This should be our theme song! It reminds me of The Humanifesto! I can’t believe I never noticed it before : P
Old song but the message has never been more true : )
LOVE!
SF Jenni
Tag Archive for 'love'
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A comment from Jackson on my last post, regarding creating sacred spaces in everyday life:
This is fantastic, Drake! The question I ask myself is: How big can I make my sacred space?
Can it be bigger than a room? Could it be the whole house? Could it be the whole street? Could it be the planet itself? Could I stretch out really far and contain the entirety of the Universe within my sacred space?If I did that, I would reside within my sacred space forever.
A reply, in three parts:
I. IMAGINATION EXPERIMENTS
You are in your backyard, an open winter’s plain, with a camera in hand, and a spindly birch stands alone before you. A sparrow flies to a far branch and begins to tweet, and you turn your head to the stimuli. The angle of vision shifts. Light and shadow form a new composition. “Snap” goes the shutter.
It’s the high summer. You are lying in bed, looking out the window to the same tree. Feeling hot, you switch on the fan above you. You look again at the cedar, now full and green. Coolness on your face brings your attention back to the fan. You look up, and follow one blade’s spin, slowing its orbit with your concentration.
That fall, standing in line at the grocery store, you are a bit bored. You need to get home, and the fluorescent lights give you a headache. Your jaw tightens. The cashier is taking too long, and the little kids up anew spots ahead are getting annoying.
Or, rather, you catch yourself growing annoyed, blink well, and exhale. You breathe down into your soles, let your arches rest, and feel the ground beneath your toes. Frustration melts into relaxation, and the environment shifts: the lights illuminate, the cashier is thorough, and the children’s whimsy delightful.
Light and shadow recompose. The blade slows.
A smile alights on the corners of your mouth.
II. PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONFESSIONAL
When I was a boy, I played lots of video games. I remember, in my early illiteracy, begging my sister to read to me the text of RPGs. As with many of my ilk, the screen, I think, shaped the way that I relate to myself.
I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror, one of those places of childhood epiphany, and touching my face, thinking, “this is my body, this is the one I get.” I had, through the analogy of SEGA, thought of my body as something I was “playing,” the character given for this life.
Using myself as an example, I tend to identify with the witnessing screen of my consciousness, rather than this body, as me. And, contrarily, I tend to see others as their bodies; it takes consideration to realize that in this other collection of parts lives a consciousness, with a history of breakups and best friends and ice cream preferences. Unexamined, I harbor a frayed mind/body dualism: I am only my mind, they are only their bodies.
Descartes would suggest that this consciousness and this body are running parallel to one another, and do not intersect. This seems silly, as this mind and this body are constantly interacting. When I hit my head on something, consciousness knows it too.
Going back to childhood, the screen conditioned me into a mediated identity. There was the subject, consciousness, and the object, the body, which have a mysterious degree of separation. We often talk of “having” a body, but rarely of “being” a body. Perhaps this is a reason that so many, including myself, tend to neglect, or even harm, our bodies, which are somehow so far away. But it is in the body that the consciousness is in the world. Rather than being mutually exclusive, mind and body are mutually inclusive.
Our bodies are constantly communicating with us. “Listen to your body, listen to your body.” But what is it saying, and how do I listen? Most obvious is “HUNGRY” and “SLEEPY!” but what are the less obvious elements, the tension in the shoulders, the pull in the hamstrings, saying to us?
A teacher once told me that all body tension is emotional. And with meditation and yoga my incredulity had eroded. It seems that it is a sensitivity to these feelings that is needed to udnrstand them. It is a though my body is a class of students, and each part wants to be called on to say what happened over the weekend. That tension, or that peace, radiates in consciousness, and out into our surroundings. The mind is manifest in the body, the body manifest in the mind.
–
Relationship is everywhere, and everywhere we are shown ourselves. The other reveals us … The whole always throws the parts into relationship, polishing the mirrors. What we see happening in the external drama we can be sure is part of ourselves. It is said that a cow walked across the entire city of Baghdad and saw only some hay that had fallen off a wagon. Likewise, some people travel all around the world and report back that everyone tried to cheat them.
Coleman Barks’s commentary, The Essential Rumi.
–
III. CONSCIOUSNESS AND ENVIRONMENT
When first laying eyes on the Himalayas, or Monet’s <em> Water Lillies </em>>, one may emit a soft “ah,” a soft vocalization of placid awe. This awe extinguishes anxiety, and the conscious mind rests on the beauty it beholds. Correspondingly, the body relaxes and releases. For a moment, the “I” and its projected barriers are gone, and consciousness is unseparated from its environment. The lover dissolves into the beloved, and this is, to me, the essence of sacred experience.
What is important to keep in mind is that consciousness does not exist somewhere else; the phenomena we experience through our senses are not behind a screen, the mind is not mediated. The state of consciousness is reflected in the body’s posture and movement, the tension of muscles and joints, in the tone of voice, in the feeling communicated by physical touch. As well, the state of consciousness frames, or perhaps even defines, what one takes away from a particular location.
Christianity and Buddhism agree that the body is a temple. The body exudes its consciousness, and if one makes safe refuge within one’s body, the way that the druid feels in Stonehenge, or the francophile in Montmartre, the sacred space of the mind expands, and the peace of that consciousness acts as a temple blessing to all those that interact with it.
Last summer in Dharamsala I received a teaching from the Dalai Lama, and walking from his throne to his car, he turned to his right and, for the briefest of moments, His Holiness connected eyes with me, and I froze in elation; all my ideas my ideas fell down, and he turned back to his path, and I cooed and clapped in a fit of Lama-induced love-hysterics.
What is the well-spring of said swoon? How is it that His Holiness radiates radical peace, through the medium of air into me? I do not know, but I sense that in that lustrous mind of his is a calm ocean, and that serenity of consciousness is manifest in the body.
In loving, we train ourselves to love more. In perceiving the beauty of the world, we make ourselves more vulnerable to seeing the beauty that is inside us. By stepping into the quiet beauty within consciousness, and gain an appreciation for this foundation of living, we in turn open our aesthetic aperture. In the calm abiding of sensing beauty in the “screen” of consciousness, one begins to appreciate the beauty of the body. This threefold sensitivity to beauty, at the seat of consciousness, as part of the body, and within space, creates a sustainable, positive, psychological ecology, transcendent of “everywhere.”
A SuperForest.
Love,
Drake
(via)
Gooood Morning Lovely SuperForest!
Since reading the book A Course in Miracles, I’ve been paying special attention to my body. My body, which I have happily ignored and reviled for years, has recently become a friend. A companion. A nice lil’ playmate.
So when my nice lil’ friend got a cold, I was keenly interested in what exactly was happening to it while I was “having a cold.” A Course in Miracles says that sickness is impossible if you are connected with love and eternity, so when I woke up with the sniffles, feeling congested and slow, I thought to myself: Great! Here’s a chance for the book to work.
Then I had to remember that the book did nothing in itself, that I myself was in charge. According to ACIM the sole reason that I was “sick” was that my mind was attacking my body. To cure the sickness, I had to identify which idea my mind was attacking my body with, an idea that my ego was desperately trying to hide from my loving attention. To accomplish this, I had to slow down and listen to myself.
The feeling of “having a cold” I quantified thusly:
Feelings of tension and tightness in my neck area, specifically where my head and neck join. A “swollen” feeling in my sinuses. Snot coming out of my nose. A feeling of lethargy and fatigue. A feeling like if I exerted myself too much, I would prolong the sickness. My eyes felt tired.
I would note this little laundry list of feelings with a kind of disassociated interest. The attitude I cultivated was one of happy interest in the fact that my body was alive and feeling sensations, but not trying to interpret those sensations in any way. Feeling neither negative nor positive about my “cold symptoms” I lobbed them onto an imaginary desk in my mind and asked please that they be whisked away from me.
In a whoosh, the icons of sickness I had created in my mind were whisked away, leaving the table clean. In that moment of imaginary clarity, I found myself exhaling fully, taking a deep breath, noting that I was thrusting my head forward at an angle. Breathing in, I felt my body soften, and resettle into a place of comfort and ease.
The cold symptoms I thus self treated for a few days. I would feel “coldy,” and I would instantly remind myself that my body did not have a cold, that it was my mind attacking my body with angry thoughts that was the cause of my unease. Much like a fencer will skillfully parry a thrust of the blade in his direction, the mind training taught by ACIM has given me the inner remove necessary for fending off what in the past would have effected me in a far different way. I could use my imagination to fight back the hateful effects of my ego as it thrashed around inside me, hiding from my thoughts, keeping my body distracted with “sickness.”
On day three I was lying down on our bed at the farm. Melissa was beside me. I had my face smushed into her back, between her shoulder blades. For days I had been moving at what felt like half speed, though we were still being as active as we normally are, more so even because we are about to move and there are many plates spinning. I had been asking myself over and over, what is the root cause of this feeling inside me? Thus far, I had received no answer.
Suddenly, like a Spanish galleon rising from the muddy bottom of a lake and rushing to the surface in a spume of white water, the idea that had been plaguing me surfaced and could be seen: I was mad at everyone.
Deep inside, there was a place in me that was really pissed at the human race. Our destructiveness, our needless enslavement of each other, our hundred million thousand daily cruelties. Why had we treated the planet and each other with such reckless abandon? Why had we destroyed so much and so many?
I was smiling as I thought this. Ahhhhhh, there you are my beauty, I thought. Like a splinter in my mind, the “everyone else is a shithead” idea had sat in there and pumped out toxic waste into my very central nervous system for nearly thirty years. This rotten creme puff of an idea had infected and inflected every decision I had ever made, every interaction I had ever had with anyone, ever. Until now, moth—–er, thought I.
This splinter I believe was the root of the separation idea within my mind. The final vestige of an Us Vs. Them idea that was firmly lodged in my operating system until I took the mental equivalent of a long, hot bath, and let that little sucker squeeze its way out of my ego, up into the bright attention of my will. Where I promptly flushed that lil’ nasty into nothingness.
There sits the wooden table, or the marble mantle, the surface upon which I place the things I wish to be whisked out of my mind, dealt with forever by something much more capable than myself. Upon the table I place the shabby little muddy model of the ship, now looking old, rotten, soaked, and tired. Please, oh Universe, take from me this rotten idea that there is a them to be angry at.
Whoosh!
And there I am left, clean and innocent in the present. The past has been forgiven. All sickness and symptoms and thoughts of unease have vanished. It took three days of focused breathing, soft attention, and compassionate self awareness to root out the cause of my cold, and when it came out, I felt immediately well. It’s funny to think that the common cold remedy is a form of amphetamine, meant to wind you up and keep you going. That’s funny because in my experience, if you want to deal with the root of the symptoms and not just treat the symptoms alone, you must slow down, breath deeply, and wait patiently for the Big Nasty to surface.
Sweating helps. The ocean helps. Tea helps. Lots of water and fluids help. Loving attention from others and a TOTAL denial of your “sickness” helps a great deal as well. Slow down and the funk will work its way out. You may feel a bit funky while it does, but once the idea is clear in your mind, you’ll be able to deal with it immediately and effortlessly. Well, effortlessly over time, with practice :)
Western style medicine pays no attention to the link between the mind and the body, specifically the link between our emotional state and the way we feel physically. That the two are linked is beyond question. Our culture has conditioned us to assume that when we are sick our bodies are fighting germs or infection, but if we shift the idea of sickness in our minds to one where the mind is trying to fight itself, then the power for our healing rests once more in our own capable hands.
There is no sickness. There is simply the mind trying to fight itself and attacking the body. Find the root idea behind the attack and you negate the idea of sickness. Eliminate the idea of sickness from your mind and you will never be sick.
I love you!
-Jackson
(via)
Number one: Figure out what you want. Do this by asking yourself A LOT of questions and listening to the answers that are returned to you. Beginning with, “What do I want?” I’ve found that simply being on the land helps me to quiet my mind. Sometimes by just sitting, other times by weeding the garden or walking silently, listening to what’s happening in my head. Then, when I receive an answer, for example, “I want to build a chicken coop,” I think about what I want that coop to look like. What are my reasons for wanting chickens? To feed my family? To feed the community? To sell? How many chickens do I have energy, money and food to raise? How much space do I have to dedicate to chickens? What materials are available to build a coop? Would I rather have a chicken tractor so I can utilize my birds for garden preparation and fertilization? Any question that I can think of, that seems important for my initial coop design, I have to remember to ask it, and listen to what comes in response.
Then, using free or cheap, found, recycled, donated, used, materials, I build Prototype A Chicken Coop. No need for expert skills, I cobble together a rudimentary first coop, get some chickens, put them in it, and see what happens. Does the cat get in and eat two of my ladies? Is it so good I don’t need to make any adjustments at all? Would I rather it have wheels for easier relocation? I observe and make adjustments. There are no mistakes, just experimenting, creating, having fun, learning and forward movement. I use prototyping for nearly all of my projects. It allows me to obverse and make decisions based on real events rather than trying to predict what will happen in the future. Here is a fantastic article SuperForester Jackson just found on Prototyping.
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Next, Land needs people. Either paid help or work/trade/live-in help. Development can rarely be done alone AND happy and quickly and cheaply. So observe the land while asking for, meeting with and inviting your specifically chosen team to come join you to live on the land. Let the grass (if there is any) grow long and tall. Observe the paths that the people create in the un-mowed grass. Plant where the people Don’t walk. Allow them to create your map for you. Trust them. You’ve chosen these people for specific reasons like, you like them, they are skilled and valuable to you and your project. Treat them as such.
I’ve now co-created land projects twice, once on two acres, currently on nine, and (fingers crossed) moving on to five. With each project, the team of people was the most integral first step after: Do Nothing. Wait. Observe. Document (photo, video, write.) If you feel you can do this alone AND cheap, you’re likely mistaken. If you’re still interested in the monetary/employment, drive to work to buy this car, buy this car to drive to work system and you’ve got a lot of money and are willing to spend it, hire some awesome peeps to help you. I’ve used the live-in, work/trade, low or no rent method for both projects and have found it to be most fulfilling for the land, the people and our collective sanity.
Figure out where you’re going to set up each camp. When you allow each team member/family their own camping spot with room to ripple out towards each other and the common areas, you will be able to observe that wherever you place a human, the land around them will get cleared and cleaned and loved from the inside out, effortlessly. Again, trust your people. Don’t micromanage. With a common goal, that one you figured out you wanted in step one, the vision will come to fruition if you communicate with and trust your people.
Water: Wells can be ideal, but take time and money. So set up some rain catchment. You can use a simple tarp/55 gallon plastic barrel system that you can run through either a natural, plant, sand, charcoal filter or a Berkey or Britta system. Also, Is there a nearby fresh spring or a stream running on the land that you can utilize?
Poop: We call our method The Tree Machine. Dig a hole about 3-4 feet deep and 2-3 feet wide. Build a simple wooden box with a toilet hole and hinged cover, and place it over hole in ground. Squat on box and poop in hole. Place dirt or, preferably dry wood chips over each poo until hole is nearly full. Remove box, fill in remaining part of hole, let sit for two weeks. Plant fruit tree over it. Repeat.
Those are the basics I’ve used for the initial phase of land projects.
Aloha!
Gooood morning my friends,
It is 2012! Let the new year’s SuperForesting commence!
We have gardens to build, and minds to set free.
Our task is two-fold: We must garden the inside of our minds, and we must create actual working, food producing gardens. By doing this we will effect massive social change, for if ten percent of us started gardening intensively, there would be food for the other ninety percent. Food in abundance and world peace are the goals.
To begin, we must cultivate a state of willingness. The coming year will challenge us, provoke us, force us to learn on our feet, learn while doing. It will be great fun. Now is not the time to get all rigid in our thinking. Now is the time to get loose and floppy like a noodle. Remember that the strongest reed is the one that bends, SuperForesters. When we are provoked we will react lovingly, or not at all. The coming year will be full of provocation. Let us declare with joy that we are willing to do whatever it takes to have peace and joy throughout 2012!
We’ve gotta declare peace within our own minds, my homies. We’ve gotta start treating our friends and neighbors exactly as we would have them treat us, if we’re gonna make it through to the golden rainbow funtime sexyland garden paradise that awaits us. Are you willing? A little teeny tiny bit willing is all it takes. I love you, and I want you to be your brightest and best.
Here’s how:
(image via mi9.com)
1. You are not a person. You are the Universe.
Your whole life you’ve been taught that you are a person. You are this name and this is your background and these are your parents, and here is your school, and these are your friends, and this is your history, and that was your life, and one day it will all end with your death, and that will be the end of the story of you. That is the essence of our conditioning. We are humans. We were born, we live a short while, and then we die. Inside our fleshy bodies, we are separate from the rest of the world. There is the car, there is the tree, here I am, and behind me is a hill. Right? This isn’t anything new, this is fundamental. And sadly, this teaching, so fundamental to the way that we perceive the world is totally wrong.
We are not humans, mes amis. That idea is a needless discriminatory classification. We are taught that we are human, but we are not. The totality of what I am and what you are too and what we both share between us and what we really are is so huge and eternal and perfect that to try to cram all of that perfection and eternity into a bag of meat and call it “Jackson” is absurd.
Here’s the truth: We are the Universe. You. Me. All of us. Everyone that has ever lived or will ever live. Everything that has ever existed. All of that is us. We are the Universe. Everything is connected because everything IS everything. There is only unity because unity cannot by definition be divided.
If you are taught that you are NOT the Universe, that you are a finite little speck of a person (and all of us are taught that,) then you will treat the “outside world” with suspicion, hostility, and outright destructiveness. That is exactly how we treat the world today. We treat it and each other with terrible cruelty, and we pretend that we’re not aware of it. We think that we can get away with such behavior because “the world” is external, and is not a part of us. But in this thinking we are terribly mistaken. For the world that we mistreat and the creatures that populate it that we abuse IS US. There is no separation between the world and the humans. The humans are the world. The world is the humans. To call one “world” and one “human” is to separate what cannot be separated, and once that is realized, once that fundamental untruth has been corrected then you realize something utterly wonderful, and that is…
(image via sree.cc)
2. You are a mind, and your mind is connected with every other mind.
Everything that is is connected. If you are the universe that means that you have all the power the Universe has. That means that you can travel through space and time. You can live forever. You will never be sick. You can operate under a completely different set of laws. We are all of us enlightened beings, and to realize our potential, we need to learn to relax into our magnificence. To truly relax is harder than it sounds. Most of us have a lifetime of pain and suffering stored up in our bodies, or the ideas of our bodies, really. To learn to quiet the body and still the mind is necessary to realize the true scope of your powers. Yoga, massage, meditation, gardening, walking, running, building, cleaning; any action can be a “walking meditation,” where our every move serves to remind us of grace, ease, and deep connective joy. Our bodies are here solely as devices for communicating healing and joy. When all minds have joined together in the realization of our unity, our bodies will no longer be necessary. We will be revealed as beings of light.
Our minds are all the same mind. When we are calm, we can communicate with each other. There is great joy in this. To cultivate a state of deep calm, we must focus on our breathing.
(image via flickr user goingslo)
3. Breath all the way out.
Take a deep breath in, not so deep as to cause any strain, but a deep and full and satisfying breath of air into your lungs. Now, begin to let it out. Slowly. At the bottom of your exhale pause before your inhale. Hold right there. Now, continue EXHALING slowly and minutely for as long as you can. Most of us are very shallow breathers. We breath in a little, then out a little, seldom taking deep and full breaths. We usually have a big pocket of left over stale air at the bottom of our lungs that doesn’t get exhaled because of our shallow breathing. This exercise will help reverse that and bring consciousness to your breathing, which is ultimately the gateway to deep relaxed mental states.
Sit calmly. Be comfortable. Be warm and mellow. Take a deep breath in. Let your exhale stretch out as long as it can. Then stretch your inhale out as well. As you exhale, you can feel your heart beating, and you can use this rhythm to help you moderate your exhale, letting out a little bit of air with each heart beat. When we concentrate on exhaling fully, we bring our precious attention to our breath, which allows us access to deep, relaxed, connected states. Slow your breathing and your respiration slows. Your heart slows. Your mind slows. The world slows. Slow, steady, and soft are the qualities we’re cultivating here, qualities that remind us how very like the Universe we are, so alike as to be inseparable.
Once you’ve realized that you are totally connected to every living thing, that you are a wondrous part of the grand creation that is life, and you are happy to see that everything you perceive as the outside world is really YOU and treat it as such, then congratulations, my friends, you are a SuperForester.
What I just wrote is in essence just a grander version of the Humanifesto, which is the nifty little document that started this whole SuperForest shebang. It says it right in there: You are the environment. You have to be good to the outside world, because in the end, there is no difference between you and the outside world. We together are all the outside world.
Aaaaaaaannnd, Step Four!
(image via truespeechfiles)
4. There is no conflict.
You are the universe. You are the totality of everything. All of time and space exist within you right now. So all conflict is absurd. Beyond absurd, it cannot exist. What is one (and we are all one) cannot be in conflict because what is one cannot fight itself. What about wars and death, and disease, and suffering? As long as we choose to see them as such, and make villains of them, and fear them, and say that they are the opposite of life we are being mistaken, and are holding ourselves hostage to our own illusions. What if all of those words could be translated into love? What if war meant love? And suffering meant love? What if starvation and deprivation of the cruelest kind were only illusions, and that there was nothing to fear? What if everything ultimately meant love?
Life has no opposite. Life is everything. We are life. What we call suffering is life. There is no death. There is what appears to be suffering and war and death, but all of those things are only life being life. Life endlessly being itself. Life is love, as human is love, as planet is love, as solar system is love, as chimpanzee is love, as war is love, as button is love, as all are love. What truly is love can have no opposite and all is love.
The war is over. The need for conflict is over. The need for desire is over. We have outgrown these ideas. We can let them go. This is SuperForesting.
All attack is relinquished. All enemies are forgiven.
Here to replace conflict is golden peace.
Okay, that was a super heavy intense download. Go outside and run around.
(image via vistawallpaper.org)
Part Two – The Great Land Caper!
Mmmkay, here’s the thing. You need land. You do, you just don’t know it yet. You need about half an acre of land. You need to have a place to live and a garden bursting with food. Beyond that garden you need fruit trees and nut trees. Beyond that you need trees for firewood, and trees for building with. You need chickens and water tanks, and solar dryers, and wash lines. You need these things. Why? These things will keep you alive. If you live in an apartment in the city, move out to the country. Do this now.
Our system is collapsing. Notice I didn’t say “about to collapse” or “in danger of collapsing.” No, I said IS collapsing. Your ability to access the things that you need to keep you alive long enough to realize your full potential as a SuperForester is not going to last much longer. That means that food, water, and power are about to run out. That means that our money is very soon going to be both worthless and useless, save for starting fires. Our degrees, our job security, our pension plans, our wealth, all these things that used to protect us and offer us the idea of security, all of them have evaporated. If you have some land that you can begin cultivating very soon, you’re going to be sitting pretty and able to help your friends and neighbors. To truly help, you must be in a position beyond needing help yourself. To help yourself, you need land.
There is land everywhere. Everybody has a grandma or an uncle or an aunt or someone that has a big house on a few acres of land. Find those people, work that land. Or we need to start occupying any unused land and use it for housing, work space and intensive organic food cultivation. For to not have land and robust working living systems when the (fill in the blank) comes down would suck. There is land everywhere. Team up and find it. A few acres can feed a lot of people. Be the people with food pumping out of your gardens when cheap oil stops flowing, or the US invades Iran or whatever insane horror show forces the consumptive life we’ve all been living to a grinding halt. And good! No one likes living this way really. It is misery to live a separated existence.
Is it contradictory to say in one breath: you are not a body, and in another say: get some land to protect your body? Yes, I suppose it is. But on the other hand, even if you are not a body, you still have a body, and as I said before, bodies are useful for healing and communicating joy. We can use our bodies to heal the scars we’ve left on each other and the planet, and in doing so we will heal our own minds. We will realize the extent to which our interconnectedness offers us room for entirely new avenues of creation and communication. New arts, new sciences, new learning, all await us. We will use our bodies to create beautiful spaces to heal and help other SuperForesters transition to abundance.
These spaces are our gardens. Where we manifest our love for the earth and for one another. Where we witness the miracle of abundance as the efforts of one gardener feeds many hungry people. In our gardens we can heal the minds of our sick friends, taught that they’d been cast adrift and marooned away from the Universe and love. And once every mind has been healed, we will dance with this planet and with each other as never before, and all of us will be revealed to be the same golden light, the same extensions of perfect universal love.
When our gardens intersect and connect they form a SuperForest, and that is us. That is our shared purpose: to unite our inner and outer gardens.
All I’m asking is that we give up everything that we don’t like and keep everything we do like. Simple enough, right? That to me sounds like heaven. That sounds like a world worth creating. Great, let’s create it.
But how are we going to do all that? How are we going to connect and share these ideas that we need to thrive? How can we possibly accomplish such a task?
We’re doing it. It is happening. That is what SuperForest is for. That is what we all are for. That is what the internet is for. That is what the Universe is for. We have seen the writing on the wall long ago, and moved to support positive change. The world is waking up, and we are here to help wake it. The people are realizing their unity, and we are here to help remind them, to guide them. We are here to help our friends and neighbors, the people we love, to realize that they are perfect love, and that they deserve to live lives of perfect peace.
Your task is thus: Garden your mind. Garden your world. You are a SuperForester, get to it.
Here is where we share our journey.
Love,
Jackson
Tasting fresh coconut water for the first time is serious business…;)
Good Evening, SuperForesters!
As you may know, I boarded a plane this past August and visited the magical, beautiful island of Kauai. I also visited L.A. and B.C., but it was while I was on Kauai that I made some pretty amazing breakthroughs about love, life and self.
I don’t even know where to start when describing my experiences. It wasn’t my first time traveling alone, but it was the longest time period and furthest away that I’d been on my own. That in and of itself made way for much growth and stretching.
I relaxed, slept in, fell in love with a cat, made new SuperForesty friends, spent cherished time with SuperForester Jackson and SuperForester Melissa, and toured around the beautiful island, exploring and journeying, and learning!
Today I want to share with you something that I truly learned on this journey:
I learned to love myself.
It was a beautiful, calm evening and SuperForester Jackson was driving me home after he, SuperForester Melissa and I had spent the day together. We were discussing this theory, and the conversation turned to our grandparents and any similarities or differences we may have from those individuals. In comparing myself to my paternal grandmother, I did something that I didn’t realize I’ve been doing my entire life.
SuperForester Jackson quickly responded, “Ok, you have to stop doing that!” I had no idea to what he was referring…but he explained that since I arrived, I had been putting myself down left and right. Chalk it up to family patterns of overly extreme humility, added to my sense of stereotypical Canadian humility, added to … blah, blah, blah! It’s all excuses! Essentially, I was telling myself and everyone around me, “I’m not that great, so don’t bother listening to me/paying attention to me/loving me.”
WOW.
It took me a few days and a challenging hike to push past some of my fears and realize that I’d not been practicing self-love like I deserved. I had glimpsed this realization while journeying through the Peacemaker book, but it had not hit home until it was bravely, honestly verbalized to me.
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.
So, SuperForest, I urge you to “love thyself”. Take a look at what that really means to you. Ask close friends and family to be brutally honest with you and tell you what you’ve been doing to yourself, perhaps without even noticing. It is a daily practice, but I am working on it, and I truly hope you all are as well.
I sincerely hope that sharing my truth in this post inspires one of you to love yourself more as well. It all ripples outward, SuperForest… but you knew that already.
You are Loved.
SuperForester Heather
Happy Birthday to the magical SuperForester Mathew!!! An old soul in a young body, Mathew brings joy, introspection, energy and love to SuperForest! I am sure I can speak for all SuperForesters when I say that I am very happy you were born, SuperForester Mathew!
Much love to you and I hope happy celebrations are in store :)
~SuperForester Heather
Hello Superforesters!
I just returned from my most recent artistic adventure in musiclandia, my second album!
It’s called “the V album” and it explores some outrageous and gorgeous reaches of the human experience~
You can find it on iTunes and www.theValbum.com!
I have scribbled a map, and now I want YOU to strap in and take off!
Listen to it!
Watch it!
Boogie down!
You know what I would love the most?!
If you learned a song and played it for me when you return!
Love!
TV
(via)
Aloha SuperForest!
I recently found myself believing that I had to make a Decision that had potential to create discomfort for myself and two other women staying on the land. I was told by a third party that these women had acquired… dun dun dun! LICE! This information was presented to me in a package that at first glance, appeared judgmental, but upon closer investigation, discovered the judgment was the cloak worn by the underlying fear. (This of course perceived by me through my own lenses of life’s conditioning.) During the communication of this new piece of the Life Pie, I began thinking, nearly believing the same negative things being communicated to me. Not just through the meanings of the words chosen, but through the tone in which the words were spoken, body language, and the general vibe of the communication. I mostly listened and asked questions, but I walked away feeling like I’d been the witness and a minimal participant in an old fashioned middle school slam session. I didn’t like the way it felt.
Sometimes I don’t always recognize that I’ve been administered a fear injection til later in the day or week when I find myself up in my head, making up stories and getting down on myself and life. I realize that I’ve participated in someone else’s version of reality and have taken a hit off the old fear pipe that they themselves were smoking in the moment we interacted. (Contact fear!) And it isn’t until my awareness of this comes into focus that I’m able to unwind the swirling thoughts in my head, look at what just happened, remind and re-center.
Jackson and I have been reading to each other A Course in Miracles: A Foundation for Inner Peace. This book – a text, student’s workbook, and teacher’s manual - contains key lessons for me (and you, if you’re interested) in thought-reversal, so we may remember to always choose love.
Although Christian in statement, the Course deals with universal spiritual themes. It is said that a psychologist at Columbia University in the 1960s unintentionally channelled Jesus Christ, and this book is the result. Initially, I was skeptical. I’ve got my own programming surrounding religion, but this was an opportunity to take a look at that particular piece of software. And besides, what can it hurt? Jesus didn’t lead the crusades or touch all the little boys. That was the people who claimed to represent him. So let’s see what the old JC has to say to some psychologist in the 60s.
It makes a fundamental distinction between the real and the unreal; between knowledge and perception. Knowledge is truth, under one law, the law of love or God. … It merely is.The world of perception, on the other hand, is the world of time, of change, of beginnings and endings. It’s based on interpretation, not on facts. It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death. It is learned rather than given, selective in its perceptual emphases, unstable in its functioning, and inaccurate in its interpretations.”
I have been incredibly surprised by how much sense this book has been making. Coupled with my education in psychology, I now see the difference between knowledge and perception. By applying these teachings, I was able to regain my center following the lice fear bomb. I was able to see that what had been communicated was this person’s interpretation of a situation in my reality. The neutral facts were: two women living on our land discovered they had lice, and lice needs dealing with. The negative spin on that information was the communicator’s fear speaking. Another’s perception. After being sprayed with fear, my interpretation heard, “Lice is gross and bad. You don’t want to get lice. Protect yourself. Tell them to leave the land. Separate. Be afraid.”
Referencing some of the Course teachings, I asked The Universe, Holy Spirit, God, Love, Mama Kauai, whatever you want to call it, for Inner Peace. I sat with myself, focused on my breath, and asked for peace. That’s all I did. Within seconds I knew how I needed to respond.
You see, last year, I had lice. My head was itching for a couple of days and I asked Jackson to check it out. My scalp was red, a little dandruffy, and had sand all up ins! But he didn’t see anything alive. A good washing and a coco oiling was our prescription for my itch. Still itchy. One night in bed, I was going crazy with the itch and asked him to check again in a specific spot. He immediately found a lovely little pair of critters. We Googled it on my phone. The image that popped up was as if we’d taken the photo ourselves, they matched so closely. One little lady and her sweet sweet lover. Oh man, I thought, What. A. Bummer. Accepting my lice diagnosis was certainly humbling. I had to tell all my friends they couldn’t hug me and why; there were bugs living on my head, and you could get them. I have no idea how I got lice. No one that I knew had it. But I live in the tropics. And apparently, lice happens here. There’s even a Hawaiian word for them: ukus. They’d somehow found their way to my lil ole noggin, loved the taste of my sweet scalp juice, set out to survive. And I had to deal.
I should say, We had to deal. Jackson had them too. Remember Jackson’s head shave back in Movember??? That was his solution. I admittedly am a bit more attached to my hair. So after the initial Cetaphil comb through, daily vinegar rinse, and coco oilings, Jackson sat with me every day and picked the nits (eggs) out of my hair. He found that the easiest way to do it was to hand pick each one, and rather than very carefully placing each precarious little egg into a bowl of vinegar as to not lose sight of it, he just ate them. What! You’re thinking, Gross!, right? It was the surest way to keeping them contained. Pick tiny dust-sized egg from hair follicle, travel shortest possible distance, place in mouth. Simple, easy and a bit of extra protein! What glorious little monkeys we are! This process continued daily for the first ten days, then every other, and then every couple of days for an entire month.
Jackson and the lovely family we belonged to at Zero One Jesse’s House continued to treat me with love and aloha the entire time I had lice. No one judged or harshed on me. No one told me to leave. We just dealt with it. We told the people who needed telling, didn’t get too close to anyone, washed the sheets and towels regularly, and picked and picked. I needed Jackson through this process, and he never once complained. It was so lovely to have him sit with me and give me his undivided attention for that period of time each day. He loved me through it.
Once I was able to find peace from the fear perception, I knew that my only option was to choose love in this new situation. I spent an hour this morning looking for and eating the nits out of my new friend’s hair. I say new friend because this was the first time we have actually taken the time to hang. She just arrived on the land, is only staying for a short time, and she needed some help. Her having lice and the lice definitely having to be dealt with led to a new connection with a new person, a morning shared drinking tea and talking story and getting to pamper a friend in need. We were able to share our lice experiences (and treatments!) and some love and compassion.
Lice is not a big deal at all. If anything, Lice is actually kinda nice! I’m choosing the interpretation that the Universe was telling me to slow down and take some time to pamper myself and allow myself to be pampered. And being on the other side of it allowed me to slow down and pass along the pampering that was so selflessly given to me.
I feel like I passed at test. I chose love in the face of fear, and that choice feels so good.
We’ve been volunteering to make poi at The Waipa Foundation in Hanalei for the past nine months. Each time we go, we end up wandering around the land to check on the various chickens, pigs, sheep, rabbits. When we began, there were about six rabbits. A few months later, Jackson noticed that there were only four. Then there was only one. One sad, lonely, scared bunny wabbit all alone in a cage with no food or water. “Heavens!” he thought.
On our way out that day, he passed by Stacy, the Queen Bee over at Waipa, and said, “I’m highjacking that rabbit.” To which she responded, “Great!”
And then we had a rabbit! SuperForest, meet Cheeks! Cheeks, meet SuperForest!
As some of you might know I spent the summer working for an organisation called Simply Smiles. I have yet to write my own overview of my summer there, but I thought I would extend this piece, written by my coworker and boss, to all of you. So here it is, please enjoy!
Not long ago, the Founder and President of Simply Smiles, Bryan Nurnberger, posted a moving account of his summer on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation. In it, he discussed the challenges of developing trusting relationships and effective programs in the absence of cohesive community. The heart of his conclusion was vintage Bryan: We will continue to work with our new friends on the Reservation despite the persistence of suspicion and a sometimes terrifying lack of hope. “The need trumps the obstacles,” as he says. My experiences as the Simply Smiles team leader in Mexico this summer were in many ways opposite from Bryan’s, but as with the Reservation, the importance of communityemerged as the dominant theme of our eight weeks in Oaxaca.
Our work with marginalized communities in southern Mexico certainly involves improving the lives of our friends there physically. We bring food to those suffering from malnutrition and to those at risk of starvation. We rebuild and repair schools. In the past, we’ve built houses and transformed a children’s home.
However, beneath and within all this practical help is an essential reality: trusting relationships and compassionate connections. This summer, in addition to refining and improving upon last year’s program, we did our best to deepen and strengthen the friendships that Bryan and many others developed in 2009 and 2010. This meant not just buying groceries but working side by side with the women of Santa Maria Tepexipana (including Lula, Christobalina, Matea, Angelina and others) as they prepared the weekly community meals. It meant holding Movie Night every Thursday and inviting not just children but people of all ages. It meant stopping into people’s homes to chat as we walked by on our way to the storage shed. It meant welcoming children into our campsite and playing cards and laughing for hours.
Those who expressed gratitude to us consistently emphasized their appreciation of ourfriendship over our material help. Personally, I believe this is because friendship is something that they can and do give to us as much as we give it to them. In any situation where the “haves” are giving to the “have nots,” there is a fundamental and uncomfortable lack of parity. But friendship levels the field. For this reason, we went deeper into this jungle this summer, holding a community meal in the mountaintop village of La Cienega, walking an hour-plus uphill in order to send a signal to them and to others: We will make the effort to come to you. We want to know where you live and to share life with you.
Each of our staff members and interns also recognizes that we could have done nothing of substance in Oaxaca City and in the jungle without the help of the local residents. Carol and Francisco welcomed us to Casa Hogar each Sunday afternoon. At the dump, Edith, Luciano, and Soledad allowed us into their homes, took us on tours, and embraced us with brilliant smiles. Each community meal in Santa Maria required at least 10 hours of preparation and hundreds of fresh tortillas. We needed a local mason (Javier) to help us make improvements to village schools. Even the people at the places we stopped on our long drive to the jungle each week became our good friends. They opened their hearts and homes to us and we know that we can rely on them in an emergency.
Yes, the food is making a difference in the jungle. The people who attend our community meals and come to our food distributions are unmistakably healthier. That is something to celebrate! And the unexpected feedback we received from some of the adults and older children – that the people of Santa Maria are closer to one another and treat their children better since we’ve come into their lives — is extremely gratifying.
However, all is not wonderful. Social injustices abound. Crimes go unpunished. Our friends at the dump still live and work in an alarmingly unsafe environment. The people in the Santa Maria region still lack anything close to decent health care (Can you imagine being a parent and not having a place to bring your sick child?). The political and economic decks remain stacked against the coffee farmers and their families and workers.
Simply Smiles has plans to help our friends address these issues, but we need your active support. Will you help us by coming to Oaxaca in 2012 and, if you feel moved to do so, by making a donation or becoming an I’m Dedicated donor? Please contact Bryan or me or visit our website if you want to be a part of this amazing life we are living – a life of deepening connections and emerging hope.
Thank you so much to our staff, interns, volunteers, and donors for creating thousands of smiles and for making Summer 2011 a success!
Most people who have owned a computer for awhile have probably needed to re-format their hard drives at least once. It just got to a point where there were too many programs launching at start-up, too many pop-ups clicked, too many mistakes trying to download something and it just got to be too much for your computer to handle. Just performing it’s basic operations took up all of it’s usage because of all of the processes happening in the background.
So what do you do? You fight with it to save what you can and then wipe the slate clean. Yeah, you are going to lose most of what you had. You are going to have to install all of your programs again and tweak the appearance until you like it again. But, it had to be done.
However, you now have a computer that is happy again. It has a bunch of free space to think and perform quickly and easily. Also, you are now more cautious than ever to make sure you don’t end up in that situation again.
This is what I am doing with my life right now.
I have too many processes going everyday to make much progress on anything. I have too many programs that I have installed in my life over the years that I have to maintain. It was never something I had the intention of doing and everything was done with good intentions.
I fell in love with a girl at 17. Our relationship was filled with infatuation and passion. Caution was thrown to the wind and a new life was conceived. So I finished school early, made connections and got a job in a field I was good at but didn’t enjoy. But, it paid well so I took it because it was the right thing to do to support my new family. Time went by and we brought another awesome person into the world. So I went and got a new car – we would need a reliable one to get around. Then I got a house – we need a nice, big place to live. Then I got a nice new bed, a nice new TV, pretty bedroom sets, a bunch of movies, new dishware, so many toys that we have to give away 10 trash bags per year just to have enough room for the new ones, dogs, cats. The list goes on.
There are so many things to worry about that I barely have time to think.
That is why we are moving.
The reasons I have stated are only half of it, but I cannot discuss the rest out of respect to other people’s personal lives. The bottom line is – there are some people here that we don’t want to be around anymore. We thought we had gone far enough, but we were wrong.
We are going to pack up the necessities, give away or sell the rest of our stuff and drive until we find a place we fall in love with.
I know that we just now got the ball rolling on Zero One Oklahoma and this is a complete 180 degrees from what I have been posting recently – but this is something my family and I have to do.
So, we are taking this negative (having to leave) and turning it into a positive (we get to start over!).
We are still planning to get another Zero One going wherever we end up, but it will not be here.
We are going to be embarking on this adventure in early 2012 and I want to visit some Superforesters if I can! So email or Skype me if you want us to stop by. We might just decide to move in next door if we like it there!
Wish us luck!
Much love,
Matt
Aloha. So much aloha to you all. It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted here and my goodness, do I ever apologize! Ever since high school ended, life has been rather uneventful. Not necessarily bad, in fact far from it! This is the first summer I’ve enjoyed in a long time, likely because I’ve gotten to share it with my very special friend who I am blissfully close with. It’s been good.
But I’ve been bored, and as such, I’ve had nothing to really share personally. I haven’t been interacting with anybody who could give me anything else to share, either. I’ve been jobless, activity-less, and truthfully, lazy. Sloth-ish? Not quite. Essentially all I’ve been doing is playing videogames, eating, snuggling, and forgetting everything I ever learned for the past 12 years I’ve attended school.
Aloha indeed!
That’ll change soon. I have an interview next week with SafeNest, a volunteer organization dealing with abuse victims. I’m moving out next year. College is at the end of the summer.
Today I decided to reorganize my room. My bed is now up against my window, so when it becomes fall here I can actually open it and enjoy the breeze and looming, ominous air right next to me as I sleep. The bed also faces the mirror so I see myself a lot more. I see myself playing guitar or video games and it’s made me realize I have some serious posture problems. Yoga time!
I did this because, as I said, I start college on the 29th and have felt myself frantically anticipating that fact. A lot’s going into it before it even starts. Money. Books, which includes money. Finding my classes. And this is only my first year. Gooooood lord. But I’ll survive of course!
And I’ll tell you why.
Me and my mate were just talking about a certain girl who… Has a reputation for being a little too high and mighty for her own good. She’s known as fun, and smart, and generally adored by all of who knows her (including our mutual friend, who has had his heart broken repeatedly by her.) She happened to say something about my boy. And I didn’t handle it well.
I’m not here to talk negatively about anyone or bring any negativity into the atmosphere, so pardon that. But that entire thing made me realize something.
I’ve been struggling with confidence problems lately. I’ve felt like I do everything wrong, and what I can do, I do pretty badly. I’ve been doing everything I can to try and get past that, but the itch kept coming back. “I want to be great. I want to be praised. I want to be this or that,” and I really had no reason for it. The last thing I crave is fame. It made no sense for me to have these thoughts, but despite that, they wouldn’t leave. Until now.
This girl mentioned above is so adored because she can do all these special things and is pretty much that perfect America’s Sweetheart type. I’m…Not. I’m a neo-hippie pantheist who plays guitar and video games with the skill of a goldfish.
But I have love.
And she might too. Obviously she does. And that’s good for her! But I realized I don’t need to have what she or anybody else “cool” has. I don’t need to be the best. I don’t need to have my name plastered anywhere. In fact I don’t care if I go the rest of my life doing absolutely nothing of societal importance.
Because I have love, and I am love, and I make and give and share love. What more could I ask for?
Even if by some haphazard chance I flunk out of college and become bankrupt and lose all my possessions and get hit by a truck and forget how to do anything short of walking and breathing, the love will never change.
The love! Will never! Change! I will always have it from some source, from myself, from the earth, the air, people, music, time, and space. I love it and I believe with all my heart it loves me.
If I lose it all, nothing would be stopping me from getting to Hawaii or Oklahoma somehow, finding a way to somebody in this community, and them immediately saying “No worries! Come home with us. Join us. We’ll take care of you for as long as you need.” That is love, and it is beautiful.
And because of that girl who I’ve been meaninglessly jealous of and resentful towards for the longest time, I realized that. How ironic.
But it wasn’t just her.
It was all of you. Without you all here at SuperForest, I would not be able to harness nor appreciate that love that I have overflowing from and through everything in and around me.
It may as well not exist. But it does.
So a shoutout to Jackson for creating this all with or without whoever he created it with. Bigger shoutout to him for accepting me and taking me personally under my wing, shoving me into this sea of joy without a second thought, as if I was here all along.
The world needs more people like you, J.
The world needs more all of you!
I hope everything’s been well. Judging by the recent rise in posts, I can see that it obviously is.
Excellent. This is what it’s all about.
Love on!
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