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.

remember!

the light goes on

 photo by Bjørn Jørgensen/NASA (Grotfjord, Norway - 1/23/12).

and on. Check out the latest universal light shows at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120124.html
This post is to remind us that we are born of Stars (The Living Universe, Elgin) and that we are the light with the power necessary to change the way poor perceptions have  misguided life. It is also the year of the dragon, wow all this magick is now!!

Foreclosure Quilts

This post came my way at the best time. Last week i proposed a quilting workshop to the Women in Occupy Seattle group. This came after an email from the co-op list with an Occupy the Economy lead in. As co-ops are part of the transition towards a diverse economic model and many are savvy on sustainability and the like, i am hoping to see partnering teach-ins across the nation. Problem and solution (one of many) together like jack, cool.

".... start an Oc quilt full of images, ideas etc on the movement , a fiber arts piece that can show in the gallery and tell a story of many pieces coming together to create something new and yet heartfully, mindfully familiar. A symbol of cooperation ...i can't wait to see it!
happy January!

Where are Seattle lights?

Birds on a Wire - wall in U District

There is some great graphic art and music coming out of Occupy. Artists and musicians were/are my mentors. They showed me a world school failed to reveal. (Lies My Teacher Told ME by Loewen) Occupy is helping expose the trail of lies and abuse hidden under flag waving rhetoric and blind acceptance to capitalization. We were taught everything needed to be abstracted, objectified and priced. Now people are gathering together and asking why? People are sking for more value, more respect more democracy..They are demanding transparency, truth and and an end to systemic battering of human spirit, dignity and their ability to live healthy , whole lives.
We are seeking autonomy from the old hierarchical top down grubbery that is resulting in a nihilism, a squeezing and shrinking of things that matter like clean air, water, living soils, healthy bodies, minds and spirits.
This is how we as a species, a culture of humanity,will move from an industrial, hierarchical state of developmental retardation. We are moving forward, being the conscious evolution.

One of my favorite music videos is "Violence Breeds More Violence, Right? 
another is Occupy: We Are The Many.

Seattle is home of so many talented people, please contact Peoples Media Arts Uprising 2012, show up, and help the world understand how energy focused will create the next story.

The Immune Response

Love this video.
Paul Hawkens understands the global biorhythm. The patterns of nature, self, culture - all are imitative, repetitive and yet autonomous within the whole. We are just a fractal of others and more! Seeing how life relates to itself really pushes the potential of our personal energy. This further validates how we impact paradigm change by being the change. This also validates how working in groups can facilitate learning as we reflect and resonate with others. Groups thus create more exposure which aids the immune response systems.

Now i just copy and paste the bio truths into the manmade construct formularies and viola, a picture is revealed again. This shows how we can counter much of the dis-ease our economic system enabled by acting in the space we create for the new construct.

The focus on profit distorted perceptions, created a false reality akin to a cancerous growth model- ah like that just can't be good right?

2012 is healing and blooming.

New Years Day + 1

January 2nd, i woke to "The Matrix" and saw it in a whole different light. The humans aren't the virus, the programming is bad. The Matrix isn't a machine or equation, it is something vastly superior and love is how we are able to understand and/or connect with "it."

Consider the phrase "if you love someone set them free, if they return, they love you." (adaptation) We were once free, then awoke to consciousness only to become entangled in our own and other's egos. We were snagged by ideologies that created systems that hooked us in at the level of the humans who made them up. As those system creators were intent on "owning the world," "winning the war against nature," and other oddities they have come close to achieving their goals. Monopolies hidden under corporate facades are calling the shots and ecosystems are collapsing. However their goals now appear vacuous, ill informed, insane even.

All along the way, a few of the people asked questions. They challenged the premise and beliefs. They questioned the goals. They queried the results.

As people woke up, they talked to others and started unplugging from the system. Now every day this is happening ever more. We are setting ourselves free. We are returning to love.

New Years Day

The first song i heard (just after midnight -PBS) in 2012 was Cold Play's "Fix You." Someone comes to my mind here, despite rational intervention, it is what is. As feelings, subtly or not so, rule the rational mind, this one is for faith to handle. I trust my intent for good to align with a natural, larger good.

As i have been calling 2012 the year of healing and transition, hearing this song was an affirmation. This is my year to cross over. I do not know what that means. I will by 2013.

I have an idea that we need to heal gender and generation chasms in order to heal the other rifts between peoples. This is a synchronistic pursuit, as personhood is such a mixed, tangled thing. We are bound to set off fireworks, both dangerous and beautiful.

So this means scouting in territories where tradition has built thousands of forts. We need to storm all the barricades and set life free. Freeing our selves, frees others. This will enable us to come into states of fuller potential.

We need to appreciate each other for who we are and not who we want others to be for us. This will translate across all the other borders. This is how barricades crumble, they dissolve with out attention. This we can do.

Hello 2012

2012

Promise is a granddaughter born

with a spiky do, universe grins!

Tis the year of Transition, setting the direction for the Transformation. However as time was a system made for tracking seasons, it is a cumbersome tool for things with no moon phases or fixed points. Good labels are a matter of hindsight, but without foresight we fail to get out of ruts.

So playing with energy and intent, here is my take:

Transition is the step up and out, towards hope, towards global healing. Transformation is the next illumination.

In other words, transitions, transformations, epiphanies and evolutionary leaps are constantly popping up all over the "timeline." Each person progresses at the speed they are able. i think starts, stops and do-overs are how we learn best. It's a timeline through a kaleidoscope.

Transforming a whole wrong minded culture is big. But we must in order to thrive as individuals. This is the new paradigm of the whole.

However, we are culturally brainwashed. Some of it like, "thou shall not steal" is still relevant, but a lot of it is not so much. Much of what we are taught is stuff deemed necessary by "they that rule," so "they" can continue their good thing. This means we get a twisted version of facts to swallow. (Funny as designing for comfort practically screams of developmental stagnation which explains the rut! Our brains thrive on challenge, but we have allowed this lesser state to hunker down and settle in)

Back to time; on the way past Rome, feudalism and into the Renaissance there were tweaks. Enlightenment brought on revolutions and the new elitists joined the ranks. (Our Founding Fathers and their wealthy alliances)

The profit minded industrialists became the new players on the block. They quickly aligned with regulators and policy makers. Their "success" led the west to see the world as a vast machine. Life "the mechanism" could be controlled, organized and counted. Whereas nature was viewed as chaotic and frightening, machines helped humans feel powerful, safe and in control of their domain. These humans felt they were winning the "war against nature."

Now we understand that way of thinking is about to take down the life support systems of the planet. While corporations shuffle to own the pieces of our collective biosphere, We the People are standing up and yelling "Back Off!" (India suing Monsanto!! after Dow and Bhopal she has had enough, Occupy Wall Street going global, more)

We are not as suicidal or as brain dead as the systems we are plugged into. We are part of the blooming, messy, natural cycle. We are Nature. We are not machines we are far MORE! The obvious doesn't wear a business uniform or khakis, the obvious wears truth as best it can.

AKA, the system we (living beings) set up has declared war on itself, is this classic or what?

OK so the transition is to start on the healing. We need to wake up from the e-drugged state of
* dependent energy into an appreciative and mindful energy. We all have a lot to do. This is good, this is change.

This is something we can do for ourselves and others. Start with the professionals, read and explore your personal territory while you learn. Then when you feel secure enough in your knowing heart, peel back the covers and share. Invite others to do the same.

Our friends and loved ones know us best. We can start there to build the trust and the spaces for healing in our lives. Then get braver and speak up at every opportunity. Change waits for no one, it is the direction that counts.

The shows i am doing with the Kerf International Exhibits and fashionRIP Project's "Peoples Media Arts Uprising 2012" are experiments in all of this. I know only from where i am, and i know i must participate to nurture the more, and so it goes. So we all go.

2012, welcome. May we learn together to thrive as whole beings in a living, energy filled, dynamic Universe.

*
Dependent energy: our food system (esp refined sugars and carbs, now GMOs and pharma frankens- patents mean $, nature is "free" until Dow/Gates pull out heritage disaster food relief from the Arctic..OMG! what price are "we" willing to pay, who are "WE?") oil and petrol chemical by products (plastics in medical devices to alleviate the symptoms of diseases caused by our Wars and from the toxins in the plastic life cycle) apps on smart phones hooked to corporate vampires, too much Facebook, too little face time. Our dependencies (addictions) on created needs will never be satisfied here, even if we had an infinite planet to carry out the experiment, which we do not, so the game is over! Please everyone, help us all move on!!