I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the earth is sacred, and that women and women's bodies are one expression of that sacred being. My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures. So, it also means challenging inequalities in race, class, sexual preference. What we need to be doing is not just changing who holds power, but changing the way we conceive of power. There is the power we're all familiar with - power over. But there is another kind of power - power from within. For a woman, it is the power to be fertile either in terms of having babies or writing books or dancing or baking bread or being a great organizer. It is the kind of power that doesn't depend on depriving someone else.
-Starhawk
We are looking for new stories, and we are looking for old stories. We want stories that are ancient, to give us a sense of history, but we also want a story that is new, to distance ourselves from the painful, vengeful, destructive, consumptive, gluttonous story that we are forced to be a part of every day.
We are looking for a story that holds more sacred than the almighty dollar and our own ego gratification.
Each being is sacred - meaning that each has inherent value that cannot be ranked in a hierarchy or compared to the value of another being.
-Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing
We do not know the words. we do not know the path, we do not know how to escape the prison of a culture that we find ourselves in.
Any ritual is an opportunity for transformation. To do a ritual, you must be willing to be transformed in some way. The inner willingness is what makes the ritual come alive and have power. If you aren't willing to be changed by the ritual, don't do it.
-Starhawk
What are we to do?
Friday, July 29, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Dragons of Earth
If we think that the world is here for us we will continue to destroy it the way we have been destroying it, because we think we can do no harm.
-Douglas Adams
We are eating the world alive. But that is okay, because the world is eating itself alive as well. And the poop that we poop contains the raw material the world needs to make more world, along with the corpses we leave behind and other odd bits of hanging that disgust us so much.
We are eating the world, but that is okay, so long as we don't eat it all up before it can make more.
And that is the problem. In the manga 'X', and the anime of the same name, we see a battle between the Dragons of Heaven and the Dragons of Earth. The Dragons of Earth are trying to destroy humanity; because left unchecked, humanity will devour the world. The Dragons of Heaven oppose the Dragons of Earth and are apparently the good guys, given sympathetic depictions and heroic character design, but these heroes never dispute the Dragons of Earth in their assertion that humans will devour the world. And thus they are us, perfectly explained.
We are eating the world, and have been for as long as we have lived on it. That is not the problem, the problem is that we are eating too much too fast, for the world to grow more of itself. The problem is that we know this, but do not want to stop.
So we live our neurotic little lives, like the Dragons of Heaven, Battling the Dragons of Earth, but offering no reason why we should be spared.
For us, there is no longer a fundamental mystery about Life. It is all the process of extraordinary eruptions of information, and it is information which gives us this fantastically rich, complex world in which we live; but at the same time that we've discovered that we are destroying it at a rate that has no precedent in history, unless you go back to the point when we are hit by an asteroid!
-Douglas Adams
-Douglas Adams
We are eating the world alive. But that is okay, because the world is eating itself alive as well. And the poop that we poop contains the raw material the world needs to make more world, along with the corpses we leave behind and other odd bits of hanging that disgust us so much.
We are eating the world, but that is okay, so long as we don't eat it all up before it can make more.
And that is the problem. In the manga 'X', and the anime of the same name, we see a battle between the Dragons of Heaven and the Dragons of Earth. The Dragons of Earth are trying to destroy humanity; because left unchecked, humanity will devour the world. The Dragons of Heaven oppose the Dragons of Earth and are apparently the good guys, given sympathetic depictions and heroic character design, but these heroes never dispute the Dragons of Earth in their assertion that humans will devour the world. And thus they are us, perfectly explained.
We are eating the world, and have been for as long as we have lived on it. That is not the problem, the problem is that we are eating too much too fast, for the world to grow more of itself. The problem is that we know this, but do not want to stop.
So we live our neurotic little lives, like the Dragons of Heaven, Battling the Dragons of Earth, but offering no reason why we should be spared.
For us, there is no longer a fundamental mystery about Life. It is all the process of extraordinary eruptions of information, and it is information which gives us this fantastically rich, complex world in which we live; but at the same time that we've discovered that we are destroying it at a rate that has no precedent in history, unless you go back to the point when we are hit by an asteroid!
-Douglas Adams
Sunday, July 10, 2011
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
I can be proven wrong. And this makes me more likely to be right than one who cannot be proven wrong. I want to be clear about this. So let's restate that assertion. A statement that can be subjected to tests that could disprove said statement is more likely to be true than a statement that cannot.
Why?
Because every time the first statement is subjected to one of these tests, it becomes more accurate. If the test fails to disprove it, then we know that the statement is accurate in the way that the was tested- and new tests looking at the statement from alternate angles can be devised. These new tests can even test the same element of the statement but in a different way or from a different angle, to test the assumptions of the first test.
If the test disproves the statement, the statement can then be revised based upon the information gained from the test regarding HOW the statement was incorrect. The statement can then be examined, rebuild and tested again.
A statement that cannot be tested, cannot therefore become more accurate. Such a statement can only defend itself by pretending that not changing is a virtue- but only the abstract can remain unchanging. Life changes in order to remain alive. A frog in your pond is not the same frog you saw yesterday-even if it is- because the frog is now built from new flies and insects, composed of new atoms, deteriorated further by the entropic breakdown we call aging. Every time you remember an event from your past, the memory itself changes by the act of you remembering it- but the memory disappears entirely if it is not accessed.
We should distrust any idea that seeks to protect itself from inquiry, and act as a dam against the flood waters of change.
I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
I can be proven wrong. And this makes me more likely to be right than one who cannot be proven wrong. I want to be clear about this. So let's restate that assertion. A statement that can be subjected to tests that could disprove said statement is more likely to be true than a statement that cannot.
Why?
Because every time the first statement is subjected to one of these tests, it becomes more accurate. If the test fails to disprove it, then we know that the statement is accurate in the way that the was tested- and new tests looking at the statement from alternate angles can be devised. These new tests can even test the same element of the statement but in a different way or from a different angle, to test the assumptions of the first test.
If the test disproves the statement, the statement can then be revised based upon the information gained from the test regarding HOW the statement was incorrect. The statement can then be examined, rebuild and tested again.
A statement that cannot be tested, cannot therefore become more accurate. Such a statement can only defend itself by pretending that not changing is a virtue- but only the abstract can remain unchanging. Life changes in order to remain alive. A frog in your pond is not the same frog you saw yesterday-even if it is- because the frog is now built from new flies and insects, composed of new atoms, deteriorated further by the entropic breakdown we call aging. Every time you remember an event from your past, the memory itself changes by the act of you remembering it- but the memory disappears entirely if it is not accessed.
We should distrust any idea that seeks to protect itself from inquiry, and act as a dam against the flood waters of change.
I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Last Chance to See... Homo Sapiens Sapiens
I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.
-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Douglas Adams and his insights are truly impressive, all the more impressive when you think of the fact that he hid them within delightful comedy science fiction stories. Something he revisits frequently is the insufficiency of our current point of view. We mistake our limited little view of the world for the objective truth and act as though we are infallible as a result. We have catalogued the system errors in our thinking, our seeing, our perceiving, our deciding, and still we pretend that somehow THIS TIME, we've got it right.
We are going to be wrong. Let us have the grace and dignity to protect ourselves and our world from our current mistakes and our future inevitable mistakes. Let us have the humility to build adaptability into our decisions, so that future children can correct the mistakes we did not expect to make a little easier than our parents have made it for us.
We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.
-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Douglas Adams and his insights are truly impressive, all the more impressive when you think of the fact that he hid them within delightful comedy science fiction stories. Something he revisits frequently is the insufficiency of our current point of view. We mistake our limited little view of the world for the objective truth and act as though we are infallible as a result. We have catalogued the system errors in our thinking, our seeing, our perceiving, our deciding, and still we pretend that somehow THIS TIME, we've got it right.
We are going to be wrong. Let us have the grace and dignity to protect ourselves and our world from our current mistakes and our future inevitable mistakes. Let us have the humility to build adaptability into our decisions, so that future children can correct the mistakes we did not expect to make a little easier than our parents have made it for us.
We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.
-Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Douglas Adams: Speaking through Dirk Gently
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.
-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself.
-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself.
-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Monday, June 13, 2011
Douglas Adams 5
The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth - when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass - the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another - particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
-Douglas Adams
-Douglas Adams
Friday, June 10, 2011
Douglas Adams 4
We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.
-Douglas Adams
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And ... the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.
-Douglas Adams
-Douglas Adams
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And ... the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.
-Douglas Adams
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