Tag Archives: culture of health

Uncategorized

You’re Fired

I’m sorry to have to tell you,
but we’re laying you off,
effective immediately.
But, please don’t feel too badly about this.
It’s nothing personal.

It feels personal,
maybe because I’m the person
you’re downsizing without.

But it’s not personal;
it’s just a budget problem–
insufficient revenue.

Which I am being invited to resolve
in an exclusively personal kind of way.
I can see why you prefer to keep the personal
separate from political,
and political power and authority and responsibility
separate from economic choices,
and economic goals
separate from ecological health,
yet I find little wisdom
in these dichotomies,
too conveniently walled off
away from each other.

I’m sorry you feel that way.

I’m not.
I’ve worked hard
to see EarthTribe this global patriotic-matriotic way.

There is no hidden agenda here.
No disparagement of your performance,
or character.
This is not personal or political;
it’s just a financial necessity
for you to pack up your personal items,
if any,
and head out the front door
with your head up,
personally and politically,
but not economically.
Not here and not today anyway.

See, I told you it’s personal,
and political.

Point taken.
Goodbye.
Don’t let the door hit you…

On my way out.
Yes, I know.
Thanks for nothing.

Why are you choosing to be bitter
about a loss not intended as punishment?
Why does this overshadow
all the years
your political and economic relationships
worked cooperatively together here?

Frankly?

By all means.

I think our cooperative corporate personhood’s
political and economic returns
would be better served
if this economic knife were at your throat,
rather than mine.

Now see, that’s why I’m letting you go.
Never trusted you.

So this is both personal and political,
as well as economic,
all to better serve your egocentric ZeroZone.
Not so much about what’s best
for our cooperatively-owned corporate personhood.

I don’t see the difference.

And that is among your outstanding issues.
You don’t see enough difference
between your egocentric and Earth’s eco-centric balance,
yet you build walls too deep and wide and high
between what is personally healthy v pathological
an what is politically healthy
and what remains of economically cooperative investment
in Big Picture ecological health care giving
and receiving
of and for WinWin ecopolitical healthy wealth optimization.

Are you still talking?

Yes,
still talking about our cooperative business planning incapacities,
but,
unlike some people,
I can talk with both sides of my mouth
and walk in the same direction
at the same time.

As long as your direction is cooperatively out the front door,
the way you first came in.

Actually, I first came in through the back door closet.
Your front door was accessible to straight white males only.

Oh, right.
The good ole boys days.

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Uncategorized

Cooperative Health and Climate Care

Toby Hemenway,
in The Permaculture City,
defines four prime health development principles,
adapted as follows:

Highest Use
orders health maintenance tasks,
ecological activities,
and growth/decomposition processes
in time and space
so the first activity in a spiraling sequence
leaves as many possible health yields
and subsequent reiterative uses
as harmonically possible.
Highest and deepest use
creates balanced wu-wei relationships
among health design elements
and wealth building processes
in and through ecologically rhythmic time
and place.

Needs As Potential Resources Analysis
identifies necessary health inputs
and wealth outputs
of many nutritional kinds,
products,
behaviors,
characteristics
spatial quantities and temporal qualities
of each subsystem in an eco/bio-system,
including humane-natural/spiritual systems,
and connects needs of one element
with outputs of another.
We thereby design harmonic relationships
of WinWin balance
among design elements themselves,
ourselves.

Zones
organize design systems
by how often they are used and need cooperative maintenance.
The most used systems
are placed most vulnerably nearest in spacetime
to the ZeroZone user
or center of identified activity.
Zones build health and organize wealth relationships
between a system
and the user of identified zero-center.

Sectors and Species
are influences from outside;
influences that cannot be altered from within the spacetime system in question.
They can be Yang competing physical influences,
such as wind and fire,
or Yin-cooperative intangible influences,
enculturing,
creolizing,
such as zoning,
care giving and receiving customs,
LeftBrain polypathic power,
and RightBrain emotional polyphonic triggers.
We place design elements
in relation to species and sectors to feed or bleed energies,
or let them pass through
with no decompositional effect.
Sectors and Species
create regenerative relationships
between parts of an eco-bio system
and Yang forces
and Yin-influences
shaping enculturation,
acclimation outside toward inside
each ZeroZone system.

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Uncategorized

Facts and Feelings We UnLearn

What are some things you learned
along life’s way
better before you went to school
as compared to after?

Oh, you mean like love
of cooperative natural-spiritual learning
rather than
mistrusting ego’s essential competitive nature,
divorced from cooperative spirit,
required to out-perform my siblings
and friends
and neighborhood peer groups?

Yes, that is a viral one.
But, if you think that’s bad,
listen to this:
My mother always taught,
and both my grandmother and mother nearly always mentored,
there is no hurt
love can’t and won’t ultimately heal.
But,
in first grade
I heard from some of my more troubling classmates
that their moms taught them
there is no anger or fear weaker than love’s strength
to survive,
including ravages of domestically violent patriarchal rule.
It was like I had learned a life sentence
when and where
these unfortunates were given an avoid death sentence.

That intersects with my own confusion
about love of learning as full healthy living
and fear of failing
as negatively devolutionary learning competitive-behavioral theory
myths and Evil Devil Stories of vengeful angry-fear-mongering
monoculturing Gods of Omnipotent SpiritStrength
and not so much Goddesses of Polyphonic Nature-Nurture
emerging polypathic deductive challenges to save patriarchal face
and inductive invitations to share love’s healing grace.

My mother was my preschool teacher.
She taught me love is highest and best use
for living and for learning,
while grade school teachers
didn’t disagree,
they merely were paid
to help us notice
differences between (0)Sum WinLose competitions
and (0)Soul WinWin cooperative ownership
of love’s nurturing powers
to cooperatively heal all EarthTribe’s sacred hurts.

I wish either Mother Earth or Mother Mom
or even Mother Grandmom
had taught me why you nearly always find sexism where you find racism,
but not necessarily racism where you find sexism’s patriarchal remnants.

I think at least one of my grandmothers
taught me the cooperative economics of gender diversity
are more lovingly powerful, and healthy,
than the competing politics of monoculturing racist theory.

Really! African or Native American?

Maybe both?

Creolizing all three in sacred one.
I learned that in school,
eighth grade biology.

I don’t know.
I think I hear an older teaching
swelling into here and there,
both before and after school.

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Uncategorized

My Democratic Town Committee

In my New England town
our local Democratic Party runs everything.

Some would argue these local celebrities
and self-promoting treasures
to posterity
rather over-run everything,
and surely we could find some truth
in this way of seeing,
but we are learning a spirit of generosity
invites more healthy pollinators,
honey bees
rather than swarms of angry hornets
nesting on the sidelines.

This Town Democratic Committee
decided to invest in a planning retreat
and were looking for a Permaculture Designer
to facilitate,
preferably someone local,
and not too obnoxious
and holier than thou
about ecological wisdom
raging against short-term economic realities
of elective politics.

Which is where I came in
to this local municipality
as Zero through Regional Four Zone frame.

Looking back,
it was fortunate I knew no one
of these Committee stalwarts
or we would never have arrived even as far as the initial client interview.

You see,
in Permaculture Design,
the initial screening interviews
work in both directions.

First,
the Committee’s Secretary emailed me
to ask if I would be interested
and even remotely qualified,
and, if so, how much
and could I possibly cut whatever that is
in half
and be flexible on scheduling,
especially scheduling of payments
for services rendered.

Second,
if all that goes reasonably bloodless,
the Permaculture Designer interviews the client.

So I told the Secretary,
and thereby everyone who was anyone in town,
that I had recently completed a Client interview
for the White House,
or at least started one,
thinking this might suggest qualifying experience,
but she was unimpressed,
possibly even depressed,
probably repressed
and feeling suppressed
about that particular client,
and recommended taking the White House out
of future resumes.

Anyway,
long polycultural outcomes story short,
we did get to a Client Interview
which began and largely ended their planning retreat.

As always,
I begin with what purposes they have in mind
for the property in question.
If a real estate agent
or maybe a sharky developer,
were also Permaculture Design Certified
this would be the highest and best interdependent uses question.

The multi-sectoral responses
are all about healthy nutrients.
One committee member thinks a healthier, more robust, educational system
is today’s magic button.
Another thinks a healthier employment market.
Especially a Farmer’s Market, adds another,
with a wink to subtly let me now
she and I are kindred cooperative organic spirits.

Their wish list leaves little to not wish for
except for fewer homeless and hungry people
bumming cigarettes in front of the downtown real estate office
and over in the Chamber of Commerce’s newly paved
and extremely well-lit parking lot.

We want healthy, but cheaper, water
and more robust waste disposal systems
and more energy and heat and gasoline for less cash
and of course lower taxes are healthier taxes
and vibrant police and fire and medical emergency services
and, yes, even healthier food
in the cafeterias,
again with a wink
from the same, now creepy, committee member.

I summarize
It sounds like you all agree
we need more integrated robust systems
growing health for all residents of Zones Zero through Four.

Except maybe not roosters
within town limits.

They gratefully agree
with obvious relief
as it is nearly time for Happy Hour,
which becomes something of an understatement
unless Happy Hours are, by definition,
timeless.

We never did get to the second question
about what are our unhappy waste streams.
Nor the third,
about how these might shrink
to swell more inclusive Happy Hours
for Zones Zero through Four.

But, as I recall,
I never got that far with the White House either.

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Uncategorized

Precocious Liturgies

I’m going through my morning routine
still at least half asleep,
pondering what was I pondering?
while preparing morning meds
and showering my daughter,
helping her dress,
filling her snack pail
for her long school bus ride,
changing my son’s overnight diaper,
lotioning ashy skin,
tying shoe laces,
hers, mine, ours,
feet walking onto the bus,
hooking all four corners of her safety harness
and walking back toward our house
thinking
I’ve been up for an hour
and now I’m ready to begin my day.

What was that first hour?
Its quality of dream
heading toward future investments
in life as more full consciousness.
Consciousness of a different dream?
A different sense of identity?
A different quality of life fullness
in contrast to dreamy half-consciousness,
on back to less than half,
and then the alarm clock
too quickly buzzing louder
to interrupt
whatever it was that had felt so ponderous
pondering what I had been pondering
before I drifted back into sleep.

Self awareness,
self and sometimes also other consciousness,
has this liquid flowing quality
of investment in life
and disinvestment through dreaming,
loss of self-embodied awareness.

I wonder if life could feel richer
if cash followed this same investment in conscious flow preference
over disinvesting in interest paid for over-dreaming
together in WinLose (0)Sum assuming societies,
Eden economies of Paradise Lost,
Bodhisattva Warriors
tying each other’s shoes
as necessary co-investment
and physically possible
and ecologically optimal
to get to that part of our conscious warrior day
we can re-invest in deeper consciousness
loving together,
investing in our cooperatively-held healthy water,
and nurturing air for the grandkids
and the back yard chorus of birds
and their grandkids
to breathe,
and fire for cooking and heating, but not hating,
and retelling family and tribal recreation stories,
Earth’s continuing liturgical investments
in self with other nutritional flowing consciousness.

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Uncategorized

The EgoTherapist Session

Have you been hearing voices again?

Still, yes.
No new ones, though,
since the Voice Against Death Investment.

So you’re still hearing from the Forest Voices
which are actually more of a rhythm and blues chorus
made up of 4-part harmonic Tree Voices
for HealthWealthy Root Systems.

Yes, that chorus forest
remains largely Yang dominant for me,
but the Yin still small sacred Voice Of and For EcoPolitical Ego/EcoMetric Harmonic-Crystal-Fractal Patriarchal/Matriarchal Balance string of capitalized
regenerating adjectives as adverbs
continues reweaving
through my wavering
Right recessive mind.

Yes, I recall from last session,
the forest chorus Yang
singing the sacred octaves for ecofeminist reforestry design,
using yin-squared
as equivalent with c-squared
and Eulerian prime relational function
as fractal bilateral RealTime consciousness.
That all comes blearishly back toward bicameral mind
from far too many past dream journal entries.
But, again,
are all these diverse voices still aware of each other?

Are you asking
am I polypathically (0)-Soul eco-conscious
that these Voices all share one dialectal
regenerative
health v pathology
full spectral WinWin and WinLose and LoseLose
MidWay PolyCultural Interpretation of History?

I might.
And I most certainly do mean to ask again,
Do all these Voices remain known among themselves
as yourself?

Yes, they know we are also one and the same Voice,
like integrity reversed through decompositional segregation,
antipathies watched throughout chronic separation,
active distrusts revisited
before and with imagined trusted facts
of alternative dipolar Voices
speaking both patriarchal and matriarchal balanced historic ecosystems
of TaoTime,
(0)-Sum WinWin.

Do you all speak with ego/eco-conscious harmonic integrity?
All intending polyculturally healthy EarthVoiced Outcomes?

Yes, I actively hope
that’s what we polypathically mean
together,
better than competitively and reductively apart.

Then you are each and all singing and dancing for reforesting Earth together?

Yes,
usually in 4/4 (0)-Soul bilateral octave colored time,
double-bind fractal torus sounds and resonant shapes
of reiterative rhythm
all our times robustly romantic together.
I mean,
for us,
me,
that’s all RealTime could become
completely together,
rather than falling apart.

You sound excited about this harmony,
in a sort of scary manic way.

Well
if manic turns to panic
I’ll get back to you.
Otherwise,
I think we’re done here.

But,
I thought we were just getting to what your Voices are actually saying.
It has taken us three years
just to give your Voices names
and understand which are older
and which newer,
and which louder and sometimes softer
and both,
and perhaps why they speak and squeak in diverse colors.

Now who’s getting excited?
But, yes, well that’s what all my Voices speak of,
LeftBrain newer YangDominant
with Elder RightBrain YinYin-squared
is equivalent to WinWin 4D SpaceTime
BiLateral EcoSystemic Theory
of Original Prime Relational
(0)-Soul Intent.

How do you sleep at night
with all that metric racket?

Oh, that’s easy.
The stars ring lullabies of light.

What about when its cloudy
or smoggy
or foggy
or just kind of boggy?

Starlight can still be overheard
through dualdark nights.

Of course,
apparently my RightBrain knew that,
or felt it
or went aptic about wu-wei waves
of bionic-ergodic reiterative communications,
positive Yang as also not(not Poly-MultiYin)
therapeutically paradigmatic.

I thought you were supposed to be
an ecotherapist.

I thought you were hoping to become
less of an egocentric smart-ass.

Oh great,
so now you’ve stooped to name-calling.
How much is that going to cost me?

It depends on whether you enjoy it or not.

Which is less?

I really should therapeutically charge more for abuse and neglect.

OK, then,
all my Forest Chorus enjoyed
this time invested,
which,
unfortunately,
we will never get back again
for better regenerative singing and dancing.

And drumming.
Didn’t you say you enjoy drumming?

Yes, and strumming
and humming.

So you’re good with the cooperative mings,
its just competing isms
your Chorus Forest has issues with?

Not sure.
We’ll have to (0)Sum
our 2020 ReVision Voices
on your ming and isms question.
Maybe next session?

Yes, let’s pick it up from there,
or here,
or wherever we are now and then.

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Uncategorized

ZeroZen CoOperators

Mother Yin nurtures a domestic economy
which retains indigenous becoming within nature-spirit
nondual places

Yin,
a concaving womb
for as long as Earth’s collective memory
of light and dualdark
may recall.

Patriarch Yang’s convexly vertical strengths of hunting,
colonizing,
commodifying
segregating quantitatively deduced values,
are not a priori possible
without primacy
of nondual co-arising
bilaterally horizontal horizons
of yin’s dawn with dusk
dualdark matriarchal sacred MoonTimes.

0-Soul
WinWin
in each here and now moment
of living and dying
with focusing bicameral balance
on matriarchy’s polyculturing outcomes
easing patriarchy’s recent past
of monocultural ego-over-investments,
turning now toward cooperative re-investments in Mother Earth
from which human nature
RNA-derived
to DNA thrive.

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Uncategorized

Death Sentences

Death leaves a sacred hole
where once lived a whole relationship
with both potential future
and a now more cherished past

Still seen
and heard
and smelled,
tasted and felt, sensed
and incensed
through an echoing hole of darkly bitter loss.

I would be a hypocrite
and a liar
if I were to condemn
our sons and their cherished friends
for cowardice
or craziness
for choosing to end their lives.

When government sanctioned taking of life
goes on and on and on
we call this the cost of just wars
or a death penalty
rather than a life forfeit.
Yet it is the living
who repay this price.

It could be more honest
to call these deliberate extractions
a death investment
and perpetual re-investment
of a culture not yet sure of how radically vulnerable
compassionate life could
and should
become.

Death investment repeated as long as politically expedient,
and also personally poignant
whether self or other inflicted
or something in-between.

I do not grieve his loss of future
but my own

For to grieve my own lost future,
all we might have yet become together,
is honest,
and holy

While to grieve his lost future
is to dishonor his choice
and his compulsion
to part ways
when life felt too dishonest
to bear another traumatic day.

To be born
before or after
or beside and aside one’s right-felt time
and nurturing place
is already loss of future
sent through messages past
as love grows too thin and faded
lust for life descends too jaded,
loss of faith
for hope
arising futures now lost.

I would not dishonor,
too easily dismiss,
suicidal loss of life
as complete insanity
as if I could claim,
with full integrity,
that inhumane and too-patriarchal living losses
are not shy of full-grown sanity.

As this day closes,
this time and place
in tears of loss
without fanfare,
without deadly sentences
much less farewells,
I yet lack courage
of my own despair
about our future of continuing death investment
as measured by my own limits
for tolerating inane insanity,
vitriolic violence,
absurd abuse
of calling deliberate death investments a penalty
as if any life were something reasonably erased
through ultimatum fines
for having had an unfortunate birth day.

This death leaves a sacred hole
where once lived a whole relationship
of futures cast together
now gently placed
apart.

What did he see
that I have not yet felt
strongly enough
to choose to never see again?

This question changes those left behind
for the rest of our haunted days and nights.

Why him,
and not yet me,
not yet us?

 

In honored memory of Greg, lived Large, yet much too short, measures of suicide and other death investments.

 

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Uncategorized

Ms. Liska

When I was a FreshPerson in a new higher school,
our English Literature class was delighted
to meet a new to our rural area Ms. Liska,
who was a beautiful teacher
both outside
and in,
and so we all loved her,
and knew she loved us as well,
although sometimes not happy with one or another
due to smart-ass behavior.

One day,
for reasons we could not imagine at the time,
nor would I remember in this rhyme
of metaphysical reasons for living
and dying,
Ms. Liska
asked if any of us had heard of Marcus Aurelius.

Whom I happened to be reading at the time.
So I was, as I recall,
surprised to see only my hand up
because I had probably just volunteered
to display my FreshPerson ignorance.

She did in fact go there
and ask just whom I thought Aurelius was,
which seemed to me
to be
a Roman Emperor
who was also a published Stoic philosopher.

And so it seemed to Ms. Liska as well
so why not dig the Stoic grinding ax some deeper?
And what is Stoicism?

Now definitions
are not my strength,
I’m more of a delineating guy.
So I thought a Roman Stoic
might be like a British Churchill,
keeping a stiff upper lip
having looked at all our deadly facts
and blundering on anyway
with this mysterious life of stoicism.

Of course Ms. Liska
would not allow stoicism to rear its obstinate head
within its own stubborn definition
so she kindly invited me to try again,
not because I was wrong,
she quickly added,
but because I could become even more right.

Marcus Aurelius reminds us
if life is indeed a bed of roses
then we should expect some deadly thorns
along life’s thunderous way.

He invites us to embrace our birthday
by remembering
this celebration is paid back
with an ultimate death day,
as what grows up must also fade down
and back.
It’s a package deal.
Accepting this package as gift
in its life and death polarities
is a stoic thing to do,
and a delusional thing
not to do,
a Greek act of hubris;
not very Roman patriotic,
not stoically realistic.

Ms. Liska found this better
than my stoic thorns
along life’s bed of dying roses way.
But,
then we skipped along to something else
and I never did have my time
to ask her what she thought
about similarities and differences
between who has authority to induce life
and whom might, then,
find responsibility for deducting my life,
any life,
humanely compassionate
or more stoically otherwise,
like a hungry Roman Emperor
or voracious bear.

For it seemed to me
quite transparently true
that in accepting my right to live
and do the best I could
to stoically tolerate
everybody else’s own acceptance of their right to live
and do the stoic best we can
with life’s inevitable ups and downs,
then we must agree with our inherited justice system,
and to live within a just war view of stoic death
is also an unjustified view of my authority to live responsibly.

I was no more authoritative
and remain no less responsible
for causing my own stoic life to begin
than to end my own life,
much less anyone else’s,
or to delegate authority
to some tired State
to do this for me.

I think Marcus Aurelius
was more stoically comfortable
with society’s right
to invite
each person who has taken a life
to become responsible enough
to consider choosing their own death
within a wider ecological context
of restorative justice.

But, just, fair, equitable restoration of a life
irresponsibly taken
does not in any way,
not even a stoic way,
suggest society’s collective right
to irresponsibly take yet another life
now lived across a threshold
of authority
beyond which we cannot responsibly live
cooperatively together.

In choosing to kill,
in choosing to sanction acts of deadly violence,
in choosing to maim and harm,
in choosing deadly and imprisoning revenge,
we stoically choose our own death day
with no more or less authority and responsibility
than for our own birthday,
and each day that follows
between life’s roses
and deadly shaming blaming thorns,
between integrity
and separations
devoid of restorative justice opportunity,
further WinWins
for each and all EarthTribe.

It is difficult to teach how to stoically fall on one’s own responsible sword
when raised in a military-industriously violent society
determined to competitively invest millions of dollars
in deadening revenge
rather than enlivening sacred invitations
to more stoic restorative justice,
celebrating life feeds life birthdays
and eulogizing death breeds death days
lost in mythic pasts
when we first sacrificed virgin children
to a drought-inducing
Vengeance is Mine
SunGod,
even before Holy Roman Empires.

Justice as revenge
assumes our competitive choices
are between brands of death,
while restorative justice,
more stoically balanced,
presumes if we did not first, more primally,
have cooperative choices between brands of life,
then branding and marketing justified death
would remain an ecological and historical moot point
of LoseLose vengeful nihilism.

And so I continued in my smart-ass ways,
wondering what Ms. Liska would think
about balancing our right to life
with fight against condoning death
except where stoically chosen.

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Historical Matters

It matters,
not just politically and economically,
but also psychologically
and scientifically
and culturally
and ecologically
and educationally,
whether your history of American development
only seldom begins before Columbus Day,
and inevitably ends with flag waving on Independence Day,
or if American loyalty to and for healthy development
began way back in pre-history,
when Father SunYang
gave birth to YinMother Earth.

Who lies within
and who and what and when and where and why remain without
your sense of Earth-patriotic identity
depends on when and where and why
you start your own evolving history,
and where you are OK about our creation story ending.

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