my musings along the way . . .
They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. But I have discovered a different approach. Now I take the shit in my life and compost it, transforming crap into magical fertiliser for new growth.
Read MoreSocial and economic inequality remains deeply entrenched in Western society despite 300 years of Enlightment-inspired thinking — and fighting — about equality. The standard narrative of social development says this is unavoidable because large complex societies must inevitably be unequal. But we have a hundred years of archaeological and anthropological evidence that says this is simply not the case. Perhaps the individualism of Enlightenment thinking has taken us as far along the path to equality as it can? Perhaps if we want a more equal society it’s time to adopt a new paradigm and learn something from people that followed different paths to achieve it long before the Enlightenment even began.
Read More“It was like I’d gone through my whole life colour blind but without knowing that colourblindness was even a thing. Until one day someone pointed it out. And I realised that for my whole life I’d not been able to see things the way that other people see them all the time.”
"What a world we could have if the stories we told ourselves were securely tethered to objective reality! What peace, prosperity and true progress might we know if we actually vetted the stories we tell ourselves, and discarded the ones that proved to be contrary to nature? History shows us that if we change the story and then act on it we can make massive changes very quickly. You have a superpower. How are you using it?"
Read More“Like the current pandemic, based on the science, the collapse of western civilization is now basically a certainty. Each of the four points above show that it is a physical impossibility for civilization to continue as it is. So it’s not a case of “if” but “when” and, if you like “how fast” and “how hard”. The collapse in fact may have already started. The current pandemic may prove to be the ‘black swan event’ (the term researchers use for the harbinger of a societal collapse). The point is not to despair, but to prepare. You may have no control over the unfolding of global events, but you do have control over how you live your life, the choices you make each day, and the things you invest your time and energy into. Its the things we each do today that determine what tomorrow will be like. So the onus is on each of us to do what we can to make the best future we can.”
Read More“And this is the delusion of our current system — seemingly unrestrained resources. A society so drunk on the super-powers provided by fossil fuels that it consumes every year twice what the planet can actually sustain. A society so disconnected from its natural resource base that it hasn’t noticed that in barely two human generations it has consumed over 90% of the large fish in the oceans, lost 60% of its wild animals, 50% of its wetlands, 70% of its insects, and 30% of its agricultural land. Entire river systems across the globe no longer make it to the sea, and fully two thirds of our own human population already face restrictions on access to fresh water.”
Read More“The journals of European explorers, missionaries and anthropologists are full of “shocking” tales of societies where multi-male multi-female mating was the norm, where sexual jealousy was unheard of, where children are considered to be fathered by many men, and mothered by many women, where homosexuality and variant gender expression were not just accepted but often celebrated, where ‘private property’ (including women and children) is unknown, and where the whole tribe is involved in and responsible for the well-being of all, quite literally from conception to death. The contrast to the standard narrative of ‘civilized’ cultures is stark, and indeed is so shockingly offensive to those cultures that most of us are completely unaware that alternatives even exist.”
Read More“My life today reflects my choice to live a life that consistently improves my personal well-being in concert with the well-being of all of Life. I choose to immerse myself in beauty, in the things that bring me pleasure, but only insofar as those things are consistent with the flourishing of life on earth. And there is no real conflict there, since I view myself as part of the greater whole. What is good for Life is, by definition, good for me. And what is bad for life is, by definition, bad for me. So I choose, for example, to ruthlessly minimize my ecological footprint. And I choose to not support — or even to actively resist — the things that cause Life to wither. Sure it means I have had to work at things and face some hard truths about the ways I used to think and act. But that ‘work’ has been the most rewarding and pleasurable work of my life. Doing it has filled my life with beauty: peace, joy, contentment, love and a sense of personal integrity that comes from having my thinking, my doing and my being in harmony.”
Read More“My point is that what it means to be human might not be what we’ve been taught, or for many of us might possibly be something we’ve never even experienced. It is certain that humans possess instincts to be much more cooperative and loving than our contemporary society suggests we are. And it’s absolutely possible that the dominant culture — that incomprehensibly, insanely, unjustly wrong system we have built — is an aberration. A cancer-like variant of humanity that built sailing ships and guns and overtook the world, but which will eventually kill its host and bring about its own downfall. It may be that better ways of living, saner, more just, and more sustainable ways of living have been with us all along, not only manifest for millennia in the myriad indigenous cultures wiped out in the march of the all-conquering ‘western’ cultural cancer, but actually written in our DNA since the times of Ardipithecus.”
Read More“There is nothing “natural” about what is going on in the Murray-Darling, and neither is it “a tragedy” in the usual sense of something terrible that befalls the innocent. This is a man-made catastrophe — and I use the term advisedly, knowing that I risk losing half my audience on this point. But it is not women who have brought this calamity upon us — it is our dominant culture. Ipso facto it is men. Men like myself, a 6th generation white male Australian. And I assert this with confidence that the historical record bears this out. Any man who has a problem with that statement needs to . . . well, ‘man up’ and learn some hard truths about his own culture, both past and present.”
Read More“Thoreau’s purpose and experience spending two years in the woods outside of mainstream society in 19th Century Massachusetts have eerily close parallels with my own decision to presently live outside of mainstream society in 21st Century Australia. There are huge slabs of his book Walden that I could make my own with simple substitutions of names or other details. And while I can’t claim Thoreau to be exactly a soul mate since our personal philosophies are at odds in places, I’m sure he would agree with my assessment that I live like I live because I feel a need to know that I am alive. And what I discovered in reading Walden is that Thoreau and I have instinctively followed the same recipe for living deep and deliberately: seeking solitude, embracing discomfort and nurturing a deep connection to nature.”
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