Wow, This Blew Me Away

First, my morning moral dilemma: 
 

I looked out my kitchen window to see a little pillow-like blond thing in the flower bed. When I saw it throw dirt on its back I realized it was my free-range chicken Chick-a-dee, having a dirt bath and sunning herself in the morning sun.

Well, maybe this dilemma isn’t a moral one, but it’s concerning to me. I want Chick-a-dee to be happy. She likes her freedom. She likes roosting on the back porch.

I’m tired of cleaning the porch, and with spring coming on I would like it to look good.

Who do I please?

She likes to be close to us, and if we don’t watch carefully she will follow the dog inside. She will, wiggling her little fuzzy butt, run after me when I go out to feed the three penned chickens behind the Wayback house. 

She will come to my call.

I bought wire to make a run between the old chicken yard to the new kenneled yard with its off-the-ground hutch. My plan is to put her in the old house, and with the run between the two, let the chickens decide what is best for them. The not-so-tame chickens are afraid of Chick-a-dee and will cower in their house when she is in the yard.

Will they work it out? I don’t know. Chickens like chickens and Chick-a-dee had a sister she was close with, but when her sister came up missing, Chick-a-dee adopted us. But I will miss Chick-a-dee at the house and telling her, “Good night Chick-a-dee.”

Okay, I left my window, got my coffee, and sat down at the computer to begin my day, and… 

Wow, this blew me away:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” 
― Buckminster Fuller

I heard Buckminster Fuller speak in San Diego California, and my mouth dropped when he said he made $300,000 a year and spent every penny of it. He would make another 300,000 the following year. 

How cool is that! 

That was 30 years ago.

I have been taking a course begun in Portland Oregon, called The Right to Exist. Now it has moved to another location and to new writers named Dominika and Cedric. Their course is The Trailblazer.

When I first began following the Right to Exist site, I thought about how people work like slaves, often hate their jobs, go home tired, grumbling, watch television and fall into bed, only to repeat the same procedure the next day.

And working mothers get their three-year-old child up at 7:30 to take her to day-care, drop the son off at school, work for 8 hours, pick up the children—go home to whatever happens in the evening, and then begin it all over again. The little girl spends 40 hours a week in day-care. 

And our social system, in giving any financial assistance, keeps the precipitant at the poverty level, for we have the belief that if a person doesn’t work, they are lazy, and we don’t want to support that. One must justify their right to exist.

“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.”

—Nelson Mandela

On the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum are individuals who rush to “jobs” they love so much they say they would do them even without pay. These individuals often make an enormous amount of money, buy jets and such, send cars into space, and are the envy of others sitting at home watching TV. 

Of course, those glorious ones got off their butts and worked for the thing they loved. As a result, some received high financial rewards. However, some have a problem. In their effort to reach the top, they forgot that inner work is required to become a whole human being. They became despondent, couldn’t handle the pressure, their relationships fell into the toilet, they used drugs to calm the savage beast and ended up killing themselves.

It’s such a dilemma.

And crap, this will break your heart:

"If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings.” –Nelson Mandela

We care.

Okay, now I am putting myself out on a limb. I am in the process of writing a course—for me? Yeah, and for anyone else who chooses to sign up. 

While working my way through the Trailblazer processes I hit a spot where I questioned what I wanted to do, where my strengths lie, and found, that while I thought I knew what I wanted—to write, to blog and to write books. Another possibility came pecking at me. 

I wanted to write my own course, not to copy others who have gone before me, but my own—to work through it with my participants, for, you know there is more than the external trappings of life.

There is also the inner work of how we relate to other human beings and to ourselves. 

Few of us have escaped life unscathed, and most people feel they aren’t good enough.

If one’s psychology is 80% of the battle in living the life we choose, then the place to begin is with clearing the path to our greatness.

I have taken more seminars, workshops, courses, and training programs than you can shake a stick at. (Words of my mother. Although I still don’t know what that means.) It is time to stop soaking up information and to pour some out.

Like spaghetti thrown to the ceiling, I will throw out my information to see if it sticks.

Share what you know. We need to hear it.

Thank you for being here. You are awesome!

So, how was your week?

Love,

Joyce

From the brilliance of Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

We are the Champions

 “When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the morning light, for your life and strength. Give thanks for your food, and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies with yourself.

--Tecumseh, Shawnee Chief

Are people stressed out, angry and disillusioned? Not the people I know, of course, but those nebulous someone’s out there. Well, drivers especially. They know where they’re going and are hell-bent to get there as fast as they can. Don’t slow down in front of them to read a road sign. Sorry, I don’t read as fast as I used to, or from as far away. They will zoom around me to make sure I get the message.

I wonder if most people are holding their emotional lid on, and any small infraction can set them off.

Traffic can do it. Around 5 o’clock here in Eugene the Beltline (The highway that connects one part of town with the other) is a constant stream of red tail lights. And getting on it is a major accomplishment. (Hello L.A.)

My daughter has been interviewing for a new job, and the interviewing process is a joke. She used to be a director of Pet Smart and as such, she conducted interviews and hired people. She wanted to get to know them. That was the purpose of the interview. Yesterday the interviewer simply read her a list of questions she could just as easily—easier—answered online. The interviewer was dullified.  Sorry, mam, that your life is so crappy.

When I meet a happy server, I praise them to high heaven.

I guess it’s the dullified ones that need raising up, but to raise someone you must first meet them at their level. There’s the rub.

Okay guys, what do we do about this? 

One suggestion I would offer if to get out from under the television.

Not one minute after I wrote the above sentence, the following information appeared in my mailbox. Courtesy of husband dear. Woo woo.

“So much insanity is being broadcast into our society that people are beginning to crack and turn on each other.” --Dylan Charles, Editor of Waking times.

The late Terence McKenna, Canadian, journalist, and filmmaker, pointed out that TV is a drug.

What else could persuade people spend an average of 5-7 hours a day sitting in front of the TV?

“You sit someone down in front of a TV set and turn it on. Twenty minutes later come back, sample their blood pressure, their eye movement rate, blood is pooling in their rear end, their breathing takes on a certain quality, the stare reflex sets in. They are thoroughly zoned on a drug.”

Obsessive and unexamined behavior in pursuit of a familiar stimulus is what drug addiction is about.

One point taken is that initially psychedelic drugs were meant to be consciousness-raising, to be a mirror. TV IS A BILLBOARD.

McKenna said his mother pressed a book on him when he was 12-years-old, and it changed the way he viewed the world. The book was the Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley*.  Huxley says to overcome bias, draw free-hand. (Interesting.) And go into nature and train the eye to see.

McKenna commented that the Vietnam war couldn’t be won by traditional means when it was broadcast into our living rooms. We could see it. We could hear the screams and see the maggots.

When war is read, as is often the traditional recording of it, it is made to sound heroic.

The media has sanitized recent wars, including deliberately not showing caskets being shipped home.

Okay, is TV good/bad/terrible or what?

It depends on what’s on TV.

Consider this;

If you want to be successful in your business, get on television.

Appear on Shark Tank and your sales will skyrocket.

Have a couple of interviewers talk about the Keto diet, and it becomes mainstream.

Used to be a book touted by Oprah became a runaway best seller. (Of course, I would love to have my book touted by Oprah, except I don’t want to appear on TV.)

Guess I’ll limp along.

All the coaches out there teaching you how to be rich could sum it up in one sentence.

Get on TV.

Good stuff is on TV, however, and this is hard for us to understand, TV has qualities that are shaping our values. (Doesn’t everything?)

However,  values not questioned is mindless following.

I know we’re all in this soup together, except when it comes to sorting it all out, we’re on our own.

Lesson from the Buddha:

 “Believe nothing. No matter where you read it, or who said it, even if I have said it unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

 “We are the champions, my friends
And we'll keep on fighting 'til the end
We are the champions.”

-- Songwriter: Freddie Mercury

We Are the Champions lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

You can tell I saw the movie Bohemian Rhapsody. It ended with that song.

*At the age of 16, Huxley was stricken with an eye disease which left him in a state of near-blindness for many years thereafter. In 1939, in a state of exasperation, he began to practice the method of visual re-education evolved by Dr. W.H. Bates. Within two months he was reading without spectacles and without eyestrain. An enthusiastic convert, Huxley wrote this book, a homage to the Bates method and a serious challenge to the orthodox medical profession.