The world had grown thoroughly disenchanted, and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent – that holy place where joy resides.
this message brought me home to myself and shined a light on my path of resistance… i will refuse to let politics, politicians and this difficult moment steal my joy…
i am rethinking my mental, emotional and behavioral landscape… my affiliations… my sources of information… my avenues of action… i no longer believe politics and politicians can take us where we need to go… i don’t believe Kamala Harris, had she won, would have made my life appreciably better, though i do think she could have kept it from getting the kind of worse i expect from 45’s new administration…
in truth, my life is pretty good now, but i don’t know how long that pretty good would last under either Republican or Democrat management… corporations, capitalism and materialism will not unwrap their malignant hands from around the throat of our potential to be happy… the system is rigged ever more in favor of greed and selfishness… the only answer i can come up with is to disengage… have as little to do with corporations, capitalism and materialism as possible… be the change i want to see…
i have decided to change my party affiliation from Democrat to Independent… i won’t be able to vote in primaries (something i think should be changed), but i need to mentally occupy the space of “what have you done lately to win my vote?”… of course i am assuming there will be meaningful voting in the future… there is also something about putting myself in the neutral independent ground that i believe will allow me to think more critically about the system in general…
this morning i read an article about lab grown salmon and chicken… according to the author, it is getting pretty good, especially the chicken1 … the supposed excitement here is for meat eaters committed to stopping the abuse of animals in factory farms and attendant greenhouse gas emissions… they will have a tastes good alternative that doesn’t abuse animals and throw methane into the atmosphere… this is not a step forward… it’s the further corporatization of the food chain… it is another step away from having an intimate connection with the planet and cosmos.. i don’t believe in factory farms… i think they are horrific… a sign that we are societally sick… but one of the reasons we are sick is we have lost connection with animals themselves… for most of human history we were in a more respectful relationship with fields, forests, rivers, streams, oceans, plants and animals… we ate mostly plants and insects… our diets were not centered on meat… killing an animal involved ceremony and thanksgiving as did harvests… we understood that we were an intimate part of, not separate from nature… it is hard to see how lab grown food is a better future…
in Jeff Golden’s book, Reclaiming The Sacred, there is a top five list of actions we can take to reduce our individual impact on climate and animals… my wife and i have made three of the five changes suggested… we don’t fly much, we don’t drive much and we have a hybrid car so, when we do, we use a third less gas, we don’t have children (he suggests fewer children)… eating a plant based diet and purchasing renewable source energy are what we have left to do… did i mention we have solar panels on our roof?… we don’t draw much energy from the grid to begin with… still, we need to opt into renewable source energy from the grid… related to this last change, we still heat our house and cook with gas… we will renovate our kitchen soon and move to all electric… we will explore alternatives for heating…
when we get home from Block Island i want to initiate monthly pot luck suppers with friends and community… i feel a need to be face to face with my people…
i have decided to stop watching TV news… even Nicole Wallace, who i grew to love during the pandemic… TV is designed to be compelling… the most compelling kind of story they can present is a train wreck… it’s in their interest to create the impression of a train wreck even when there isn’t one… and when there is, make it seem worse than it is… it’s in their interest to instill fear in us… it may well be that we should be afraid right now, but i doubt TV news will make me any more prepared for the oncoming train wreck… i will read the news instead… i am working on curating my sources now…
how are you preparing?…
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if the common refrain about the taste of an exotic protein is “tastes like chicken”, what does it mean to produce a lab grown meat that “tastes like chicken?” ↩︎