Nature = Beauty

reflections ...

... it's the people stuff again. It pretty much always comes down to the people stuff, maybe because we are people!!! What is the story we are telling and how do we put ourselves into that story? And what are the new stories being told?

... it's the heart stuff again. Of late it oftens comes down to the heart stuff, maybe because that is what has been missing !!! How do we keep our hearts open amidst so much fear, violence and suffering?

... it's the bridging of many worlds again. The strength in diversity brings with it the challenge of integrating everything into a whole. How do we bridge what appear like contradictory worlds?

... it's back to seeing the invisible and acknowledging the mystery in our ever changing lives, in these increasingly uncertain times we live in. As someone told me yesterday, enlightment is like water to a fish. All anyone needs do is open there eyes. It's all around, ever present ... we only need feel it, to see it, to be it.

Occupy Love ...

... the revolution is love - oh yes !!!

Urban Green Places ... aka Trees that touch the sky

... nevermind parks and gardens, check out this 27 storey building being planned for Milan by Italian architect Stefano Boeri.

Bosco Verticale, as it is known, is an example of architectures attempts to green our urban landscapes. Writing in the Daily Telegraph (UK) Christopher Woodward  (Director of the Garden Museum), observed, while "Researching our current exhibition From Garden City to Green City we were inspired by projects in Paris, Valencia and Sao Paolo in which architects have created a new generation of buildings in which architecture fuses with nature, such as Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale project currently under construction in Milan: two 20-storey-plus blocks in which each apartment has a garden big enough for a tree cantilevered out into the sky. It is a glimpse of how London could be, with a dash of political will. We have a new generation of architects whose ambition is to make living communities, not to erect air-conditioned icons in glass. The public demand is there..."

If cities are a part of our futures ... let's make green places happen !!!

The Self-Attribution Fallacy

Intelligence? Talent? No, the ultra-rich got to where they are through luck and brutality. Click on the link below to reading a chilling indictment of the psychological qualities of the wealthy and high achieving business/financial executives. George Monbiot writing in The Guardian newspaper (UK) suggests that not all successful business executives are psychopaths, however, the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. The openning paragraph begins:
"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes."

Click here to read more  ... The Self-Attribution Fallacy

I am the 100%

I like what this guy says a lot, very much, too infinity ... and beyond.

Nature ... Murmuration ... Magnificent ...

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Every autumn thousands of starlings dance in the twilight. No one really knows why they do it. Sophie Windsor Clive and Liberty Smith, came across this spectacle by chance while canoeing on Lough Derg, the last of the three largest lakes on the River Shannon in Ireland. A living swirling cloud of starlings. The birds gather in magical shape-shifting flocks called murmurations, having migrated in the millions from Russia and Scandinavia to escape winter’s bite. Murmurations are also seen in the UK including Gretna, Scotland and Brighton, England. Scientists aren’t sure how they do it, either. Even complex algorithmic models haven’t yet explained the starlings’ acrobatics, which rely on the tiny bird’s quicksilver reaction time of under 100 milliseconds to avoid aerial collisions—and predators—in the giant flock.

Impenetrable as the flock’s movements might seem to the human eye, Daniel Butler writing in the Daily Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4736472/The-mathematics-of-murmurating-starlings.html suggests the underlying maths is comparatively straightforward. "Each bird strives to fly as close to its neighbours as possible, instantly copying any changes in speed or direction. As a result, tiny deviations by one bird are magnified and distorted by those surrounding it, creating rippling, swirling patterns. In other words, this is a classic case of mathematical chaos (larger shapes composed of infinitely varied smaller patterns). Whatever the science, however, it is difficult for the observer to think of it as anything other than some vast living entity."

An A-Maz-Ing S-eye-T :)

There are no such things as weeds ...

Some images from occupy the streets

 

The love movement :)

Birthday Poem for Luis

SONETO LXIX

Tal vez no ser es ser sin que tú seas,
sin que vayas cortando el mediodía
como una flor azul, sin que camines
más tarde por la niebla y los ladrillos,

sin esa luz que llevas en la mano
que tal vez otros no verán dorada,
que tal vez nadie supo que crecía
como el origen rojo de la rosa,

sin que seas, en fin, sin que vinieras
brusca, incitante, a conocer mi vida,
ráfaga de rosal, trigo del viento,

y desde entonces soy porque tú eres,
y desde entonces eres, soy y somos,
y por amor seré, serás, seremos.

  - Pablo Neruda -

 

Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,
without the torch you lift in your hand
that others may not see as golden,
that perhaps no one believed blossomed
the glowing origin of the rose,
without, in the end, your being, your coming
suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,
blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:
and it follows that I am, because you are:
it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:
and, because of love, you will, I will,
We will, come to be. 

Who knew bamboo was the future?

... not me, but after watching this I am now a total convert!



and if you want to see how beautiful a house made from bamboo is, check this out ...

Rebecca Solnit on Hope

Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Join Rebecca to explore why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

Solnit takes to the pulpit in the video below to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen.


Rebecca Solnit on Hope from The School of Life on Vimeo.

http://www.theschooloflife.com/Sermons/Rebecca-Solnit-on-Hope 

"To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, “The work of this emotion requires people to throw themselves actively into becoming, to which they themselves belong”. To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it.”

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the dark: the untold history of people power, Canongate Books (Edinburgh) 2005, p. 5

Thanks to Ruth Potts for the quotes and the link.

Occupy the Streets - London, UK.

This is the initial statement from Occupy London:

At today’s assembly of over 500 people on the steps of St Paul’s, occupylsx collectively agreed the initial statement below. Please note, like all forms of direct democracy, the statement will always be a work in progress.

1. The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.
2. We are of all ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, generations, sexualities dis/abilities and faiths. We stand together with occupations all over the world.
3. We refuse to pay for the banks’ crisis.
4. We do not accept the cuts as either necessary or inevitable. We demand an end to global tax injustice and our democracy representing corporations instead of the people.
5. We want regulators to be genuinely independent of the industries they regulate.
6. We support the strike on the 30th November and the student action on the 9th November, and actions to defend our health services, welfare, education and employment, and to stop wars and arms dealing.
7. We want structural change towards authentic global equality. The world’s resources must go towards caring for people and the planet, not the military, corporate profits or the rich.
8. We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression.
9. This is what democracy looks like. Come and join us!

http://occupylondon.org.uk/