my thoughts are sometimes better expressed by others.....

“Circumstances don’t make the man,
they only reveal him to himself.”

— Epictetus

Gratitude doesn't send you out shopping to find satisfaction;
it comes as a gift rather than a commodity,
subverting the foundation of the whole economy.
That's good medicine for land and people alike.

Robin Wall Kimmerer,
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge
and the Teachings of Plants.
Milkweed Editions. 16 September 2013.

"Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong."

-Terence McKenna

Tyler Grace wrote:"Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong."

-Terence McKenna

That is an interesting choice! I wrote down a much longer quote from one of his lectures to much the same effect but never ended up sharing any of it.

"All I know is that I don't know nothin'"

- Operation Ivy

Here’s part of the interview:

Bell: Do you mean that, for example, a psychedelic experience could turn a communist against communism?

McKenna: Absolutely, I think it could. I think that in many cases it did. How could the idea of atheistic materialism maintain itself in the face of the counterevidence of the psychedelic experience? What the psychedelic experience is saying, essentially, is that everything is connected in a way that is not woo-woo or emotional, but actually palpable. And therefore our actions have consequences. Now, most political agendas deny that their actions have consequences—so, for instance, Marxism had this theory of how human beings are that was so off base that eventually it had to be pitched out. Consumer capitalism has a theory of human beings and what constitutes their happiness that looks pretty hollow from the point of view of the psychedelic experience.

I think postmodern ideologies—marxism, consumerism, so forth and so on, have based all their planning on an assumption of the absence of spirit, and in fact, this is not true. There is a spiritual dimension to humanness that cannot be denied. Now it certainly can be distorted, and that’s another side of things, but I think the search for psychedelic experiences represents the genuine religious impulse, especially when pursued at the dose levels I recommend. This is not party recreational stuff. The phrase “recreational drugs” is an effort to trivialize this, and I think, for one reason, i dont think the government is ready for the full airing of the constitutional contradictions that are contained in suppressing people’s genuine wish to use psychedelic substances for henuine purposes of religious exploration.

Bell: Let me ask you this very good question. If everybody in the world were to have a psychedelic experience of the kind you described in the last hour, this amazing psychedelic experience that might kill you from amazement or astonishment when you take it, what would the result be? What would the social changes be? What would the new government structure, if any at all, be? What would we all be collectively, after that experience?

McKenna: I can’t see the end result except to say, I think a lot of flexibility would come into the system. A hige amount of our social structures run simply on momentum, and I think that momentum can be fatal, and it’s that momentum that these huge, reality-shattering psychedelic experiences deflect, because they push the restart button and suddenly the innocence of childhood is not a phrase or a memory, it’s a re-vivified experience.

From part 1 of an interview hosted by Art Bell

"Permaculture is a more symbiotic relationship with nature, so I can be even lazier."

-Paul Wheaton

Perhaps the art of harvesting the secret riches of our lives is best achieved
when we place profound trust in the act of beginning.
Risk might be our greatest ally.
To live a truly creative life,
we always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are,
attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant
and where new beginning might be ripening.
There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable
to what is new and different.
I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth
that was not rewarded a thousand times over.

John O’Donohue on Beginnings
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/12/30/john-odonohue-blessings-beginnings/?mc_cid=cae3de6127&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

Optimism is the belief that things will get better.
Hope is the faith that, together, we can make things better.

Jonathan Sacks,
The Dignity of Difference (2003)

We are participants
in a vast communion of being,
and if we open ourselves to its guidance,
we can learn anew how to live
in this great and gracious community of truth.

Parker J. Palmer
(1939-Pres., Senior associate
of the American Association
of Higher Education,
senior advisor to the Fetzer Institute,
founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal)

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be.
We are not wise, and not very often kind.
And much can never be redeemed.
Still life has some possibility left.
Perhaps this is its way of fighting back,
that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world.
It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins.
Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty.
Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate).

Mary Oliver
Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

Don't ever become a pessimist …
a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist,
but an optimist has more fun,
and neither can stop the march of events.

Robert A. Heinlein

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Imagine harvesting food from a tree that your great grandfather planted, that your grandfather then climbed to harvest nuts from, that your father climbed and rested beneath, whose seeds your mother made a flour from to nourish you, that your son will feed your grandchildren from, that your grandchildren, when the tree dies will use the wood for shelter, the inner bark for medicines, the resin for fire-starter, the needles as incense in a ceremony for the tree and for the lives which the tree made possible. Such is the life of a people who live close to trees, intentional in their legacy.

-Ben Falk, permaculturist and author

https://medium.com/@benfalk/toward-a-tree-crop-culture-e599186b30e9

The word humility, like the word human,
comes from humus, or earth.
We are most human when we do no great things.
We are not so important;
we are simple dust and spirit—
at best, loving midwives,
participants in a process much larger than we.
If we are quiet and listen and feel how things move,
perhaps we will be wise enough
to put our hands on what waits to be born,
and bless it with kindness and care.

Wayne Muller
(1953 to pres., leadership mentor, therapist,
minister, community advocate)

“They fell into the alarming error of taking the obedience of the soldier
for the consent of the nation.
Such confidence is the ruin of thrones."

Victor Hugo.
“Les Misérables."”

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses."

Malcolm X

"A wise man can play the part of a clown, but a clown can't play the part of a wise man."

Malcolm X

"You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it."

Malcolm X

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

— Albert Einstein

There are perhaps many causes worth dying for,
but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.

Albert Dietrich,
Army GI,
Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich

There is nothing more difficult
yet more gratifying in our society
than living with sincere, active,
constructive hope for the human spirit.

Maria Popova
(1984 to pres., essayist, author, poet,
literary and arts commentary)