasive gringo culture will simply become the latest palette of colors in which Mexamerica’s natives will paint the same murals they’ve always painted: the murals that express Mexamerica’s genius loci.
- http://tobyspeople.com/anthropik/2007/06/nine-nations-mexamerica/

Indigenous Perspectives in Global Earth Observing System of Systems

2009-08-26T06:33:00.000-07:00

Via: http://www.earthzine.org/2009/04/06/indigenous-perspectives-in-geoss-an-interview-with-dr-gregory-cajete/

By Paul Racette, posted on April 6th, 2009 in Earth Observation, Education, Featured Person, People, Technology

Dr. Gregory Cajete

Indigenous scholars around the world are leading a renaissance in understanding of traditional Indigenous knowledge. One such scholar is Dr. Gregory Cajete, a Tewa Indian from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico and author of five books on Native American education, history and philosophy. In one of his books, Native Science, Natural Laws of Interdependency, Dr. Cajete writes, “Native Cultures have indeed amassed an enormous knowledge base related to the natural characteristics and processes of their lands through direct experience and participation.” Dr. Cajete is director of Native American Studies and associate professor in the Division of Language, Literacy and Socio Cultural Studies in the College of Education at the University of New Mexico. He received a Ph.D. from International College – Los Angeles New Philosophy Program in Social Science Education with an emphasis in Native American Studies. Earthzine’s Editor-in- Chief, Paul Racette, asks Dr. Cajete about Native American science and the role Indigenous perspectives have in realizing an integrated Earth observing system.

Earthzine: Describe native science and the natural laws of interdependency?

Cajete: From my perspective, native science really is a body of knowledge that has been accumulated by a group of people, Indigenous people, through generations, that deals very specifically and is very much founded on how that group of people has developed an intimate relationship with the plants, the animals, the places in which they have lived. It is also how the communities have integrated that knowledge within themselves, how that knowledge has been expressed in their language, their art, their music, their dance and their practical technologies for living in places in which they have evolved. Interdependence is a principle that expresses itself in the context of native science. Expressions can be seen in the life of an Indigenous group of people, the ways in which a group of people calibrates their agricultural cycle around key times of observation of the sun with regard to the equinoxes and solstices, how they understand when plants and animals are best to be harvested, when to go hunting, how to serve plants in certain kinds of condition for medicine and how to use those same plants, say for creation of shelter or as food. So there are many kinds of ways in which native science expresses itself in traditional native cultures. You almost have to be very specific in focusing on a particular group of people to be able to understand how the natural world is integrated in their life style and the expressions of cultures of those people.

Earthzine: Why does myth and metaphor play a central role in human description of the world?

Cajete: That’s interesting. Myth is really an interesting term because in today’s society, myth is often viewed as a kind of a fable or false story. In native traditions, what are called myths, are better described as stories. Many are called guiding stories that were actually created to teach about something that was important to the people, such as how to survive, how to pick plants at certain times, how to create a context for sustainable hunting practices. The metaphor comes into place in the stories to teach about something else and the something else is really the core teaching of the story itself. Metaphors have been used in a variety of different ways in story forms to convey information and knowledge over generations. Story telling essentially is the first foundation of teaching anything. Human beings are story makers and story tellers.

Earthzine: Traditional Indigenous knowledge is founded on the understanding that we are all related, as in mitakuye oyasin. For some, this is a very difficult concept to grasp. What can you say to help explain this context in which Native science can be understood?

Cajete: If you understand natural systems, to say that everything is related almost goes without saying. I will use an example that I remember David Suzuki presenting in his talks where he uses the example of argon as an element that is contained in the air. They are kind of like tracer atoms. The air that we breathe and that is finite we share with each other right now and eventually we will be breathing those same argon atoms again. The idea is that air is shared by all living, breathing entities and through that physical process we become related to each other. It is using those kinds of ways to describe the fact that physically, socially, even spiritually there is this interconnection and interrelatedness that human beings share with each other and that is referred to by saying we are all related. Mitakuye oyasin is the Lakota way of expressing that idea and that reality. There are words in other Indigenous languages that describe the same thing, that we are all related. We use a term in my language, because corn is kind of our sacramental plant, a staple of our traditional diet, we say we are all kernels on the same corn cob.

Earthzine: You write, “We are Earth becoming conscious of itself, and collectively, humans are the Earth’s most highly developed sense organ.” NASA just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Images of Earth from space have transformed the way we view the world. How have images of the Earth, our planetary siblings, our Sun, neighboring nebulae and distant galaxies affected native science?

Cajete: In many ways it helps us to visualize what native science has always been, in one way or another, trying to define, first of all that we are all interrelated, we all breathe the same air, we are made of the same elements of the earth, we are conveyors of the sun’s fire, we are participants in the activities of the biosphere no matter where we are and so this idea of the photographs of Earth, especially the newer technologies that allow us to see the Earth as it is evolving its processes, its weather patterns help us to visualize a living, breathing, active planet processes, the life process of the planet itself. And so those images and ways of understanding ourselves, really do add to the conceptions and perspectives of native science. A metaphor that is sometimes used in native science is “we are all members of Turtle Island”. This is an idea that has been popularized by the Iroquois Confederacy but it is really a notion or an idea that is held by all native tribes. The metaphor describes Earth as a living, breathing, super organism and that we as human beings ride the turtle’s back. The thoughts that we think, the actions that we perform, the understandings and the insights that we gain, the celebrations as well as the sadness that we feel are all registered on the Great Mother of the turtles’ back. And so, we affect the consciousness of the Earth as she affects ours. This idea of the super organism which is the planet Earth has been held by every Indigenous culture that I can remember ever studying and can be said to be the prime philosophy of native peoples. It is the understanding that one comes to naturally; if you are a good observer you can begin to see how life forces interact on the Earth or just in the place in which you live, and you begin to have a sense that there is this greater organism, this greater process that is a part of life.

Earthzine: A principal goal of GEO is to integrate Earth observing systems into a Global Earth Observing System of Systems, GEOSS. What role can Indigenous perspective play in realizing an integrated Earth observing system?

Cajete: Much of the practical day-to-day knowledge of Indigenous people, what is called traditional environmental knowledge, is based on generations of knowledge and understandings that have been passed on through generations by people who live in certain places. Indigenous peoples around the world, living in the places that they do, have knowledge of their places that becomes important data that needs to be integrated into this broader body of knowledge if we are going to understand the ramifications and deal with issues of global climate change. These bodies of knowledge need to be a part of that broader story. We need to create a much larger story of the Earth than we have currently. What we now have is just bits and pieces of a much larger puzzle and so while we are able to see through satellite imagery all of the Earth and the system of the Earth, we don’t necessarily have the details of what is going on in specific places of the earth. The other contribution, before I go on, is one of attitude and one of philosophical orientation. It goes back to the Earth as a living system, as a living entity that deserves respect and deserves understanding and deserves some kind of reverence. Really the message of Indigenous cultures and traditions is you have to have reverence for that which gives you life.

Earthzine: We are all being impacted by climate and environmental change. The impact is now severe for many Native Americans and Indigenous peoples whose life ways are tied to the rhythms of Earth. Are there any needs or gaps that Earth observing technologies or satellite observations can fill for the Native American communities?

Cajete: One way that that technology can be useful to native areas, native reservations, native lands, and native communities, is through providing an understanding of how rapidly change is happening in certain land bases controlled by native peoples. There is a lot of interest among many tribes with regards to the GPS technologies. Tribes that have a large land base are able to see how their land base is changing due to deforestation, drought conditions, flooding or a variety of weather related effects In earlier days, let’s go back historically, the first Europeans found, what could be called the Garden of Eden, an amazing richness in America that wasn’t present in Europe. The tendency at that time was to think that this abundance was just a natural occurrence. We are beginning to understand that the abundance was what today can be called ‘terraforming,’ for lack of a better term, where groups of Indigenous people took care of the places in which they lived to such an extent that they were able to bring those places to an abundance of plants and animals and diversity. Practices of people enhanced living in those places to the extent that it created a bounty of plants and animals that humans could use for food. I know this was true in the Southwest as well because we supported much larger populations than are supported now due to an ability to work with the land in such ways that they enhanced wild food as well as traditionally domesticated foods. What I am saying is, today what the new technologies can help us do is to actually begin to understand our land bases in a much more intimate way, in some ways the way we used to understand them. I see a lot of advantages in technology.

Earthzine: You write, “This knowledge must now be transferred to others and studied seriously by Native and non-Native people the world over for the models and lessons that it can provide as we collectively search for an environmentally sustainable future.” There exists resistance on both sides. How can we lower the barriers of knowledge sharing?

Cajete: I think by helping each other to understand the cultural principles that both our knowledge systems operate from. A lot of the misunderstanding on the part of native people is the feeling that Western science is totally antithetical to native philosophy and maybe at certain levels it is. And at many levels there are aspects of Western science that are utilized by native people to enhance their lives. Likewise, consider native people’s regard, understanding and consciousness related to reverence for the land… how we are going to look at it in a generation from now. Is it going to affect our people and the people for seven generations or more? Understanding of an ecological reverence, philosophy and consciousness that guides the generation of knowledge in the context of science becomes very important and a much needed component. We are searching for, if you will, a revitalization of that reverence of the land and that reverence for all living things that we have always had because we wouldn’t be here as human beings if we didn’t have that. To bring it into a contemporary context to be able to then practice a more conscious form of science is what I am looking to. I know that Eastern traditions, Buddhism for instance, are also being explored for the same reasons, that there has to be a kind of consciousness that guides science rather than the consciousness that has guided it in the past. The big question is “how are we going to develop a kind of consciousness that allows us to work the future and work with the natural processes that are part of nature in a way that benefits both us as human beings but also benefits and cares for the finite resource which is the Earth?” Native traditions in their variety of very diverse kinds of ways were able to do that at one time and I think those are the things that we have to rediscover. This is a rediscovery on the part of native people themselves. There is one book that I highly recommend called Beyond Culture and it’s written by a gentleman whose name is Edward G. Hall who was my doctoral thesis chair. He really explored how conflict happens as a result of language and cultural difference and I think we have to begin to learn again a new kind of language of talking to each other that goes beyond those traditional barriers and traditional kinds of issues that we have culturally. Those kinds of bodies of research are very important. For me as an educator, a native educator, there are two quintessential issues that we have to come to terms with. The first one is how we are going to deal with ecological crisis which is an issue of physical relationship, our physical relationship to the Earth. The other crisis is how we are going to deal with each other, which is the issue of social ecology.

Earthzine: It has a spiritual dimension as well.

Cajete: Absolutely, the context is a spiritual consciousness.

Earthzine: You’ve called for a ‘mutually beneficial bridge and dialogue between Indigenous and Western scientists and communities.’ In your eyes, what do you see looking ahead?

Cajete: I see a lot of projects that bring together native communities and the body of native community knowledge with Western scientists working on projects related to issues that are viewed as meaningful and important to native communities. A lot of this is going on already in many ways. So, I think coalitions of Indigenous people are working with interested scientists to begin to address just issues and creating a bridge of dialog between each other. It happens actually in small ways at first in small projects in which there is a respectful and direct relationship around the issue that is established by the Western scientist and by the native community members. I have seen a lot of positive, very beneficial kinds of science being done as a result of that kind of relationship, but it begins with a social relationship, a social relationship that is established first that then leads to trust and then leads to mutual beneficial knowledge. I think those are the kinds of tasks and kinds of teachings that have to happen in the education not only presently, but certainly in the education of the future.

Acknowledgement: This interview was conducted prior to Dr. Cajete’s speaking engagement for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Science Colloquium on November 21, 2008. The seminar was co-hosted by Goddard’s Native American Advisory Committee for which Paul Racette serves as co-vice chair.

Don't Panic, It's Shamanic ~ The August Spore

2009-08-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

The Santa Fe Spore will be holding our monthly conversation, collaboration and planning over fine food and drink at Flying Star in the Railyard, they are open late on Wednesdays, have good food and participate in the Farm to Restaurant Project. We can discuss other possibilities at the meet up.

This August we will be focusing on the current interest in Shamanism. What can we learn and integrate into our lives and culture that we lost as we moved away from more Shamanic or Animist societies? What do shamanic and animist ways of living, have to do with the flourishing of the human species? Bring your thoughts and ideas!

In tribal societies, shamans are healers and visionary leaders who go through dangerous initiations to gain knowledge from the spirit world. Modern culture repressed and dismissed shamanism as archaic and irrational. Today, our society seems increasingly irrational, unable to change its course in the face of looming environmental and economic catastrophe. Meanwhile, shamanic practices such as soul retrieval, journeys with sacred plants, and ecstatic dance are gaining popularity. What meaning and value do these techniques have for us today?

These are participatory events, they are what we make of them. If these ideas interest you, lets take the first step and discuss our ideas for future projects, events and actions.

animist propaganda

2009-08-06T23:24:00.000-07:00

I may be a bit behind the times on this one, but I don't usually watch kid movies. Visiting family I found myself watching The Ant Bully with my nephew. What a great piece of animist propaganda . . ur um education . . . um point of view.

I recomend it if you haven't already seen it . . .

Evolver Santa Fe Offline Events

2009-08-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

Animystic Muse

2009-08-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

Be sure to check out this new animist blog focusing on "nature-centric philosophies and world-views found within literature, music, and art."

The Muses have guided creative people through out time and continue to do so. Animiystic Muse explores themes of Paganism, Animism, Eco-Spirituality, Naturalism, and other nature-centric philosophies and world-views found within literature, music, and art.

http://animystic.net/

Toward 2012 -Fusion of Spirit and Science

2009-07-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

Neal Goldsmith introduces us to psychological concepts of the self. As we evolved we compartmentalized our lives, science and spirit have been separated for millenia, isn't it time we try to reconcile them and begin to fuse them together again?

The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence

2009-07-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

ABSTRACT

We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. But there are good reasons for thinking that this view is too limited. Recent experimental results show that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even if they look from behind and if all sensory clues are eliminated. And people's intentions can be detected by animals from miles away. The commonest kind of non-local interaction mental influence occurs in connection with telephone calls, where most people have had the experience of thinking of someone shortly before they ring. Controlled, randomized tests on telephone telepathy have given highly significant positive results. Research techniques have now been automated and experiments on telepathy are now being conducted through the internet and cell phones, enabling widespread participation.

Speaker: Rupert Sheldrake
Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 75 technical papers and ten books, the most recent being The Sense of Being Stared At. He studied at Cambridge and Harvard Universities, was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He is currently Director of the Perrott-Warrick project, funded from Trinity College Cambridge.

Essence of Permaculture

2009-07-19T21:42:00.000-07:00

A 16 page summary of permaculture concept and principles taken from Permaculture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability by David Holmgren.

http://www.permacultureprinciples.com/

It contains an introduction to permaculture, thoughts about the future of the movement and the values and use of the permaculture principles. A great way to expand your knowledge in preparation for the full length book.

This pdf eBook contains interactivity that is best viewed using Adobe Reader, available from www.adobe.com

English eBook download (468k pdf)
Spanish eBook download (612k pdf)
Portuguese eBook download (620k pdf)
Hebrew eBook download (2.2MB pdf)

thebuilders · D.I.Y. ~*~ conscious agents of change

2009-07-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

~~~Avant Gardening, Building and Living~~~

There is more life on the edge where two systems overlap. Systems can then access the resources of both. Lets increase the edge ~ traditional, regenerative, cooperative and wise ways to build and live ~ adobe, cob, domes, yurts, living architecture, tents, wabi sabi, community networking, links/leads for learning, services and ideas, dreams, spiral walls, spiral gardens, permaculture, mycorrhizal fungi, strawbale houses, herbalism, crafts, furniture, musical instruments, festive protests, bartering, tool making, metalsmith, medicine/health, bodywork, yoga, Tai chi, Aikido, squating, ceramics, renovated ghost towns, nomads, qawwali, tea, animism, culture jamming, poems, thoughts, bioregionalism, primitives, bioregional-animism, experiences, Voluntary Simplicity.........

Lets share our stories and experiences around living a more balanced life, making this group a vehicle in bringing these topics out into the light and really happen. Sharing our experiences and ideas, and supporting each other to organize and build our lives, and communities in the "real world."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thebuilders/

Permaculture Ethics

2009-07-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

Permaculture is unique amongst the sciences because above all it is an ethical system. Permaculture ethics are:
Care of the Earth (including all life),
Care of People
& Fair Shares for All.

In this short excerpt from the award winning documentary film about the suffering of animals for food, fashion, pets, entertainment and medical research, the truth about our connection with our fellow earthlings is revealed in graphic detail.

For more information about the full length movie please visit:
http://www.earthlings.com/

For more Information about Permaculture please visit:
http://www.permacultureplanet.com

Ten-lined June Beetle – Polyphylla decimlineata

2009-06-28T00:56:00.000-07:00

Just the other day one of these fellows visited my home. I was surprised at how large he was and startled when he hissed at me as we tried to catch him to remove the lint from his legs and put him back outside.

He got some lint hanging out at my house.

Check out these links to find out more info on this guy . . .

http://bugguide.net/node/view/207325#288706

http://www.enature.com/fieldguides/detail.asp?recNum=IS0028

Benefits of a William and Mary education

2009-06-23T21:03:00.000-07:00

Visionary Psychedelic Surrealism by Myztico

2009-06-22T00:31:00.000-07:00

http://myztico.mosaicglobe.com/

"The creative process is truly a spiritual transcedental gift that allows one to co-create with our Divine Creator, to put it simpley "Creativity is my Religion". It gives me a deeper purpose in life much more gratifying than the quest for impermanent materialism. We are all blessed with certain gifts that we bring to this world while we are here on this earth plane. Each of us are part of a complex matrix of consciousness that spans across the inter-dimensional cosmos. Some of the images in this gallery were inspired by entheogenic sacred teacher plants that I have explored throughout the years. Others appear through Dreamtime cycles behind the veil of perceptions, beyond the superficial everyday experience that the naked eye and our limited 5 senses can decipher. Therefore "ART" is the 3rd eye of human evolution, it is a sacred gift not to be taken lightly. It informs, educates, heals, enlightens and defines our humanity on various levels. Here, I share with you some of the imagery I have experienced within a variety of inter-dimensional realms. I have attempted to capture these visions to the best of my natural abilities". This is the first gallery of several on this site, take your time to absorb what is here. There is something here for just about everyone and if you can learn something new while visiting here and if the art, music, poetry, videos and educational materials contained within this site resonate with you please share this site with your family and friends. I have put together this site as my small contribution to the human family with the intention of spreading positive energy about the state of our fragile planet and that collectively with our love for all life and the unknown that we can each contribute towards dreaming a better world for generations to come! NAMASTE!

http://myztico.mosaicglobe.com/

Santa Fe, New Mexico Spore's first regular off-line gatherings

2009-06-08T22:51:00.000-07:00

What story is the place you live telling you?

2009-04-04T09:15:00.000-07:00

What season is it?

What animals are out and active?

What plants are awake, what are they doing?

How is the weather?

Which constellations and planets are out?

How are you interacting with all of this?

Connecting to our environement

2009-04-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

How do we exist in our day to day reality? In what manner do we connect to our environment and all that is within it? How do we relate to our own bodies?

I invite you to give this some deep thought and to share what you find.

I challenge you to begin to relate to your self and your surroundings in a slower and more personable way than usual. You have the wisdom inside you that you need and if you get stuck, try asking the land and animals that you live with.

What story is the place you live in telling you?

our new Evolver group

2009-04-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

I am utilizing the new Evolver social network to host a group so that we can have more interaction on the topic of this blog. We can make connection, build community and share ideas.

Check out our group . . . http://www.evolver.net/group/bioregional_animism_upper_rio_grande_santa_fe_river_area_0

Check out Evolver. . .
http://www.evolver.net/about

About Evolver
What is Evolver.net?
Evolver is a new social network for conscious collaboration. It provides a platform for individuals, communities, and organizations to discover and share the new tools, initiatives, and ideas that will improve our lives and change the world. Evolver promotes sexy sustainability, yoga glamour, and shaman chic.
Are you an evolver?
Evolvers are hope fiends and utopian pragmatists. We see the creative chaos of this time as a great gift and opportunity to rethink, reconnect, and reinvent. Evolvers appreciate pristine mountains, open source economics, and the precocious laughter of small children. Evolvers belong to the regenerative culture of the future, being born here and now.
Did you ever think:
Humanity has potential beyond our imagining?We are a part of nature and not the bosses of it?We could make a world that works for everyone?We could collaborate instead of compete? If so, you are an evolver already. If not, maybe you should give it a try?
Why Evolver.net? Because we are the ones we've been waiting for.Because it's our world to change.Because the universe is deeply mysterious, displays an extraordinary sense of humor, and has a great dance beat.
Maybe you don’t like social networks. Maybe you use too many already. Maybe you are sick of being IM’d and pinged, poked and stroked, prodded and friendstered.
Evolver is different.
Evolver.net brings together a global community that shares similar interests and values. It provides a platform that helps us find the resources, peers, news and information that makes a difference. Evolver.net is collaboratively filtered and professionally curated so that the best material gets disseminated widely.
On Evolver.net you can:
• Express yourself to your peers.• Find inspiring news and helpful information.• Share resources and swap services.• Connect with pioneering groups and organizations.• Find the collaborators you need to help you realize your vision.• Meet the community off-line – at regular Evolver “socials,” film screenings, parties, and events.
The evolution will be actualized.www.evolver.net About Evolver
What is Evolver.net?
Evolver is a new social network for conscious collaboration. It provides a platform for individuals, communities, and organizations to discover and share the new tools, initiatives, and ideas that will improve our lives and change the world. Evolver promotes sexy sustainability, yoga glamour, and shaman chic.
Are you an evolver?
Evolvers are hope fiends and utopian pragmatists. We see the creative chaos of this time as a great gift and opportunity to rethink, reconnect, and reinvent. Evolvers appreciate pristine mountains, open source economics, and the precocious laughter of small children. Evolvers belong to the regenerative culture of the future, being born here and now.
Did you ever think:
Humanity has potential beyond our imagining?We are a part of nature and not the bosses of it?We could make a world that works for everyone?We could collaborate instead of compete? If so, you are an evolver already. If not, maybe you should give it a try?
Why Evolver.net? Because we are the ones we've been waiting for.Because it's our world to change.Because the universe is deeply mysterious, displays an extraordinary sense of humor, and has a great dance beat.
Maybe you don’t like social networks. Maybe you use too many already. Maybe you are sick of being IM’d and pinged, poked and stroked, prodded and friendstered.
Evolver is different.
Evolver.net brings together a global community that shares similar interests and values. It provides a platform that helps us find the resources, peers, news and information that makes a difference. Evolver.net is collaboratively filtered and professionally curated so that the best material gets disseminated widely.
On Evolver.net you can:
• Express yourself to your peers.• Find inspiring news and helpful information.• Share resources and swap services.• Connect with pioneering groups and organizations.• Find the collaborators you need to help you realize your vision.• Meet the community off-line – at regular Evolver “socials,” film screenings, parties, and events.
The evolution will be actualized.www.evolver.net

Browning the Greens

2009-02-27T17:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.realitysandwich.com/browning_greens

Antonio Lopez

Van Jones’s The Green Collar Economy proposes a “design for pattern” approach advocated by Wendell Berry, with the intended goal of solving two problems -- economics and environment -- with one solution. This method seeks to redress the common trap of designing solutions for singular problems without taking into account the broader, holistic context or source of an issue. By advocating for green tech jobs and training for traditionally underserved communities (in particular the urban poor and incarcerated youth), Jones rightly points out that many environmental programs have in the past been elitist and out of touch with the needs of working class people, and “people of color” in activist parlance. I personally eschew this term, simply because many people, such as myself, are hybrids and don’t fit easily into racial categories (I apologize in advance for my interchangeable use of various terms of differentiation, such as “white” or “Hispanic”). But Jones’s point is well taken. We have to argue for social justice as well as environmental care, without which we will continue to fracture and disaffect our movement. If we are to find the true pattern of ecological culture, we need to see that it’s composed of many hues, and many classes. So far corporations have benefited from our lack of understanding that the war against the environment is also class warfare.

The anti-immigration stance of a Sierra Club faction a few years ago is a good example of environmental elitism being out of touch with the broader population, in particular by alienating predominantly Latino low-income and working class people. Another example is a prominent environmental organization in Santa Fe that, according to an insider, is unselfconsciously anti-human. This has resulted in their work advocating against Hispanic loggers in Northern New Mexico. Ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning has sided with Hispanic loggers, who traditionally practice low-impact harvesting, but have been caught in the middle between NGO environmentalists and multinationals. Big companies well versed in divide and rule tactics have exploited the tension between Hispanic workers and more recent immigrants, who tend to be affluent white people using the land for recreation, not for subsistence.

The situation in Northern New Mexico bears further investigation. Santa Fe, where I lived for more than 15 years as an adult (my family is colonial Spanish and has lived in New Mexico for more than 300 years), is a rich cauldron of tension between the older land-based cultures of the Hispanics and Native Americans, and the influx of affluent whites. The immigration started after the Mexican-American War with the advance of American settlers to the West, but increased at the turn of the century as New Mexico became known as a safe and aesthetically rich environment for artists fleeing the oppression of industrial and puritanical East Coast life (many of the early émigrés were gays and artists, “black sheep” of their world -- hence my designation of New Mexico as the “land of exile”). From early on whites have paternalistically altered traditional artistic and folkloristic customs to match capitalist market practices (such as creating competitive art markets for traditionally made items for the home or religious purposes). I feel that I can speak with some authority on these matters because for many years I worked as a newspaper reporter covering arts and culture for Santa Fe’s daily paper, which put me in the middle of these social conflicts.

During this time I also got involved with bioregionalism. My entrée into the movement came in 1996 when I attended the First Bioregional Gathering of the Americas in Tepoztlan, Mexico. The congress was a week-long event with participants from all over the Americas, but was hosted by Mexico’s Rainbow Tribe, a decidedly alternative hippie counterculture. Canadian and US bioregionalists have similar countercultural roots, but many didn’t seem to jibe with the multicultural mixing between North and South that ensued. I remember one early morning when a Mexican family placed stereo speakers on top of their family van and blasted cumbia towards the camp. An irate Northerner stormed out of his tent, and summarily smashed the offending speakers on the ground. So much for peace, tranquility and harmony. Though this anecdote exaggerates cultural differences (and glosses over the many counterexamples that took place during that week), it reveals a kind of undemocratic arrogance that tends to emanate from Westernized political organizers.

Mexicans by nature have had to adapt to dominant cultural idioms (they are a hybrid culture, after all). In the case of the camp’s inner conflicts and workings, I observed that many Northerners failed to adjust to local (Mexican) customs, notwithstanding Mexican efforts to accommodate their guests. I’ve seen these kinds of behaviors repeat themselves in Santa Fe, a predominantly Hispanicized city. I recall a conversation with a Buddhist activist there claiming that Hispanics were too ignorant to care about the land. She said this (ignorantly!) despite the fact that descendents of the Spanish colonies have lived there for more than 400 years in a sustainable manner (much longer than we can say of US culture). It wasn’t until WWII that the draft and the advance of “free” markets displaced the land-based communities. Old-timers, such as my grandmother who was born in 1912 (the year New Mexico became a state), grew up on “organic” beans, chile, meat and corn. I put the term in quotes because organic was conventional, not the reverse. She is 96 and a tribute to the traditional lifestyle. Before the war there was little money used. Most people bartered and worked collectively on their farms or ranches. So you can imagine that it’s an utter insult to hear some environmentalists tell the locals that they are too uninformed to practice sound ecological practices.

But culture changes, and fortunately there is much more cross-fertilization going on between environmentalists and underrepresented communities. In fact, the point at which I first came into contact with Van Jones was when the Pond Foundation offered scholarships for Hispanics and Native Americans to attend the Bioneers conference in 2003. I went under the auspices of the Ecoversity, founded by Frances (Fiz) Harwood, an anthropologist who was very sensitive to bridging ecological cultures. I met her at the Mexican gathering in 1996, and worked closely with her for many years. I spent many years with Fiz conversing and strategizing among local Hispanics about browning the greens. When Fiz died of cancer, one of her deathbed requests was that there be a large local party featuring a cabrito (goat roasted in the Earth with hot coals); she insisted that an animal be slaughtered and served at the event. The (white) Tibetan Buddhists overseeing her funerary arrangements (Fiz was Buddhist) were horrified because it would create “thousands of years of rebirth.” The party went on, with red chile seasoned cabrito on the menu.

At the Bioneers conference where I first saw Jones speak, Bronx activist Majora Carter was also there, demonstrating that the Bioneers had crossed the multicultural bridge. The attendees were still largely white, but one evening I found myself congregating with upwards of 40 New Mexican Hispanos and Native Americans who had been brought there by the Pond Foundation. I remember feeling at home in the group, but slightly alienated when we tried merging with the general population. I imagine that people more strongly rooted in their communities find it even harder to adjust to the dominant culture when in general it refuses to budge or absorb from the “bottom-up.”

Consequently, I think one of the keys to Jones’s book is the section in which he critiques California’s efforts to pass Proposition 87 in 2006. Recall that the concept was to tax state oil resources to fund alternative energy research (funny how we designate natural energy as “alternative,” and synthetic as normal). Of course the oil companies pounced on the opportunity to pull “people of color” to their side by arguing (falsely) that their utilities and gas expenses would go up. This was a replay of what I experienced firsthand in 1990 when I worked for CalPIRG as a grassroots organizer on the Big Green Initiative, one of the most ambitious green legislation proposals ever put to the general vote. I recall working in a get-out-the-vote campaign in which I cold-called voter registration lists in West Los Angeles (the affluent part of the city) comprised of 25 electoral districts. I don’t remember if the disadvantaged sectors of LA were being organized, but I do recall very vividly the $25 million ad campaign unleashed by Chevron against us, and feeling helpless because we were unable to respond in kind to their lies about raising the cost of food, fuel, etc. to working class families. We certainly did not have the coalition to buttress that claim. Not surprisingly, victimized by a classic confuse-and-conquer PR blitz, we lost big time. Several years later, though, Latino janitors and maids were much more successful advocating for changes in their working conditions in LA. Too bad the movements didn’t merge.

That heart-breaking experience ended up discouraging me from activism for many years. I imagine that those who invested so much time and money in Prop 87 also felt that way, and worse that they were “outmaneuvered” by the oil companies yet again. But Jones offers a blueprint for survival, and he is absolutely right that it will take a coalition between different sectors of society to get it right. What is most useful in his critique is not the navel gazing that I’ve seen among some environmental activists, but a necessary deconstruction of the practices of the divergent coalitions who have traditionally not worked well (or not at all) together.

Jones argues that the division between environmental and social justice activists falls into three polarities: ecology versus social justice; business solutions versus political activism; and spiritual/inner change versus social/outer change. He calls for moving from opposition to proposition by replacing the “versus” with a “plus,” and to get better at defining what we are for rather than what we are against. The solution -- “three P’s: price, people, and the planet”-- mirrors the corporate responsibility model for the three stakeholder solution of economics, environment and equity. If such a formula were applied to the situation in Santa Fe when environmental activists battled Hispanic loggers -- or even the case of the Spotted Owl, which unfairly pitted workers against the environment -- I believe a more lasting solution would have resulted. Not only would sustainable forest harvesting be encouraged, but traditional land-based cultures would have equity and subsistence, and the rift that has divided New Mexico’s new comers and old would be bridged.

Thankfully lessons are being learned, as evidenced by the Pond Foundation’s efforts to brown the greens, and vice versa. Unfortunately, due to my physical distance from the Obama campaign’s work in New Mexico, it’s unclear to me whether these multihued coalitions are emerging in the aftermath of the election. My hope is that Jones’s well-conceived plan becomes the norm, and not the exception in this turbulent transition to declining economy and rising stakes of environmental degradation.

Image by James Burnes, courtesy of Creative Commons license.

Off the grid of modern technology

2009-02-06T04:34:00.000-08:00

What do you think, is it possible, would you want to, is he doing it right?

What benefits would it have in the practice of Bioregional Animism?

How would you do it?

Without Us

2009-01-19T10:18:00.000-08:00

Many mistakes i have made... still do. But i realize now that breathing is a gift that can be shared, nurtured and grown. Enjoying to do so, means i still have the strength to give something back to Earth before i surrender my body to her as final offering.

OyateUnderground New Year’s Message to The Lakota People and The World

2009-01-10T14:29:00.000-08:00

OyateUnderground New Year’s Message to The Lakota People and The World from wanbli wiwohkpe on Vimeo.

Raw Footage: An Interview With The OyateUnderground from wanbli wiwohkpe on Vimeo.

Watch the rest of OyateUnderground's Videos
http://vimeo.com/user899792

Wild versus Wall

2009-01-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

Actions that are affecting the lower end of our bioregion, our grand river . . .

In the Borderlands-Wildlife and the Border Wall

Wildlife and the Border Wall - This is a video about the wildlife, landscapes and people of the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. It is part of a project I am working on with the International League of Conservation Photographers to highlight the ecological and human impacts of the border wall the United States is currently building along our southern border.
For more information please go to ilcp.com/borderlands

Wild versus Wall

This film details the unique and diverse natural areas along the southern borders of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and explains how they have been and will be affected by current and planned federal border policy and infrastructure, as well as the danger to our rights and safety imposed by sweeping new powers granted to the Department of Homeland Security. A DVD with the long and short version can be purchased. Go to www.arizona.sierraclub.org/border for more info.

Border Wall = Environmental Disaster

I find this as one of the most important wildlife issues of the decade. Actually I find this as important as the drilling in ANWR or the eco mess created at Yucca Mountain. It is a very ignorant mentaliity to think that a 700 mile steel concrete wall will have no impact on the ecosystem or endangered wildlife. The Bush Administration has waivered over 30 environemtal laws to construct the wall. Thats right, the governemnt is violating laws to supposively enforce one. Most undocumented workers come into this country through temporary visas and over stay their visit. This wall will do nothing except bring more migrant deaths to people stranded in the desert, waste hundreds of billions of tax payer money, destroy eco-systems, deplete wildlife and most likely bring animal extinction. It is clear that as long as Mexican and Central American people are living in poverty, that the American economy is in need of low cost labor, and that laws continue to be restrictive then illegal immigration will be inevitable. The 20 billion dollars that the U.S. has spent on militarizing the border in the past decade has had no appreciable effect on immigration levels, but it has caused thousands of deaths and untold human suffering. That's 20 billion dollars that could have been spent on education, foster care, healthcare, alternative energy, or any other productive cause. From a conservative point of view, building a fence and trying to prevent immigration is the last thing from being a fiscal conservative. The cost of building and maintaining a double set of steel fences along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border as much as $49 billion over the expected 25-year life span of the fence, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Even if the fence is built it won't do a thing to solve the problems leading to illegal immigration along the southern border. If people are in need they will find a way to cross the border. History has proven that with the Berlin wall, Korea, and other instances in the past. Not only is this kind of policy expensive with regards to money but it has also cost thousands of innocent lives. According to Princeton University Professor, Philippe Legrain, "More than ten times as many migrants are recorded as having died on the U.S. border with Mexico over the past ten years than were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall during its twenty-eight year existence -- and many believe the true number of deaths along the US -- Mexican border is much higher than the official figures". The number of innocent people dying will only rise as long as the American government continues to build this New Berlin Wall along the Southern border. America is allegedly trying to spread democracy and freedom to other parts of the world, yet, liberty in its very own country is diminishing. How can one call a country, with a wall along its border, a free nation? I believe most of the national enivronmental groups are avoiding this issue because they don't want to lose membership or donations by touching the issue of immigration. A true enivronmentalist would stand up against this attrocity being comitted towards animal life. I think its about high time that Earth First or even the ELF come down to the southern border.

Some interviews by Steev Hise. Other footage is from an episode of Democracy Now, congressional hearings, and the documentary "Earthlings".

Language of the land

2009-01-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

I was searching for examples and models of Indigenous Leadership when I came across this page <http://www.yesmagazine.org/wiki/index.php?title=Indigenous_leadership>from Yes! Magazine that links to several from the magazine. I found one article to really stand out and speak to a discussion that was going on at the bioregional animism tribe @ <http://tribes.tribe.net/bioregionalanimism/thread/b6a12498-660a-4e5a-b513-4b93f2dec45d> that addresses the topic of actually being the land.

In Jeanette Armstrong's article, "I Stand With You Against the Disorder" <http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1346> she talks about the rootlessness of our modern culture. I was particularly struck by this part,

Language of the land
The Okanagan word for “our place on the land” and “our language” is the same. We think of our language as the language of the land. The way we survived is to speak the language that the land offered us as its teachings. To know all the plants, animals, seasons, and geography is to construct language for them.

We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. The soil, the water, the air, and all the other life forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without land. It is to be displaced.

As Okanagan, our most essential responsibility is to bond our whole individual and communal selves to the land. Many of our ceremonies have been constructed for this. We join with the larger self and with the land, and rejoice in all that we are.

The discord that we see around us, to my view from inside my Okanagan community, is at a level that is not endurable. A suicidal coldness is seeping into and permeating all levels of interaction. I am not implying that we no longer suffer for each other but rather that such suffering is felt deeply and continuously and cannot be withstood, so feeling must be shut off.

I think of the Okanagan word used by my father to describe this condition, and I understand it bet-ter. An interpretation in English might be “people without hearts.”
Okanagans say that “heart” is where community and land come into our beings and become part of us because they are as essential to our survival as our own skin.
When the phrase “people without hearts” is used, it refers to collective disharmony and alienation from land. It refers to those who are blind to self-destruction, whose emotion is narrowly focused on their individual sense of well-being without regard to the well-being of others in the collective.

The results of this dispassion are now being displayed as nation-states continuously reconfigure economic boundaries into a world economic disorder to cater to big business. This is causing a tidal flow of refugees from environmental and social disasters, compounded by disease and famine as people are displaced in the expanding worldwide chaos. War itself becomes continuous as dispossession, privatization of lands, and exploitation of resources and a cheap labor force become the mission of “peace-keeping.” The goal of finding new markets is the justification for the westernization of “undeveloped” cultures.

Indigenous people, not long removed from our cooperative self-sustaining lifestyles on our lands, do not survive well in this atmosphere of aggression and dispassion. I know that we experience it as a destructive force, because I personally experience it so. Without being whole in our community, on our land, with the protection it has as a reservation, I could not survive.

Check out the rest of the article here . . .

Bioregional Animism Upper Rio Grande/Santa Fe River

2009-01-09T21:48:00.000-08:00

This blog has been co-opted to the service of a local Bioregional Animism Blog of the Upper Rio Grande in general and the Santa Fe River Valley in particular. From this post on we are switching over to the above focus.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, please let us know and you can be added to the blog as a contributor.

What the heck is Bioregional Animism?

Bioregional animism is by definition relating to the land/bioregion as the source of ones religion and culture. It is a form of Personalism where other than human persons, including the whole bioregion itself, are related to and communicated with as persons, not as if they were persons but as persons. Animism does not personify other than human persons, animals forces of nature, plants, the land and sky, it gives up human dominion over the designation of who and what a person is. Bioregional Animism does not treat animals, plants, forces of nature, or the land and sky as tools, or symbols, for humans to use but instead views these other than human persons as just that… persons who can be communicated with, who relationships and partnerships and allegiances can be formed with for living in mutually beneficial and reciprocal ways; In both the physical and spiritual world. Bioregional Animism sees that ones larger self is the eco-region one lives within and that animist spiritual practice, cosmology, ontology, culture, and life practices are all expression of that larger ecological and transpersonal self. In a way Bioregional Animism is a response to the need for the rediscovery and rebirth or earth embracing traditions, and attempts to embody the ideal slogan of thinking globally but acting locally. Many people are drawn to shamanism in an attempt to find this way of relating to self and earth just to find that there is no shamanism in reality, shamans are healers and spiritual leaders designated by an animist tradition or culture, in other words all shamans of the world are animists not shamanists. Bioregional Animism attempts to assist others in discovering the spiritual tradition which is an expression of the land under their feet and the sky over their head which fills their lungs and moves through their heart. Bioregional Animism attempts to show us that the spirit of the shaman as well as the animist is derived from and is an expression of the bioregion, of the land itself and forms from deeply intimate relationships with the life and spirit of those around us. Bioregional Animism works with a base inspiration from the work of Graham Harvey’s New Animism www.animism.org.uk/. As well as with modern concepts of bioregionalism by such authors on the subject as Kirkpatrick Sales, www.schumachersociety.org/publi...3.html Please read His book Dwellers in the Land: A Bioregional Vision. As well as Harvey’s revolutionary work on new animism titled, Animism: Respecting the Living World.
(via http://bioregionalanimism.blogspot.com/)

Stay tuned to this blog or/and visit these links to find out more in a hurry!
bioregionalanimism.blogspot.com/
www.bioregionalanimism.org

Want to discuss the topics here in this blog as well as other topics that may be on your mind?
Visit the discussion group @ http://groups.google.com/group/southwest-animist-syndicate

Visit other discussion groups related to Bioregional Animism @ http://tribes.tribe.net/bioregionalanimism and http://tribes.tribe.net/bioregionalpaganism

Updated Postings

2008-08-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

Life in the Santa Fe River Bioregion

Media Event: Plutonium, Hazardous Radioactivity Found in NM Water, Plants, Dust as Domenici "Celebrates" New Plutonium Warhead Certification

2007-07-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

Media Event Tuesday July 10, 10:30 AM, Hotel Santa Fe, 1501 Paseo de Peralta
Re: Radioactivity Levels Hazardous in Los Alamos Area. Plutonium
Detected in Santa Fe Drinking Water.

LANL Plutonium Reported in Santa Fe Drinking Water, While Dignitaries
Celebrate First Plutonium Pit

The Santa Fe Water Quality Report for 2006 was delivered with the June water
bills. The report stated that there was a "qualified detection of plutonium
238" in Buckman Well Number 1. This means that plutonium from the
development and production of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos National
Laboratory (LANL) was detected in Santa Fe drinking water supplies.
However, the actual amount of plutonium contamination could not be
determined by the test performed. The Water Quality Report is issued each
year as required by the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. In 2006, all
contamination detections were below federal and state drinking water quality
limits.

Plutonium is the main ingredient in the core or trigger of a nuclear weapon,
known as a plutonium pit. At the same time that the detection of plutonium
is being reported, LANL is once again taking its place as the nation¹s
plutonium pit manufacturing facility. Dignitaries were invited to a
celebration for certifying the first plutonium pit to be accepted by the
government for use in the nation's nuclear-weapons stockpile since 1989,
when Rocky Flats was raided by the FBI for environmental crimes. According
to Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a Santa Fe based NGO, this new pit cost
approximately $2.2 billion.

In the production of plutonium pits, contaminants are released into the
environment through air and water emissions and radioactive and hazardous
waste is generated. The first plutonium pit was manufactured at LANL for
use against Nagasaki, Japan during World War II. At that time, the waste
was dumped in unlined and shallow trenches.

Approximately 12,000 cubic meters of plutonium contaminated waste remains in
unlined burial areas on the LANL site, which is a source of the groundwater
contamination. LANL is located above the regional aquifer, which flows
towards the Buckman Well Field, where the City of Santa Fe gets 40% of its
drinking water.

Registered Geologist, Robert H. Gilkeson, said that intermittent and low
level detections can be an early indication of an approaching contaminant
plume.

Gilkeson said, "There is an emerging environmental emergency. Detections of
LANL radionuclides in Santa Fe drinking water wells have been published by
the Department of Energy in environmental reports since the late 1990s, but
the detections have not been adequately investigated. The contamination
must be addressed now with monthly sampling using the most sensitive
analytical methods."

In addition, a recent independent study of the area surrounding LANL found
elevated and potentially harmful levels of radioactivity in materials which
humans are routinely exposed to, such as dusts and plant life. The
Government Accountability Project performed the study, with technical
assistance from Boston Chemical Data, Inc. They will hold a public press
conference to discuss these findings on Tuesday, July 10 at the Hotel Santa
Fe, beginning at 10:30 am.

Joni Arends, of CCNS said, "LANL contaminants are impacting the surrounding
communities. What is national security if we do not have clean air, water
and soil? LANL contamination must be prioritized as the threat, and the
mission transformed to clean up past operations. The time for nuclear
weapons is over."

Government Accountability Project
West Coast Office
1511 3rd Ave., Suite #321 • Seattle, WA 98101
206.292.2850 • www.whistleblower.org

July 9, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Tom Carpenter, GAP Nuclear Oversight Dir.
Phone: cell 206.419.5829
Email: tomc@whistleblower.org

Contact: Dylan Blaylock, Communications Director
Phone: 202.408.0034 ext. 137, cell 202.236.3733
Email: dylanb@whistleblower.org

Press Advisory: GAP to Release Report Showing Elevated Radioactivity
Found Around Los Alamos Press Conference to be Held Tomorrow in Santa
Fe

What: Press conference to release and discuss latest
report on citizen environmental sampling performed around the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. Report released by Government
Accountability Project (GAP).

When: July 10, 2007, 10:30 a.m.

Where: Hotel Santa Fe, 1501 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM

Who: Tom Carpenter, Director, GAP Nuclear Oversight Program
Marco Kaltofen, Scientist, Boston Chemical Data, Inc.

Contact: Dylan Blaylock, GAP Communications Director,
202.408.0034, ex 137
Tom Carpenter, 206-419-5829 (cell)

Government Accountability Project

The Government Accountability Project is the nation's leading
whistleblower protection organization. Through litigating
whistleblower cases, publicizing concerns and developing legal
reforms, GAP's mission is to protect the public interest by promoting
government and corporate accountability. Founded in 1977, GAP is a
non-profit, public interest advocacy organization with offices in
Washington, D.C. and Seattle, WA.

Dharmahouse in Santa Fe?

2007-07-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

For some time I have been considering the development of a contemplative and sustainable living based household here in Santa Fe.

I am a full time student looking to live in a household where meditative and healthy living is a central focus to those living in it. We could combine resources to make living well much more easier. Gardening/permaculture, Community-supported agriculture, along with other aspects of living where combined forces will ease our efforts.

I invite anyone interested and/or has any ideas on this topic to share here. I hope that something will develop along these lines.

Below I have posted some info and a link to a community that is doing some of the things that I am thinking of. This is a dharma house in France, they own the land, but I don't see why we couldn't begin by renting a house and in time consider the development of a larger community.

The Dharmahouse community project

In May 2006 the community moved in and started to live together in an 8 acre property in southern France. The property was previously a farm, and gave us a great opportunity to start to explore our desire for community living in the context of natural surroundings. We started to experiment with growing our own food using ideas based in natural and synergistic agricultural systems. We have also started to explore ecological and sustainable building techniques as a basis for future community building. The present property is serving as a springboard and small-scale temporary model for community living. Our main goal is to establish a co-housing community based around the teachings of the Buddha and environmental concern. Why did we choose Cohousing? And what is it? To start with a dictionary definition Cohousing is:

"a type of collaborative housing that attempts to overcome the alienation of modern subdivisions in which no-one knows their neighbours, and there is no sense of community. It is characterized by private dwellings with their own kitchen, living-dining room etc, but also extensive common facilities. The common building may include a large dining room, kitchen, lounges, meeting rooms, recreation facilities, library, workshops, childcare."

The concept of Cohousing was first established in Denmark in the 1970s; catalysed by frustration at the isolation and impracticality of modern day housing designs, cohousing became an attempt to redefine how our living arrangements can support and develop our human relationships. Taking inspiration from different cultures and traditional village settings, the concept of cohousing is now being developed across Europe, north America, Australasia, and eastern Asia.

Expanding on this definition of cohousing within the context of the Dharma, we are seeking a ‘practicing neighbourhood’, a sangha to provide nurturing and supportive conditions for our spiritual lives. Our common building could perhaps be a Dharma hall, to again support our practice, where we could come together to share, discuss, meditate and support each other. This could also be a place where Dharma teachers could come and lead retreats from time to time.

In the on-going development of this project we are keen to discuss the social, economic and environmental aspects of cohousing. What follows are some of the benefits of cohousing and also some of the issues that we will be looking at in our discussions when we come together in August of this year (1st-5th). I am sure many more questions and discussions will be raised when we meet, this will give us a chance to inquire into what best direction we can take this project in the years to come. A chance to dip in to the sea of possibility! Maybe a few different visions of community will emerge from these discussions, maybe a few different communities could start - the beginnings of small network?

Let's see……

http://www.thedharmahouse.com/English%20pages/EN_cohousing_community.htm

Buddhism

2007-05-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

I recently got a bug to check out the Buddhist schools here in Santa Fe. I had first thought to return to the Shambhala Center where I attended a really great series of classes last spring. I found that they have moved a little further from my house and stopped the classes for a while. So I checked out the Thubten Norbu Ling Buddhist Center on Alameda because it was really close to home and I felt drawn to it for some reason. I would stop there during slow periods while on my Taxi shift, sit across the street, listen to the river, smell the sweet blooms and chant.

I checked out their calendar and decided on a class to attend. Fortunately, before I attended, I stumbled across a flyer for the class I intended to attend, it said down towards the bottom that the suggested donation was $20 per session or $75 for the entire weekend workshop. I had read on their website that classes were free, but they asked for a donation to help with rent and all. I usually leave about ten dollars if I can afford it, so $20 threw me for a loop. I could attend a yoga class at the most expensive studio for that price. Wow!!! So, now I am looking for some teachings, a school or center once again.

I really liked the people and teachings at Shambhala, I wish that they were still around.

Have any suggestions?

Stupas Along The Rio Grande

2007-05-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

Building a monument to enlightenment: The consecration of Tashi Gomang Stupa near Crestone, Colorado.

Stupas Along The Rio Grande

Anna Rocicot

http://www.stupa.org.nz/stupa/Rio_Grande.htm

The stupa, an ancient form of architecture, evolved significantly in both form and meaning with the coming of the Buddha. Cairns in ancient India were traditionally raised as monuments to kings and heroes and contained their remains. At the suggestion of the Buddha, stupas began to be built as monuments to the Awakened Ones and their disciples, a reminder of the potential for enlightenment within us all. Its corpulent shape now suggested the Buddha in meditation posture: the base, his crossed legs; the rounded dome, his shoulders; the square-shaped harmika with painted eyes, his head.

As Buddhism spread, so did the building of stupas, and each area or country developed its own style. It was only a matter of time before Western practitioners would try their hands at stupa building.

From 1983 to 1996, six Tibetan-style stupas were built in a line roughly following the Rio Grande river from Albuquerque, New Mexico, north to Crestone, Colorado. Traditionally in Buddhist countries, hundreds of monks supported by devoted lay followers contributed to stupa construction. Along the Rio Grande, each community of dharma students, or sangha, found its own way to meet the rigorous, precise, and expensive demands of building a stupa. Wise direction for the careful completion of each step, from fire pujas (prayer ceremonies) for fair weather to the construction of hundreds of thousands of tsa-tsas - tiny clay stupas - to be sealed in the bumpas, the spherical rooms below the spires, was provided by lamas - especially the Venerable Lama Karma Dorje, resident teacher at the Kagyu Shenpen Kunchab Center in Santa Fe, who has overseen the construction of three of the stupas in New Mexico.

Khang Tsag Chorten and
Ngagpa Yeshe Dorje Stupa, Santa Fe

The story of stupa building in New Mexico began in the early 1970s in Santa Fe. David Padwa requested H. H. Jidral Yeshe Dorje Drudjom Rinpoche of the Nyingmapa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism to come to Santa Fe and donated the funds necessary for Khang Tsag Chorten (or "Stacked House" Stupa) to be built. Consecrated in 1973 by the Venerable Drodrup Chen Rinpoche, the eightfoot-high stupa, now under the care of the Maha Bodhi Society, is located adjacent to Upaya, a Zen center. The following year, Khang Tsag Stupa was also blessed by the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. It is said that all stupas bless beings who see or touch them whether or not they understand the dharma. But Khang Tsag Stupa is believed to have the additional power to purify all hostility.

Kagyu Shenpen Kunchab Bodhi Stupa, Santa Fe

A few miles from Santa Fe's largest mall and the infamous Cerrillos Road, one of the most hazardous thoroughfares in the state, this stupa looms up over the adjacent trailer park. Off busy Airport Road, there is a graveled driveway, and a large white-walled enclosure. As one enters, only the back of the stupa is visible-white and pristine. Circumambulating, visitors arrive at the huge, painted doors of the Kagyu Shenpen Kunchab Bodhi Stupa. Within the shrine room, a statue of the Buddha, surrounded by paintings of saints and holy beings, invites you to take refuge.

Lama Karma Dorje was sent to Santa Fe at the behest of the renowned meditation master, His Eminence Kalu Rinpoche. He began building the stupa with a local practitioner Jerry Morrelli, in 1983. They worked for three years, with help on the weekends from members of the Santa Fe sangha, and in 1986, Kalu Rinpoche consecrated the completed stupa.

Ngagpo Yeshe Dorje Stupa, Santa Fe

The newest stupa in Santa Fe commemorates the life and work of Ngagpa Yeshe Dorje, one of the first lamas to visit the area. Since 1986, Ngagpa Yeshe Dorje of the Nyingmapa lineage and master of weather ceremonies for the Dalai Lama had visited Santa Fe annually to perform the Dur ceremony (to benefit students and deceased relatives) at the Kagyu Shenpen Kunchab Bodhi Stupa. Following his death, his students, under the guidance of Tulku Sang Nga, built a stupa for him in the mountains east of Santa Fe.

There are eight traditional architectural styles of stupas, and the seventeen-foot-high Ngagpa Yeshe Dorje Stupa was built in the elegant but simple "bodhisattva" form. It was consecrated in 1995 on private land.

Kagyu Deki Choeling, Tres Orejas

The gift of a small statue of a stupa by Kalu Rinpoche to Norbert Ubechel, a longtime student of the Karmapa, was the inspiration for a twenty-two-foot stupa in Tres Orejas, New Mexico.

A few miles north of Taos, Tres Orejas is an almost treeless expanse between three peaks and the 600-foot drop-off of the Rio Grande Gorge. There are few inhabitants, no water, and no electricity. Despite monetary gifts for materials, the building of a stupa here was an arduous task. Lama Dorje and Ubechel hauled water for mixing cement by hand for the construction of Kagyu Deki Choeling, a "bodhisattva"-style stupa similar to the one in Santa Fe. Other students lent their labor, and on August 8, 1994, three years after the project began, the Venerable Lama Lodo consecrated the stupa. It was later blessed by the five-year-old Tsogya Gyaltso, tulku of Kalu Rinpoche, as well as by Bokar Rinpoche, a meditation master of the Kagyu lineage.

With Lama Dorje, a handful of students later built a gompa or meditation hall. From the steps of the gompa, the stupa is visible below, shining white. The cedar trees here are wind-stunted and twisted, like the treacherous road that leads to the stupa, looking out over miles of sagebrush as if from the edge of the world.

Kagyu Milo Guru Stupa, El Rito

About a quarter of a mile off NM Highway 522, which stretches from Taos toward the Colorado border, stands Kagyu Mila Guru Stupa, thirtyeight feet tall and clearly visible, an unexpected architectural jewel set close to the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in El Rito.

From 1992 to 1995, a handful of families living six miles north of the mining town of Questa gathered every Saturday morning to build the stupa. At an attitude of 8,ooo feet, work is possible only from April to November. And almost every Saturday during these months, Lama Dorje and a few Santa Fe students made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to El Rito, bringing plans for the next phase of construction, strong arms, and a generous supply of doughnuts and Gatorade.

Land, donations, and volunteer labor came primarily from students of the late meditation teacher Herman Rednick, whose teachings blended Eastern and Western meditation concepts. Lama Karma Dorje provided inspiration, guidance, and constant supervision of the project.

At the suggestion of children in the community, an inside shrine room was included in the plans for Kagyu Mila Guru Stupa. Cynthia Moku, art director at Naropa Institute in Boulder, who had helped direct painting of the deities in the shrine room at the stupa in Santa Fe, designed and oversaw the painting of the Kagyu Mila Guru shrine room. In the small chamber, nearly human-size representations of Chenrezig and Tara rise before the meditator with a sense of immediacy. Every detail seems to enliven the walls with a tangible spiritual presence.

In June 1995, students finished details on the stupa before the arrival of the six-year-old Tsogya Gyaltso Rinpoche and V. V. Bokar Rinpoche for the consecration. The following year, Lama Karma Chodrak, an associate and friend of Lama Dorje, arrived from India to join the community as its resident lama.

More info on the Kagyu Mila Stupa, supplied to me by the centre

Tashi Gomang Stupa, Crestone, Colorado

Five miles south of Crestone, Colorado, high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and surveying the San Luis valley, stands the forty-one-foot-high Tashi Gomang Stupa, "stupa of many auspicious doors," commemorating the moment when the Buddha first turned the wheel of the dharma.

His Holiness the Sixteenth Karmapa, who in 1980 owned 200 acres in the Crestone area, envisioned a Tibetan medical college for this area as well as a monastery with three-year retreat facilities. In 1988, Crestone dharma students received a letter from His Eminence Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche suggesting that they begin with the construction of a stupa. Due to its remote location, in an area lacking electricity and running water, and the need to build a "floating" foundation, the construction proved expensive and lengthy. Students spent five years and more than $10,000 making the hundred-thousand tsa-tsas required for the bumpa alone.

Here, too, a combination of volunteer labor and generous donations brought the stupa to completion. Kyenpo Karsar Rinpoche and Bardor Tulku Rinpoche of Woodstock, New York, directed construction, and on July 6, 1996, Bokar Rinpoche consecrated Tashi Gomang.

(Much) More info on the Tashi Gomang stupa

No-Name Stupa, Albuquerque

Rarely does a visitor to a national park have the opportunity to brush past a relic of the great Tibetan Guru Padmasambhava. But at Petroglyph National Park in Albuquerque, strollers may encounter a stupa. Consecrated by lamas and containing the many traditional objects that help make a stupa sacred, this stupa has no name. It is not advertised or even acknowledged by officials at the park's visitor center.

The National Park Service in iggo began acquiring the property of Harold Cohen and Arriam Emery as part of Petroglyph National Park, established to preserve the Native American rock art chipped into volcanic stones there. The move came six months after the consecration of the ten-foot-high stupa, which had taken Cohen and Emery eleven years to build on their property. According to Cohen and Emory, they lost their home and their battle to retain the stupa. Money they had saved for a future Padmasambhava Center was spent in litigation.

Lama Rinchen Thuntsok of Nepal, who had aided the couple in building the stupa and had consecrated this Nyingmapa bodhisattva-style stupa in 1989, advised them to view the process as a lesson in impermanence and suggested they build a larger stupa. The park service maintains that the stupa has been moved off what is now park land, but Cohen and Emery hope public opinion will influence park service officials to protect and preserve the stupa.

Anna Racicot is a writer living in Questa, New Mexico.

Tricycle The Buddhist Review

Here is another page describing the stupas of the Rio Grande

Back to the Stupa Information page

I’m interested in living in a world not being systematically dismantled.

2007-04-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

. . . "Do you believe that the culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to obtain a sustainable way of living? If you don’t, what does that mean for our strategy and for our tactics? We don’t know. The reason we don’t know is that we don’t ask that question. The reason we don’t ask that question is that we’re so busy pretending that we have hope.

One of the smartest things the Nazis did was to co-opt rationality and to co-opt hope. The way they did that was by making it so that at every step of the way it was in the Jews’ rational, best interest not to resist.

Would you rather get an ID card or would you rather resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to go to a ghetto or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to get on a cattle car or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to take a shower or do you want to resist and possibly get killed?

Every step of the way, it was in their rational best interest to not resist. But I’ll tell you something really interesting: The Jews who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising had a much higher rate of survival than those who went along. We need to keep that in mind over the next ten years." . . .

. . . "Most of our actions are frighteningly ineffective. If that weren’t the case we would not be witnessing the dismantling of the world. Yet we keep on doing the same old symbolic actions and keep on calling the making of this or that statement a great victory.

Now don’t get me wrong, symbolic victories can provide great morale boosts, which can be crucial. But we make a fatal and frankly pathetic error when we presume that our symbolic victories, our recruiting and our morale boosting, by themselves make tangible differences on the ground, and we should never forget that what happens on the ground is the only thing that matters.

There comes a time in the lives of many long-term activists when symbolic victories, rare even as these can be sometimes, are no longer enough. There comes a time when many of these activists get burned out, discouraged and demoralized. Many fight despair. I think fighting against this despair is a mistake. I think this despair is often an unacknowledged, embodied, understanding that the tactics they’ve been using aren’t accomplishing what they want and the goals they’ve been seeking are insufficient to the crisis we face.

These activists get burned out and frustrated because they’re trying to achieve sustainability within a system that is inherently unsustainable. They can never win. No wonder they get discouraged. But instead of really listening to these feelings, they so often take a couple of weeks off and then dive back into trying to put the same old square pegs into the same old round holes. The result: more burnout, more frustration, more discouragement, and the salmon keep dying.

What would happen if we listened to these feelings of being burnt out, discouraged, demoralized, and frustrated? What would those feelings tell us? Is it possible they could tell us that what we’re doing isn’t working, and so we should try something else? Perhaps they’re telling us to switch metaphors. That we should stop trying to save scraps of soap in a concentration camp and try to bust out of the whole camp."

From an Derrick Jensen interview.

Grow Here Now and Build Here Now

2007-04-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

a future of possibility Lama Foundation, located in the Mountains of New Mexico is host to Grow Here Now and Build Here Now. Annual ... all » workshops which bring together teachers as well as students of sustainability. Join us as we examine “what is permaculture” as we attend the Grow Here Now - Convergence at Lama.

Permaculture is a word originally coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid 1970's to describe an "integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man" 'Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs. People, their buildings and the ways in which they organize themselves are central to permaculture. Thus the permaculture vision of permanent or sustainable agriculture has evolved to one of permanent or sustainable culture.

Tsankawi

2007-04-22T23:35:00.000-07:00

Local Ecology

2007-04-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

http://resistancetraining.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/daoism-and-ecology/

Because of the vast comprehensiveness of the Daoist cosmic ecology, and not in spite of it, the arena for all human action is the immediate environment. Only by paying attention to the minute details of one’s local context is one able to penetrate to the deep roots of the Dao. Popular Chinese culture is full of ways for human beings to micro-manage their environment, from feng shui, the strategy of arranging one’s immediate area to take full advantage of its natural environment to taijiquan (t’ai-chi-ch’üan), the embodiment of cosmic patterns to properly attune the self in the world.

Daoism has particularly emphasized the importance of small beginnings and local perspectives not as an end in itself, but as a strategy. The advice of the Dao de jing is to be low, soft, weak and nonassertive. The Zhuangzi praises the spontaneous skillfulness of craftspeople that cannot be easily taught in words, but is achieved only by the repeated practice of an individual in a highly particular context. Religious practices begin with the purification of mind and body and take for granted the respect for all living beings in one’s immediate environment. Religious communities enshrine such attitudes in precepts that are the precondition for more advanced methods.

Reversion and Spontaneity
The goal of all higher Daoist practice is to mirror unobtrusively the dynamic spontaneity of one’s environment, to become imperceptible and transparent as though one were not at all. This goal is made all the more remote by the complex web of social and intellectual structures layered throughout history that form the cultural flux in which human life is trapped. The path towards pure spontaneity thus consists always in reversion or undoing. This reversion can occur mentally, through sitting in oblivion, physically, through the generation of an immortal embryo, and even cosmogonically, through alchemical practices founded on the principle that degenerative natural processes can be reversed and restored to their pure essential state.
Constructing Nature
Daoism proposes a comprehensive and radical restructuring of the way in which we conceive of our relationship to nature and our cosmic environment. This imaginative act does not readily lend itself to the solution of the problems of modern society except inasmuch as it challenges the very foundations of our economic, political, scientific, and intellectual structures. At the same time, however, as Daoism becomes more influential in the West, even as it is misunderstood, it surely exerts a positive influence with respect to understanding what it means to be embedded in a cosmic ecology.

In such an understanding nature is not something outside of us to be dealt with after the fashion of a mechanic repairing a car, but is both a mental attitude to be carefully cultivated and the true condition of one’s body that contains the infinite dimensions of cosmic reality within itself. Ultimately, therefore, nature is to be constructed and visualized time and again. Its destiny lies more than anything else in the human powers of imagination.

Synergy Fest

2007-04-07T11:48:00.000-07:00

MEXIRAQ

2007-04-06T11:51:00.000-07:00

La Llorona

2007-04-06T11:40:00.001-07:00

The Tears of Llorona

Introduction: The Tears of Llorona

http://www.terrapsych.com/introduction.html

Craig Chalquist, PhD

It is my experience that the myths we enter most deeply
are not ones that we choose out of some book of myths.
Rather, in some profound way, these myths choose us.

— Christine Downing

California can only be understood by those for whom
the symbols, if they come at all, follow the land itself
in the order of apprehension: it can only be known in
all its dimensions by the native, or by those like
him, from within and never from without.
— Wilson Carey McWilliams

Sing in me, O muse, and through me tell the tale….

On May Day of 2000, having returned to San Diego County after being away for eighteen years, I was putting away some books when one of them chanced to fall on my head. I bent to pick it up and noticed the title: Homer’s Odyssey.

Oddly enough, I had just been going back three hundred years into the history of San Diego and then of California. I had read about that brutal butcher Cortés, credited with naming our state after a fictional paradise; about Cabrillo and Vizcaíno, those transient seafaring explorers who came, saw, claimed territory, and left; and about Father Junípero Serra, who opened a mission here before moving on to bless nine more. It was he who led the first European colonization of my troubled homeland.

I had also been dreaming about San Diego, who personified herself into my nocturnal reveries as recounted in my book on Terrapsychology, the study of the presence, or “soul,” of the land. That book grew out of depth-psychological doctoral fieldwork begun shortly after my return to San Diego, the county of my birth. Local history, trauma, geography, dream: why did they seem to parallel each other image by image and event by event? Getting to know the past and present lay of the land might give me a hint or two about this.

Responding to a subvocal restlessness, I got up from my research one evening, made my way around piles of books, and went for a walk through the Escondido Hills. Ten miles to the south stood the Elfin Forest, where a ghostly woman in white was said to occur of a quiet night looking for her lost children. A familiar hawk circled high above my right shoulder.

The research wouldn’t let go of me. In my mind’s eye I saw a map of California with twenty-one crosses near the coast, each indicating a mission, an enclosed adobe complex in which padres who sailed over from Spain and walked north from Mexico in 1769 had sought to convert the indigenous peoples of California into laboring Christians. Nothing new in that story, especially for someone raised on this soil. I loved to travel and did so often, but I had lived in this state all my life.

That pattern of crosses…it seemed familiar, struck a hidden chord, wouldn’t go away. I halted for a moment. And then I had it. Those crosses marked the path of my wanderings throughout California. Every town I’d ever lived in, felt compelled to get acquainted with, or visited for more than a few days or weeks was a mission town along El Camino Real, the “royal road” that linked them all. Serra had compared the chain to a rosary.

For eighteen years, then, I had unknowingly pursued him up and down what had once been an actual paradise, the verdant home of loam-hued human beings deliberately made out to be childlike savages by colonizing consciences eager to be soothed. Having witnessed what each place had become, I moved on—was moved on—up the King’s Highway to the next leg of my long Californian odyssey. But why?

Nor was I alone, for another figure haunted me just as I had shadowed Serra.

Not long after the Aztec Empire fell to the ministrations of Hernando Cortés, a ghostly woman was said to appear in the streets of destroyed Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) roaming and weeping and wailing. Stories about her proliferated, but in most of them, a young, pretty mother gave birth to the son of an unfaithful lover, a heartless and powerful man who threatened to abandon her and take the newborn with him. To prevent this, she drowned the child (in some versions two children) under the full moon, and then she lost her mind. When she finally died, she was condemned to wander near bodies of water, a sad ghost wailing for her lost children, whose souls she must find in order to finally attain redemption. To this day many Mexican mothers warn their own children not to stay out late or La Llorona (“The Weeping Woman,” pronounced “lah-yoh-roh-nah”) might snatch them away, mistaking them for her own.

I had been born in San Diego below a full moon, the double-Cancer son of a dark-eyed mother who had lived on boats and bays and beaches. A self-styled gypsy, she did not want to raise children, but my father did and made it plain that he expected to. To solve this dilemma, my mother arranged a secret adoption, then told the entire family—including my father, according to him—that I, who would have been given my father’s own name, had died of heart failure at birth. I passed briefly into foster care and ended up in the home of the adoptive parents who raised me without knowing much about my past. But when I first learned my mother’s name after a long quest after my roots, its echo with that of the Weeping Woman remained hidden from me: Lorna, born with eyes biologically devoid of night vision.

No matter how estranged we may consider ourselves from the tangled, improbable—indeed monstrous—world of myth, in various ways and under certain circumstances unwilling tributes to its signs, fictions, and symbols are wrung from us.
— Frederick Turner

From the standpoint of depth psychology, the discipline that evolved from the pioneering work of Pierre Janet and C. G. Jung and the synthesizing contributions of Sigmund Freud, who founded the field of psychoanalysis, a myth is not a dead explanation for lightning or rain, but a living force in human affairs and assumptions. Dream, drama, symptom, folklore, ideology, religion, and perhaps psyche itself all display a deep mythic structuring. A fabled pathway unknowingly retraced and haunted from San Diego to Sonoma by a roving figment of Mexican folklore might seem coincidental to the thinking of mainstream materialism; but heaping on the head of Coincidence what does not fit a worldview imitates the ancient Roman habit of reflexively attributing uncanny happenings to the wheel-spinning goddess of luck and chance.

A series of coastal pilgrimages, a wandering, weeping specter, and a city of asphalt and dream, all repeating uncannily like doubled images seen but through a glass darkly. What did they all have in common except the old Mission Trail itself?

A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there. It is for precisely this reason that stories are not told without identifying the earthly sites where the events in those stories occur.
— David Abram

As I studied and walked and thought, at my side lurked a very San Diegan suspicion that El Camino Real, La Llorona, Lorna, Serra, and a frowning dream city might after all represent random spinnings of the wheel of Fortuna; but along the way my doubts melted like adobe in a downpour. If these images could flash from so many disparate realms of highly localized experience, from maps to moves, bays to births, then didn’t it make more sense to think of them as emanating like heartbeats from hidden but potent waypoints up and down the King’s Highway? Was it possible that a mythic-imaginal geography permeated the physical?

Psychotherapy knows all about returns of the repressed: unhealed wounds repeating themselves symbolically in encounter after encounter and decade after decade. Could the traumas inflicted by conquest, exploitation, and loveless domination similarly punctuate the history of a stretch of troubled terrain?

The more I learned about the places where I had lived, the greater grew the sense of a persistent voice I could not hear; of old local traumas, ironies, and unlearned lessons passing in succession like a series of repeating billboards written in an indeciphered tongue.

It is not accidental that “home” and “haunt” share deep roots in Old English, that we speak of the home of an animal as its haunt, or that “haunt” can mean both a place of regular habitation and a place marked by the presence of spirits. Like scars, the spirits are reminders—traces by which the past remains present.
— Jack Turner

My researches included the discovery that no one had written a history of the mission cities and counties of California before, let alone one informed by recurring local motifs now known to terrapsychology as “placefield syndromes”: facts of the land which symbolize themselves into the minds and souls they interact with. We are not as separate from the places we inhabit as we like to believe. Obesity rates parallel the sprawl of fattening cities. A fortified border is not just a very tall fence: it also recurs as a psychic division, a cleavage of the heart, a spiritual dam, a cultural barrier, a split within the self, a political regression, and an ecological absurdity. The matter we would master enters into us at will through openings of metaphor and bridges of dream.

To my knowledge, no one had investigated the thematic resonance of place before, but in terms of my role I had years of experience. As I had been for my clients, so I would become for the coastal counties that had infected me: a wounded healer, an unveiler of shadowy narratives, a chronicler of their reenactments, and a breathing repository of themes both current and archaic decanted into the psychic spaces I made available, unknowingly at first, but now opened freely.

“To come alive again,” wrote Albert Camus, “one needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland. Certain mornings, on turning a corner, a delightful dew falls on the heart and then evaporates. But its coolness remains, and this is what the heart requires always. I had to set out again.” I had, at least, the homeland along with the resolve to initiate another recurrence: that of following the Mission Trail all the way up El Camino Real to listen more consciously into unburied pasts, into underground themes still pulsing in the shadow of what we like to call development (from words that mean both “enclose” and “expose”), a contemporary legacy of the relentless march of Cross and Sword.

Perhaps one spots a freshly fallen tree, or a bit of flaking paint, or a house where none has stood before—any disturbance, large or small, that inscribes the passage of time—and a place presents itself as bearing on prior events. And at that precise moment, when ordinary perceptions begin to loosen their hold, a border has been crossed and the country starts to change.
– Keith Basso

This book is a collection of California tellings arranged in chronological order county by county. Rather than laying down dead in a text caught in a fantasy of objectivity, they constitute a multidimensional history in the spirit of Nietzsche’s term “genealogy”: a quest through events, prime movers, Great Men, “facts of history,” ecological anomalies, character quirks, and other forces often lab-coated as causes to uncover the themes and images in motion behind them. Put simply, this book is less a case history of California’s edgy psyche than a “place history” set forth in a series of vignettes: briefly sketched deepenings into what has happened here.

As with most case presentations, woundedness will remain a chief concern as we move from city to city and county to county up the King’s Highway through emplaced, paradigmatic, and often ironic motifs whose echoes outlast lifetimes and defy monocular assessments. Our focus will not dwell on the self-congratulatory spires of Progress and Development, for example, but must linger with their unpopularized umbrae as we move an incident at a time from Baja through Alta to the terminus of the Mission Trail and beyond it to the hope for fresh sights and soundings that make for healing and an end to anguished reenactments.

Our wanderings upon the trail of Serra and Llorona move back and forth within magnetic lines of geography, trauma, biography, reverie, psychology, relationship—and myth, “myth” not as lie or fiction, but as collective manifestation of a storied presence beyond the daily ken. To describe Llorona as a mythic figure is not to declare her unreal (those who so regard her do it at their peril), nor does it reduce her to a byproduct of human thought. She is a ghostly, wailing psychic body, a tortured tissue of dreamstuff looking in on the maulings of malls and the damnings of dams, and transgressing at will customary notions of propriety, landscape, gender, and power. What she has to teach us awaits at journey’s end.

As for the architects of the historical and contemporary events described in these pages, some, like Cortés, were deliberate, ruthless opportunists, and some were not. There were missionaries who beat their “children” while others stood up for their rights. The missions founded and guarded to house the Indian converts were neither “concentration camps,” as Carey McWilliams has written, nor blessed outposts of civilized pure-heartedness, as the Catholic Church maintains even now against documented evidence to the contrary. Into the so-called New World rootless men carried new ideas and a measure of good will as well as diseases of body and mind. Whether their motives were akin to those of gentle St. Francis, nominal patron of a colonizing Order, or corrupt Alexander VI, writer of the papal bull of 1493 that handed a brave New World to Spain, what these true believers and wandering conquistadors did here lingers on to demand recognition, even to haunting us from within.

Starting out from a Prelude in conquered Mexico and Baja, we will learn the story of each mission town from its founding days onward, listening for themes and meanings and gleaning the symbolic from the factual as we feel our way into the past of each county—San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, and on up to Sonoma—whose colonizers still struggle in localized returns of the ecohistorically repressed. Quotations throughout highlight themes latent in the material.

History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history, we did both the country and ourselves some harm along with some good. Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging.
— Wallace Stegner

For these unhealed and highly symbolic events have not been left in the past, as the biographical material in each chapter will emphasize. Old motifs of wounding haunt our occupied territories—inner and outer—as persistently as Llorona haunts her children. In nightmares, symptoms, families, freeways, and barrios along El Camino Real, a contemporary Cortés still charges across a promenade, a resistance still greets the gold-seeking invaders, ideologies obliterate indigenous values, and Llorona still moans for a chance at redemption.

The men responsible for starting us along this five-hundred-mile trail are long gone, as are their most immediate victims. But the will to colonize—places, people, resources, economies, cultures, even gods—is no bygone relic of a less evolved era. It has grown clever enough to pitch for the planet and “the people”: for democracy, globalization, progress, even freedom (from a Sanskrit term for “to own”) in the totalizing campaign to enforce widespread dependence on rosy pseudo-worlds of pleasant fantasy. Yet, “The dream lives on,” notes Kevin Starr, former state librarian, “promising so much in the matter of American living. It also threatens to become an anti-dream, an American nightmare. Memory, then, must come to our aid; for while the recovery of the past can traumatize, it can also heal.”

A newly ecopsychological sensitivity informed by myth, history, and folklore must also remember an ancient human truth: those who alienate themselves from the natural world by attempting its domination always alienate and dominate people.

Disregard of the invisible landscape—and impressing change upon the physical terrain that anchors that landscape—forces psychic pain and dislocation on others, pounding flat those imaginative bumps by which they orient themselves and which give meaning to their worlds.
— Kent Ryden

California has ever been pictured as an exquisitely spiritual place—but one insisting that the spiritual ground itself in the earthly, in cool rivers and dank, tangled roots. In psychological terms this means taking our highest aspirations here with a healthy dose of sorrow, protest, humility, and absurdity, blending them soulfully in the cauldron of the heart. Only then, when the stories and themes have grown slowly within us, can we claim the authority to have heard even a little of what California has to say. She is many things, but I have yet to know her as silent.

The fictional Ramona of Helen Hunt Jackson’s sappy novel is our most well-known weeping woman, but she is in no danger of being our most vocal. Shunned everywhere else, Llorona has been invited to come forth from the shadows of the mission communities and haunt this work of hearing and witnessing, contemplate its stops along El Camino Real, and moisten it where needed with a few of her copious tears. For after all, our excursion moves not just into bright Californian daylight, but into the shadows too, where sightseeing must surrender pride of place to another mode of vision, namely: soul-seeing.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Setting Out Again
Highway’s Beginning: The Cry of Cihuacoatl
San Diego
Orange
Los Angeles
Ventura
Santa Barbara
San Luís Obispo
Monterey
San Benito
Santa Cruz
Santa Clara
Alameda
San Francisco
Marin
Highway’s End: Sonoma
Epilogue
Afterwords: California Indian Voices
Bibliography

La Llorona image created by Carlos Encinas.

West of the West

Juana Alicia’s newest project:
“La Llorona” mural, San Francisco Mission District
http://chicanas.com/jalicia.htmlCome to the July 10, 2004 fundraiser at Mars Cafe! (pdf flyer here)

How you can help

Juana Alicia is presently creating a new mural, entitled “La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”) for the corner of York and 24th Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. This is the current site of her 1983 mural “Las Lechugueras.” Juana Alicia is currently raising funds to replace the deteriorating Lechugueras mural with the new Llorona mural.

In her imagery and practice of art, Juana Alicia attempts to break down traditional barriers between genres, media and categories, combining the personal with the political, the public with the private, to create images that are simultaneously decorative, educational, critical and celebrational. Her art often pays homage to ancestors and contemporary, living people. Through her paintings, artist and educator Juana Alicia seeks to create visions of hope by reflecting histories of both trouble and triumph. These images also project the possibility of asserting our highest human values in scenarios of a compassionate world. In the past twenty-five years, Juana Alicia has created over thirty murals and a large body of drawings, prints, paintings, mixed media and ceramics.

Although the Llorona Mural Project is a work of art, its “work” is to support environmental and social justice and raise awareness about water issues. The new mural will illustrate the effects of globalization on our natural environments, both urban and rural. The work reveals environmental conditions, crises and hopes shared by the local Latina/o, indigenous, and other communities of color who share the sacred ground we call The Mission. The planet and our physical bodies are composed mostly of water. Water connects and affects all of humanity and all life on the earth.

This mural seeks to educate viewers about the central importance of water in our lives, and about the crisis we face with regard to its scarcity and contamination. The mural will also celebrate the role that women play as caretakers of the environment, using as it’s central protagonist “The Crying Woman” of Mexican history and legend. The new Llorona mural, like her predecessor, will focus on women and environmental health and justice. Juana Alicia created the existing Lechuguera mural in 1983, and it is one of her most published works. It has traveled across the world as an image on book covers, postcards, posters, and via the Internet. Because the existing wall has deteriorated excessively, it will need to be resurfaced and this process will necessarily wipe out the existing work. Instead of re-creating it from “scratch”, the artist has elected to create a new, updated work on the topic of working women and the environment.

The mural has lent its message about the struggles of farm workers to many organizing struggles and has received wide exposure; Juana Alicia is satisfied that the Lechugueras mural has lived a long and fulfilling life! Las Lechugueras depicts the dangers of pesticides, factories in the fields of California, and the menace of the field bosses and immigration service while it honors the strength of Mexican women farm workers and the beauty of our natural environment. The new mural will address the worldwide environmental crisis over water. The new piece will celebrate as a heroine La Llorona, the much-maligned mythical Mexican woman who haunts the riverbanks in search of her lost children. For Mexicans and Chicanos, La Llorona is the protagonist in an oral history rooted in the conquest of Mexico. It’s a story that is still told to children today. There are many versions of the story, but over many generations, children have been warned to stay away from the river banks because La Llorona might capture them, mistaking them for her own children. Often it is said that she herself drowned her children in a fit of rage, insanity or despair, though other versions portray her as saving them from enslavement and conquest. In Juana Alicia’s mural design, she reclaims La Llorona as a heroine instead of presenting her as a crazed victim, which is frequently the case. In the image in the planned mural, La Llorona will be pictured in the act of saving her lost and “at-risk” children, and the river will be pictured as a source of life, beauty, and restoration. The mural features diverse scenes of environmental struggles over water: The U.S./México border; Cochabamba, Bolivia and the Narmada River Valley in India.

In the center of the composition, a thirty foot tall Chalchiuhtlicue (the Aztec goddess of the water), surrounded by clouds and mountain waterfalls, gives water to the world. The ancient lake Texcoco that once covered the Valley of Mexico emerges from the mists that make up her skirt. To the left of the goddess, Bolivian peasants defeat the fat cats of corporate domination in a fight for the water rights of their country, and to the far left, the farmworkers of India’s Narmada Valley hold a protest by refusing to leave their flooded homelands, threatened by an enormous dam project. To the right of Chalchiuhtlicue, we see the Llorona herself, embracing one of her children, while extending her hand to those still in the water. She revives the spirits of her children and preserves the planet for future generations. Behind her is the nopal, symbol of Chalchiuhtlicue, the cactus that flourishes, gives fruit and flower despite the harshest of conditions. Its secret is an internal reserve of water. To the right of the Llorona, the Women in Black of Juarez march alongside the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande), demanding to know what has become of the murdered daughters of the border. A maquila (border sweatshop) pours pollution in the background. , reviving the spirits of her children and preserving the planet for future generations.

The Llorona mural is a new addition to Juana Alicia’s body of work which bears witness to the deepest challenges of our communities, and to the marvelous potential of our imaginations to transform crises into triumphs of the spirit. Juana Alicia’s work can serve our local community and its organizations that serve our civil rights and equal opportunities as well.

If you would like support the Llorona Mural Project, you can do so in various ways:

Donations in any amount, can be made out to “The Women’s Building” (Juana Alicia’s fiscal sponsor), with a notation “for the Llorona Mural Project.”
You can donate services such as assistance with publicity, printing, fundraising, website building, or documentary film or video assistance.
You can volunteer as a project assistant, hauling water, washing brushes, bringing food and answering questions from passersby.

If you would like to support this project in any way, please do not hesitate to contact Juana Alicia at texcali@pacbell.net or see her website: http://JuanaAlicia.com

Bibliographical Resources for the Llorona Mural Project

Barlow, Maude and Tony Clarke (2002) Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, New York, NY: The New Press.
Basu, Amria, Ed. (1993) The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women’s Movements in Global Perspective Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Davis, Mike (2000) Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City, New York, NY: Verso Press.
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic, Eds. (1998) The Latin@ Condition: a Critical Reader, New York, NY: New York University Press.
Galeano, Eduardo (1973) The Open Veins of Latin America. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.
Louie, Miriam Ching Yoon (2001) Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory, Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Macy, Joanna R. with an introduction by Thich Nhat Hahn (1999) World As Lover, World As Self, , Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
Nelson, Barbara J. and Najma Chowdhury, Eds. (1994) Women and Politics Worldwide, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Ruiz, Vicky and Ellen Carol Dubois, Eds. (1994) Unequal Sisters: a Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd Edition. New York, NY: Routledge.
Schultz, Jim (2002) “Bechtel Corporation vs. Bolivia’s Poor” The Democracy Center On-line. http://www.democracyctr.org/
Schultz, Jim (2000) “Bolivia’s War Over Water” Earth Island Journal, Fall 2000 Vol. 15, No. 3.
Sen, Rinku, Ed. (1995) We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, United States Rural Mission of the World Council of Churches. Geneva, Switzerland: WCC Publications.
Shiva, Vandana (2002) Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Shiva, Vandana (1999) Stolen Harvest: Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

Return to Chicanas.com

http://www.juanaalicia.com/photos/album/la-llorona/

Yonder Lies It

2007-04-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

From:

Yonder Lies It

The little migra in every US Xicano

February 20th, 2007

http://www.yonderliesit.org/blog/

I have always had trouble believing am a Xicano. No matter that the evidence points to the fact that I am just that.

This has become even more apparent for me here in Europe. the Nordic corner, isolated from Aztlán. Being away from the motherland has proven a sky that raineth a mana of ideas. I started out by declaring myself a 187 exile. The first Xicano in Exile driven away by Pete Wilson and his conservative tirade of this and that of the likes of me. Then I wrote. I wrote and I discovered the real Xicano in me through the written word.

This has proven quite productive because xicanismo is closely tied to language. I am fortunate to love language so in the process of peeling the core that I had in proper Aztlán, using language as a peeler, I discovered layers of myself that I figure I would not have otherwise managed to put in evidence to the naked eye of the I. Through my language [read: English, Spanish, Spanglish, Espanglish, the southwest dialect] I learned who I really am. I found my roots. Being away from the American psycho identity dominatrix that usually sadomasochistic fellows like me tend to bed with gave airs of freedom unknown. It was a breath of fresh air away from the stars and stripes which hangeth upon us like a Democles sword.

We xicanos tend to prefer the gringo in us because it is just the gringo in us which makes us. And because some of us understand only that side and use our mexican heritage like a mourning gown we never take of we react naturally to anything that threatens this ‘identity’. Though this theory is hardly embraced because it means that Aztlán lieth not in one nation but precisely in the being of two de facto lands. So don’t expect people to nick away in approval at the latter exposed idea.

Little is known about the degree of gringoness in each in one of us. We discuss this not because doing so would mean too much differentiation rendering atoms a mere metaphorical image. So while we spouse in all glory all México we seldom do so our American side. Yuck say some. Too pocho, too gabacho.

We don mexican heritage like a perennial día de los muertos affair, in all earnest. Although some xicanos drape themselves in their mexicanness like a fashion gown, alas! their appearance or self image, shallow like a dead river bed, doth needeth a cork. This gringo alienates us from one another because as gringo nature is we feel different. The kind of different that says am better than you. An am and you world which builds canyons the like of the Grand one. It is a fact which cannot be denied. Tis easy to lay claim to Aztec culture and ignore the rest. Tis easy to lay ink to flesh temples of the Maya when Geronimo, so close yet so far away from Quetzalcoátl, remains in the sands of the Sonora Desert surrounded by the silence of time.

I, for example, have been excluded from my so-called brethren from both sides. My brethren xicano infected by Manifest Destiny from Los and my xicano brethren infected by mexican nationalism who are yet to realize how xicanos they are.

I feel the difference like a slight scent of garlic because am not fully Mexican and because am not fully American. That is my most natural state. A state that perhaps ensued in me a quest for learning to command the whip which castigated me the most, language. So I learned to command what the land gave me as a birthright. And this difference became even more apparent. I went below the shallow.
I was born in Tijuana. Of recent I have reached a sort of compromise with myself. I say am a xicano tijuanense. Un xicano de este lado. That is, a Xicano which is not born in the US.
By adhering to this formula I allowed myself to become closer to my own surroundings. That is, I saw that which nurtured me whilst I breathed Geronimo’s sand through nostrils filled with muck from other lands. Santa Ana winds cleared the way.

Off course it still irritates me to be xicano in the vicinity of my gringo cousins because though I speak english I am not a US citizen. Here in Sweden they a saying about Germans: there is a little Hitler in every German. I can say this about my gringo Xicano cousins: there is a little migra in every US born Xicano.

Posted in Xicano Commentary, Aztlán de mi vida, Tijuana and the like | Comments Off

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Surya Namaskar

2007-04-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

From:

Chant to accompany Surya Namaskar

Om Hram Mitraaya Namah Salutations to Mitra, the bestower of universal friendship

Om Hrim Ravaye Namah Salutations to Ravi, the bestower of radiance

Om Hrum Suryaaya Namah Salutations to Surya, the dispeller of darkness

Om Hraim Bhaanave Namah Salutations to Bhaanu, the shining principle

Om Hraum Khagaaya Namah Salutations to Khaga, the all-pervading

Om Hraha Pushne Namah Salutations to Pushan, the mystic fire

Om Hram Hiranyagarbhaaya Namah Salutations to Hiranyagarbha, the golden colored one (who brings healing)

Om Hrim Marichaye Namah Salutations to Marichi, the light

Om Hrum Aadityaya Namah Salutations to Aaditya (an aspect of Vishnu)

Om Hraim Savitre Namah Salutations to Savita (Savitri) the impeller

Om Hraum Arkaaya Namah Salutations to Arka, the remover of afflictions

Om Hraha Bhaaskaraaya Namah Salutations to Bhaskara, the cosmic brilliance

http://www.yogaisyouth.com/yiy/108.htm

What Is Terrapsychology?

2007-03-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

Craig Chalquist, MS PhD

http://www.terrapsych.com/whatisTP.html

For the last five hundred years of Western history, environmental research has confined itself primarily to looking at the world from the outside, through a screen of self-interests, numbers, theories, and data. Whether prompted by profit, curiosity, fear, or concern, this heavily quantitative style tends to frame the world as an object and ourselves as detached observers of it.

Yet every culture, including ours, has insisted throughout its pre-industrial stages that the world—including the sky, the air, the sea, and particularly the land—is alive, reactive, and very present to what human beings do upon it. From kami to lorelei, naiads to dryads, the Navajo Changing Woman to the Neoplatonic World Soul, every local folklore reflects what the Greeks and Romans knew as the genius loci, a resident “spirit of place.”

That such animated images have been depreciated as mere projections or primitive superstitions says less about indigenous or rural psychology than about an economically and colonially vested need to see the land as an exploitable resource and ourselves as above it, masters rather than dwellers or guests. Nevertheless, they recur time after time in place after place. Artists, poets, naturalists, nature healers, and wilderness guides have born frequent witness to the strength of this influence of the surround. So, finally, has psychology as it extended outward from inside the person to inside the family and beyond with constructs like the transference (Janet and Freud), the psychological field (Lewin), intersubjectivity (Stolorow and Atwood), the relational matrix (Mitchell), and ecopsychology.

Terrapsychology seeks to hinge the two great traditions of inner and outer knowledge—the richly animistic and the empirically scientific—by listening into the terrain and its features and occupants without losing what more external knowings can tell us about them. Put simply, terrapsychology is the deep study of the animated presence, or “soul,” of locale, made visible through deep connections with the human interior. It treats the places and things below and around us as psychological presences in a widely flung field.

It is precisely the power of these connections that the market- and conquest-driven Western habit of self-world mind-matter dualism has obscured. But if they inhabit our psychological field—and their persistent reappearance in dreams, symptoms, folklore, recurring motifs, and unhealed local histories suggests that they do—then we share an ongoing but nonvocal dialog with the things around us. Consider the following examples of this:

A man residing in a city heavily militarized in his absence discovers otherwise unanalyzable qualities of defensiveness and guardedness showing up in his relationship with a long-term resident.
A woman working in an oppressive, conflict-ridden institution realizes that she and her coworkers unknowingly repeat a 150-old local historical drama whose key player bore the same name as the institution’s.
A graduate student researching the designs of petroglyphs scattered around a present-day bombing range discovers carved images shaped like bombs, jets and explosions—images carved hundreds of years before the invention of missiles or aircraft. Indigenous locals attribute these parallels to the presence of the Thunderbird deity.
Another student preparing to visit a county he’s never been to dreams about it the night before his trip. The word “contaminated” occurs throughout the dream. When he arrives at the place, he finds this motif everywhere, from polluted bays and streams to invading species and underground oil spills.
In a small sample of interviewees asked about their experience of some sacred or meaningful place, all unknowingly describe it as though it were a soothing, healing, or mentoring person.
Shortly before a tsunami strikes, five tribes move inland to avoid a flood that destroys their villages. One medicine leader claims that the god responsible for the deluge warned him in a dream.

The tribalist says that the natural world acts like a community of living beings. The geologist says that natural disasters like tsunamis come from measurable seismic movements. What if both are partially correct?

From the mainstream perspective, the examples above seem superstitious in their evocation of a soul or spirit of place. But this perspective fails to distinguish between literalized animism—explaining meteorology or other natural events as being caused by a spirit or arcane force—and the inner experience of these events as animated, ensouled, and full of significance. That places and things act as though alive need not conflict with explaining them outwardly as Western science normally would. How we experience them depends on the mode of consciousness available: literalistic and externalized, or symbolic and interpretive.

The uncanny aliveness of the locations we inhabit seems to be the rule rather than the exception. It’s as though what the conscious mind sees as dead places and things, the unconscious reacts to as animated presences and metaphors. Borderlines and borderlands, polluted bays and polluted moods, personal complexes and apartment complexes all seem to resonate together. This should not surprise us. Not only can events in the world symbolize aspects of the human self, those aspects in turn point back to the features of the world that evolved our minds.

Terrapsychology aims to bring these resonances more fully into consciousness by using the psychological field in which they surface to listen in on parallels between human and ecological wounding and well-being. Rather than reducing one to the other, the method honors the fully interactive nature of placefield motifs—recurrent themes common to people and place—as multidimensional, interdependent, intersubjective, and symbolically connective and meaningful. In fact, given the “transferential field” they inhabit with us, we interpret them much like the images of dreams, where even the most literal facts carry symbolic impact.

When local events are reexamined as linked to our interior depths by motif and metaphor (the language of the unconscious)—in other words, as though they possessed their own subjectivity, inwardness, or psychical aspect—then a fortified border is not just a very tall fence: it also recurs as a psychic division, a cleavage of the heart, a spiritual dam, a cultural barrier, a split within the self, a political regression. Instead of a psyche confined to human heads, we behold an ecology of the heart, where verdant landscapes moisten verdant souls. The matter we would master enters into us at will over bridges of image and dream.

How is terrapsychology different from ecology or environmental psychology?

Terrapsychology follows the example of deep ecology and depth psychology by looking below the surface of obvious connections between persons and places. Mainstream studies show a high correlation, for example, between rates of obesity near expanding metropolitan regions, whereas a terrapsychological question would be: Do we need a new concept, obecity, to describe an unconscious but bodily registered connection between urban sprawl and expanding waistlines?

Is terrapsychology scientific?

In terms of “science” narrowly defined as a search for causal relationships, the answer would be no, but humanistic and transpersonal psychologies have pushed for broader definitions. To extend Abraham Maslow’s remarks about studying the uniqueness of individuals to the uniqueness of places and their features: If what we discover does not fit a particular idea of science, “then so much the worse for that conception of science.”

What kinds of research does terrapsychology conduct?

Because current quantitative and qualitative methods tend to split self from world, we are fashioning our own blend, called Terrapsychological Inquiry, which draws on phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethnology, naturalism, geology, geography, collaborative inquiry, and various techniques from depth psychology to put the presence of place directly into the foreground.

Can you prove that matter possesses qualities of subjectivity?

Not with purely quantitative methods. They can’t even prove that we possess a subjective life. Search for it and all that appears are neurotransmitters and complex nervous networks. No hidden vital principle, no homunculus pulling the strings anywhere, and why? Because subjectivity is not a locatable thing to be detected from without. It is the felt interior of matter: the “within” of everything, as Teilhard de Chardin expressed it. The more complex or "brainy" the matter, the more differentiated the subjectivity. Looking for a source of subjectivity with such crude instrumentation is like leveling a yardstick at the symphony-ghost floating in the space between stereophonic headphones. It breaks the basic engineering rule of “the right tool for the right job.” The terrapsychological view is that the right tool is the psychological field: using the researcher’s subjectivity to explore the subjective properties of a given location.

Do you investigate things like ley lines, morphogenic forces, vibrations, etc.?

Not usually. Aside from what’s mentioned above about the limits of quantitative methods, the thesis that places and things occupy interactional fields with us makes force explanations unnecessary. If a housing development or a forest are resonant, integral parts of someone’s psychological field, then looking for lines of force or energies stretching between them and the person’s psyche is less fruitful for us than uncovering more symbolic, transferential connections. Discussions of forces and energies also tend to be what analyst Heinz Kohut referred to as "experience-distant." We don't invalidate any of that, but we try to keep within the range of what we can sense and feel.

What are some of the benefits of this kind of investigation?

All who have done it feel closer to the world, to things, to the places where we live. They have come to be like persons to us. As a result of this interior connection, we are less willing to see our surroundings wasted and destroyed, and more willing to educate each other about the losses of sanity and joy and embodiment that parallel losses of air, water, and land. Human and ecological health, wholeness, and justice can not be legitimately separated.

We also find ourselves less inclined to unknowingly repeat, become entangled with, or otherwise act out themes of local or historical wounding. It sounds paradoxical, but the very expansion of consciousness that allows reassessment of local doings as psychical facts somehow detaches us from the shadows they cast into the human psyche. The materialism of an unconscious identification with the environment, the very regression indigenous psychology has been accused of being stuck in, gives way to an intersubjective dialog. It’s rather like the difference between knowing and loving an animal well—prizing its uniqueness, respecting its needs—and babying it to death, looking down on it, or covertly reinforcing its barking or biting.

Deep ecologists, naturalists, and bioregionalists have spoken and written at length about the need to reinhabit our surroundings, to live in them consciously and caringly. Wendell Berry’s observation that we Americans still have not truly arrived in America speaks to the need for this sense of emplacement, of being still long enough to feel connected and responsible. Terrapsychology engenders this while demonstrating how the what of our surroundings also tends to approach us as a who.

Terrapsychology: Reengaging The Soul Of Place

- Spring Journal Books -

Annual Free Seed Seconds Give-away at the Seeds of Change Research Farm

2007-03-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

Folks - this is forward from Seeds of Change Farm -

Annual Free Seed Seconds Give-away at the Seeds of Change Research
Farm
April 13, 2007
3:00-7:00 PM

Hello All,

It is that time of year again! Time to clean out your planting
trays, make up some seedling mix and hop on over to the Seeds of
Change Research Farm to get some seeds.

Scheduled time - Friday, April 13, 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM.

This year we are adding two activities to our agenda:

3:00-4:00pm A presentation by Emily Gatch and Emily Skelton on
starting seeds, creating your own soilless seed starting mix, seed
dormancy, germination and testing. This will be a great time to get
all of your questions answered about growing from seed.

4:00-6:00 PM Free Seed Give-away from our seed seconds and un-
sellable seed.

Bring your own ziplock baggies and a sharpie pen!

6:00-7:00pm Potluck Dinner. Please bring your favourite dish to
share with your neighbours and friends.

Location:

Seeds of Change Research Farm
340 County Road 0057
San Juan Pueblo, NM 87566
505-852-1508

See you there.

Emily Skelton
Seed Cleaning and Quality Co-ordinator

Freecycle(TM) Santa Fe

2007-03-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreeCycle_Santa_Fe/

Welcome to Freecycle(TM) Santa Fe.

Tired of your toaster oven, never opened the cappucino maker, have an extra yard of gravel in your driveway.

Post and someone will find it.

Give and take freely. Your lost labelmaker is someone elses treasure.

FREECYCLE ETIQUETTE

1) NO POLITICS NO SPAM. Two strikes you're out. By spam we mean any commercial e-mail soliciting products or services.

2) SUBJECT LINE
Use these phrases:
OFFER: old couch
TAKEN: old couch
WANTED: old couch. [Please use this one sparingly]
ADMIN: new idea

3) KEEP IT FREE.

4) NO TRADING PLEASE

5) FYI: RESPONSES GO ONLY TO OFFERER. It keeps down the sheer # of e-mails.

6) PICK UP. arrange as you like, generally, 1st responded, 1st serve, if a charity responds, you may want to give them a 1st shot.

7) PETS. It is okay to offer pets up for adoption. Please be responsible and compassionate whether you are adopting or giving up a pet. Make sure the pet is going to the right home.

8) NO sexually explicit items, alcohol, drugs or guns.

Copyright (C) 2003-2006 The Freecycle Network (Freecycle.org) All rights reserved. Freecycle and the Freecycle logo are trademarks of The Freecycle Network in the United States and/or other countries.

Impeachment in New Mexico Defeated

2007-03-09T15:54:00.000-08:00

Impeachment in New Mexico Defeated in Procedural Vote to Prevent Full Senate Debate. Senator John Grubesic Sends Out Beautiful Press Release.

In a move that appears to have been carefully orchestrated, New Mexico's impeachment resolution was blocked from full debate on the Senate floor by a handful of Democratic Senators, some of whom switched their votes for unknown reasons.

Here is the list of Senators who voted against the Resolution

Senator Ben Altamirano, President Pro Tem, Voted for it in Rules
Senator Pete Campos
Senator Carlos Cisneros, Signed the Bill but is on the Senate Finance Conference Committee with Smith and Jennings, strong opponents.
Senator Phil Griego
Senator Tim Jennings
Senator John Pinto
Senator John Arthur Smith
Senator James Taylor
Senator David Ulibarri, Voted for it in Public Affairs

From the media gallery, we noticed Senators Cisneros, Griego, Campos, Taylor and Smith in a huddle, but it wasn't until later that we considered its significance. Senator Altamirano, the President Pro Tem, appears to have been a strong voice on the topic, and there may have been some word from the Governor, although that is speculation. Please see Senator Grubesic's beautiful press release on the topic to go.

As I look at the way forward, I see several promising directions. There are still several important pieces of Legislation that need support, namely the No Real ID Resolutions, the Prohibit Nuclear Weapons Memorial and the Dismantle Kirtland Nuclear Weapons Permanently measure. I will need a day or so to examine the options and determine which to focus on and am interested in reader feedback on the subject.

At this point, it is also important to begin to turn once again to the national debate on the manufactured and propagandistic "War on Terror" and aggressively intervene in the ongoing lack of understanding there.

Several national marches will take place later this month, such as the March on the Pentagon on the anniversary of the Start of the Iraq War. Mother Media would like to join other citizen organizations in some sort of action here in Santa Fe on that day, and I believe there is significant effort involved in an Albuquerque event which we would like to publicize. There is also a multi-organization event this Saturday called by Dave Batcheler of the Constitution Party which may be of interest to some citizens, more information below Senator Grubesic's Press Release. I was enormously pleased recently to pick up my first Constitutionally sound Liberty Dollars in solid silver and silver certificate from Joe Thornton and his wife. I strongly support this intiative to use a currency that is backed by a commodity (any commodity would do, silver is handy and standard) and am thankful to Mr. Thornton and his wife Glorietta Miller of Carrizozo. Joe was formerly a registered Republican but one of our strongest impeachment team members. You can see his testimony in the several videos we created of the Rules and Public Affairs Committee Hearings which have had over 15,000 viewings between them. Congresswoman Liz Holtzman's videoconference testimony to Senator Ortiz y Pino is also now available online.

I very much enjoyed the opportunity to work with everyone, there were times where I felt we were all postively glowing in the Committee hearings. It is clear to me that we have a terrific team ready and willing to do what needs to be done in these dangerous, but opportune times. We must all do what we can to bring the issues that matter to the fore, and there is no better way to do so than as a candidate for office. To that end, I would like to offer my candidacy for US Senate and hope that you will let me know your thoughts on the issues that are important as well as recommendations for how I might be most effective on behalf of all of us, and Mother Earth. If you are interested in helping with such an initiative, let me know.

by Leland Lehrman h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458

Senate Joint Resolution 5 Killed in the Senate -- Procedure before People -- by Senator John T. L. Grubesic

Santa Fe, NM This country was founded by rebels. This country was forged in violence, ferocity, dissent and uproar. This country is vanishing before our eyes, not because we are blind, but because we are willing participants in its destruction. Today on the Senate floor you witnessed an excellent example. The Impeachment Resolution -- Senate Joint Resolution 5 died quietly with no debate whatsoever. The dignity of the New Mexico State Senate was maintained as we followed carefully designed rules of procedure to ensure that nothing disrupted the workings of this austere body. We did a great job of making it appear that government was working.

However, we have to ask, which government and on whose behalf? The action taken by the Senate was not the action taken by a body that protects the freedoms of a sovereign people. The action was a carefully orchestrated option designed to protect the integrity of an institution and perpetuate the well-oiled workings of government. A government that has evidently forgotten that we serve at the pleasure of those we govern.

It is clear that, from the highest levels of government in our country down to our State, very few of us want to deal with the unpleasant political mess that impeachment could become. Our actions today showed where our priorities are we forgot that the Constitution was not designed to serve government, but to protect the people. There should have been debate, argument, uproar. Instead, we quietly gutted the sovereign power of the people with polite political procedure.

When future generations look back on our time, the shock will not be because of the violent, impolite nature of the fight that preceded the destruction of Constitutional government, but by the meekness with which we watched it die.

Urgent Alert: Republicans Mount Counterattack, Stall Impeachment Resolution in Procedural Maneuver.

2007-03-08T08:30:00.000-08:00

Urgent Alert: Republicans Mount Counterattack, Stall Impeachment Resolution in Procedural Maneuver. Floor Vote Called Prior to Debate for Tomorrow, Thursday March 7th During Floor Session. All Citizens to the Roundhouse 9:30 AM On. Check Senate Print Media Gallery for Updates.

With shock I received word today from resolution sponsor Senator Ortiz y Pino's secretary Sharon Shaffer that the Republicans had used a procedural maneuver to stall the Impeachment Resolution and prevent a full debate on the floor. Immediately double-checking with Majority Leader Michael Sanchez's secretary Sharmaine, I realized that the impeachment resolution had been dealt a serious if not fatal blow.

During the ordinarily mundane reading of committee reports, wherein the Senate is informed of the decisions of the various Committees, the Republicans decided to block "adoption" of the Judiciary Committee report. They were successful in a voice vote largely because the Democrats, caught completely off guard, were not on hand in number to oppose the motion.

Majority Leader Michael Sanchez successfully held the roll call vote until the Democrats could be present in number, and when I spoke with him late in the day, he told me that the roll call vote would happen some time Thursday.

Therefore, it is now urgently important to call in high volume and with utmost respect to the swing vote Senators listed below under action items via the Capitol Switchboard at 986-4300. Let them know through their secretaries that the Republicans have chosen to use an unfair procedural method to require a vote on the resolution before it even gets a chance to be openly debated. Explain that there will be a Senate Floor roll call vote on the adoption of the Judiciary Committee Report with the Impeachment Resolution SJR 5 in it, and ask them to be on the floor alert to vote in favor.

This vote may be more difficult to win than the vote for final passage, because it must be taken without opportunity for debate on the merits of the resolution. Some believe that Senator Sanchez has everything under control and will successfully move adoption when he gets the opportunity. According to experienced sources, there is a remote possibility that there will be a "Call of the Senate" wherein the State Police are assigned to track down every Senator and all are required to be on hand. Regardless, this moment of truth will be a historic occasion and it is essential that maximum public scrutiny of the decision be brought to bear in order that the gravity of the decision be made clear by the citizenry. Be there. Along with the action items below, I have created two worksheets for serious citizens with the phone numbers of relevant Democratic Party Central Committee Members and County Chairs on it. Download and call away:

Basic List of All Relevant County Chairs and Vice Chairs
Complete List of All Relevant County Central Committee Members

Please lobby all media outlets aggressively to cover the floor vote.

Action Items:

Stay focused on the swing votes in order of difficulty from estimated hardest to easiest: John Arthur Smith, Shannon Robinson, Tim Jennings, Phil Griego, Lynda Lovejoy, Pete Campos, Nancy Rodriguez, John Pinto, and James Taylor. Lidio Rainaldi is a special case, having expressed exasperation with the amount of in-person activist pressure, but also appearing to be favorable. Senator Ortiz y Pino's strategy now is to leave all in-person negotiations to him, Senator Grubesic and the other favorable Senators. Some passionnate in-person testimony has disturbed undecided Senators and although understandable, it could swing the vote the wrong way.

Shannon Robinson, the respected sponsor of SJM 47 Prohibit Nuclear Weapons Production deserves special attention from Albuquerque voters, especially those in his district: 17. To find out if you are in his district, check the NM Legislature website at http://legis.state.nm.us . We can't really understand why he's against the resolution, and he needs to hear from his constituents. They can have a significant impact on him, especially delegates of the Bernalillo Democratic Party who should immediately pass a new resolution of support and forward it on to him.

Here's the info on the Bernalillo County Democratic Party Leadership for Senator Shannon Robinson:

Bernalillo County Democratic Party Officers: Chair: Marvin Moss (505) 298-2643 Vice Chair: Cate Stetson (505) 264-1658 130 Alvarado NE Suite 400 , Albuquerque New Mexico 87108 505-256-1855 (main) terribk7@aol.com

Here's the info on the Sierra, Luna and Hidalgo County Leadership, relevant to Senator John Arthur Smith (Deming):

Luna County Democratic Party Party Officers Chair: Sam Baca (505) 546-3322; Vice: Sonia Arteche (505) 546-3406 322 West Pine Street , Deming New Mexico 88030 505-544-4609 (main) 505-546-5777 (fax)

Sierra County Democratic Party Party Officers Chair: David W. Farrell (505) 895-3352, dafarrelli@hotmail.com Vice: Jan Thetford (505) 894-1208, jan@BlueFeatherEnergetics.com P O Box 583 , Truth Or Consequences New Mexico 87901 (505) 740-2700 (main) dafarrelli@hotmail.com

Hidalgo County Democratic Party Party Officers Chair: David Escobar (505) 542-8053 Vice Chair: Rebecca Estrada (505) 542-9629 1516 Main St. , Lordsburg New Mexico 88045 (505) 542-8053 (main)

Here's the info on Chaves County, relevant to Roswell Senator Tim Jennings along with Eddy, Lincoln and Otero:

Chaves County Democratic Party Party Officers Chair: Tom Jennings (505) 625-1984 Vice Chair: Melissa Jones- Witt PO Box 1797 , Roswell New Mexico 88202 505-623-8331 (main)

All County Party Information is here.

http://www.nmdemocrats.org/ht/d/GetLocal/letter/b/pid/360053

The below information is still relevant regarding the final outcome.

When contacted, Senator John Arthur Smith D - Hidalgo, Luna and Sierra was solid against and it now appears that Senator Shannon Robinson D-Bernalillo is solid against. Please call them as well as Senator Tim Jennings, John Arthur Smith's co-chair on Senate Finance who now becomes a serious swing vote, along with Senators Phil Griego, Pete Campos, Lynda Lovejoy and the other undecideds above. Most are expected to vote with the Democratic leadership which is now solidly on our side.

Please remember decorum without feeling overly restricted.

If you have not already memorized the phone number for the Capitol Switchboard which can connect you with anyone in the Roundhouse, it's 986-4300. Click the image above right to view the Public Affairs Commitee hearing video. Judiciary Committee video coming soon.

Basic Impeachment Background Here.

by Leland Lehrman h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458

NM Impeachment Resolution in Solid 5-1 Victory

2007-03-06T11:24:00.000-08:00

NM Impeachment Resolution in Solid 5-1 Victory in Senate Judiciary

Committee - Floor Vote Imminent

In what may be a national first, a State-initiated impeachment
resolution against the President and Vice-President of the United
States has reached the floor of a State Senate. Drawing support from
hundreds of supremely dedicated citizens willing to wait hours on both
weekends and weekdays for the opportunity to speak, the five Democrats
present on the New Mexico Senate Judiciary Committee, voted in favor
without doubt or hesitation. No audience member spoke against.

Former Congresswoman Liz Holtzman's expert witness testimony appeared
via videotape and was enormously influential due to her standing as a
member of the Judiciary Committee that begain impeachment proceedings
against Richard Nixon.

Senator Rod Adair, the sole Republican willing to answer the charges
made a best effort to deny them, but was ultimately unconvincing.
Predictably citing the now suspect war powers of the Executive Branch
and claiming that the United States is the guardian of the free world
against fascism and totalitarianism, Senator Adair used the propaganda
term Islamofascists to vilify America's opponents in the Middle East
and justify the ongoing wars. No Democrat attempted to refute Senator
Adair's position, but the hour was late and their vote said it all.

The resolution now goes to the Senate floor where the vote is expected
to be close. Majority Leader Michael Sanchez, who controls the floor
schedule, voted solidly without comment for the Resolution in
Judiciary and recently stated to the press that he expects the measure
to pass in a party line vote. However, Democratic Senators John Arthur
Smith and Shannon Robinson have declared their hesitance to vote for
the measure and Senator Tim Jennings and Phil Griego remain
uncommitted. There is some question as to whether or not the vote must
pass with a majority of the Senate (22 yes votes) or a majority of
those present. Authorities on the Rules of the New Mexico Legislature
are working on the question but believe that a majority of those
present will suffice.

All hands on deck by 1:30PM, Saturday at Capitol ready to stay into the evening.

2007-03-03T03:30:00.000-08:00

Impeachment Still in Judiciary, Senate Floor Vote Also Possible But Uncertain. Majority Leader Michael Sanchez and Democrats were in caucus last night perhaps discussing deal with Republicans. All hands on deck by 1:30PM, Saturday at Capitol ready to stay into the evening.
The best information we currently have is that SJR 5 is on the agenda in Judiciary today, Saturday, after 2:30PM in Room 321, but that Majority Leader Michael Sanchez may make a motion to take SJR 5 out of committee and down to the floor for a full three-hour debate and vote sometime after 1:30PM. There is some kind of deal rumored, namely, that the Republicans will get to have a controversial bill heard on the floor as well: Mandatory Parental Notification for women sixteen and under seeking abortion. The Senate Democrats and Republicans met in caucus yesterday, perhaps to discuss particulars.

Senator Sanchez has told the press that he expects the impeachment resolution to pass the Senate floor in a party line vote, but we've counted the votes and it is perilously close. According to the sponsor, Ortiz y Pino, a Senate Joint Resolution, since it has so much power, must pass with twenty two votes in favor, a true majority of the Senate, rather than just a majority of those present. Looking at it the other way, we can lose only two Democrats and still win. Senator John Arthur Smith D - Hidalgo, Luna and Sierra was solid against and it now appears that Senator Shannon Robinson D-Bernalillo is solid against. Please visit or call them as well as Senator Tim Jennings, John Arthur Smith's co-chair on Senate Finance who now becomes the swing vote, along with Senators Griego, Rainaldi and the other undecideds. Most are expected to vote with the Democratic leadership which is now apparently on our side.

But there's a new wrinkle, Senator Linda Lopez's mom may have had a stroke yesterday, and Linda is in the hospital and missed yesterday's session. If we lose her vote, Senator Robinson, and John Arthur Smith, we lose. There are of course plenty of other ways this could go, but that's my concern. Absolutely all respectful, supportive testimony and documentation must be brought to bear on Senators Jennings, Robinson, Griego, Rainaldi and John Arthur Smith. Prayers for Senator Lopez and her family are in order. There will be DVDs available of former US Congresswoman Liz Holtzman's videoconference testimony in favor and a viewing station set up in the Roundhouse by around 1pm, check with impeachment headquarters in Senator Ortiz y Pino's office, Room 414.

Although there is no longer any real concern that the bill will be heard on the floor in the morning session today, the best guidance I can offer is that all citizens get to the Roundhouse by 10:30AM for the 11:00 opening of business on the floor. That half hour is the best window available for direct discussion with Senators as they come down from committee to the floor, which is open to citizens until roll is called. Today is likely to be a fateful one, and we will be metaphorically painted and in full ceremonial dress. I will be moving between the Senate Majority Leader's office and the Information Desk at the East Entrance from 10:00 or so helping people identify and pitch the Senators. Terrence McCarthy and Nancy Kenney, among others, will be set up in the Senate Media Gallery where one may also find allies. Once again, you may be able to reach me through Arwen's cell phone: (505) 603-6084. It is also possible to have the operator page me from the information desk if necessary.

Please also note decorum without feeling overly restricted. No clapping in Committee after speeches or from the gallery.

Basic Impeachment Background Here.

by Leland Lehrman h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458

Urgent Update: Impeachment Resolution

2007-03-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

Urgent Update: Impeachment Resolution May Bypass the Judiciary Committee and Go Straight to the Senate Floor Vote During Friday, Saturday Sessions.
There is speculation that action may happen on Friday, March 2nd to take SJR 5 out of the Judiciary Committee. Attorney Randall Cherry - Senator McSorley's staff analyst - is the source of this information as directly relayed by citizen Terrence McCarthy of Vivo Studios. Jim Williams of KUNM and Dorothy Fadiman, Concentric.org, co-producer of the video linked at right above provided corroborating statements.

Since both the bill sponsor and the Committee Chairman are already in favor, they can make a motion on the floor in open session that the Resolution bypass Judiciary. However, this motion must receive unanimous consent - not likely - or then win either a voice or roll-call vote. According to Charlotte Roybal, longtime Democratic Party delegate, if the Senate votes to take the resolution out of Judiciary, floor debate on the resolution will still have to wait until Saturday, perhaps around 10AM. Stay tuned via either the sponsors Ortiz y Pino and Grubesic's office, Judiciary Chairman McSorley's office or the Majority Leader Sanchez' office. Again, all can be contacted at 986-4300. Did you memorize the number yet?

It is now time to count our votes on the entire Senate floor. If all the Republicans vote together and are present (likely), we can afford to lose only three Democratic votes against or five abstentions. We know that John Arthur Smith D - Hidalgo, Luna and Sierra was solid against. Tim Jennings D - Chaves, Eddy, Lincoln and Otero may take his cue from Smith, but is on the fence, having told me personally: "You can't impeach someone for stupidity." Sen. Lidio Rainaldi is known for conservatism, and declined an information packet recently offerred saying that he already knew how he was voting, but not saying how that was. Senator Phil Griego, D-Los Alamos, Mora, Sandoval, San Miguel, Santa Fe, Taos is also well-known for skepticism and the following Senators' votes are not known: John Pinto, Lynda Lovejoy, Nancy Rodriguez, Pete Campos, James Taylor, Shannon Robinson.

Given that that the timetable for the floor vote has been accelerated, it is now time for the full-court press. Every Democratic undecided Senator, all the time, especially the swing votes: Sanchez above all, the rest of the above undecideds and some say Altamirano. Although he voted for the resolution in Rules Committee, Senators do not always vote for a bill on the floor the way they did in Committee, for various reasons.

Please also note decorum without feeling overly restricted. No clapping after speeches or votes in committee or from the gallery, in particular. Although I find the thought that decorum should have an impact on a meaningful vote abhorrent, I must admit that as a father, there have been times when my children's unruly behavior has brought my anger upon them. I'm not proud of it, and there can be one hell of a fuss when they don't get to watch a movie, but sometimes it happens and I have to end up apologizing later if I was out of order.

We won't get a second chance.

I am going to leave the number and type of speakers to the sponsor and the Chair this time. The sponsors are now suggesting that we focus on the "asking for an investigation" part and avoid rendering verdicts in our testimony. I agree there may be some merit to the cautious approach at this time. Apparently it may help us with swing voters. Take this under advisement, but it is not meant to stifle your initiative, which is the most precious of all the human qualities found on this team.

If you have not already memorized the phone number for the Capitol Switchboard which can connect you with anyone in the Roundhouse, it's 986-4300. Citizens will be onsite at the Roundhouse tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday to assist if you would like to hit any of the key offices in person. Please look for us either on the floor, outside the Majority Leader's office, or in the Media Gallery overlooking the House floor on the East Side of the Capitol Building. I can be paged at the Information Desk on the East Side. I will be also be leaving updates with Arwen Gwyneth Hubbard at (505) 603-6084 and may be reachable at that number. Click the image above right to view the Rules Commitee hearing. The Public Affairs hearing will be online shortly. Basic Impeachment Background Here.
by Leland Lehrman h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458

Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing Saturday for NM Impeachment Resolution.

2007-03-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing Saturday for NM Impeachment Resolution.
The Saturday hearing will probably be after the floor session, however, we do not know exactly when that will be. The best guess is after 3PM, but maybe in the morning and possibly not until 7PM, as we are at the back of the agenda. Stay in touch with Senator McSorley's office for updated time information: 986-4485. Please continue to call Senators Michael Sanchez, Lidio Rainaldi and Richard Martinez, the swing votes on the Judiciary Committee. If you have not already memorized the phone number for the Capitol Switchboard which can connect you with anyone in the Roundhouse, it's 986-4300. Click the image above right to view the Rules Commitee hearing. The Public Affairs hearing will be online shortly. Basic Impeachment Background Here.
by Leland Lehrman h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458

The below action items are still relevant, but I want to make a commentary on the proceedings. Senator Michael Sanchez, as the Majority Leader, is supremely important to the success of this initiative for more than just the reasons given below: swing vote on Judiciary and in charge of the Senate Floor hearing. Because he is in charge of the Senate Floor schedule, he also decides which House Bills get heard on the Senate floor, giving him enormous leverage with House members. What this means is that we will need his support not just to get the resolution onto the floor of the Senate, but to get it through the House. We will need him, for example, to recommend to House Majority Leader Ken Martinez that it receive only one committee if possible. If it must receive two committees, we will need his support asking the Chairs of those committees to schedule it quickly. As the session winds down, the competition for passage gets intense, and the question is no longer do the Legislators support the bill, but how much do they support it? Are they willing to take the chance that it will be a "showstopper," as House Majority Leader Ken Martinez worried.

Controversial bills such as this one become hot potatoes, and the horse trading gets heated over them. Republican procedural moves like boycotts and filibusters become likely. We could get pressure from allies who have other bills that are in danger because of our resolution. Absolutely the only way to make sure that we succeed in the face of such resistance will be massive citizen pressure, both on the legislators themselves as well as on the press. These two "estates" must be lobbied with equal skill and dedication in order to create the synergistic effect known as "the story," wherein the entire population suddenly becomes involved in a kind of collective consciousness event. The energy around the initiative is already moving in that direction, with television producers beginning to focus on it and radio, print and internet audiences already well-attuned.

The Rules Commitee documentary has been seen nearly 8,000 times since it was first uploaded, and is ranked five stars.

New Mexico Impeachment Resolution in Stunning 3-2 Victory Sunday.

2007-02-26T19:16:00.000-08:00

New Mexico Impeachment Resolution in Stunning 3-2 Victory Sunday. All Eyes Turn to Judiciary Committee and Swing Votes Sanchez, Rainaldi and Martinez
Judiciary Chairman Cisco McSorley both signed and voted for the bill in Rules and we hope to get a hearing this week, but have heard from the Committee Secretary Mary Parlet that it will not be scheduled until next week. Supportive and thankful calls to his office encouraging a hearing as soon as possible are in order. More importantly please call Senators Michael Sanchez, Lidio Rainaldi and Richard Martinez, the swing votes on the Judiciary Committee. If you have not already memorized the phone number for the Capitol Switchboard who can connect you with anyone in the Roundhouse, dial 986-4300.
Basic Impeachment Background Here.
by Leland Lehrman h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458

Video coverage of the event will be available online shortly. Video
coverage of the Rules Committee hearing is at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4529463175813468205&hl=en

Video of the introductory Press Conference is at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9070880407596532695&hl=en

More information on the New Mexico effort to impeach Bush and Cheney
can be found at:
http://mothermedia.org and http://afterdowningstreet.org/nm

NM Impeachment Resolution Public Affairs Hearing

2007-02-25T21:35:00.000-08:00

I didn't get inside the hearing, but I was fortunate to hear this man's music. If the crowd in the hall outside the hearing was indicative of the out come, it was yay for impeachment.

Google Video of New Mexico Resolution to Impeach Bush and Cheney in Rules Committee 5-0 Victory

2007-02-25T09:54:00.000-08:00

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4529463175813468205&hl=en

This video was taken on February 16th. We won that round 5-0. At 2:30 today, Sunday, Feb. 25th, the resolution gets heard in Senate Public Affairs. We will have that video ASAP. But this one is amazing. Do all you can to get it out there. For those not familiar with the situation, please see http://mothermedia.org and http://afterdowningstreet.org/nm

Local seed bombing

2007-02-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

I am thinking to make a variety of seed bombs that focus around local tree guilds. I think the easiest will be acacia and sumac, but I would also like to make some with ponderosas too. I am planning to use the guild format, putting complimentary seeds together in guilds so they help each other out.

Another idea I had was to make three sisters bombs.

If anyone has any good ideas let me know.

Below are some links about seed bombs in general.

Seed bombing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Seed bomb)

Jump to: navigation, search

Seed bombing, also known as "Seed Grenades" is a technique of introducing vegetation to arid soils or otherwise inhospitable terrains. A seed bomb is a compressed clod of soil containing live vegetation that may be thrown or dropped onto a terrain to be modified. The term "seed grenade" was first used by Liz Christy in 1973 when she started the "Green Guerillas". The first seed grenades were made from balloons filled with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer. The seed grenades were tossed over fences onto empty lots in New York City in order to make the neighborhoods look better. It was the start of the Guerrilla Gardening movement.

[edit] External links

Original Seed Bomb instructions

http://greenmuseum.org/content/work_index/img_id-11__prev_size-0__artist_id-3__work_id-4.html

http://www.bittermelon.org/SeedBomb.htm

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/02/guerilla_garden_1.php

http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

2007-02-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

http://resistancetraining.wordpress.com/2007/02/24/
the-power-of-community-how-cuba-survived-peak-oil/

NM Impeachment Resolution Public Affairs Hearing Set for Sunday, February 25th around 2PM, Room 321.

2007-02-23T07:56:00.000-08:00

NM Impeachment Resolution Public Affairs Hearing Set for Sunday, February 25th around 2PM, Room 321.
Senators Mary Kay Papen D- Dona Ana and David Ulibarri D-Cibola, Valencia, Socorro are still the swing votes. Continue to call their offices as well as those of the Dona Ana, Cibola, Valencia and Socorro County Democratic Legislative delegations via the Capitol Switchboard: (505) 986-4300. Call the Democratic County Party Leaders in the above counties, contact info below. Ask them to pass a resolution of support and call Sen. Papen and Ulibarri. Basic Impeachment Background Here.
by Leland Lehrman h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458

Fearless citizen Paulette Frankl suggested I stick to action items. Here's what we need to do in order to win in Public Affairs on Sunday. Remember our neighbors in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world, and be ambitious. The official schedule will be posted on the New Mexico Legislature website later today.

1. Bring all your friends. Call everyone you know and tell them about the hearing. Call the press and ask them to cover it. Come early to get a seat, bring signs to hold outside and cameras. Memorize one phone number: 986-4300, the Capitol Switchboard. Forward this message to your lists and friends.

2. Personally visit with Senators Papen and Ulibarri in the Capitol Building. Volunteers will show you how to pull them off the floor or find them in the Roundhouse if you would like to learn the process. We have a team of volunteers who will be at the Roundhouse daily, call Terrence McCarthy at 231-8382 or David Luckey at 986-6022 to arrange. Grab your copy of the 2007 Legislative Almanac at the Information Desk. Bring multiple copies of a personal letter addressed to "Senator/Representative [Leave Name Blank]" so you can fill it in as needed. Bring copies of the resolution itself, our talking points, the New Mexico Democratic Party platform, and your favorite documentation on the subject. My favorite is James Bamford's article on ACLU vs NSA which shows that a Federal Judge has found the Bush Administration guilty as charged for violating the Constitution as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Senator Ortiz y Pino's latest official SJR 5 Press Release is also useful.

3. Call or visit with the other Senators and Representatives from Dona Ana, Cibola, Valencia and Socorro County. These are Senator Papen and Ulibarri's neighbors. Senators Mary Jane Garcia and Cynthia Nava, D-Dona Ana are in support. Ask them to talk with Sen. Papen. Representatives Antonio Lujan, Mary Helen Garcia and Joni Marie Gutierrez, D-Dona Ana are also in support. Ask them to speak with Senator Papen. Call Senator Linda Lovejoy, the Navajo. Ask her to support and speak with Sen. Ulibarri. Call Majority Leader Ken Martinez, D-Cibola and ask him to support and speak with Ulibarri. For Ulibarri also call Reps. George Hanosh, Elias Barela, Andrew Barreras and Irvin Harrison. For Papen also call Rep. Nunez. Many of these legislators are Democratic Party delegates and will have been at the Platform Convention to hear the roar of applause when the Impeachment Resolution passed last March. Remind them of it. Senator Tim Jennings of Roswell is reported to have influence with Senator Papen. He's on the fence, and told me you can't impeach Bush for stupidity. Let him know what it's really about, and then ask him to speak with Senator Papen.

4. Call the leaders of the Dona Ana, Cibola, Valencia and Socorro County Democratic Party, most of whom were also delegates to the Platform Convention. Ask them to pass a resolution in support of SJR 5, to announce the hearing on Sunday to the party members, to attend it, and to call their Senators. For Dona Ana County, we have two Democratic Party phone lists: the leadership list and the delegates to the Convention list. Call a page or so.

5. If you're religious, pray. If not, focus your intention.

If you can support us financially, buy an ad in this newsletter or in the Sun News. This bulletin is on the web at http://mothermedia.org for those who don't have html email. Send paypal to leland@33o.com or use the link below for credit cards.

All experience gained elsewhere, fails in New Mexico

2007-02-22T21:06:00.000-08:00

1st house spider

2007-02-22T20:38:00.000-08:00

The First Ladybug of 2007

2007-02-22T11:47:00.000-08:00

2007-02-21T07:03:00.000-08:00

All Hands on Deck in Support of upcoming Public Affairs Impeachment Hearing - Senator Jeff Bingaman at the New Mexico Capitol on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 10 AM - We May Get a Chance to Petition Him on Iran and Impeachment
Senators Mary Kay Papen and David Ulibarri are the swing votes on Public Affairs. Please call their offices via the Capitol Switchboard: (505) 986-4300. Also please call Senate Public Affairs Committee Chairwoman Senator Dede Feldman encouraging her to schedule the hearing this week (Friday or Sunday) and thanking her for her leadership on the issue and her positive vote in Rules. Basic Background Here.
by Leland Lehrman h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458

This is it folks, over the next three to five days we are looking down the barrel of the Legislative gun. Dona Ana County Senator Mary Kay Papen, in a frank and cordial exchange of views, declared her disinclination today to support the resolution to impeach. However, it was not a hostile no, and sources close to her office consider her undecided. She expressed her openness to constituent opinion and responded favorably when I offered her a press packet with several editorials, news articles, the NM Democratic Party Platform and talking points. It is now essential that members of the Dona Ana county Democratic Party remind Senator Papen of the Democratic Party's official resolution to impeach made with overwhelming support in March of 2006. The Republicans have indicated they plan to attend the hearing. If they do, and either Ulibarri or Papen vote with them, it's over.

Public Affairs Committee Chairwoman Senator Dede Feldman decided not to take the resolution out of her committee today, fearing Republican opposition. She also asked that we limit the number of speakers at the Public Affairs Committee to five, which number I hope is still negotiable. It is essential that citizens be on standby to arrive early to get a seat at either Friday's 2:30pm hearing or Sunday's hearing if scheduled. Final date confirmation should come tomorrow. We will get a show of hands audience vote at the hearing and our presence will not be overlooked. I am also asking that those willing to support my testimony please send me their name, city and phone number such that I can invoke you all when I testify and present our petition to the Committee.

There are other things we citizens can do since urgent political action is necessary. Please contact Senator Papen's Dona Ana County Democratic Party Chairwoman Melinda Whitley at (505) 523-0470 and Vice-Chair Carlos Riis Gonzalez at (505) 202-1040. Please also call Senator Ulibarri's Cibola County Democratic Party Chairman Bruce Boynton at (505) 285-4242 and Vice Chair: Elisa Bro (505) 287-4915. (Extra Credit: Call the Valencia and Socorro County Democratic Party Leadership) Ask them to call an emergency meeting to put forward a new resolution in support of SJR 5 and to call their Senators in support. Santa Fe and Grants County have already put forward new resolutions, thank you. At bottom please find the official letter from the Santa Fe County Democrats. Feel free to use it as a template in your own county. Here is the news story on the Grants County Resolution in Support of SJR 5 Impeach Bush and Cheney:

http://www.scsun-news.com/news/ci_5197003

We do have plenty of support down South. Majority Whip, Dona Ana County Senator Mary Jane Garcia signed the bill and is expected to vote in favor on Public Affairs. She - along with Reps. Antonio Lujan and Mary Helen Garcia who are also supportive - should be contacted through the switchboard (505) 986-4300 and urged to impress upon Senator Papen the importance of voting for impeachment: warrantless wiretapping, lying to congress to provoke war, ordering torture and the suspension of habeas corpus.

News Recap from the Rules Committee Hearing

Bulletin: Citizens Inspire New Mexico Rules Committee in 5-0 Vote in Favor of Impeachment Despite Republican Boycott.

When President Pro Tem Senator Ben Altamirano, the swing vote on the Rules Committee, seconded the motion to impeach, it was clear the people had done their job well. Well over one hundred people, nearly fifty of whom spoke, crammed into the Rules Committee hearing room. After impassioned speeches from the citizenry, the Democratic Senators made intelligent, straightforward comments in favor. When the final vote to impeach was cast, applause could be heard all the way outside in the halls of the Roundhouse. But there is much more to do. We have just one month to get through two more committees, the Senate floor vote, the House committees and the House floor vote.

A good summary of events at the Roundhouse last Friday can be found on the Democracy for New Mexico blog here:

http://tinyurl.com/2xxej5

But today I will focus on what we need to do now. The swing votes on the Public Affairs committee are Senators Mary Kay Papen of Las Cruces and David Ulibarri of Grants. It is essential to mention to them that the New Mexico Democratic Party overwhelmingly supported the Impeachment Resolution at the March 2006 Platform Convention:

http://www.nmdemocrats.org/ht/a/GetDocumentAction/i/838875

Senator Papen was confused on this point, suggesting to me that the support was lukwarm. However, the unanimous opinion of the delegates I know who were there is that of the 1200 delegates, there were only 22 or so against. The thunderous standing ovation in favor took the gavel of the Chairman to quiet. Senator Ulibarri has spoken favorably about the resolution to us, but has not committed his vote either way.

The people of New Mexico brought us to tears in Rules. A man with his son shipping out to Iraq this week, a former CIA officer, Judge Anne Kass, Republicans for Impeachment, youth, Veterans for Peace, a Rabbi - it was amazing. There was not a single voice of opposition, as even the Republicans on the committee hid throughout the proceedings.

Although Senator Papen's vote may be difficult to get, the right amount of support from her constituents should bring it around. It certainly did in the case of Senator Altamirano. If the next committee hearing is as impressive as the last one, Senator Papen may change her mind on the spot. But in order to keep the momentum building, we need your help.

Furthermore, we urgently need to raise money for video production and extra people to monitor the press and stay on the Senators. This is where those not in New Mexico can help greatly, because with money, we can quickly turn around video production like the above and post it on Google Video. Volunteers are great, but they frequently cannot work quickly, something we must now do.

We lost time and energy due to the fact that our Senators were not aware of discouraging and erroneous information that came out in the media. We need to keep a close eye on the press and make sure that such stories are countered effectively and immediately. Extra full-time eyes and hands on the scene are now essential such that foolish mistakes don't cost us more time.

The best way to help Mother Media's impeachment efforts is to buy an advertisement in this newsletter or in our print partner, The Northern New Mexico Sun News. You can send support via paypal to leland@33o.com or by clicking the link at the top. Checks can be sent to the address below. Thank you for helping us prevent further catastrophe at the hands of this ruthless and lawless Executive Branch.

Leland Lehrman
163 Old Lamy Trail
Lamy, NM 87540
h: (505) 982-3609 o: (505) 473-4458
leland.lehrman@gmail.com

To Santa Fe County Democrats,

State Senator John Grubesic of Santa Fe joined Senator Gerald Ortiz y Pino of Albuquerque in sponsoring Senate Joint Resolution 5, Impeach President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. The resolution is in line with the Democratic Party Platform as established at the platform convention in March of 2006 where impeachment was put on the platform with thunderous applause by more than 95% of the 1200 delegates present.

We hope you will voice your support for the resolution by calling President Pro Tem of the Senate Ben Altamirano and Majority Leader Michael Sanchez to urge their support for the resolution. Their support is necessary for passage. Call any legislator at the switchboard: 986-4300. We also need Senators Rainaldi, Papen, Ulibarri and Martinez of the Public Affairs and Judiciary Committees.

The resolution may come before the Senate Public Affairs Committee as soon as this Friday, February 23rd around 2:30pm in Rm 303 at the Roundhouse. It will be officially posted on the Senate Committee schedule:
http://legis.state.nm.us/lcs/agecalendars.asp
later this week. We hope you will make time to attend the hearing and voice your support for the resolution.

As the President ignores the American people and Congress on the subject of Iraq and prepares for war with Iran, it becomes more and more obvious that the duty of citizens is to impeach. The resolution itself lists four charges, which under Jefferson's Rules of the House can be transmitted by a State Legislature triggering Federal proceedings:

1. Lying to Congress to provoke war. 2. Ordering warrantless wiretapping. 3. Ordering torture. 4. Ordering illegal detentions.

Any one of these charges is grounds for impeachment. In the case of ACLU vs. NSA, federal judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the President had "indisputably violated" not only the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, but also statutory law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

How long can we allow the Executive Branch to put itself above the law before our cherished Democratic Republic is destroyed, taking the world with it? Now is the time to act. Please attend the Rules Committee Hearing this Friday morning around 9 AM and call Senator Ben Altamirano and Majority Leader Michael Sanchez asking them to support the Democratic Party platform and the welfare of the American people and the world.

Sincerely,

Connie Salazar, Chair Santa Fe County Resolutions Committee and Member of the NM Democratic Party Resolutions Committee

An interview with Chellis Glendinning

2007-02-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

http://inthewake.org/glendinning1.html

Chellis Glendinning is writer and a psychologist specializing in recovery from post-traumatic stress. She is the author of Waking Up in the Nuclear Age (1987); When Technology Wounds (1990); My Name Is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization (1994); Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy (1999, 2002); and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade (2005). Off the Map won the National Federation of Press Women 2000 Book Award. I interviewed her by telephone in January, 2005.

Aric McBay: Can you tell us about the community where you are living now?

Chellis Glendinning: I live in the village of Chimayó, New Mexico. It is one of a number of villages, a village system, that was established in the 1700's and the 1800's. It was Spanish culture meeting an indigenous situation. But the people themselves were only partly Spanish. A lot of them were Mexican natives, and a number of Moors and Jews. Also there was intermarrying with Native people here in the Rio Grande Valley. And then there were also various people who were fleeing Europe, so there were Greeks, Irish, and other kinds of folk. What we call the result is Chicano, but it's a in fact a big mixture.

Each village has its own common lands that usually extend out from the village into the forest. So the setup is fairly archetypal the world around, and it's a setup of sustainable living with hunting, fishing, and small agriculture. I've been living here for more than twelve years.

AM: Can you tell us a little bit about the changes that have been happening recently in your village in terms of encroachments by the dominant culture?

CG: There's been a huge change. Such that the place is unrecognizable in a way because, in I'd say the last four years, around the turn of the millennium, the changes really started. And they all happened at once so it's hard to point to one thing. Before this, the old way was very much being lived and assumed. The old philosophy was part and parcel of every breath.

Then all of a sudden, we get the big freeway coming up from Sante Fe, we get the WalMart, we get the cell phones, we get the satellite dish. For the longest time it seemed like just one person in the village had a computer, and all of a sudden, computers became common. Right now we're just getting the Home Improvement, so when that thing opens it is going to be the end of traditional adobe architecture.

And also a lot of money that came in. So that there was new clothes, new cars, and everything changed.

AM: How are people psychologically reacting to some of the changes that you are seeing now?

CG: Well, it's very new, so that's hard to say. I think that that's something we can maybe talk about in ten years. I think that a lot of people are excited about the changes right now.

AM: Is mostly the young people who are excited about it, or is that something that spans across different ages?

CG: I think a lot of people are excited about it. For many young people, it's all they've ever known.

AM: What has the relationship of the people in your community been to the civilized people who have been increasingly encroaching over the last few decades?

CG: Well, one of the reasons why I really like living here - and I felt at home immediately - is because of the gut level mistrust of things that come in from outside.

An example is when some poor, unsuspecting bank - who did not realize that they were dealing with what we call El Norte - put an ATM machine in Chimayó.

It was out in a place that used to be a barn that had a kind of overhang. I can't think of the world in English but in Navajo it's cha-ah-o. It's got poles with a roof, cha-ah-o. A "carport"-type thing, I guess is the word. Only it wasn't made out of carport materials, it was made out of wood and brush from the forest. This was a place to where the horses from around in that area would always escape and meet with each other to hang out under the cha-ah-o. Well, this is the building where the bank decided to put the ATM machine. [Laughter]

They made that cha-ah-o thing the pull-up, so you could be protected from the rain or whatever. Not very much time went by before the guys in the village took their hunting rifles and shot the ATM to shreds. Just shot it to shreds! There was nothing left of it.

The bank just fled.

Another story is when the state come up here from the capital, Sante Fe, to put a dam in. And so they decided they were going to hire the local people from the village of Chimayó and also other villages nearby: Truchas, Córdova.

The people from the state said it was going to take about six months to do the project. Every day the guys would go up there, and this was just great, they had a job, they got money.

And they built things and whatnot, and at the end of the day they'd come back to the village and have dinner. Then in the dark of the night they'd go up there and burn down whatever it was that they'd built that day!

AM: Wow.

CG: There was a real distaste for anything coming in from the outside world. Which I'm very sorry to say has been seduced out of the people.

One of the first things that happened was that they brought in these cell phones, and they started putting towers up. It's not a tower that we have, a cell phone tower that spews microwave radiation out in 360 degrees. It's more like a relay, that's channeling radiation to the next tower.

It was put up right in our village. It's very obvious, and the act of putting it up was very obvious. But nobody did anything. I was the only one who seemed to be appalled at this thing. I had a lot of information on the health effects of microwave radiation. I can't fully explain what happened to that can-do attitude that was so prevalent before.

AM: So did you have television at this point? When the tower came in?

CG: Having technology was spotty in the beginning of my time here. Not everybody had a telephone. Very often if you called somebody you were calling the phone next door, and you would have to wait fifteen minutes while someone would go over and get them. Not everybody had a television. Not everybody had running water. Not everybody had a toilet. Certainly not everybody had a car.

I grew up in a time when the telephone numbers were things like "Fairmount one, oh-nine-hundred," "Yellowstone two, nine-five-seven-four," things like that. And then at a certain point, and I think it was in the seventies, they changed to all numbers.

I'm not bragging that this was a major Luddite act, maybe it was more an act of nostalgia on my part. But I thought, "Well, why don't we in our village," - because each village has its own unique telephone exchange - "why don't we go back to what '351' was before it got changed to all numbers?" I got these blank stares. All we really would have had to do was change the zeitgeist of three thousand people. But I got blank stares. It turned out that we didn't get phones in the village of Chimayó until the rest of the country had already changed to all numbers!

AM: I'm curious about some of the differences that you've observed from when you were - were you living in San Francisco before you moved there, or...

CG: I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and went briefly to college on the East Coast. Then I went to Berkeley and lived in the Bay Area for twenty years. Then I moved here. I moved to another village first. So I was living in another village for about seven years.

AM: I'm curious about some of the differences that you've observed between people living in the Big Cities and people living in the communities where you are. And, in general what do you think makes the dominant society, civilization, so distinct from sustainable and indigenous communities?

CG: That is an incredible topic. I don't even know if I can bring words to it. Every time I go somewhere, like the Bay area, I cannot believe it.

Somebody picks me up at the airport, let's say, who maybe I've known for a long time. They look at me, and the basic difference is that I'm wearing jeans and cowboy boots, but who cares? They look at me and I look like I'm the same person I was before. And so they start talking to me the way that they talk to each other. And I have absolutely no idea what are talking about.

I have to negotiate a massive cultural shift. Now often these are radical people with whom I agree on a lot of things, people who eat health foods and are against the war in Iraq, and are feminists and all that. But there's this bottom line difference in their set of assumptions and experiences. After two or three days I can figure out what's going on. And then I can participate in their world. But they can't know where I'm coming from.

It's been a really interesting education for me in terms of how Native people have to interface with people from the dominant society. Clearly Native people feel like they're not being understood. Where they come from - what they know - is a separate reality.

I've taken living here very seriously. I've taken it as seriously as anything I've ever done in my life. In many ways I've been assimilated into this world.

AM: I lived under a tarp in a forest defense campaign out in the woods for about six weeks at one point, and I and the other people who lived there noticed that whenever we went back into the city it was a completely different - and really very unpleasant - experience to be in that environment. And that everyone behaved in a completely manner than we did in our little autonomous collective. And I can only imagine the changes that would occur after decades of living outside of that.

CG: I can make a stab at explaining what some of these things are.

AM: Please do!

CG: One thing is that life here is face-to-face. You know everybody. And if you don't know everybody, you probably know their family. This is not mass society.

Your experience is your guide. It doesn't matter that people here don't read books, so much, that many people have not been "educated" in the way that the dominant society defines what education is.

People know about things based on experience, or based on what the culture has given them. Let's take something like "psychology." People's understanding of what the human psyche is capable of and how to deal with is is highly honed. But the understanding is not abstracted, or in the same language that you learn at psychology school.

When people talk about basic human knowledge, it's often explained in terms of stories. And that's the lifeblood of village life - the stories.

There are workshops and classes and conferences on story-telling in the dominant society, but still, in a way, it's a thing outside of ourselves. But when you are living in a culture where story-telling is the way information is passed around, it becomes second nature. It is how people know things.

There's something very human-scale about this, because that's the way that were created to understand life. There's something very handleable about it. And also there are things that emerge from that.

For instance, when story-telling forms the basis for how people know and think, there's a lot of room for people to be themselves. Out in the dominant society there are rules; you're allowed to have a tear, but you can't burst out crying. Or you can't get angry.

In this world you can be however you're going to be. Life is viewed as a process. So if one day someone's out there shouting and screaming and tearing down the fence, the next day it's back to normal. It's no big deal.

If such a thing happened in suburbia, it would be all shameful, and perhaps the family would be tainted for generations to come.

In the village life where everything hangs out and life is viewed as a process, there's no disaster if somebody has some kind of an outburst.

AM: That's great!

CG: And also, in the dominant society, there's an emphasis on achievement. Individual achievement. We might surmise that - with the loss of the connectedness to other people, to the tribe, to the natural world and to sustainable life in the natural world, with the loss of all that, and with an arising economic system emphasizing the survival of the individual or the nuclear family unit - then individual achievement becomes the meaning of life. I was dating a guy who was a local farmer, and I asked him, "What do you want for the rest of your life?"

And he said, "I hope that nothing happens."

I was dumbfounded!

I was thinking, "Well I'd like to write a whole bunch more books and have an impact, you know."

But that was his goal: he hoped that nothing would happen, that the seasons would pass and he would go hunting and grow corn and take care of his horses. But that nothing really major would happen.

AM: That certainly indicates how people in the dominant culture seem to be driven by a deep dissatisfaction about their own lives. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about in terms of the difference between the dominant society and indigenous societies?

CG: By the way, I would call the world of northern New Mexico "land-based". There are Native people who preceded these folks and still live here. Even though the Chicanos share a lot of survival practices, there is a difference in terms of length of time of being here.

I could go on and on. What it means to raise a pig and kill it, what it means to go hunting, what it means to grow corn and use every single part of the plant...

There is something here that's a problem, though, and the problem is called envidia, envy. Surely it exists out in the dominant society, but people there don't identify it as a problem. And I always think "Well, these folks here are so close to a survival that was communal." It's relatively recent that some people here got more than other people. And the dominant society came and dangled things - and so some people do have more than others: more acreage, more cars, a bigger TV, nicer cowboy boots, more cows.

In envidia, if one person rises above the others, then everybody gets upset about it. And this phenomenon is viewed as a problem. But I see it as an outgrowth of the fact that somebody could get a bunch of new stuff or could become more famous than the others - and that's a result of the brush with the dominant society. Envidia is a symptom, really.

AM: I'd like to ask about some of the psychology of people in the dominant society. We know that people have a lot of psychological defense mechanisms that prevent them from recognizing the severity of our situation and the damage that civilization is causing to the planet and to communities. And that society at large has it's own mechanisms to encourage this ignorance. You write about both of these in your book When Technology Wounds. So my question is what does it take to break down these barriers so that people can honestly perceive and recognize what is happening? Or, in other words, what will it take for the majority of people in the world to recognize the destructiveness of the dominant culture?

CG: That's the question, isn't it?

AM: [Pause] OK.

CG: [Laughter] One thing I've learned by living here is how I just responded to that question.

AM: Yes,.well, that's fair!

CG: Yeah, I'm sure I could spout off but I don't feel any reason to. We've been grappling with that problem for a long time.

AM: So, on slightly more practical note, I think that we'd agree that people in the dominant culture operate on premises that are both false and absurd. Premises like "Human beings are separate from or superior to the rest of nature," or that "Progress, capitalism and technology are both good and inevitable." And I hope that as industrial collapse progresses people will increasingly question these assumptions. So, on a more pragmatic note, how can we help people to reorient themselves away from these harmful assumptions and towards the assumptions of healthy, ecologically sane communities?

CG: One of my assumptions is that the dominant society is dysfunctional at every level and within every one of its structures. It doesn't serve people. It doesn't serve life. It doesn't enhance connectedness or beauty or spiritual meaning. It's not even sustainable. Which doesn't mean that the healing spirit doesn't find a way to express beauty or connectedness, or aid in a million ways. It does, that's what is so miraculous. But the basic morals that we're living in, the social structures, the architectural structures, the way the road is, the way the transportation is, the way you get money - anything that you could bring up is dysfunctional.

Good people have been trying on so many levels for the longest time. When I was younger I thought "Oh, well, here's the answer. Oh, here's the answer." I had that kind of an attitude about the things that I engaged in. Not to say that they weren't really good things, I always picked really good ideas and projects - but whatever it was it always remained as a small thing in the world of the dominant society. It always remained as an "alternative."

I still believe that - whether you are offering workshops to people on racism, or you're a masseuse, or you're demanding the return of land that was stolen, or you're doing natural childbirth, or you're growing your own food, or protesting the war, or you're dismantling the microwave relay stations - no matter what, it's all crucial.

Maybe I could divide the important effects into categories.

In one category would be challenging the dysfunction, saying "No," attempting to reveal it or bring it down.

On the other side would all the ways in which to say "Yes." All the ways to reconnect. All the ways to love. All the ways to enhance healing. All the ways to reach out to others, and support others in their struggles.

AM: You know that I'm writing about "collapse," and so I think a lot about people's context within the dominant society - and about how that's going to be lost for an increasing number of people. I'm trying to think about things that we can do for them if that's something that we want to do, or if that's an option that's open to us.

CG: I think we all had a chance to think about collapse in the year 2000. It was acceptable to think about it. Which is interesting. Because before that you would really be viewed as a wacko if you talked about such a thing.

"What if you don't have any electricity? And you don't have any gas in your car? And neither does anybody else?" That's really about all you have to think about to imagine it. And then you have to think about what you're going to do about that. Each one of us has a different situation.

My well is electric, so one of the things that I had to explore as 2000 was arriving was if I could get a handpump for my well. And it turned out it would have been a really stupid thing to do because it's seventy feet down. The other thing was the river was about an eighth of a mile away. And so I was thinking, how was I going to haul water from the river? Or go to the river to use the water?

But somebody who lives in an urban apartment has another challenge. And so collapse is going to be different in different places.

AM: Some of my friends find the idea of collapse really terrifying, and that's certainly understandable. I suspect that they might emotionally feel that prospect of collapse more deeply than I sometimes do. Do you have any thoughts or advice for people who find collapse really frightening, on how they can deal with those those feelings of fear, and then think about what they might have to do?

CG: I think that the act of thinking about what you need to do could help. Get practical about it. Put thought into creating a system for yourself. And that system might have to do with the other people in your apartment building. Or it might have to do with wheelbarrows. Or it might have to do with walking somewhere and meeting people. Or it might have to do with fish in the bay. Think it through. Where are you going to be? What are you going to do? Be practical. My sense is that people can prepare, but that a lot of the rest is going to be invented on the spot.

The system, as dysfunctional as it is, is keeping us alive, you know? It is what we know. The human psyche is, I believe, built to mirror the environment. We were built to mirror the sky, and the wind, and the seasons, and then to relate to them in their language.

As a psychologist, my practice is with post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead of mirroring the tribe and the human touch and the feeling of the wind and the animals, the psyche actually mirrors back the trauma, and becomes structured according to the trauma. Living in a society as we do - mass society, dysfunctional civilization - it's what we know, it's what we expect, it's how we believe that reality is. And so we have to inject ourselves with a different vision.

To begin with: how to get water. How to get food. How to deal with waste.

The puppy doesn't poop on the bed, you know. The teeniest little puppy knows that.

Back in the seventies and eighties, I was involved in the creation of a psychological process whose purpose was to get us out of denial and numbing about the nuclear arms race. It was called Despair and Empowerment, and it was a process for coming to terms with feelings so that people could face death. And therefore become active to stop the arms race. Maybe that same process could be applied to the current situation. But I'm feeling much more down-to-earth and practical about it. Today's challenge doesn't feel like a big psychological process. It feels like re-thinking how you are going to deal with water, food, and waste. And how your relationships are going to be arranged around those tasks.

AM: You talked about our minds mirroring back the world that's around us. I hope that as a lot of the industrial infrastructure and institutions are removed or become inactive, that people's minds will begin to mirror the localized communities they are creating, and begin to see the nature and living creatures and land wherever they are. How long does something like that take to happen? How long does it take for people to start to shift away from that institutionalized framework?

CG: [Pause] I don't think there's a single answer. People are going to go to what they know. For instance, I bet that a lot of people would end up hanging with the people in their churches, or their synagogues or their mosques or their sanghas. Other people might end up being in their apartment buildings. For some people it will just be completely, utterly chaotic. Some people may be caught in the subway. They may be far from home. They may have to deal with it where they are. What if you are an American soldier in Iraq, and for some reason the electricity stops working? Well, that's a different situation than me being in Chimayó. Some people will be in dangerous situations in terms of human contact. Some people will be in dangerous situations in terms of technology. They may be in danger because of something like in the BART system under the San Francisco Bay. And they are in a tunnel underneath water. You know?

AM: Yes.

CG: In the early days of the bioregional movement in the Bay Area, we were challenged to think about where we were. To think about "Where does the water come from?" Of course, people thought the water came out of the tap. "Where does it really come from? It comes from the Sierra Mountains." And to think about matters of sustainability, how the various Native peoples sustained themselves in the East Bay, in San Francisco, in Marin County. What were their ways? What kind of resources are there? In other words, basic questions of place. These are all good things to do.

When the Soviet Union broke apart in 1989 and Cuba was no longer getting aid they had to figure out how to survive. And now every single apartment in Havana has a garden.

During World War II, when all resources were being pinched inside the United States, there was a thing called the Victory Garden. It was viewed as patriotic for every single home to have a vegetable garden.

And then after the War, of course, the food corporations, and the unsustainable economy rose up again to make profit. And so then they pooh-poohed gardening and made going to the supermarket the new thing.

The other thing that you might want to have is medicine. I've always thought that the most valuable things that I have are my homeopathic medicines. Get your medicines together.

Speaking as a psychologist I'd say preparation will help people deal with feelings of fear.

AM: Ok, great.

CG: I'm sorry I can't give you more. I mean, we're just people! [Laughter] And we're dependent on this monstrous system. Most people are not in a good situation with this.

AM: Well, I think it's good for me actually, because it's helped to confirm some of the direction that I've already been taking, and the work that I've been doing on so far. I was worried, "Oh, I'm going to have to do all this elaborate research into psychology," to understand how people might respond in that situation.

CG: Crisis brings out the worst and the best. But nobody knows who's going to be which way, you know? Clearly there will be marauding people. Hungry, marauding people. Maybe with weapons. That will happen in some places. And in some places people will pull together.

Did you see the issue that Adbusters put out?

AM: I saw some content on their website, I haven't read the physical one. What did you think of it? You've read it?

CG: I actually have a piece in there under another name. It's smaller than I wrote it originally. I pretended that I was from suburbia. This exercise in imagination gave me an opportunity to think about what you would do if you were in that situation. I found myself thinking about systems that people could use. I had this idea of turning the football field into a massive community garden. And hauling water in different things that were made for other activities, like shopping carts and garbage bags and children's wagons. I imagined that the cheerleaders from the high school had gotten together and put what they knew about communicating in groups - which is an area of expertise for teenage girls - and they came up with a ritual that bonded everybody together.

But I also got a chance to think about the psychological stuff. There's a wonderful book written in the fifties by a psychiatrist named Martha Wolfenstein. It's called Disaster. There's an awful lot being written about post-traumatic stress in today's world because trauma is so prevalent in our lives at this point. But this was written earlier.

She'd done studies of communities that had gone through things like floods or fires, and she came up with an overview of what happens to a community when there is a disaster.

Even if it's non-violent, a disaster is a break with people's assumptions about reality - and where help comes from. Collapse of social and technological systems is clearly a case where we won't be sitting around waiting for the Red Cross to show up. The job of helping is going to fall upon us. To be the Red Cross, to be the police, to be the ministers, to be the mothers, to be the fathers, to be the ceremonialists, to be the farmers, everything.

If I can think of things that already exist, I would have to say that co-counseling would have a role to play.It was founded in the sixties, as a radical approach to psychotherapy. The idea was that you don't have to go to a therapist and you don't have to pay money. Co-counseling is a way for people to do it themselves. It's not "real" psychotherapy in the sense that you pay a psychotherapist is because a psychotherapist knows something about how psyches are structured; there is an expertise.

But there's an incredible wisdom to co-counseling in that it's two people talking to each other. Each one takes the agreed upon period of time to talk and express feelings, and the other one listens. And then you turn it the other way around.

Another thing is to create ceremonies to bind people together and give them strength. For some people it might be the ceremonies they've always used. For other people, it may be a process that emerges that's egalitarian and reflective of the new predicament.

AM: I also think of Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" - I don't know if you've heard or read much about that?

CG: Yes.

AM: It seems like some sort of theatre or drama or public performance can also be really useful for binding people together, and also for exploring feelings and relationships in a community.

CG: Yes. Great.

AM: Are there any other books or resources that you wanted to recommend or suggest?

CG: Well, my first book is called Waking up in the Nuclear Age, and that is a description of the psychological process that we developed in the 1980s. Another book with actual exercises in it is a book by one of my colleagues named Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. She collected various practices that many different people had come up with.

Again, I don't feel very highfalutin about this. I mean, in contrast to other times in my life when I felt like, "This will really work." We're talking about the breaking apart of mass society. By its nature it's got to be human-scale process. It comes down to who you are with and what you are going to do. So it's hard to be highfalutin about it because it just comes down to everybody's ingenuity and strength - wherever they find themselves.

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