You are Part of It

I have had trouble writing down my discussions with my favorite tree  and getting it into my published dialog. As I have been running I imagine this tree and begin a dialog. When I get to the tree and stop my dialog usually intensifies and I have had a variety of insights  that have changed my perspective on the relationship between myself and the world of plants.

Me: Hello tree

Tree: Hi

I have been writing about all object boundaries being semi-permeable in a more concentrated way recently and the development of these ideas has begun to effect how I experience the world and myself in an interesting way. Several days after writing

The illness that we have struggled with since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 has been eliminated. We are like a people who have collectively been afflicted with a slow growing cancer that almost killed us during the Bush presidency. Last night we got the CT scan and lab work back and our doctor told us we are cancer free. The chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, was successful and we are ready to begin our recovery.

There has been a lot of talk about Barack Obama and poll results that show him with a significant lead over John McCain in this year’s presidential election campaign being comparable the Tom Bradley’s run for Governor of California in 1982. Tom Bradley was ahead in pre election polls and lost that election. Many people believe that the reason for the gap between the polls and the election result for Mr. Bradley was due to white voters saying they would vote for Bradley when responding to the questioning of pollsters and then changing their mind when voting privately.

No longer searching
For the parts
I have found them
The little boy
Lost and found

Part of me
That had to stop
Crying
Had to make
A new self
New life
Has finally gotten
What he needed

Now we are
Whole
Inner battle
Turned to inner
Cooperation

Then a quest
Within
And without
To find
Lost self
Lost source
We have
Succeeded

I hope writing
Survives
Reading too

I hope children
Find a place
To grow
Plants too

I hope water
Survives
For the living
Ebb and Flow
Through
Cell walls

I hope we
Stop
Eating time
Faster
Than it lives us

Like many others Barack Obama’s historic speech, A More Perfect Union, touched me deeply. Why? Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” helps me answer that question.

In my mid to late 20’s I experimented with a relatively strict vegetarian diet and I felt great. Later I abandoned my vegetarian experiment and started to eat more like I had when I was living at home with my parents except that I continued to eat more rice and beans and much less meat than I had before my vegetarian days, big mistake. Dr Fhurman, in his book “Eat to Live” recommends a diet consisting plant foods in the following percentages of total calorie intake,

Individually and collectively we are facing more than a technical or human systems crisis in the knowledge that we have, and still are, creating a global climate meltdown through the continued expansion of a fossil fueled, industrial revolution driven, global capitalist consumption economy. Finding a new way to live in our world as a conscious super powerful species is going to have a huge impact on our identity. This isn’t trivial.