Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So what are we make of the fact that the price of oil tanked to below zero per barrel on April 22, the greatest drop in history? The price has gone up slightly since then, hovering around $16 a barrel on April 25th, but it is still severely depressed. Who will suffer from this? And perhaps more importantly, who will gain?
According to Cantadora and Wise Woman, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Descansos are symbols that mark a death: as an example, a cross by the wayside with the name of the person who died spelled out in nails. Can we create Descansos for our dying civilization? For die it must if we are to live. Let these words be my Descansos offered in gratitude to She Who Loves Us All.
Each of us can decide what is the right action for us to take. It is important that our action comes from a place of peace inside, and that it brings joy. It does not need to conform to other people’s standards or expectations. We can find our particular passion that lights us up, and put it in service to the earth, in service of strengthening our collective wellbeing.
Just as income inequalities and social class differences are divisive and give rise to opposed interests and perspectives, being in the same predicament creates unity and shared interests. Hence the pandemic has brought us together in the same way that research shows greater equality does. Both make us feel we have more in common.
#BristolFoodKind is a campaign to create a community of acts of kindness through food during the lockdown. This community is sharing practical ideas about how you can buy food, reduce waste and grow from home, in a way that is considerate to yourself and your community at a time of crisis.
As in every transition, in this time we are witnessing structures collapse, both mental and institutional, and the subsequent state of crisis and negotiation that this entails. Yet the bardo brings with it a valuable promise: the ability to re-create the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world.
In the US, transportation is said to be the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The most common solution put forth is a false one: “we’ll electrify all our cars, maybe our trucks too.” Planes and ships are usually not proposed for replacement by electric versions, but trains are. So what’s wrong with this idea?
Instead of de-coupling human civilization from nature, we need to live in and by nature. We are fooling ourselves and betray the rest of the living by pretending we are a species that doesn’t need the rest of the living – after all we are nature.
This book is focused primarily on domestic climate policy, because neither we as individuals nor our government can, with a straight face, presume to advise the wider world on climate issues unless we ourselves have at least started the journey toward life within ecological boundaries.
How will future generations fare in the world of scarcity and instability to which our present-day actions are consigning them? Catherine McGuire’s short story collection The Dream Hunt and Other Tales suggests a multitude of possible answers to this.
Cultural burning is far more than a new method in the spectrum of hazard reduction burning; it is a recognized official Australian wildfire prevention technique. Cultural burning sets focus on re-establishing the kinship between the species in a certain ecosystem; it pays full attention to fire relationships of the area.
Having been shaken to our collective core by the COVID19 pandemic, can we muster the will to make major changes in how we rebuild our systems, to truly transform how we function as a society for the betterment of Earth and her inhabitants? What cause is more just, fair, and wise?
