Check this out SuperForest. This is awesome.
Love.
Archive for the 'technology' Category
Heyo SuperForest!
So today I was inspired. Today I decided that the old news needs to go. Today I decided to start SuperForest News Network! For now it will simply be distributed on our Facebook page daily (or at least as often as I/we can). The idea behind it for now is to share potential news stories (the headlines at the very least) that should be making the news. For now it will just be generic awesomnesses, but in the future I would love to get actual specific stories of awesomeness from around the world. I want to share stories of kindness, love, compassion, thoughtfulness, sincerity, surprise, kittens, and puppies. Like I said the things that should be making the headlines. So, PLEASE go head over to our Facebook page and like it, so we can spread happy stories around the net and globe! Here is our first story (note: most stories will only feature on the Facebook page as a headline, and not on SuperForest.org main page):
SuperForest News: This just in – mother read bedtime story to child last night. As a result the Child slept happily. Today at school she brought kindness to peers and teachers, smiles were had by all.
For more SuperForest News be sure to check into our Facebook page!
Love,
Mathew
SFNN Correspondent
Permaculture at its finest. A living swimming pool stacks the functions of rainwater catchment, water filtration, food production, wetlands reclamation, wild animal habitat formation, energy capture in the form of heat from the sun, and the most important function of all: fun.
“David Pagan Butler introduces natural swimming pools: beautiful swimming ponds that require no chemicals, just plants and a simple solar powered filter pump to clean the water.”
(via)
Aloha SuperForest!
Since finding out that we are pregnant, my research and experience has lead me to appreciate the incredible service that midwives offer in supporting women and encouraging our true power and intuition on this transformative journey in growing, birthing, and parenting a new human being.
Jackson’s beautiful sister, Nile Nash, has launched an IndieGoGo fund raising campaign for her latest and greatest endeavor: A Midwifery Clinic in San Francisco. Complete with annual exams, full midwifery care, and, while she’s down there, a waxing! With 14 days left in her campaign, this Mama Lion will surely appreciate all support given. Be sure to check out the rewards she’s offering, like fancy hand knitted hats and even a well woman exam.
Help this amazing woman help other amazing women!
Love you Nile, and all the midwives of the world.
Love + Aloha,
Melissa
Gooood Morning SuperForest!
I often write about the mind and its power over the body. I also often write about how our cultural conditioning determines every aspect of what we call our minds. Our values, our likes and dislikes, our preferences, all are based in where and when we were raised.
This plasticity of the mind is something that I think about a lot, sort of like a toaster thinking about toasters toasting, I guess. How to use this plasticity to my advantage is my main focus.
Case in point: fermented cod liver fish oil.
Melissa was doing some research into tooth decay and found a number of websites that advocated using a combination of fermented cod liver fish oil and butter oil to help teeth stay healthy. Now, why this butter/oil combination works is beyond me, but that it could work is interesting. Basically, if I believe that it could work, then it could work indeed.
The problem is this: the stuff tastes wretched. Fermented cod liver oil tastes exactly like it sounds like it would taste; like fish guts that have been left out to get stinky. Melissa bought a little bottle of it and we decided to eat the recommended quarter teaspoon. Blech. Not wanting to have our teeth fall out, and believing in the curative power of the stuff, I decided to play a little game with my and Melissa’s minds. I would craft and introduce an idea into the both of us that would counter act and redirect the “get nauseated” impulse that arose in me whenever we tasted the fish oil.
One night, before our fish oil, I said to Melissa something to the effect of:
“Hey, you know why I love this fish oil?”
“Why?” Melissa said.
“Because it always reminds me of that time we spent with the Eskimos up in Alaska. Do you remember that?”
Melissa and I have never been to Alaska, nor have we ever hung with Eskimos. Melissa quickly and amusedly pointed that out.
“No, no, you remember! We went to Alaska and we lived with the Eskimos and we had so much fun! We ate seal blubber and cod liver oil and all that raw reindeer meat. Oh man, wasn’t it delicious? Every time I eat this cod liver oil it reminds me of that trip.”
Melissa and I were smiling at each other. The basic idea was this: my feelings toward the taste of cod liver oil were totally conditioned. The taste of cod liver oil is neutral. How I felt about it was everything, and how I felt about it was entirely up to me. Since I had been conditioned to believe that cod liver oil tastes revolting, I decided to create a fake memory that would redirect the nausea into a feeling of nostalgia and satisfaction. I didn’t hate the tastes of cod liver oil, I loved it! It reminded me of a great time I once had with a person I loved.
Now, that this memory I created never happened and that fact was inescapable had nothing to do with the effects it had on my mind. My mind, plastic and flexible and re-writable piece of wonderment that it is, happily accepted the new procedure for what to do when encountering cod liver oil. Instead of not enjoying it, I chose to enjoy it, and as a result I did.
When I eat cod liver oil now, it brings to mind three things: the memory of creating the memory and sharing it with Melissa (happy!), the fake memory of the trip to Alaska and the enjoyment of exciting Eskimo cuisine complete with bizarre made up details that I have filled in myself (happy!), and the idea that my reactions to everything I encounter are entirely up to me, once I recognize that my reactions are open to being set and reset ad nauseum ad infinitum (triple happy!)
Think about the power implicit in this. What could you do with your life if you realized that literally everything you thought or felt could be rewritten, and redirected into whatever experiential alley you chose?
(via)
Case study two: Love the Police.
Whenever I am driving, and I see a cop, a part of me freezes. Gets nervous. Perhaps it’s because I’m from Los Angeles originally and the sight of a cop while driving means getting pulled over and getting a ticket. My conditioned reaction to seeing the police was to have my peace upset. Realizing this unhelpful pattern was dominating my behavior I set out to change it.
Starting several months ago, whenever I was driving and saw a cop, I would wave or give them the shaka. Instead of simply ignoring the police while inwardly freezing up a bit, I forced myself to be gregarious.
“Ah ha! A policeman in a squad car! My friendly friend! My helpful friendly officer friend. The police are here to help.” this was the sort of thinking that I forced myself to engage in while smiling and waving at the police. That they never waved back made no difference at all.
For a while, I would be driving, see a cop, freeze up inside, remember my pattern interrupting idea, and force myself to wave. It felt unnatural. It felt phony. It felt forced and stupid. But I kept at it, and yesterday a miracle happened.
I was driving, I saw a policeman in a squad car coming toward me, and I felt a rush of gratitude and happiness. I waved at the passing policeman and continued on my way. The reconditioning had worked!
“Fake it ’til you make it” is a popular phrase in the world of mind study. Feeling sad? Force your face into a grin and watch as the happy parts of your brain fire and soon you feel happy. Force yourself to laugh and eventually you’ll be laughing for real. Force yourself to reconsider and redirect your feelings towards the police from fear to joy and watch as the police begin to trigger joy feelings in you.
I did the same thing with tailgaters! When people tailgate me now, I pretend that they are my friends and their car has broken down and I am towing them. Instead of feeling frustrated when people drive on my tail, now I feel a bit sad when they pass me.
Training, puppies, training. I have treated my own mind like it was a new dog and I am astounded to see that it is quite capable of forgetting old patterns and replacing them with new ones that I like better and serve me more. I can teach my mind new tricks and the end result is that I am happier.
Every single facet of my reality is up to me to control. Every single thing. How nuts is that? Even more nuts is that I am not some sort of special case. We all have this gift. Most of us will not realize it or utilize it because we are never told that it exists, and we are never taught how to utilize it. You have the same power of mind that I myself have. You can take any external stimuli and train your mind to react to it in any way you see fit.
Our culture conditions us to feel and think certain ways about the world, but once we realize that this is so, we can examine and change any pieces of conditioning that we feel no longer serve our peace and happiness.
Got an unhappy past? Change the story to one of your triumph over adversity, with all your former enemies and tormentors recast as zen masters and teachers. Change the story in your mind and observe that your body will respond accordingly. That statement may strike you as offensive and elitist, but that’s your choice isn’t it? My words are neutral. You decide how to feel about them.
The conditioned separated ones will be upset by this information, and the flexible united ones will use this trick to make their entire existence one of joy and peace. Which side would you like to be on?
The search for enlightenment boils down to this: enlightenment is inside you, in the form of a chosen set of responses to the outside world. If Buddha would just smile and enjoy a nice long sit in a thorn bush, then you and I can train ourselves to enjoy the same thing. We can tell ourselves that the thorns that pierce our flesh are actually loving kisses, or the tickling of butterflies. Or we can tell ourselves that we love the feeling of thorns in our flesh, that it reminds us of wonderful, happy things.
We can choose anything and everything to enjoy, especially the things that our culture has told us to feel negatively towards: sickness, death, poor people, rich people, women, men, other ethnicities, other people’s sexual preferences, religion, the military. We can enjoy or loathe these things at our convenience. But to loath them, indeed, to loath anything, without understanding the mechanics behind why you feel that way, is a waste of a good mind. Your mind has better things to do.
We can use any trick we like to remake the world, but it always starts with remaking ourselves.
Love,
Jackson
p.s. Here’s an earlier SF post about how I taught myself to pee on command.
Good morning SuperForest!
You may be familiar with this pale blue dot:
Hooray Earth!
And you may remember the beloved Carl Sagan’s words about this image:
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”
And, being that we are a repository of existential loveliness, you may remember Jordan and Jackson’s fabulous posts. But hark! There’s news!
As I type these words on a chilly gray Park Slope (fancy!) day, our species may just be crossing a threshold. This cosmic coming-of-age is due to the fact that Voyager 1 and 2, that dynamic duo of interstellar explorers is in the blazing precarity of the heliosphere, the outermost edge of our solar system, where the wooshing solar winds meet interstellar gases, and beyond lies … the unknown. As in, team humanity is almost out of reach of our fair and noble Sun’s magnetic fields, and those lovely little Voyagers are about to — as in within the next decade — exit into the greatest of beyond. Our first kiss with the outer cosmos. And you always remember your first.
Hooray humanity, and our soon-to-be universe smooch!
This post inspired by the wowtastic RADIOLAB from WNYC, which might be the most aurally delicious podcast around.
(BONUS BOWIE (WHY NOT?))
Hello friends,
I have a big announcement: this is an especially special day, as it is the birthday of not one but two of the most fabulous people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, our very own Heather and Jackson. We’ve written and read one another’s words for a few years now, and these two inspire me endlessly. Here are some choice bits:
“We grow up learning about self-esteem, self-respect and self-love from friends, family, school, workshops, etc. etc. etc. Sometimes all of that learning is floating around in our heads, but we don’t feel it. For me, it took an honest conversation to wake me up to the destructive pattern I’d been self-inflicting. I didn’t think I was enough, I compared myself to others, and I was worried if I outwardly loved myself too much, I’d come across as cocky and self-absorbed. What I realized, however, is that I am a unique, amazing, beautiful person and I have a lot to offer this world — I just have to get out of my own way and love myself, so that I can find inner peace, a joy-filled life, and a loving life-partner, ” from Heather’s Journal: Love Thyself.
“This transmission of knowledge without communication is something that I have thought much about since I left CEDU. I have seen firsthand what it means to simply yell at someone to do something, or to belittle them into subservience to your will. That does not interest me. Violence is something I have explored so thoroughly, it no longer has any luster to me. For me, to communicate true joy and love has become the challenge. Without words. I am great at words! I can word, word, word, along with the best of them. But to simply live in joy, and transmit the life of joy, has been my goal,” from Jackson’s Journal: Where is the Fun?
AND ONE BONUS BIRTHDAY: Today is also the birthday of Chögyam Trungpa, Tibetan Buddhist lama and American beat poet.
“There is no problem when people are not stuck on anything but are in the process of expanding. Then you can find a sense of built-in freedom. Don’t try to put everything into a pigeonhole. If you do that, you might find yourself stuck in one pigeonhole. But if you regard your existence as cosmic, then you won’t be stuck on anything. Our home is not just this planet Earth. It is our solar system.” from I Don’t Know Where But I Love This Book.
Triple birthday love-wisdom bonanza. Wow. Big thanks to all of you for being awesome.
Love,
Drake
Similar to No Impact Man this couple undertook a year long challenge to stop making trash! Check out their website and film!
Recently I was pondering individual action. Is there any point in making a change if I am the only one doing it?
I saw this great interview on Annie Leonard’s new podcast: The Good Stuff! She is no stranger to SuperForest, having created the Story of Stuff (and several other stories since then). This week she interviewed one very passionate young person…
We hear it every day from people who are concerned about what’s happening to the environment: “What can I do? I’m just one person!” What if you were just one 8-year-old boy? Cole Rasenberger didn’t let that stop him from taking on one of the world’s largest fast-food chains over its packaging. In this episode of The Good Stuff, Annie learns how Cole rallied other kids at his school to join him in challenging KFC. And Danna Smith of the Dogwood Alliance tells us about the threat to Southern coastal forests from wasteful fast-food packaging
This was a really great reminder for me to work with other people. Together we can! Do you have any tips for getting other people on board? How do you get others to support you?
GOOOO TEAM!
Love,
SuperForest Jenni
Good Morning SuperForest!
Since we found out that we’re pregnant, Melissa and I have been consuming a lot of baby and birthing info. Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept is one of them and the information it contains is truly astonishing. According to Liedloff, who spent many years living with indigenous tribes in South America, the reason for what we refer to as the Separation in Western culture, could be directly related to the way that we are treated and cared for as newborns.
Jean Liedloff cites that indigenous children are more peaceful, better behaved, never spit up, and grow into fuller human beings than Westerners due to the fact that indigenous babies do not leave skin to skin contact with anyone for the first six to eight months of their lives. Indigenous babies are simply never put down, and are instead kept in a sling or papoose during waking hours, and kept between the mother and father at night. This constant contact with the motion, sudden noises, changes in temperature and light and darkness, that accompany being always near an active adult means that the babies become socialized simply by not being segregated into special, quiet, baby rooms.
Furthermore, indigenous children do not wear diapers. Instead, the mother and child develop a communication style that allows the mother time to ready an appropriate location or receptacle for the baby’s movements. This diaper free existence means that the children do not get diaper rash, nor are they left to sit in their own waste, ever. It also means that indigenous babies grow used to communicating their needs and having them answered far earlier than Western children.
Perhaps what we refer to as the Separation refers to the literal separation that occurs between mother and baby in the instant that it is born? In Western culture, the baby is taken from the mother, weighed, wiped, swaddled, has its nose and throat suctioned, and then is eventually given to the dazed mother. Indigenous mothers have the freshly born baby placed directly on their stomachs where the baby and mother bond and the infant is gently allowed to suckle. This indigenous infant will not leave the contact of another living, moving, human body at all until the child is learning to crawl.
Think back. Do you remember a time as a very young being when all you wanted in the world was to be held? By mother, by father, by anyone? Grandparents, other children, dogs, wolves, anything would suffice as long as it’s breathing, moving, alive, textured, allowing our innate human need to be touched is satiated. Wrap a baby in a lifeless dry blanket and place it in a non-moving box in a silent room, and witness the way it cries for help and contact. By giving our infants this contact that both they and we crave, we allow them to feel human; treated in the same way that humans have been treated as babies for 99.99 percent of our existence.
According to Liedloff, Westerners symbolically abandon their children to cribs and quiet rooms, which conditions them to emptiness and a forever feeling of lack. In contrast, indigenous tribes welcome and cherish their children, treating them as though they were wanted and are right. The assumption in the West being that unless children are rigorously directed and supervised they will either kill themselves or will somehow grow into anti-social beings. The indigenous method is exactly the inverse; children are assumed to be fully capable of assuming responsibility for their own choices , and the emphasis is always on the natural goodness of the individual, allowing the individual itself the opportunity to assume a self-selected role within their society.
The difference is something that we all know deep in our bones, Liedloff says. To change it, we must recognize first that something has gone awry, that fad and fashion have swayed our inborn logic and instincts. Then we must pick our children back up and allow them the time in arms that they deserve. They will not be long in our arms. Babies grow very quickly.
A truly fascinating book and certainly one that flew directly in the face of everything that I’ve assumed about children and child rearing. I highly recommend The Continuum Concept to parents, teachers and students, and anyone who enjoys studying culture, group dynamics, and societal norms.
LOVE!
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