Solstice
Surprising, the beginning of the year 2012 is rapidly approaching. Getting past the Christmas emotions is paramount,
and thank goodness the Solstice is upon us, and the hoped for wash of new longer sunlight days is a lifeline to the
powerful excitement of the coming year. Opportunities abound in every aspect of life, provided I will not accept
conventional thinking. All that we know and do in this hyper-media world is formula-ized to the Nth degree. If I
thought buying anything would bring me a better life, then I'm headed in to get my head examination, only why pay money
for that when I know they just want to drill holes? I already know I am completely cracked, or that's another way of
saying I'm doing OK. Look at this operation in Camden to buy farmland and preserve it (here).
Do I really need to be euthanasia-ized? The Good Life is essential but that means value to my choices. Pay the banks,
buy the local stuff, it's all market schemes. Take the best that I need, that's my motto, pay no dues local or cosmic,
it all rests here in my chest and heart. Breathing is forced in exercise, a better thought is that BREATHING IS EXERCISE..
I do that when I sing every morning, and my health glows like another sun.
2012 STOP TO CONSIDER: Commentary by Bill Anderson
The grace of New Year's resolutions, so aren't we all trying to become more happy by eliminating the imperfections of our desire, our addictions, our obsessions, etc? Well, cast-off doubt and rejoice! No there is no God who can save you. Except that the community is god that recognizes it is at the end of the rope of conventions that control a spiraling demise. The balanced budget ghost is one of security, and it is said, that if there is money to pay for living then resting securely in our dream world, we shall move into the future. Political slogans keep our mind off what we must do.
Growth is the most important product of community. A balance of planning and development to the goodness of place, your community, and not our town, is important. The town exists because it was set-up to be a local provider of education and city services around a community. It was principally governed by the working people for the working people who stayed in one place, and worked. Now we are highly mobile community, melding with shopping habits and work commutes.
Growth is incipient on productivity for income to feed and supply homes and pay taxes for town services. No productivity causes severe imbalance, and the town becomes more aggressive to raise taxes and maintain the status quo of town services. People buckle the belt tighter when times get tough, and demand town does too, but our conventional beliefs are impossible to break.
So we hope another rich patron stumbles into our town to gird up the impossible shores, that is by changing our ways to make growth yield productivity and bring money by OUR efforts.
When will we get mad and angry enough to command change and become a great city again? The community of Camden is a healing center, that is where many people help on various ways of modulating our being through healing. Is it the combination of sea air and fresh Maine air and waters, the vast greenery of our Spring, the wealth of happiness felt by our people in outdoor activity, is that our healing impetus? Is it the rigorous winter that girds our belief in recycling, and balancing the previous rape of natural resources and destruction of the landscape by the cement industry, is it the moral values of the Back to Land Movement?
Hi-tech streams through our veins here too, and the understanding that ideas can change the world, that we are above it all and in it all. Maybe we want it to not change, not develop, and get more difficult as others pack up and leave the state for work elsewhere. Like the Native American dancing on the warpath against the European settlers who came with hunger for land and diseases that killed so many, we rally around the sacred tree to stop development that despoils the landscape, AND STOP GROWTH. The earth is our canvas upon which we paint the new world! We must remember that the sacred is also the use to become.
Celebrate your neighbor, welcome the new people who will enrich your shores, embrace your healing community.
In a town of need, needing growth, there are so many with so much, there are banks who give so little now, we have begun 2012 with doom already in our pocket. Occupy your mind with looking, not at what we are told we can't do, but look at how we can make it become what we can do, -be a community that makes people and banks and town change their ways to build growth.
Case One, August 20, 2011
Are Camden and Rockport people still MAD enough not to accept the advantages of union, two villages and one entity. Why? Or, can this be the key to the mess we are in? Logically, these two towns work together, but two town managers, two select boards, two everything except the high school. Decreasing enrollment means downsizing, and everywhere, striking at the heart of what people think the way world ought to run. Everything is held in sanctity, cautiously we are heading for catastrophe because the way it works. We can't imagine any other way. The mental outlook is akin to the dark ages, where things never changed. There is no leadership, no planning, no positive growth, only nitpicking at the Augusta bureaucracy. We want our cake and eat it too. A big choke coming-up.
My Mainer neighbor has a way of explaining horrendous lights flooding my property and the sky, they are grandfathered. That works for him, and the Code officer, but simply put, shows a complete disregard for the future. The future is NOT grandfathered.
The Sacred Cow, Aug 1, 2011
As usual our perceptions stand on the moment, as I read the latest PR piece from Maine Farmland Trust (Villagesoup 17 July). The effort to gain funding from Land for Maine's Future, to buy/preserve the Rokes-Spears farms in Camden failed but an alternative is being sought. I wonder how much money is this organization seeking and who will give it, and why?
This "Gentle Ben" organization begins with the huggy name, nothing more sentimental than farmland, and ending with trust, so you know its home we are talking about.
In order to sell anything, there must be a need, a desire, a fantasy to fulfill. The very bankable feeling in Maine is to preserve. Rarely does this activity do the opposite.
This began 50 years ago as wealthy educated "flatlanders" moved-in, they countered the survival mode of traditional society, because the kind of development here was seen as pervasive, exploitive, really ugly, as well as offensive, as in a neighborhood attraction, the worst kind.
We are very open to preserving, and many people donate money and wear the hat and hike the extensive preservation already established in Camden.
I am in the singular position of overlooking Rokes field, and if it is preserved, it might be thought to be to my benefit. Lucky Guy!
The lucky guy here, other than the sellers, is the highly visible oreo cookie, beef farm managed by Coastal Mountain Heritage Trust, another biggy in preservation. This farmer has an extensive holding of hayfields. Hence, farmland has a farmer, though not of the right kind. He makes hay for beef, and sells to other animal owners.
What is the right kind? This is a complex question, because MFT ideally sells to a young, new breed of farmers who cater to the market with product, local and usually guaranteed to be free of harmful substances. Rokes-Spears will need a farmer with buckets of cash, to settle favorably with the owners.
MOFGA and Eliot Coleman and others are pre-eminently Maine, evolving from The Depression (sound familiar?) and the Back to Land Movement, in particular, Scott & Helen Nearing at Harborside Maine, who wrote The Good Life.
Preserving our society means actively creating a new dynamic. A field that makes people feel good as they commute by, if they are lucky, mowed by a farmer, and not farmed, is not a problem at least until the new ice age comes.
But what if..., instead of the old paradygm of balancing exploitation, a creative solution was found that could create community, new solution to growing within the current structure, new roads and housing that moved towards solving the sustainable dream almost as credo within the vacation land and waters, the therapies hereabouts, the food grown, AND more children for our schools and systems of care, and TAXES.
Sometimes change can be good, if we create it positively instead of hiding under the blanket of preservation.
The Service, July 2011
Camden and Rockport were once one town, but over an argument about a bridge in Rockport Village,
they split. Now if East Germany and West Germany can create one nation, why can't Camden and Rockport unify,
cut expenses, and plan for the future? People spend money preserving the open space mostly because its institutional,
or grandfathered.
The pursuit of a vision for a better world, a correction in how the larger or smaller world runs, even your own personal world. It is said that all people are activists now, even though many don't care to devote active work towards a desire to benefit the people against larger manifestations of corporate greed, governmental stupidity, environmental trangsressions, or returning a recycleable item to the correct pathway; the answer is that all wonder and need to contribute to avert the cataclysms of massive change affecting humanity now as the ice caps melt and the earth is seen to be in great change, -possibly because of man's technological evolution and the very nature of energy driving that bus. In essence, WE ARE ALL ACTIVISTS because we seek a world that is better.
Emerson spoke of those who care less about the world, troubling with negativity the advantages to others, that they might as well go to the grave, for there is no sense or use of these people. On the other hand, debate is a crucial part of advancement, and then, making hard decisions. What makes sense is to listen carefully, assess the information you receive, cross-check it, then act.
Organic farming versus big farming, about 3% of farming in USA, whereas it is 50% in Australia. People see the advantage to supporting organic but not because it's better for you, or tastes better, rather by definition it is a farming approach to the well-being of the land, composting, using water resources. It is NOT using excessives pesticides and fungicides which run-off into water ways and threaten the very life of all natural forest, wildlife, water bodies and humans. Flat field farming has rampaged the world, and only now is there rising a counter-balance to the exploitation of earth through organic practices and genetic engineering. The nature of progress is always met with resistance, a holding of the ways against change, but the planet has 6 billions people, most of whom are not blessed by the American sense of well-being and prominence. They are emerging in hundreds of urban freedom centers, and the ways are evolving because of need and choice, i.e., having left the village and the farms, and servitude to the old ways. People, and women especially, go to urban centers for work, and choice, and freedom. They are living activists, by their desire to encompass their growth and become better.
Can Americans and Northern Europeans discriminate against vast cultures of emerging people? Activism has changed the semantics of dissent, the next wave of democratization of the world is upon us, and choices must be made to feed the world, not just food, like excessive crops from American wheat farmers who have long been pridefully touted as American largesse to the third world, smug in amassing profits while eroding the land, classic exploitation of third world need and of the very American land and water. Yet we tolerate it, as we watch it die, as new ways evolve. It is in energy, which is what food gives, but in a larger sense, electricity to light books, computers, culture, education and urban evolution. The big cities of yesteryear are dwarfed by new urban need. As the predicted famine in the last 40 years of the twentieth century disappeared, so too a whole new set of variables have emerged, and it's not going to be like it was, only much better.*
The world is in the grip of levels of fear and uncertainty, others such as corporations nations even neighbors are seen as having evil intentions, and financial straits are found in tightness whereas sales are on a higher plane of imagining the better world. While people struggle, science plods along solving problems. Then one day, cataclysms are remote and euphoria of being is a fresh breeze in everyone's sails.
|
* Stewart Brand The Whole Earth Discipline AN ECOPRAGMATISTS MANIFESTO
Also, Christopher Childes The Spirit's Terrain
The Maine Back to Land began here, but more than that, people living in Maine believe that it is GOOD LIFE.
A great book, exploring a direct evolution from Thoreau's activism through Greenpeace.
All may be bought online used for under $5.
|
