Judith Browning

Thanks for posting some excerpts from the NPR article.

I have no doubt that humans can figure out how to survive with less population growth and way less consumerism.

as to this question...

 Why are they paying their employees so poorly that the employees need public assistance?  

Walmart has done this from the beginning...paying as low a wage as they can get away with and always less than full time work so there is no chance of any company insurance or perks.
Many here in the US are working for less than a living wage and need a safety net.
I think more and more folks are waking up (as seen in yesterdays election results here) to see that the direction things have been going since the first of the year is not what they expected and only making things much worse

I thought this was an interesting view to add to this thread.
'Could smaller families rewild the planet and make humans happier?'
https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/npr-news/2025-11-01/could-smaller-families-rewild-the-planet-and-make-humans-happier

I remember Pat Paulson but not his political party name although I must have heard it at the time....and wasn't he on the Smother's Brothers?
1968 is when I graduated highschool and began college that summer.
My politics centered around stopping the war.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Paulsen

"Stillness is vital to the world of the soul.
If as you age you become more still,
you will discover that stillness
can be a great companion.
The fragments of your life will have time to unify,
and the places where your soul-shelter
is wounded or broken
will have time to knit and heal.
You will be able to return to yourself.
In this stillness, you will engage your soul.
Many people miss out on themselves completely
as they journey through life.
They know others, they know places,
they know skills, they know their work,
but tragically, they do not know themselves at all.
Aging can be a lovely time of ripening
when you actually meet yourself,
indeed maybe for the first time."

~John O'Donohue

PITY THE NATION

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (after Khalil Gibran)
2007

M Ljin wrote:

Judith Browning wrote:

I asked a hundred painters
and a hundred poets
how to paint sunlight
on the face of life.
Their answers were ambiguous and ingenuous
as if they were all guarding trade secrets.
Whereas it seems to me
all you have to do
is conceive of the whole world
and all humanity
as a kind of art work
a site-specific art work
an art project of the God of Light
the whole earth and all that's in it
to be painted with light.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(1919 to 2021, American Poet and Publisher)

Strange…I was at the library the other day and felt inexplicably drawn to pulling out A Coney Island of the Mind. I think it was the same day you posted this.

He's one of my favorite poets...since high school even, when my senior year english teacher stepped out of the box and inspired her class with new readings.
I still have a few of his older books of poems but not the more recent with the poem I posted.

“Souls love. That’s what souls do.
Egos don’t, but souls do.
Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed― all the beings around you are souls.
Be one, see one.
When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one,
we human beings all over the planet.
We will be one. One love.
And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies― it’s all one.
It’s one energy.”

Ram Dass

"Our minds as well as our bodies have the need of the out-of-doors.
Our spirits, too, need simple things, elemental things,
the sun and the wind and the rain, moonlight and starlight,
sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfumes of dawn
and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among the trees."

Edwin Way Teale

Our reasons have only to do with cost and our labor and our age.
The floor would need a redo for support....there's a tile lined brick chimney straight up through a metal roof that would work.

The thought of beginning another big project is beyond us now but back in the seventies, if we had heard about rocket heaters, it would probably have happened, as back then we were attempting all sorts of time consuming low cost things .

We've always lived out in the woods where there were no codes although I guess we never really thought much about it or even asked?
Now that we are on the edge of this small rural town I don't think anyone would care or notice...we've never thought to ask anyone about any of our building projects here.

And , we've never had house insurance so no limits there.

So, really, it comes down to money and energy.

“They were careless people,” Fitzgerald wrote, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby