02009-03-21 | Uncategorized
Friday afternoon I took a walk. Sat down in front of a cafe with a coffee and read a couple of pages…
I am reading Gary Snyder’s book Back on the Fire: Essays on my iPhone (on the free Kindle application) and bookmarked this:
The moon shines on the river
The wind blows through the pines –
who is this long beautiful evening for?
– from the Cheng Dao Ke
Isn’t that wonderful? And here is another passage that struck me. I am quoting Gary Snyder who quotes Gregory Bateson…
I would then suggest: as climax forest is to biome, and fungus is to the recycling of energy, so “enlightened mind” is to daily ego mind, and art to the recycling of neglected inner potential. When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like a mature ecosystem. Turning away from grazing on the “immediate biomass” of perception, sensation, and thrill…
What I like about ebook reading is that I have always have the books with me, on my phone. Books by Gary Snyder or Ken Wilber or Basho need to be ingested in small bites and well-chewed before they are swallowed. I remember when I first read one of Ken’s books in 1999 I would read a page or two and then put the book down and contemplate what he had written.
The above Gregory Bateson quote reminds me of something Stephen Batchelor said:
Buddhahood is simply the optimum mode of being that can be reached within human existence.
I quoted that from memory and it might not be word for word correct.
It seems to me that, just as every clump of small trees can eventually become a mature forest, humans can reach an optimum way of being, (((whether that’s colored atheist, buddhist, christian, moslem, pagan etc.))) given enought time. With the destruction of our ecosystem the race is on for humans to mature a tad faster, but as a species we handle pressure pretty well. In fact, we don’t seem to do anything until the last minute, until the water heating in the pot becomes so unbearably that we have to jump. :-)
Check this out – the water in that pot is getting hotter!
Played guitar for a couple of hours last night. Sometimes I notice that making music aligns all of the molecules in the universe. Things feel different afterwards. Rahim calls it settling the soul.
It takes an hour just to really warm up the hands and the last half hour of two hours is really fun. And in case you are wondering whether that means that the first half of a concert is a just the warm-up, no that is not the case because we play a lot during the day. Stevo and I find rooms to play guitar in and Jon walks around with his bass plugged into his in-ear monitors and plays a lot. And we always have a soundcheck that can last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. I’d say on tour we each play an average of 3-4 hours very day. Sometimes more.
I was wondering about starting shows with Silence: No More Longing again. I hope the audience has not grown tired of hearing that song. I find that it perfectly tunes me, the guitar, the room and the air in it, and of course the audience. Afterwards I feel ready to make Music, no, actually that happens at some point during the piece… I enjoy playing it and I really enjoy when I start the tremolo and Jon steps up and plays a solo. Silence is a nice way to introduce the band to the audience, the music to the room, the audience to each other and so on.
Saturday Morning. Early. Santa Fe Baking Company. Breakfast burrito – no bacon, and coffee. You know what I mean, Stevo! Did I mention that a friend introduced me to an elderly woman once, who he said invented (((and he meant that literally))) the breakfast burrito a couple of decades ago. For as much sense as a breakfast burrito makes, it wasn’t always so.
Old school fixie riding!
02009-02-21 | Uncategorized
Walked to Downtown Subscription and ran into a friend. We shared a table and over coffee he showed me a magazine called World Watch with this article in it. The article says that a theory that explains the evolution of ecosystems may also apply to civilizations as well-and we’re approaching a critical phase.
Our Panarchic Future | Worldwatch Institute
Because energy is a society’s master resource, when Rome exhausted its energy subsidies from its conquests-when it had to move, in other words, from high energy-return-on-investment (EROI) sources of energy to low-EROI sources-it faced a critical transition. And, at least in the Western part of the empire, it didn’t make this transition successfully. It couldn’t sustain the cost and complexity of its far-flung army, ballooning civil service, hungry and restless cities, elaborate information flows, and intricate irrigation systems. Not that it didn’t try. Rome’s prodigious effort to save itself by putting in place a system to aggressively manage its energy problem was simultaneously one of history’s greatest triumphs and tragedies. It was a triumph because, for a while at least, the effort reversed what seemed like the empire’s inexorable decline; but it was ultimately a tragedy because it didn’t address the empire’s underlying problem-complexity too great for a food-based energy system-and was thus bound to fail.
The western Roman empire couldn’t make the transition from high-EROI to low-EROI sources of energy. Today, our societies are headed toward a similar transition as oil becomes harder to find. Sometime in the 1960s the United States crossed a critical threshold when its EROI for domestic petroleum extraction started to fall, and it’s likely that since then just about every other oil-producing region in the world has crossed the same threshold (often it takes a while for data to show clearly that the threshold has been crossed). Very few people-certainly not our society’s leaders-grasp the significance of this change, yet it’s of epochal importance. It marks the beginning of a shift from our modern industrial civilization to some other kind of civilization.
The author explains that as society becomes increasingly connected, complex, and efficient, it also becomes less resilient. This lack of resilience has brought the world to a stage of vulnerability that could trigger a major ‘pulse’ of social transformation. Humankind has experienced only a handful of such pulses throughout its existence, including the transition from hunter-gatherer communities to agricultural settlement, the industrial revolution, and the recent global communications revolution.
I think most of us can tell that WE are on the verge of something, but exactly what that is we don’t know. As an artist I know the feeling well, because it precedes most of my recordings, but of course the scope of this is much larger. This is not a personal or artistic transformation, this is possibly world-wide.
02009-02-21 | Uncategorized
Ran into a friend of mine yesterday and he showed me an article in a magazine called World Watch. Very interesting read. After studying the ecology of forests for decades the interviewee is applying some of the knowledge gained to civilization.
Our Panarchic Future | Worldwatch Institute
A theory that explains the evolution of ecosystems may apply to civilizations as well-and it says we’re approaching a critical phase.
02008-09-03 | Environment, Nature
Putting nature in Ecuador’s constitution – Los Angeles Times
This month, Ecuador will hold the world’s first constitutional referendum in which voters will decide, among many other reforms, whether to endow nature with certain unalienable rights. Not only would the new constitution give nature the right to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution,” but if it is approved, communities, elected officials and even individuals would have legal standing to defend the rights of nature.
Inclusivity is the buzzword (((at least I think so))) for the next decade. And we can’t stop at finding ways to include marginalized people, we have to include animals and indeed the whole ecosystem if we are to survive. We cannot let anybody mess with the ecosystem (((and our great grandchildren’s world and well-being))) without notice. I read that last sentence from the linked text above and have to applaud it.
