How to Save the World

the mess
the world
poverty

war

famine

cruelty

Tibet enslaved

Africa ruined

the Middle East an ongoing shame

the beautiful Koran turned into a war cry

the beautiful Bible turned into an excuse to close the mind

and then the soil the forests the global warming and so
on

ah,
and all we need to do
is
love

forgive

help each other out


which means:
get out of the old rut
of me me
busy busy
buy buy
seek approval seek approval
money money

and what's left?

waking up
simplicity
happiness
now


George Dolinsky"s plan:
get 60 million people together
and teach them to be nice

George Gurdjieff's idea:
200 awake people
could turn things around

but that was back in the 40's
so now maybe 700 awake
people

not impossible
and not easy


want to join
the pilgrimage
to awakeness?

saving the world

in this month's
sun magazine
(not to be confused
with our local
sonoma sun newspaper
of boosterism
and inanity
and a few worthwhile tidbits fame)

a nice rant
by andrew harvey
about saving the world
via
mystical activism

like all andrew harvey,
to me,
this is heavy on
"hey, everyone..
the look
at me
be andrew harvey
being really passionate
about being
really ......"

sounds kind of like me
except
i'm so bad at getting a following

or i'm so bad
at really believing that everyone
should
.....

even save the world

not that that wouldn't be great:
humanity getting its shit
together,
but the evidence is...


people asleep
(including andrew harvey as
he gives this interview)

and people addicted
to their habits

including the car

and talking without
knowing they are alive
and real
while they talk

and

nature
out there
as something to be used
and talked about
and driving thru
or driven to
but to just be,
you know,
easy and sweet
and gentle
with this world
we may or may not want to
save

how to do
that?

heck
if i know

and i
do know
this:

a big key
to "saving the world"
is
happiness

not hurried
and loud
and expensive
and dumb ass happiness

but

happiness
that is very very easy
happiness
that
doesn't need to run away
from the world

happiness
that
gets bored with
most of the run around stuff

and doesn't need to withdraw

into bastions of
raving
or bliss
or hideaway retreat
or loud ass noise
or rushaway
activity
or exotic
"vacation"

not that

but
happiness
that is
its own
vacation
as the
now
the
now

even this nos

is always
a vacation

sweet
pure
free
easy
and
no waiting

Signs of Waking, 1

SIGNS OF WAKING:

THE SWEETNESS OF NOW

There is already a power of now out there. Go power, go, go. And what are you feeling right now? Feeling as emotion, what are you feeling? Feeling as sensation, what are you feeling?

How do you feel, right now?

And whatever the emotion and the words about it, and the reasons for it, and the circumstances, let that slide for a while, and enjoy putting your awareness on the here and now sensations in your feeling of being you, right now, alive.

If you want.

Maybe feel your hands holding the book, and feel your bottom resting on whatever it is resting on, or your feet standing into the ground.

So, this is now: we have gravity, and legs and arms, and a spine in between. And our feelings have some kind of sensations toward the middle of us sometimes.

Is this too much?

Slow down.

It’s all about slowing down.

This is how you are going to love yourself more, and love others more, and end emotional suffering and feel more comfortable in your body, and help join a simplicity and ease of living that will save the Earth.

This is how, together, we are going to come back to our sanity and peace of mind and easy going friendliness that is how we were meant to be as human beings.

Can you follow your breathing, right now?

Just noticing the air coming in your mouth or nose and maybe noticing something happening in ribs or lungs or diaphragm, can you notice a difference that noticing your breathing makes?

Please don’t fix or correct or do anything fancy with your breathing, but if you notice your aren’t breathing, life might be a little more fun, a little more sweet if you did breathe.

And this is what is really interesting: what is the difference in our selves, in our sense of ourselves, in our sense of being alive, when we notice that we are breathing?
What is the difference when we notice our butts on our chairs or our feet on the ground, or back on the couch, whatever is connecting us with gravity? Can you find some pleasure in that?

This is always part of us, until we die: breathing.

This is always part of us, until we go into outer space: a connection to gravity.

Most of us have arms and legs we can use and fingers and toes at the end of them. All of us have a spine that is designed to hold us up easily in gravity. What difference does it make if you notice your spine now?

Is this too much?

Good.

Is this just right?

Good.

Is this not enough?

Good.


Part of this adventure, this learning signs of our waking to now, will be a process called the Work of Byron Katie, which could help us when we get lost in feeling bad about how the world is treating us. Part of this adventure is the wonderful retraining and opening of our awareness to what is going on in the present moment. Part of this adventure is trying this and trying that, and having experiences.

This is always true: right now we are having some experience.

What is it?

Without any story of how it should be different, what is our experience right now?
Without any story of what we have to do in the future, what is our experience right now?

Without any story of our various problems and troubles in the past, what is our experience right now?


Shouldn’t I be telling you all sorts of urgent reasons to come into the present?

I don’t think so.

Just come.

Experience the sweetness and ease of being, right now, whatever you are, right now.
This is what we save the Earth, the simple, simple, simple ease of feeling very fine, right now.

No need to go somewhere else: we are already right here.

No need to wait: now is already now.

No need to buy any Nowing outfit, no need to join any Nowing club, no need to get anyone’s approval to come into the Now.

No need to feel better to come in the now.

And, hey, get this: no waiting. In itself waiting to come to Now is about as silly as it can get. So, here we are, breathing, sensing some sort of sensation that goes along with whatever feeling we are having. Here we are, with a spine and two arms and two legs, all placed in some position in gravity? And noticing all that:

How do you Feel, now?

Waking Up, Saving the Earth: Non-Dummies

Waking up, Saving the Earth, Being Happy, and More, for Non-Dummies
How dare I set out to write a series for non-dummies?

Well, for one thing, I don’t have to get approved to join the fabulously successful “for dummies” school, a sweet and kind approach to everything from computers (windows, Excel, web pages, OS-Dos, and more) to the Bible/Catholicism to yoga/Pilates/golf to pregnancy to music to languages. And more. The Dummy kindness is in making the steps easy, trying to get to the basics, making the learning accessible and fun.

Sometimes they succeed in this, sometimes not quite so much, and still, much as I wish and plan for these writing to be composed of many small and delightful and easy to achieve steps, I do not want to join the Dummies club.

Sorry: this Earth is in too dire of straits for the Dummies to rescue it.

Sorry: humanity is committing too much mayhem for the Dummies to wake up and stop messing up the lives of those around them.

Sorry: relationships between husband and wife, between parents and their children, between ex-mates and the other ex-mate, between religion and religion, nation and nation, are all in all in such a shambles that the Dummy approach is not going to turn around the suffering.

Sorry: centuries of mindlessness have proven this: occasional technological progress, even of the most amazing sort (accomplished by a “scientific method” designed to undermine Dummy-ness, at least in the laboratory) is not enough to bring peace of mind, real happiness, cooperation among nations, cooperation between humans and the Earth, or ongoing health, happiness and harmony.

So: am I saying that things are a mess?

Yes.

Am I claiming that the way out is only through some sort of “waking up” out of some sort of “ongoing trance?” Yes.

Am I saying that we need to deny our happiness as part of this “waking up?”

No.

Am I saying that most of what passes for “happiness” is some sort of numbing out or escape and distraction from a life lived in the present moment?

Yes.

Am I say that this is bad?

No.

Am I calling on the human race to wake up and shift its age old embedded sloth and misdirection?

No.

Am I offering a path for anyone who wants to wake up to a more happy and useful and aware and creative and Earth healing life?

I hope so.

Is this path about being good?

No.

Is this path about waking up?

Yes.

Are most people awake when they think they are awake?

No.

Do people go through their days, dress themselves, eat, talk to their family, get in their cars, go to their jobs, more or less perform their duties, come home, eat, watch television, talk on the phone, do computer stuff, do this and that, read books, and go to bed, all in a state of sleep?

Yes.

Can I prove this?

I don’t want to.

Can you discover this for yourself?

Yes.

Will this be humiliating?

Maybe. Or humorous along with being humbling. Or exciting.

Next time: Is the Earth in a hurry?

Too many words

National November Writing Month
continues,
keeping at my 3000 words a day
humph,
getting tired
and exhilirated
all at once

and life isn't words
they can just
point us
out of
the messes
we get into
with our words

toward a hug
or a sunset
or a walk
or a kiss
or a swim
or a pleasant time
in a garden,
puttering
or on a bench

and all the words
to help persuade
us to stop ruining our world,
which has such amazing
grace and balance
as a natural system
and then we have all our roads
and buildings and
machines
all these creatures
who don't poop
food for other creatures
(almost the definition of
natural, weirdly enough:
this quality of pooping out
foor that is useful to some other
species,
bird poop for the soil
and the seed
bear poop
the same,
plant poop
is the oxygen we breathe
our poop
could be of great use
except tons of chemicals
and medical poisons,
and radioactives in it,

but what is the poop
of a car factory?
cars.
and how do they feed the earth?

back to
the simple
walking
talking
reading
writing

even these computers
who will eat them
when we are done with them
how to keep a cycle going
and not an expanding and hidden junkyard

earth as paradise:
the garden principal

earth as junkyard
the stuff principal

oh, well
what do do

something at community center
tomorrow or
next supposed to help us out

who knows

anyway,
at 27.046 words
a lot of stuff
and maybe a little wisdom
and good story
is coming along

whole idea of so many words
in one month:
not enough time
to get too uptight and critical with ourselves

and guess
what:

a great break from writing
and neglecting our hereandnow body
and being in the head
is

desk trainer

as i say at the bottom of my emails

For happier neck, back, hands,
shoulders, brains
try
DESKTRAINER via
Try Desk Trainer, free lesson

ciao
chris

The shift

Are we going to go under
as a species,
or are we going
to rise
to the opportunity,
for a sweet and amazing
resurrection of human,
humane,
earth centered,
love oriented,
now is great
values?

This movie, is a great start: The Shift

4 minutes.
Take them.

Earth, Now, Loving the Life we Could Slow Down and Know

EARTH DAY AGAIN

Earth Day
Now
Earth Day
Now
We are alive
Now we know we in the Now
Or not
Now we can walk, or drive
Now we can breathe and smile
Or Rush Around
Now, we can watch the trees and the sky
Or worry about all we have to
Get Done

Now,
The Earth is waiting for us
Waiting for our feet
To walk
To caress
To join
To enjoy

Ah,
Yes.

Earth Day
Now day.
Wonder
Full

If we wake up
And
Let it be.

(And older essay,
from April of 2005, goes like
this Earth Day is Each Day.)

---

PLEASE BE WELL:


Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enlightenment

BE

Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.

Pink Haired Boy Explains Grafting

PINK HAIRED BOY EXPLAINS GRAFTING
Back in the wee days of my first times in Sonoma, say ten, eleven years ago, I'm a pluggin away at making the squalid patch of land out at East Seventh and Denmark into the beautiful garden, some pictures of which you can see if you take a bit of a stroll down the sidebar to your right.

Anyways, who comes by but a wee late, a Tommy or a Timmy, it took me a long time to get his name straight, but the little lad had bright whitish blond hair and a big love of nature. His Mom, Julie, bless her heart, knew this and living nearby, brought him around a lot.

And then, as he got older he brought himself around a lot, and spent some grand times in Mom's backyard, too, learning and playing with plants.

And then trees.

And now, all of 13 or 14 (eighth grade), he, definitely a Tommy, is now a bright and fun expert in Exotic and Normal Fruit. And Other Yummy trees.

And so, today, at the garden park, all's the more the shame I have not a picture just now, but I'll bike on by his near the garden house and get one tomorrow, he led a workshop in grafting trees.

And for the event, just to make sure that he didn't get lost, he'd died his hair a bright and shocking pink. I asked him if it was a wig, and no, it weren't. Was his hair, bright and fine.

And so, bright pinked haired, and young and bright brained and excited and in love with trees, he led a crowd of some sixteen or so adults through their paces of how to graft an apple variety to another apple tree, which cuts to make, how to wrap and facilitate the graft, which trees are easy ( apples), which trees are a bit tricky ( peaches), which don't even need to be grafted, you can just stick a cutting in the ground: figs, and grapes and kiwis, the last two of which aren't trees.

Roses, too, and at the garden, the entire grape arbor and all the roses growing out in the edges and not in the tidy little rose area were planted by just sticking a cutting in the ground.

Tommy showed us cleft cuts, and showed us whip grafting, and demonstrated a nifty and bit refined tongue in grove improvement on a whip graft. He told us about scions and root stock. He was fun, smart and entertaining and got a lot of information out. He showed some real grafting onto some real trees at the Garden Park and gave away some scions for the participants to take home. A good and educational time was felt by all.

So : next time the newspaper says a boy named Tommy's going to led a workshop in grafting, take it. You'll be in for a great treat.

The Porpoise of Life

WHAT IS THE PORPOISE OF LIFE?

The days come along, the sun comes up, and we are alive one more day. What to do? How to live?

Obviously, we are things to do, jobs to go to, families to raise, friends to see, and then: what is it all about?

Well: the short version: being good to the Earth and ourselves and others. And at this point in history: beginning to clean up the mess humanity has made and pull the species back from its almost blind lunge to extinguish itself.

This seems like a daunting job, and it is, and that's a part of the Really Big Job: to be happy and self loving and other people loving and to save the Earth. Which is a misstatement, really, the Earth will be fine if we humans wipe out ourselves and many of the living species, it will survive and evolution will create something new again, hopefully a little more heart and nature smart (as opposed to brain smart) than we are.

The Earth will survive, so what we really mean when we say Save the Earth, is to bring the balance with nature back to a livable point where we don't wipe out the human experiment.

So, here we are. Life is short, or long, and we have the challenge: to wake up to this glorious moment.

To be happy.

To be good to ourselves.

To be good to others.

To "Save the Earth" (as a place that humans can survive and thrive).

These seem like pretty good porpoises of life.

And I guess: to have something like a sense of humor, which a statement like "porpoise of life" may or may not qualify as.

Oh, well, that's part of the good life:
to make an effort,
and if it fails,
take a happy breath
and move on.

Ciao,
Chris

(And do check out: Desk Trainer to undo neck and back and shoulder and stress stuff from being at the computer, or Life. This is one step toward happiness: less feeling bad.)

13 Possibilities: Inspired by a Joel Kramer talk

13 POSSIBILITIES VIA JOEL KRAMER
Joel Kramer, a thinker and yoga guy, came by Sonoma last night. He let himself wander all over the place under the title of Yoga and Self Transformation. This was a delightful discussion, bringing up many of the same issues that this ongoing series of essays has been exploring: What are we to do with our lives? How to help the mess that the Earth and her people are in? How can we become better and happier people?

Actually, I don’t know if Joel talked much about happiness, but the idea, the flavor was underneath.

Then I came home and glanced at a book Marlie had just got at a girlie swap gathering, mainly clothes were swapped around, but books and videos, too. The book is good, I’ll talk about it day after tomorrow in the taichiyoghealth blog, but the hint for today’s essay is that the author likes the natural rhythm of thirteen moons, and in each of the thirteen chapters gives a list of thirteen food ideas from around the world. Having been born on Friday the thirteenth, I too am quite fond of the number thirteen. I’ve an earlier essay, called Thirteen Ways to Have a Wonderful Relationship, from October 23 of 2005.

So today’s essay is going to be 13 thoughts/ possibilities inspired by Joel Kramer. In honor of his honoring of the meandering principle of water and good gardening and nature in general, these will meander. So, with that rather long, foreshadowing (partly to avoid getting to the “hard” part), here we go.

1) Yoga is about the mind as well as the body. The body is conditioned and had certain limitations which can be explored, and if explored kindly and without force and pain, these limitations can be learning pathways to not only more flexibility but more awareness of how to change. In the mind, gad oh gad, do we have conditioning. We have so many filters up about how we see the world, that, hey, guess what, we usually don’t see the world, but only prebaked unclear idea of the world. In yoga, we have lots of tradition, which is nice, as a stepstone, but not as another filter/demand structure.

2) This conditioned thinking, combined with the human ability to create and invent, has led the world into a sorry mess. We have old ways of thinking, as in “All those guys are bad, we’d better go kill them,” and this is combined with brand new sparkling zippy wappo weapons. (Note: this is my rather loosy goosy paraphrasing and taking off from Joel. He sets a much higher tone than this, so don’t judge him by me. I’ve added him and his lovely companion Diane to my links, so go to their website (JoelKramer-DianaAlstad.com) and buy their books or listen to their pod casts. AND: what I am saying is very, very much in his spirit of everything is up for grabs and the new clear and fresh way to see things, which is what all these essays have been about for the last couple of years.)

3) These weapons allow us to be disconnected and supremely inhumane in our killing. Back in the spears and clubs days, if you were wrecking and wounding someone, you knew it. From a plane two miles up or a missile launched from hundreds of miles away, the killing is quite antiseptic and clinical. (Joel didn’t talk about, but for me, one of the most amazing images from Fahrenheit 911 the movie, was the kids, and they were just kids, in the tanks, with their rock and roll music, blasting humans and buildings as if they were in some hot nightclub video game). Which is to say: our brains our way ahead of our hearts.

4) Humanity is at the edge. We could lose the game and extinguish the species. AND this is when evolution tends most likely to happen: when it has to happen. So we’ve got two things going: a race to the edge of the cliff, and a chance to use the knowledge that as a species we could perish, to figure out how to co-operate and learn and shift ourselves to a better level of being.

5) This shift has a lot to do with getting out of our narrowness of identification, of our little group, or tribe or country. We have to learn how to identify our deeply selfish interest in identifying with the Big Picture.

6) Many of the conditioned ideas about opposites aren’t so worthwhile, if you get honest. For example, the cooperative vs. competitive thing. A bunch of people get together to raise a neighbor’s barn. All cooperative and cozy and no competition. Except, the competition with whatever trees had to be chopped for the barn, habitat destroyed to make way for the barn, and so on.

7) Joel had some fun comments about the competitiveness in yoga, and how we try to be good and not be competitive and can’t help ourselves, because we look over here and over there. He stated, and this I’ve brought up for from the Gurdjieff work, our brains are meant to compare. That’s what they do. So we can’t help it.

8) What I’ll add to that, and this is all me, is that the Feldenkrais work is often far more useful than many other systems, because it makes hugely explicit use of this comparing as a basis for learning. The comparing starts at the beginning of a group lesson, when you lie of the floor and compare your left leg to your right, and the left side of your ribs to the right, and so on. And then, throughout the lessons, most of the time with eyes closed, since on the floor you aren’t going to fall over, you are comparing: what is the difference if you turn your head to the right while turning your shoulders to the left and if you turn your head to the right while turning your shoulders to the right, or what is the difference to the right shoulder if you push up through the left foot and side of the pelvis, and so on and on and on. In the Feldenkrais work, learning is defined as discovering a difference that makes a difference. Brains compare because that’s how they learn; and this comparing thing gets shanghaied by our judgmental part. (Joel had a fun thing about the phrase: Don’t Judge, being a judgment.)

9) In real yoga, the goal is to learn about yourself and your conditioning. In relationships, we are in minefields of conditioning, and often stymied by myths that require us to pretend to be “gooder” than we really are. The yoga of relationships helps begin to lift us out of the sort of self absorption of yoga, the privileged permission to spend this time getting me, me, me in better shape, with better energy and freer and sexier body. (Again, this is me coming along, making fun of the Look Better Naked idea of yoga, which is explicitly part of the Bikram advertising.) Anyway, Joel did bring up how yoga was a privileged luxury, and part of the deal was how to go from this to, well, Saving the World.

10) Over the ages, we get caught up in the idea of evil. And what is the idea of evil? It is that there is a continuum of violence and when you go beyond a certain point you are evil. Joel was going somewhere with this, but I don’t know where. All I’ll say, is that it’s clear from history, that people love to deal with what they call evil by the Final Solution: Wiping it out. Be it modern agriculture as war with insects, or dumb bell politicians dealing with Fundamental Moslems, the primitive tendency is to clear the slate of the Bad Guys.

11) Children these days are being deprived of a connection to nature, and there are huge pressures on parents that make it hard to raise their children decently in the onslaught of all the crappy food and media and the rush of modern life. Which is part of the World is a Mess theme, and also part of this theme: real community seems to be almost gone. If it takes a village to raise a child, where are our villages. Both in our families and in our world, we need ways of real relationship that are not only satisfying for our lives, but will.... Save the World.

12) In the face of all this mess, the best inner place to be is one of optimism. Factually, “realistically,” this might not make any sense. But internally, to thrive and be effective and to enjoy our life on this crazy planet, to be optimistic is the only realistic option.

13) Too much avoidance of the real world, and real problems and real opportunities and real needs has been the hidey hole of a life after life, heaven, the next life, some sort of immortality gizmo going on. If we come back from that unknowable possibility, to the world as it is, there are chances all over the place to make a difference. The fun is in finding them.

(If you read this Joel and Diana, I hope you enjoy this, and please straighten me out on what I missed. Anyway: it was a fun ride.)

Gardening: nature and mulch

IMITATING NATURE

Nature knows, nature grows, nature does it the easiest and most elegant way, and say, how can we imitate nature in our gardens.

BUILD SOIL FROM THE TOP DOWN. Nature doesn’t dig up soil, except for wild pigs. It throws down leaves and twigs and dead animals all to decay from the top down to make soil. In the garden, create your beds by laying down newspaper as a leaf substitute, put a little manure and kitchen waste under the paper, a little straw o compost over it and let it decay into soil in nature’s way.

NATURE COVERS THE EARTH IN WALL TO WALL ORGANIC MATTER. The only place that there are spaces between plants is in a desert. Look at most commercial farms, or those gardens with a lot of bare dirt between the plants and you see something looking more like a parking lot than nature.

In permaculture we call all this dirt showing between plants: brown desert. What to do about this? Grow more weeds for one. Many, as in purslane, mallow, dock, wild radish, wild chicory, and pigweed, are far more nutritious than anything grown commercially, by a factor of almost 10. Weeds also give the gophers and other critters something to eat beside your plants. Also, grow smaller plants between your bigger ones. And mulch, mulch, mulch, it’s not living and oxygen making like a weed, but at least it’s organic, and makes soil instead of little pockets of desert.

MULCH, MULCH—THERE CAN NEVER BE TOO MUCH MULCH


Above I commented of how Nature, in all climates except the desert, carpeted the Earth with 100% organic matter. A prairie is all plant, a forest has trees and plants and deep mulch, neither leaving any gaps unfilled with organic materials. In a garden, one way to fill the gaps between the designated plants, is with other plants, prairie fashion, either a weed or another designated plant. For example, winter squash or pumpkins were traditionally grown under corn to suppress the weeds and keep the hot sun off the ground. (Along with these two, beans growing up the corn made up the traditional Three Sisters of the Native American garden). Or you could grow lettuce or strawberries under sunflowers or apples tress over blueberries over lettuce. And so on.

You could also imitate the forest, spreading a thick carpet of organic mulch between your designated plants. You know about our cardboard and woodchip pathways. You know about newspaper and straw or compost between plants. In permaculture, comfrey is grown specifically as a mulch plant, taking advantage of its endless growth as a supply of leaves to pack down against the soil. Neighbors foolish enough not to leave the grass on their lawns when they are mowed, are another source of mulch, if the grass isn’t full of chemicals. Straw bales, or even more nutritious, hay, are a quick and easy way to pack in moisture saving, soil cooling and soil building organic material between your plants.

Think of yourself as a microorganism, busy converting organic matter to soil if the conditions are right. Would you want to hang around near the surface on a hot Sonoma summer day? Then again, under four to eight inches of straw or leaves or newspaper or plucked and piled up weeds, how would you feel now about sticking around and making some soil for the garden?

Water, water, water.

This is in other places on this website, but watch: an acre foot of water is an acre one foot high in water.

The Plaza is 8.5 acres.

So the Plaza one foot high in water is 8.5 acre feet.

And it rains about 2 and a half feet of rain a winter,
so the Plaza gets 21.25 acre feet of water a year.

How much is that? An acre foot of water is about a third of a million gallons.

So, the Plaza gets SEVEN MILLION GALLONS OF WATER A WINTER?

Are we conserving that, being conservatives in the real meaning of the word?

No.

Can we?

Yes.

Do I want to bring nature into all our decisions? Yes.


One more water fact:
the City (all of us users combined) uses 700 million gallons of water a year.

Lots.

Let's create a program to pay people to take out front lawns
and put in drought tolerant gardens.

Yeah.


And, finally, how to calculate the rainfall on your rooftop?

Take the square feet and multiply by 2.5 feet of rain per winter for the cubic feet of water.

E.g. 2000 sq. ft. roof, means 5000 cubic feet of water.

Take that times 7.5 gallons of water per cubic foot.

So, for our example, 5000 X 7.5 = 27,500 gallons of water per winter.

What to do with that, or the seven million falling on the Plaza?

Dig dry wells, pour it down in during the winter, let it percolate back up in the summer when we need it.

Or, for houses, cisterns, even.

Let's start thinking about this precious rain, each winter's gift that we shove so heedlessly down our storm drains.

Why I am running for city council

Why am I running for city council?
By Chris Elms, for the city of Sonoma council.
September 24, 2004

I am running for city council because I love life, I love Marlie and I love Sonoma. Because I love life, I don’t waste my time in a car box when I can be out walking or on a bike, where the ceiling is five miles high, where the air is fresh, where I can see flowers and trees and talk to people I know.

I love Marlie because I’m lucky enough to have figured out how to have a great relationship and lucky enough to have meet another person, who with me takes this responsibility: her job is not to make me happy. My job is not to make her happy. We are happy on our own steam and then come together for glory and friendship and fun.
For the same sort of responsibility reasons I’m running for city council. I wanted to see root, radical, real ideas being brought up. I didn’t see them being brought up. I decided to run and bring them up.

I love Sonoma and see it being ruined by people whose minds are in this box: we have to keep building at the rate of 100 units a year and “that’s only, really, the historical average of 88 units per year.”
That’s turning our small town into a place that is in danger of no longer being a small town.

I’m running to say: let’s stop that nonsense and lower the rate to 50 or 44, and make that building ecological, with green space around us.

I’m running because no one else was or is talking about lowering the speed limit. Don’t we want to get through town quicker? Isn’t it hard to drive by the Plaza on weekends and event days?

No to getting through town quicker. A faster life is a life in rush is a life that is missing the pleasure of the moment. Yes, it’s hard getting by the Plaza. Treat yourself to a bike ride, or staying home and talking to someone you love.

Think of sex. It is now. It is in the body. It feels good.

Think of a fresh peach. It is now. It is sensation in the body. I tastes good.

Think of watching a child laugh or play. It is now. The pleasure, if you notice it well, is in your body. It feels good.

Quality of life is about coming to the now, and being happy in the moment. All the rest is not worth putting on your tombstone.

I’m running because I love to speak in public and want to raise issues of what is happiness, what is a good life, how we can connect to nature as part of who we are as human beings, how we can keep our small town small, how we can take care of each other in humane ways. A living wage law is taking care of each other. Slowing down traffic so it’s more fun and easy to walk and be on a bike is taking care of each other and the earth. Slowing down the rate of building and making it ecological is taking care of each other and the earth.

These are the commandments of permaculture ( a system of design and thinking to promote a permanent culture, like that of native tribes who lived in balance with the earth for thousands and thousands of years):

Care for the Earth.
Care for each other.
Sharing of the surplus.

That’s it, and I’d add: be present. This breath is precious. This trip downtown is precious: don’t waste it in a car box. Get onto your feet or onto your bike.

I truly think being in a car box limits the mind. A roof two inches above our heads is a trapped space, fine for listening to someone else’s ideas on the radio, but poor for thinking new thoughts. Get out under a ceiling five miles high to have real thoughts. I am running to win and I would love your support. Give a call, contribute money, walk a neighborhood. Talk to people. It’s fun. They love hearing my platform: slow down traffic, slow down building, involve ecology in all decisions. And, I should add, take care of each other.
If you join this campaign, you’ll be joining a movement to reclaim our lives from the false promise of happiness later. The false promise of slowing down the building later. The false promise of being happy after you’ve rushed around enough.

Happiness is now. This campaign is for fun and it’s to win, win big so all the dinosaurs in their stuck thinking can wake up and see: oh, my god, the people really do want to change how things are drifting along.

I would love to talk to any group you might want to organize for a little half hour to hour meeting. I will not, however, do a coffee and cookie thing: I will do an organic tea and organic fruit thing. I believe eating organic is good for our bodies, it tastes better and it’s better for the earth. Even better, let’s get together in someone’s garden, chat, pull a few weeds, share what we love about being alive, and then let me tell you about the campaign and answer any questions.

Love, earth and happiness to you all:

Chris Elms
Phone: 707-996-1437
e-mail:
website: slowsonoma.com (calm)

Who am I? Who are we all?

Who am I? Who are you? The busier I am inside the words in my head, the bigger the false picture I can create of who I am, and how I am different than you. If I hold Marlie’s hands and close my eyes and follow my breathing, I become a calmness, I become breathing, I become Life aware of Itself. Then when I open my eyes, and look at my sweet friend, I am her. The me, me, me has dissolved, and I am just the one in my awareness.

Another name for this is love.

Another name for this is peace.

Enough of that, for now: this is, for now, a website devoted to the ideas behind my campaign for city council, and the ideas behind the philosophy of life that I have been discovering and evolving. The aim of the philosophy is to make sense of life.

So far, life makes this sense: we are here to wake up to the present, to be happy, to love life, to help others love life and themselves, to live in harmony with the Earth and take care of the Earth, to take care of those less fortunate than ourselves in a way that allows us to remain present, peaceful and happy. Happiness is not running around accumulating things. It is being present with a friend, a lover, a child, a rose, a pet, a forest, an ocean, a job you are doing and loving. Being present in your ordinary life.

This is good.

This is what the campaign is about: quality of life as everyday happiness, not some vague phrase.