Benblog

The trail becomes a trusted friend. You have stories together now woven into the turns, the ups and downs. That ditch where you think "remember the time..." and laugh about the time you fell, or swallowed a spider. Or saw a rafter of turkeys, as surprised to see you as you them. The trail offers encouragement - the nature of trails is they want you to succeed. To progress. To take care of yourself, so you will visit more often.

Trails begin to become you. Those rocks and roots and soft pine needles and forest full of scent. They become part of your lungs, your toes. Your ankles begin to understand the contours of the ground, that twist that once hobbled merely a nip to remind you that you belong to the woods. Pay attention. At times, on days when the weather purrs for both you and trees, you feel the lungs expand, arboreal gills, and your breath harmonizes with the forest's cycle, the exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen operating without any effort of your own.

streetcar

streetcar

Just posted an entry to rifuture.org about modern transportation.

Numbing expansion

Picking up mugs from Dave yesterday, I realized that part of the irony of the way people use drugs is that those who live by their bliss, artists as the more supreme example, often use drugs to expand their consciousness. On the other extreme, people of enormous wealth and privilege, often hard fought, use drugs to escape their consciousness. Their own hedonism absorbed in the futility of seeking happiness anywhere other than inside the authentic self.

Robber Barons of Globalism

My greatest fear in the age of globalism is that the faceless forces of global capitalism, the computers calculating trades, with no accountability to future life on this planet, are beyond the reach of nations.

That the combat of Mammon needs to be engaged globally, with knowledge workers at the forefront of the movement, as they already are.

While we thought that the robber barons of old were bad, they were limited in how much they could exploit labor and natural resources for profit, generally using the government as a police force OR hiring their own.

Unless we curb population growth, our options for survival will be to become more like the concentrated wealth in Mexico or the distributed wealth in Canada, globally.

Or we will always live in strife, resources falsely scarce, demon progeny of our own fears. Imprisoned by hell's lapping flames rather than soaring with the wings of angels.

The Mind's Journeys

Loki is often as content and tired having ridden around in the car for twelve miles as he was when we would sometimes go on long, long runs together in the winter.

I am struck by how long I've blogged that I have benjones as my username.

It is time to run another marathon.

On my own, facing the loneliness of dog.

The Protective Father

When my dad was growing up, his grandfather, who had prospered after the depression by having faith in some stock he held on to, paid for all the college educations of all his grandchildren. Was generous whenever my dad went to visit, possibly to all the cousins as well, always giving my dad a $20, back in the 1950's and early 1960's.

He did well, and shared his prosperity, to the benefit of future generations.

Unfortunately, my grandparents squandered their inheritance, spending it instead on ridiculous indulgences, like a custom yacht (which they called a houseboat), and ending up having little left at the end, for themselves or the future.

Maxing out

I'll bet there will be a lot of folks who've never contributed to campaigns before maxing out this year on the Presidential campaign.

This is a shift in the way we allocate the nations resources, and this is a case of things having made a return towards the trajectory of feudalism. We think of Europe sort of monolithically in the Romantic period, which was a fanciful idea of existence even back then.

But we are where we are.

The path could have been less brutal all along, but now we face the choice:

Will we be the generation that brings peace to this world?

That sets us towards a trajectory of joy and love?

Right now, having discovered so intimately that we are not alone through all of these massively changing communications technologies, our initial recoil, limbic brain reaction, can be brought into harmony, a vision sublime realized.

Generating Wealth

When we think about what it requires to have stability, people need some level of suffering, some level of hope. I don't think humans are designed to live without any pain and suffering, but nor are we designed to live in a world where there is only pain and suffering.

Harvesting onions today, we discussed whether or not we could have better farming as a result of our better understanding of body mechanics.

There is work that is back breaking to do that might be more reasonably approached with better training of workers in using the proper mechanics to perform manual labor.

With that manual labor invested in products that sustain rather than destroy us.

The wealth of the fields. The wealth of joy.

The Olfactory Truth

I hope that the experience of the 2008 Olympics begins to help people understand the true cost of our own throw away society.

When China eats itself up from the inside out, will they simply colonize the rest of the world? Rewarding the overlords, and sending the disenfranchised to disenfranchise others?

The pollution in Beijing is us. Us as in U.S. - buying crap that does nothing to satisfy us, taking our soma in the meantime.

Touching the earth

Talking with Michael a few weeks ago about soil formation has me thinking more and more about soil systems generally, and how we focus so much on the top soil, the very, very tippy, tippy top of an eons old process dependent on so many micro and macro forces that understanding the physics of the process requires a little humming now and again, just trying to tune in the cosmological chords ultimately at work.

But touching the soil again, going out and weeding rows and rows, feeling my glutes shiver thinking about all the bending I've done over the last couple weeks, brings enough of the poetry to connect me to the forces that brought me to this moment.

The ancestors farming.

The ancestors, when all else fails, eating the earth.

That should be a basic question for all society - can you eat the dirt you walk on? If not, why not? Is it dirty? Is it polluted? Does the earth not taste good?