revolution finished

 

GOD and HUMAN

MOTHER and NATURE

CHICKEN and EGG

MAN and ROOSTER

INVENTOR and INNOVATION

can’t go backwards

LIFE is always forward

and equal.

 

be born

re-birth

revolution

sex

acceptance

Filed under: activism, art, city, community, creativity, cycling, design, education, experience, future, humanity, iran, life, love, music, nature, philosophy, poetry, politics, school, student life, sustainability, work

succession

i doooooooooooooooooooooo

and then i incubate

i doooooooooooooooooooooo

and then i incubate

i doooooooooooooooooooooo

and then i incubate

i doooooooooooooooooooooo

and then i incubate

My life is always at

’succession’:

(ecology) the gradual and orderly process of change in an ecosystem brought about by the progressive replacement of one community by another until a stable climax is established

doing is growth

incubation is understanding growth

Filed under: life, nature, sustainability

nature is not a well-designed puzzle

“Have you ever seen a child take apart a favorite toy? Did you then see the little one cry after realizing he could not put all the pieces back together again? Well, here is a secret that never makes the headlines: We have taken apart the universe and have no idea how to put it back together. After spending trillions of research dollars to disassemble nature in the last century, we are just now acknowledging that we have no clue how to continue — except to take it apart further.

Reductionism was the driving force behind much of the twentieth century’s scientific research. To comprehend nature, it tells us, we first must decipher its components. The assumption is that once we understand the parts, it will be easy to grasp the whole. Divide and conquer; the devil is in the details. Therefore, for decades we have been forced to see the world through its constituents. We have been trained to study atoms and superstrings to understand the universe; molecules to comprehend life; individual genes to understand complex human behavior; prophets to see the original of fads and religions.

Now we are close to knowing just about everything there is to know about the pieces. But we are as far as we have ever been from understanding nature as a whole. Indeed, the reassembly turned out to be much harder than scientists anticipated. The reason is simple: Riding reductionism, we run into the hard wall of complexity. We have learned that nature is not a well-designed puzzle with only one way to put it back together. In complex systems the components can fit in so many different ways that it would take billions of years for us to try them all. Yet nature assembles the pieces with a grace and precision honed over millions of years. It does so by exploiting the all-encompassing laws of self-organization, whose roots are still largely a mystery to us.

…Networks are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them.”

-From Introduction in Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Filed under: community, design, nature, problem solving, social community networks, sustainability

Patterns in Nature (by Jan Bang)

“The idea of Permaculture ecological design: reading nature’s book

A very short history of the development of human conciousness

We all have our various points of view, in our everyday lives and also in our deeper consciousness. We might experience the same events, but we often interpret them completely differently. In a similar way different eras throughout history have also seen the world from different points of view. There is a popular idea that our knowledge of the world has grown and developed during the course of our history. That in the beginning we knew very little and that now we know a lot. That we have developed from ignorance to knowledge. But when we look closer we find that people just experienced the world differently when we look closer we find that people just experienced the world differently in past ages and that our development is not simply a straight line ascending.

In the age of Mythology our experience of the world was full of meaning and significance. The ocean, for example, was enormous, changing, deep, wild or calm. It reflected our own mind, it was an experience of a personality, Poseidon to the Greeks. Everywhere in nature there were faces and personalities. The natural world around us was a reflection of ourselves and we could gain insight into ourselves by observing it.

About half a millennium before Christ there occurred in the West, in Greece specifically, a change from Mythos to Logos. A change form the mythological consciousness to logical thinking and rational thought. The philosophers began to ask questions about the nature of the world. Where does it come from? What is it made up of? One of their starting points was the idea of the four elements, earth, water, air and fire.

Hippocrates laid the foundations of western medicine around 450 BC. He was obsessed with process and how the temperaments related to various substances of the body. Air was related to blood and the sanguine temperament, water to phlegm and the phlegmatic. Fire was clearly choleric and had to do with yellow gall, while earth was melancholic and related to dark gall.

This system of thinking continued and was developed without structural changes for the next two thousand years. Alchemy continued the aspect of process in a strong way, relating various elements, such as mercury, sulphur and salt, to the four elements already defined by the ancient Greeks. Process was still seen as the most important aspect of the world and the human being. Paracelsus, 1493-15441, was an alchemist and is still regarded as an important figure in medical history. Alchemy today is widely regraded as some kind of medieval superstition, but today’s chemistry is actually mostly alchemy without the spiritual bit, ‘Alchemy Lite.’

With the Renaissance there came a complete break from the traditions of the ancient world. Copernicus discovered the heliocentric nature of our solar system, Luther broke with the venerable and dominating Catholic Church and eventually Descartes declared that anything that cannot be measured is not worth considering. Materialism gradually came to dominate our western thinking and this began to spread around the world with the so-called Age of Discovery. Art, Science and Religion had until then been regarded as an undivided trilogy; gradually they drifted apart. Today they seem to be completely unrelated.

Since the Renaissance we have taken apart the world. We have become caught up in a reductionist science that removes the spiritual component as unmeasurable and therefore irrelevant. For Descartes nature was dumb, there was no spirit in sticks and stones, nature was res extensa, a dead thing, while res cogitas was the thinking component which was the foundation of our existence: ‘I think therefore I am.’

Surely we are much more than just thought. We walk, talk, intuit, feel and act. ‘I walk, therefore I am,’ or ‘I talk, therefore I am,’ or even ‘I intuit, therefore I am.’

In our era, having completed the journey from the whole to the part, our task is to put both the world and the human being together again. We need to reintroduce the wholeness of the world and the creatures within it.

Writing something may be taken as analogy: I have an idea; to begin with it is a complete whole, but I analyse it, break it up into manageable components and begin formulating chapters, paragraphs, and finally compose sentences made up of words and letters. I hope that someone will read these letters and words, understand the sentences and eventually come to share my understanding which initially inspired me to write. In our view of the world we may now be at the stage of being obsessed by its letters. But the idea of writing is that what I write should be read by someone. Now that we are able to read the letters of existence, surely the next step is to read what is written.

This is the immediate task for us at this point in the development of our consciousness, to read the book of the universe we have been given. To arrive back at the Big Idea by laboriously making sense of the letters, getting the understanding implied by each sentence and finally comprehending the universe by the flow of ideas we perceive in the paragraphs and chapters given to us by nature. This is what Permaculture sets out to do.”

Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities p.38-39

Filed under: community, design, life, nature, quotes

Permaculture

“Permaculture looks for the patterns embedded in our natural world as inspirations for designing solutions to the many challenges we are presented today. Permaculture encourages individuals to be resourceful and self-reliant and to become a conscious part of the solution to the many problems which face us both locally and globally. Permaculture means thinking carefully about our environment, our use of resources and how we supply our needs. It aims to create systems that will sustain not only for the present, but also for future generations. The idea is one of the co-operation with nature and each other, of caring for the earth and its people.”

-Jan Martin Bang (Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities p. 49)

Filed under: community, nature, problem solving, quotes, sustainability

water

digitally reproduced from my notebook; written on Friday August 10

What is it about water?

Why are we gravitated towards it? Why is it that I enjoy sitting here on a bench in Elgin Illinois near the Big Timber train station facing the Fox River infront of a home’s extended lawn after missing the hourly train departure… twice? Why did I decide to sit here, watch the stream of the river as the sun sets at 7:38 to the jitters of birds and soothing sound of water, and all surrounding?

What is it about water?

Without even knowing the answer we know that being beside it is an intuitive attraction. Have you ever thought about why it feels nice? Why is it so beautiful? Why do we enjoy the movement of hydrogen and oxygen in a constant never-ending flow?

Have you ever thought deeply about life and nature — and how they are one? Life is nature and nature is life. We are living and beside water we engage ourselves with our true nature — our desire to be one. Life is one and we are life.

we fail to see the evidence
and misunderstand the obvious.

we look for clues when nothing is hidden;
continue searching and cover the given.

question beauty
and magnet your heart;
trust is in your senses
to not set you apart.

Filed under: experience, humanity, life, nature, philosophy, poetry