Fashion Field Guide

I am starting a serial on fashion, ecology and evolution that will be posted on the Fashion Ethos blog.  The intro is there now.

When i started this journey i knew so much less than i do now. I trust information will constantly change and as we all try to remain afloat we will adapt, dive, leap and swim as needed.

Right now i am feeling the current and instead of treading water i am going to swim against it. I have been doing this quietly, building muscle, heart, breath and spirit.

All the while i have met other swimmers, virtually and in person. I know we are not crazy, we are solutionaries. So it is time to collect and synthesize my findings. Besides my dad asked me when i was going to write the book. he is in his 80s so i figured i better commit. So here you are dad, i am on it.

 There are many doing this "change thing" and i have faith that enough of us will get through to enough others and the human species will have another go, this time with the upstairs brain in charge.

And yes a life metaphor is playing under the description!

Another Love, Down

I go by this community "poster wall" a lot. It is on the way to my mother's place. So when i stopped yesterday to look at the new art, i didn't know it was a memorial.

I did not know Ana, but i feel she was loved by her friends, her community. I do not know much else, but I felt the universe. I was touched inside where life resides and i allowed it to surface.

I cried standing in the parking lot as i took the photos. The tears were for Ana, her friends and for all the children sacrificed to a culture that can't shake the lies from its past to look the future fully in the eye.

This is a culture that sacrifices its children for commerce and works more on fear than promise and potential. This thinking can and must be laid to rest.

We can now understand what it means to align with the whole of life; to see from a different viewpoint. We can dare to go inward to free ourselves from the outer false reality that was staged for the benefit of the few. We are no longer controlled by a world of scarcity, a world where some had to lose in order for others to win.

This world denied emotions, empathy, compassion, connection and puffered up the ego, made strict rules and used racism, class distinctions and other false "reals" in order to exist. It became a stage for professional dissonance and mindless distractions.

That world is no longer useful nor tolerable.The old rules and attitudes are being discarded, we are moving towards who we truly are, we are freeing our spirits, our emotions and our minds.

Ana's friends faced the pain and felt real enough to show the world. Thank you. You are that which will flourish, you are beautiful.

Valentine's Day

 Stitch-istration of two trees that represent  traditional 

male/female archetypes. They help ground me when i visit.

What a conundrum, i really diss the market's shout to buy junk. This holiday is another one that begs for presence, not presents.

We want love, not delusional referrals of heart that are what?- control agents, monitors of care, tributes to normed relationships, reflections of cultural values? Somewhere we bought the abstract and lost a lot of the true value.

When humans sought to understand their yearnings for the essence that lies in knowing, pulls them toward an authentic connection beyond self, they wanted to share the idea so they gave it a name and Love was born.

In a culture that gives a lot of homage to things measurable, provable and repeatable,  lovers are losers. Putting faith in science over our own experiences has dreadfully limited our perception of reality.Once again we are looking in the mirror and asking , how did we lose vision and come to this?

Science is a bright light yes, but shouldn't be the only light in the realm. Science is a tool that when used properly can yield terrific results. But it has also led to myopia, a numbers based dependency and a new kind of ignorance. Fearing that which is not controllable we have caged ourselves in this ridiculous empire of data. Safety in numbers, safety behind walls, safety in stuff, we have gotten used to shooting ourselves in the foot. When asked to stand up for heart, we feel the pain and respond slowly if at all.

We send Valentines made by strangers in foreign factories. Question the love.

All around us we see the reflection of a sham reality that our culture projects. See how it postures, poses and glitters, see how our mainstream media prances it about, see how we are seduced into accepting it all as real life.

Once you see through it you can never not see it again!

So here's to Love, here's to Real Love all vulnerable and messy and lacking in data because it is always new, unique and universal, simultaneously at once.

So stop buying love...

Show up vulnerable and courageous for truly that is brave, heroic even.  In a world of bad beliefs based on competitive, dog eat dog, win/lose set ups we must speak up. It is time to kindly ask the old fear based ideologists to back off, for there is  love to give and life to live.

Belief Systems

Wool roving felted onto nylon which 

was once the bottom of a vintage negligee. Felting is great fun and

creates amazing texture. I did this first piece as an experimental sample. 

Now need to find its "home."

Last month's snow put an abrupt stop in my anticipated flow of events. Watching the world transformed by nature created its usual beauty break, but this year it brought to mind climate change and shock.

Why shock? I thought of culture shock, the feelings that are synonymous to sudden immersion in a really foreign land, one where language and customs are very different from your own daily events.  I surmise there is a correlation between this experience and  my own culture' inability to embrace the next reality. No matter how one may research, gather information, study the language and traditions, no matter the plan; stepping into another "way of living" surrounds a person with all matters of the unexpected. This taps our senses and we wake up to the immediacy of being. 

At this point we choose fear of the unknown (what train, how do i say "show me" etc) or we embrace it. Usually there is a mix of both, but with practice the unknown becomes the magic doorway of possibility. 

Perhaps this is where one can consciously choose to evoke the law of attraction, perhaps it is mere physiology, an  adrenaline response, perhaps it is the way our sacred heart communicates with us and the whole of life. Call it what ever, a rose is still a rose, the point is that when our energy meets new energy, we come alive. Sparks get our attention,

Change in everyday reality, where every minute brings us a step nearer to extreme climate chaos with concurrent ecosystems damage and the nihilistic wealth/resources suck to the 1%, has many of us mesmerized by the virtual undrama. (despite Occupy) We are lost to big reality by immersion in shallow reality.

The signs and symptoms of change show up, little by little, over time. Like a cancer, our cultural dis-ease feeds best on populations in states of semi inertia. Be it cells or humans, populations respond to alarms and they reAct. This must be why fear driven systems are so dominant; it is easier to "prove" the necessity to respond than to chance prediction. (Predictions hang out with the like of wiccans, pagans, shamans and such, and throughout Western history were akin to calling cards for tortuous ramification. The "original church" wanted zero competition for the "souls" of human beings.)

Without bells and whistles, Insidious dis-eases and toxins creep in under the radar and thrive until our immune systems are too weakened or overwhelmed to respond adequately. Is this what has happened? Is our cultural "real" no more real than a person accepting as normal a condition that irritates but until it really is a bother won't take time to investigate and find a cure? Wow, like our daily shallow over rides our true dharma until we are forced awake. 

This is a version of " the lobster in the pot." The poor lobster doesn't feel the creep of the heat's intensity until it is severe. The lobster's environmental shock-up comes too late in the classic story. However we are more conscious than lobsters and therefore "we" have been noting the evidence of our head towards disaster. As a result, thousands (more?) of citizen's groups have formed to treat the symptoms. This is part of that which Paul Hawken's calls the global immune response system. Now, in 2012, there truly is a new level of urgency. We as a species are pulling ourselves, our families, our world of brothers and sisters together and are jumping "out of the pot." We are risking the ire of the ogre for our very lives. 

This jump from the known "boiling pot" towards a new consciousness is evolutionary behavior. We are putting faith in the currently unprovable, because what we thought we knew has proven flawed beyond repair. We can and will do better. We are moving towards that which we want to manifest, trusting our sacred hearts to be the compass they were intended to be. This is a leap of faith, evolution, courage, but most of all, heart.

The sparks are here, the fire is lighted, we are the phoenix and need not succumb to the ashes of our own distorted beliefs and premises. Our hearts say soar, soar beyond this delusion, soar towards the light.

Choose light!

2012 Time for Change

 Colin Day Abstract Kerf International Gallery 2012

I saw this great flick last night at Wallingford Meaningful Movies.

2012: Time for Change -Teaser

The flick starts with a bit about the Mayan calendar ending in 2012. Then we are taken along with Daniel Pinchbeck to sample a variety of  alternative natural systems and savvy possibilities while weaving through the insanity of our mainstreamed anthropocentric systems design. Along the way there are some fun parallels.

In the Mayan creator story the first "people " were of mud (crawled out of the sea ?) They were oblivious to nuance and therefore were wiped out.  The next batch were wood  and better than mud, but still full of fear which led to a warring nature. The wood people were wiped out by a flood (Noah's Ark?)

Then came the people of the Corn!!!

"We're like corn chips walking because we really have a very, very large fraction of corn in our diets, and we actually can't help it because it's an additive in so many of the foods we find on the market shelves," Dawson says. (Todd Dawson, a plant biologist at the University of California-Berkeley, can test a strand of hair to determine how much corn is in your diet or mine by looking for a form of carbon found in corn.)

 Wow, we "children of the corn," have big choices to make.  We can stick to the rut of business as usual;  controlled by fear and scarcity beliefs, led by systems that seek to create dependencies that further control us by taking our lives into a material spin dry-AKA good for corporations but bad for life.

In defense, we were led to believe this was progress, this was man and science in control of life, dominating the planet. (Having dominion over is a Biblical phrase) I guess that little dopamine rush released during a "buy" was worth the price for awhile. But we are getting over it. As we gain sophistication, we ask more questions. We are seeking our further potential.

Many of us are asking for a life that values life itself.Seeing the connected, interrelated beauty of the living universe will help us co-create the next phase. People of the evolution. people born of stardust, people who respect the intelligence of the natural world and learn to align with that which is us and not us, simultaneously, they choose light.

Ok Corn people, show the world your true colors, lets bloom outta this dive.

City Looks

great look spotted Saturday in the A M.