I've
been quiet lately here at Epiphany Now. I'm suffering from a
bit of reality induced writers block. I'm tired of doom, and the
amount of doominess that's just outside waiting for me, and you, and
anybody else not anesthetized on fukitol, corn beer, and big idiot
clowns smashing into each other for the purposes of moving a pigskin
around on fake grass. Even the fuckin' grass is fake in that wallerd
out carcass of a long past stinkin' dead horse that is American
football. Even the name is arrogant since football (as in the game
where you kick a ball around with your feet) is probably one of the
oldest sports. A game that's played and recognized globally as
football, but here we call it soccer and reserve the name "football"
for a sport that has very little to do with kicking a ball. It seems
we can't even be honest about our sports, and that we need to be
exceptionally different along with how we measure things. The rest
of the world uses metrics, what with it's easy to understand
increments of 10.
What
of the metrics of the future? Agreeing on how we measure that, be it
with metrics or standard, they both spell the collapse of our complex
civilization. Not a collapse fit for television or the big screen,
but one fit for a detention room with a group of misfits nobody wants
to be around (that's the rag tag group of genius boomers at the Diner... well actually the Diner is a good cross section of different ages). Each year will be shittier for more people, and
eventually you may be amongst their roles. Present and not accounted
for as an economic non-person who's been pushed to the margins of a
collapsing society without so much as a reach around for the years
spent servicing that big tube up your anus, stuck there by the
machine, and always sucking memories out to feed the bullshit black
hole that the American Hologram projects into every mush for brained
i gadget wielding cyborg. Where reality is presented on smaller and
smaller screens that we all hunch at, growing crooked, and gnarly in
our weaknesses with obsolete flesh. Flesh composed mostly of man
made chemicals...flesh maintained on genetic modification and powered
by ancient fossil sunlight, as John Michael Greer recently dubbed
petroleum.
Why
should those internet i gadget cyborgs look away from their ithingies?
Why should they wake up and notice that memory hole tube up their
ass that's powering the Matrix? We can't all be Neo, and it seems
whenever he tries to make an appearance he's whisked away to a
kookville for profit, corporatocracy owned private prison (it's interesting to me that Google Blogger doesn't recognize "corporatocracy" as a word). Those
state of the art prisons they've been steady building need prisoners
to remain a profitable business. You can't make money on building
and running prisons with no prisoners now can you? It helps that the
laws have been rewritten so that we can be deleted in some forgotten
military prison that's tucked away where nobody will ever notice.
They might as well just send us to the land of away, with the rest of
the trash in our consumer fueled "landfills," or trash
dumps as I prefer to call them. At least that's an honest
description. The place where our inability to think past the newest
flavor Dorito goes to rot, along with any chance at a future that
doesn't resemble something you'd likely find somewhere in a smog
choked Chinese slum, or an Indian one for that matter. There's
nowhere left to go from here except straight into what's left when
the fog from a perpetual progress myth dissipates, and there's no
longer anything that agrees with the stories you tell yourself...that
you verify with that imagidgit and all of those stupid scripted
stories that pass through that memory tube up your ass. It's always
convincing you that what you need is to work more hours for less pay
and no benefits so that you can afford to support those slums that
steady chuck out shit for you to buy. Shit that breaks just as soon
as you bring it home. Your home being just a place for the thing to
pass through on it's way to the trash dump.
How
empty can we imagine ourselves to be? Can we get much more empty
than a paradigm that mines the wealth of nature for the production of
trash? A system that subjugates everybody to it's incessant worship
of profit as the only sacred. The game is rigged. You gotta have
money to play. Now you gotta comply to the new wealthcare mandates
or be fined, leading to imprisoned...eventually. Just being alive requires that you pay, and only money
will be accepted as payment. Well, that's not true, there is also
the option of an all expense paid incarceration in one of those for
profit prison businesses where you can make a few cents a day to pay
for the cigarettes that will hopefully kill you before your prison
gay cell mate decides to push your shit in. It doesn't sound that
bad does it. It sounds like you could almost learn to enjoy having
your shit pushed in doesn't it?
The
trouble is not in imagining a world where money is not required. It's actually quite easy to imagine. It's
just that you'd be imagining a lie. Money's not going to go away,
and nor are the men whom control it's completely hallucinated nature.
In fact, those men control trigger happy goons in police suits. And
those police suits revel in their high tech deadly weaponry, and in the sound that
their boots make when they stomp on your freedom to be a slave in
this Orwellian New World Bravely that's become the reality
surrounding the imagidgits we're all plugged into. Well, we're not
all plugged into them, at least not unconsciously. There are those
of us whom are trying to come up with solutions to all of this
totalitarian tyranny over nature and the mass human mind. We're out
here hiding in plain site where we are free to think about the world
outside of the Matrix. Hiding in glitches hoping for a miracle and
trying not to fall prey to near term human extinction nihilism (or
one of those shit pushin' in prisons).
The
way forward is to no longer care about the Matrix and the goons whom
worship at it's suffering feet. We need to collectively turn our
backs on the system. I'm trying my hardest to do that, but there
aren't many options and it requires a bit of luck to pull off. We
don't have the money to build a future before the Matrix grinds to a
halt (one stair step at a time all the way to collapse). The answer is as simple as access to land so that we, the
unplugged and empowered forward thinkers, can begin setting up the natural systems
that will sustain us. It's easy to do! Real easy on the ground, and
especially while we still have tractors and chainsaws. Restoration
Agriculture, permaculture, ecological design, and perennial
agriculture are all ideas that seek to implement the answers to all
of the problems we face as a species.
Money
stands in our way, true, but more importantly we stand in our way.
We need to get out of our way, and that's exactly what us Heliopaths
are trying to do at the SUN Foundation. We are trying to believe
that as bad as the endless procession of problems we face on this
planet are, that they are not insurmountable. There has to be a way
through the endless storm that industrial civilization is proving to
be. We've turned ourselves into slaves and are doing our level best
to destroy life supporting biomes on this planet. As a Heliopathic Rasta Man Druid
it's my job to figure this shit out (and it's okay to laugh at my dumb ass self applied moniker). As a father and husband it's my
responsibility. Hell, as a sentient being with access to abstract
thinking, it's my responsibility to figure this out. This is a call
for help. If you are reading this, and you have not been to the SUNFoundation website, please do drop by for a visit. Have a look
around and ask questions. Join the dialogue about how we're going to
fix this mess and contribute to the solutions we're so desperately in
need of.
I
believe that the solutions to the demise of this industrial
civilization will have to be small, grass roots, decentralized, and
connected to the natural world, just like SUN Foundation is. The solutions will not happen if you
don't try to pull them out, if we don't try. You, I, the other
guy...us all. The goons are coming for us all sooner or later.
Their masters already have all of your rights locked safely away at
the bottom of the Land of Away with all of our mindless consumption,
and that's all right next to the shit storm future we've left for our
children. I refuse to be a part of a wealth pump that grinds up
whole mountains, and oceans, and peoples just to spooge it all back
out onto itself and everybody else in an endless act of hedonistic
narcissistic greed. We fuel this machine with our apathy. We give
our power away for the right to consume imagidgits and America's Got
Talent. Let us take the land back, and so take our power back. Help
us figure out how to do that. Become a Heliopath and help the SUN
Foundation come up with the solutions to our problems. We're
interested in solutions at SUN. Solutions that will weather the
building storm. Got any ideas you want to share?
The first person to guess what a "rock angle" is will get a bottle of SUN sauce...my fermented hot pepper sauce mailed to wherever they want it free of charge (and there are two possible answers I'll accept). Here's a hint...it's a word that my son Ayden Zen McCarty thought up. Guess I should prepare to give away two bottles.
Here are some pictures of one of the ongoing SUN Foundation projects. It's a monumental hugelspiral. The hugelspiral will be completed once we wheelbarrow 12 yards of topsoil on top of the 2 yards of mushroom compost, on top of about 6 yards of leaves, on top of white pine, poplar, oak, and maple sourced from the land.