Feeling Good

I'm feeling pretty good right now and I know why.
I like to have stuff to do and to be useful neither, of which is easy to achieve these days but....
My lapsed function as a Tree Warden has suddenly revived.
 I had an email asking me for my thoughts on management of one of our local woods. So I've been out, made note of things I thought worth mentioning and just emailed my comments as requested........and I feel happy that somebody needed me to do something.
  I feel worse than a spare bride at a wedding most of the time. I was always busy, busy, busy years ago and I miss it more than I realised.

Retirement is just another word for Redundant.

I had to re-post this entry from Jon Symes blog

Of Butterflies and Bees: Moving Toward Wholeness

May 21st, 2014

| By Jon Symes

In earlier times we sat, all together under the same stars we see today, around a fire. The world worked.

There’s a moment in the life of a caterpillar when it begins to eat more and more. It becomes a voracious consumer and eats many times its own weight in food. It eventually becomes bloated and immobile
The container ships groan under the Golden Gate Bridge every day, many times a day: I see them from the bus. The huge red calipers of the bridge measure their loads. 6 containers high, 16 long stacked 12 abreast, Oakland-bound and regular as clockwork. Global trade on the high seas. Box after box after box, loaded with iPhone, iPod, iPad, iStuff, motor cars, empty jars, jars of pickle, Christmas tinsel, plastic beads, plastic toys, sweat-shop jeans, rice and beans, my next pen, or pencil, my next purchase, my lifestyle, my comfort . . , , all heading for Main Street, from China . . . or Vietnam . . . or Thailand . . . or China.

Imaginal cells
You and me
With our desire to be
Whole and free
In harmony
With the whole family
Of humanity
The plants and trees
The rivers and seas
The clouds and the breeze
The birds and bees
[Please bless the bees
We need them bees]

At that very moment inside the caterpillar there are these tiny cells waking up. The biologists call them imaginal cells.
A winter’s evening in San Francisco, rushing through unfamiliar hallways in the community center searching for the meeting that would open doors to new understandings. Redirected at Exploring Norse Mythology, straight on past AA, left at Cantonese for Beginners, eventually we find Room 23: Transforming Oppression. Here in a room of more than 40 this white male is in an unfamiliar minority, now seeing the world through the eyes of the Latino, the African-American, the Asian-American, the Native American, the queer, the transgender, the trans-sexual. Every “oops” and “ouch” shows us where we haven’t really seen each other. Every time we cross the lines of difference to overcome the experiences that have shaped our lives and to hear our sameness and our beauty. Each new understanding helps us see the differences as mere constructs, the separation unnecessary and ultimately unreal. Each new connection opens up new conversations and new worlds; it is hope for our future.
These cells keep popping up and joining together despite the best efforts of the caterpillar host to destroy them. The cells join as clusters, the clusters as strings.

The host will control
Break up the whole
Divide and conquer
Extend still longer
The tired old dream
The dominant theme
The rule of nation
Hate-creation
Man’s domination
Our separation
Unless we’re together
Come what may, together

Author Rivera Sun writes about the USA, “Revolution is on the table, once again. It is being discussed with increasing seriousness as our representative republic fails to adequately meet the populace’s needs”.
Can we imagine a revolution here, amidst our imported comfort, manufactured consent and hijacked dreams?
As the imaginal cells gather the rest of the cells collapse into a kind of nutritive soup
At the bus stop heading home, another container ship beneath the bridge, heading home too. Stacked high again. What are we exporting these days? Root beer, coca cola, baseball hats and yoga mats, cheerios and candy canes, planes, missiles, bullets and bombs, tanks, Harleys and Hummers (or do the tanks come in from China?), modified seeds and cures for diseases we didn’t used to get. Or promises of peace, freedom, democracy, and the American dream. Perhaps the boxes are empty after all.
Much is dying in our world, or collapsing; fish stocks, pristine forest, water tables, glaciers . . . . . but also economic systems, financial models, trust in government, and jobs, good honest jobs. We are in the end times, the dying days of an era, all of us together caught in the death throes of an outmoded way of being. All of us together trying to do what we think is right, and protect the children; in the sweat shop and the boardroom, on the commuter bus or the ship’s bridge, doing what we think is right and protect the children. As our world collapses around us, something new is born too, deep in our hearts; care, responsibility, compassion and camaraderie. Will enough of these precious goods arrive in time, before Sun’s revolution?

So let’s cluster
We’ll muster
Will and creativity
Greatness has waited patiently
For the day when
We’ll rise again
Speak truth to power
Now’s the hour
To fan the ember
And remember
We are who we’ve been waiting for

The imaginal cells become the genetic director of the caterpillar. The cells and strings reorganize in new unrehearsed ways.
Around the fire, faces lit by the dancing flames, a quiet settles, a calm with depth, a calm that resonates with responsibility freely chosen, that vibrates like a sworn vow. It’s a moment that dissolves the last vestiges of difference. The fire is a comfort even though the air around is warm, a pipe is passed and the tobacco smoke carries our prayers into the star-bright New Mexico night. These sisters, these brothers have gathered here to pour their love into Mother Earth, to take on what’s theirs to do in the creation of a new way of being. Not one of us can see this future clearly, nor how we must be, but unstoppably, alchemically, forged in those flames and countless other fires around the world; a new consciousness is emerging.
One day soon that container traffic will end, we’ll export only compassion and import beauty. We’ll worry less about our differences and dance with all that connects us. The collapse will complete and the new-birth will deliver. We’ll laugh about those old, dark, caterpillar days and celebrate our triumph, the will and creativity that brought us through.

Happy ever after
Joy and laughter
Our spirits rising
Hearts re-sizing
With who we really are
On this bright star
All of us free
To live in harmony
With the whole big WE
Plus those birds and bees
[How we need those bees!!]

Soon the chrysalis becomes transparent. And in a final leap we discover the unpredictable miracle that is a butterfly.
About Jon: Jon is the Outreach Director for The Pachamama Alliance, and author of the book Your Planet Needs You. He is responsible for taking The Pachamama Alliance’s transformational education to audiences and partners around the world, and for developing new formats for these messages of awakening, all lead by the mission: bringing forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just human presence on this planet. Published in 2006, Your Planet Needs You, maps the challenges we face in creating and living a new future and shows ways to overcome these. This book, and his passion for sharing its message in practical ways, was so resonant with the work of The Pachamama Alliance that he was invited to join that team in San Francisco in 2007. Since then he has helped develop this message and taken it far afield, including to China, New Zealand, Ecuador, Ireland and India. This entry was excerpted from his blog on Speaking Tree.

Catch up..

Managed to catch up on my  daily word count by today ....phew.
Monday was scrapped because of computer problems and me losing my temper with aforementioned machine.
Tuesday life got in the way and I was up to my neck in issues.
Today however has been good, got writing done including back-log, socialised with my elderly neighbours and still had time to go for a walk. Aaaaaah......................

Still writing

Not feeling quite as bad as yesterday, but definitely unwell. How far this is down to the Hay-fever and how far to all the meds is debatable. The sun is shining and I'd love to be working the garden, but.

I wrote another flash piece this morning, under 600 words but I don't think it needed more.

Bad day

Woke up feeling odd, right eye swollen, soon followed by left eye. Went to doctor, as I thought ....it's part and parcel of the damn Hay-fever. Given eye drops; by the time I got home I had a sore throat. By lunchtime a fever.

Somehow I still managed 400+ words, but I haven't re-read them so they're probably trash.
Need to sleep.
Bye