Our Hearts Are Brave

We wish so passionately for that moment when our mettle is tested and we can show what we’re really made of. Our great stories, now movies and TV shows, are about this.

Our hearts are brave but our souls are tender and we feel too strongly the weight of our potential pain. We shut in our keenest awareness and are spared from seeing these moments which we yearn so strongly for, yet just as strongly fear.
We never have to face that fear of potential pain or the moment when our mettle is tested. We never have to choose or act and maybe that’s where the biggest fear lies – that our choice or action will reveal us to be lacking.
The tragedy is that our failure to notice, our avoidance, becomes our choice. The effect is the same as if we had looked honour in the face and, finding the cost too high, shut up our brave hearts and walked away.

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Waking up

When my mother was sick and dying from lung cancer something started to change in me.  I started to look around and take stock of my world, and my role in it.
I saw an epidemic of rape & mysogeny and at best patriarchy. I saw disgusting violence and ridiculously selfish war. I saw 200 years of a grossly unsustainable lifestyle and a blindly stubborn,  sociopathic refusal to acknowledge or change it. I saw the worst of what a human can be.

When mom passed away she took something inside me with her. She took the safe, protecting distance which seperated me from the problems of the world. She too my ability to deny. She took my blinders off and woke me up.

I look around and im dumbfounded at the masses of people and their ability to stick their heads saf.ely in the sand and continue their lives as if nothing is happening. I find the chorus from a Rage Against The Machine song running through my head,  begging to be screamed out:

WAKE UP!
WAKE UP!
WAKE UP!!!!!!

WHICH Vs. THAT

WHICH Vs. THAT

 Is it strange that I find this really interesting? 

Language is cool.  I really like the written word. It resinates with me and is my favourite method of communication. I signed up for emails about grammar and language too.

Most awesome hair EVER

髪型ヘアカタログ/人気サロン発ビューティーBOXヘアスタイル.

 

It’s in Japanese so you have to surf it intuitively, but it’s not too hard.  I cut my hair when my mom passed away in October, going from very long, to very short.  I had short hair through my mid 20’s and early 30’s but I also had a lot more cash to blow on getting it cut and coloured.  Now, I’m having a hard time finding a stylist that I can both afford and that I like.

I made that terrible mistake that a lot of people can empathize with – I tried to cut my own hair.  Now I’m looking for an affordable place to get my hair cut, and finding it tough to choose between the many salons in my area.  But there’s hope.

Finding this page has given me a catalogue of haircuts I can show to my lucky stylist and if he or she is any good, they should be able to reproduce it.  It has also renewed my faith in the haircutting industry.  There IS something beautiful out there, even if you have to go to Asia to get it.  Or do you?

What if I just to went to a very asian salon?  One where the stylists would be trained in the hair cuts that are popular in Asia.  That might work.

Inspiring the Shift to a Sustainable Paradigm

I found this great list of 100 top documentaries and I’m excited to watch then.  My boyfriend and I watch documentaries together a few times a week so we can ship away at some of these.  For the record I’m not a huge documentary fan, especially if it’s the major source of your information or opinion.  I like to read the studies, articles, opinion peaces, I like to check facts and research people.  But I have to admit a documentary can be a great introduction to a subject or a relatively quick way to put all of the peaces together.

Films For Action Presents: The Top 100 Documentaries Inspiring the Shift to a Sustainable Paradigm.

Mother Tree

This is so interesting.  I read about the fungal network and how plants can actually use it to communicate but the discovery that a forest’s  Mother Tree uses it to distribute resources and provide for the forrest is so exciting.

More Information

 

Mother Trees connect the forest Video

The End is where we Start from

In my ever widening quest for information I’ve started to realize that my actions and lifestyle have effects greater than just what I see around me.  How and why is a whole other topic for a whole other day.  For now let’s say my reasons are sound and I need to make some changes.

I’ve made some of the easier changes already: I conserve power like it’s gold (it kind of is since I pay for it!!); I never waste food; I recycle and don’t buy things with tons of packaging; I don’t participate at all with Walmart; I have greatly limited the use of my car and am considering possibly not having one; I try to buy locally grown and in season foods.

Now that I’ve mastered those steps I’m moving on up.  I’m not going to use plastic bags anymore.  This small thing has been one of the hardest for me to accomplish; I never remember to bring a cloth bag with me or don’t think that I might need one so I’m using thinner bags that can be left in my purse.  I’m also going to see how possible it is to stop using plastic all together.  If I can’t avoid it I think I’ll be okay with biodegradable stuff, but I don’t really want it in contact with my food; the research I’ve been reading indicates it might not be such a good idea after all. There must be biodegradable garbage bags out there!

It’s winter now so the farmer’s markets are closed but next year I’m going to see if I can get fresh food from local farmers markets only – no more produce that’s GMO, traveled a long distance or grown in other countries for me!  This will mean a change in diet, which funny enough I think will be fairly easy.  I’ll have to eat with the seasons, whatever is being grown at the time is what I’ll eat.  I kind of think it’ll be a more satisfying and healthy diet.  After all, it’s the way I evolved to eat.

Another thing about my future diet – I’m not going to eat beef or beef products.  The world resources that have to go into producing beef and dairy are staggering. Luckily, this won’t be a big deal for me; I already don’t eat much meat and I definitely prefer fish if I’m going to eat an animal.  The hard part is the cheese . . oh how I love cheese.  But I guess I can always eat goat cheese.

And here’s the thing about not eating all of this stuff . . I think if I had a steak a couple times a year it wouldn’t be so bad.  I try to balance my decisions using this qustion: If every one of the 7 billion people in the world today did what I want to do (eat beef daily for example) is it sustainable?  If not, then I can’t in good conscience do it.  So, if everyone had steak a few times a year would it be okay?  Well, I haven’t seen any research specifically on this but I estimate, from everything we know now and the research I have read, it would be okay.

Here are a few other things I’m  planning:

• A balcony produce garden next summer
• Buying local as much as possible. I’ve found honey, produce, breads and bakery, even coffee (it’s imported from 3 different small, family owned & run growers by a local Canadian family).
• Toilet training my cats so I don’t have to use & waste all that cat litter.

Interested in knowing more?  Here are a few things you can check out:

BBC Horizon – How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?

Toilet Train Your Cat

Balcony Gardening

 

 

*’The end is where you start from’ is a quote credited to T.S. Eliot