"How can you poison some thing so beautiful?"

"How can you poison some thing so beautiful?"

One night during a San Pedro long dance ceremony with a South American shaman I was sprayed by some perfume he had made during a dieta in the amazon, made with amazonian flowers.
In the perfumero curanderismo practice they take the perfume into the mouth and spray it on you in a mist from the mouth, the breath carries the and charges the intention to heal with the perfume. This is called Ch'alla, and is done primarily as a ritual action for cleansing.
I opened my self to receive the medicine. So many times healing is a painful process, cleansing is allot of hard work and I find my self resistant to it as I think many of get some times, this time I opened up, and "took my medicine".
I started coughing so hard it was like puking from my lungs! Once my lungs were cleaned out the scent of the perfume of the amazon flower people could find their way into my chest and deliver their message of healing to me.

I heard this very beautiful collective of voices say within me..."Why would you poison something so beautiful?"
I broke down in tears. A harsh question to be asked, I was racked with quilt for poisoning my body and at the same time feeling the message of the flowers telling me and affirming that I was a beautiful being, but I could not personalize the message completely. As the message expanded I saw how I was participating in poisoning the earth with pollution through damaging ways of relating to that which is around me and actually is me. The message expanded even larger and I could see that this was a question to my whole species.
Much of the work I am doing here is a response to this question, and a way to reciprocate and give thanks to the flowers of the amazon that healed my body and spirit that night. That night they showed me ways to not have to poison my self and my environment, showed me alternative ways of relating to the world, not out of guilt, shame or fear, but out of love for all that is.


Since that night I have been looking at the social and environmental impact of importation, out-sourcing, and air travel. A friend of mine is an ecology student and allot of what I learn from her is very helpful. During one of her sustainability classes her teacher pointed out the immensely negative impact of air travel. A round trip ticket creates as much pollution as 100,000 SUV's driving for a full year. I began to look into it more. As I felt more and more drawn to bioregionalism I wanted to look at more and more reasons to embrace it. I found out that air planes dump the rest of their fuel from the air before landing to prevent explosions due to crash or some other potential landing problem, the chemicals in jet fuel are carcinogenic and mutagens, they have been found in nearly ever sample of breast milk in mammals as well as breast tissues, they are a major cause of breast cancer as is the same with PBDEs used as fire retardants in plastics. the chemicals can be found nearly every where in the world in water samples soil samples its unreal!

It is humbling and extremely scary to think wow when I eat a banana I am contributing to the poisoning of a mothers breast, to all mothers breasts, I am poisoning that which nurtures billions of babies, something beautiful.
Air freight is one of the fastest means of transporting food especially perishable fruits from other places in the world. When ever we eat a non local food that is out of season where we live, we can count on the fact that the majority of the time, it was flown to us. It is a horrible irony that the way wee feed our selves is killing us and others and not in the balanced cycle that life normally functions. The chemical found in the breast milk also keeps babies from gaining the immune boasting qualities of the breast milk, eating a banana makes babies sick... I have to hold my head for a moment and just allow the nausea to pass just from the thought....

I am in no means attempting to create motivation for change through fear and guilt. "My god look what your doing for shame!" I don't go for that I feel that with information like this we can make more intelligent decisions on how to live our lives and be motivated instead out of love then fear and guilt.
I think its more important then ever to attempt to look at what you have in your life, what you need and see if you can attempt to replace that with a local alternative do I need to travel by air? Why am I motivated to travel? Where does my food come from? Could I really fulfill my needs from local sources? More times then not we can! Though we do not have to work with just native regional foods and materials and life ways, we can work with what has been imported to our life places and integrate them and adapt them into our lives in a sustainable way.
The Polynesians for example have what they call boat plants that they took to Hawaii. Plants that were not native to Hawaii but were integrated to the ecosystems there. These plants were essential to their survival there, as was the pigs they brought with them.
With a knowledge of permaculture and ecology we can create natural holistic alternatives needing to import very little, working as a community, the development of cooperatives, collectives, and farmers markets in your local area can help immensely. Once systems of relationships are strengthened and old habits of relying on out sourced foods and other needs are changed, you will be surprised as to how much of a difference your making both socialy and ecologically. There is simply no need to import every thing we need. It appears so now but that's an illusion we are all going to have to face together, through working together to establish alternatives.The answer I give to the flowers of the amazon "How can you poison something so beautiful?" is..."I cant, I wont! Please show me ways to live! Advise me help me generate wellness for all. Aid us in finding alternatives. Be our allies?" If you ask the spirits of nature to help you in this way you discover they are more then happy to help! you can learn allot from a flower!

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Bio-Regional Animism in Less than Five Minutes

This is a speech I will be giving at The Unitarian Universalist Church of the Paluse, in Moscow Idaho, on Sunday the 23rd of September 2007.

Spirituality is everywhere to be found; it unfolds with the peddles of a rose, and gurgles in the song of a creek, and in the canyons, and running through the forest. This is the experience animism is built from. It is the belief in spirit. It does not distinguish from the spiritual and the material; instead, they are one and the same.

Our planet is a vast network of ecosystems that work in highly concentrated ways and have been surveyed for their resources then divided to be bought and sold on the market. Through this homogeneous market, our culture has become disconnected from our eco-systems, losing the sacredness of daily life. Nature is not a collection of resources for human consumption, but are equals to humans. This teaches us to relate our lives to what is needed for daily sustenance and to contributing back to nature, forcing one to realize that life is sacrificed to sustain life. This perspective demands empathy with our environment and to feel its reality in order to implement environmental, ecological, and social change. Humans are not above nature but as much a part of it in every way. However, we have been irresponsible, subjugating our environment to mere material and forgetting its spiritual nature.

Bio-Regional Animism seeks to re-cultivates the sacred relationship of humans and the eco-systems they inhabit by recognizing the lessons taught by animist cultures worldwide, past and the present, and applying the animist process to our eco-systems. It spiritually relates our modern culture to the forest, rivers, mountains, animals, energies, and scientific principles as individuals with inherent worth and dignity. Scientific understanding of the environment, like knowing where your water and food comes from, social activities of local wildlife, and the medicinal value of indigenous plants, builds the foundation for relating to our ecosystem through improvisational ceremonies and meditations. This is achieved by discarding the dualism of modern society, and realizing there is only spirit.

Bio-Regional animism is not a new religion or even a new tradition of neo-paganism; rather, it is a way of relating to our environment in a deeply spiritual way and can co-exist with other ways of life, given openness to the needs, desires, and unique understanding of their ecosystem. Bio-Regional animism is not the path for those who seek predefinitions and structure; instead, it directly challenges these notions, leaving us with the very soil under our feet and sky above our heads, and that is what we work with to grow our spiritual relationships.

designing bioregional Economies...

This is just a great site...
www.ceres.ca.gov/tcsf/path...pter2.html
Designing Bioregional Economies in Response to Globalization
this is another really great site...

OHIO I LOVE YOU!!!!
http://www.ohiopeakoilaction.org/action-communitycurrencies.html

Creating autonomy from the non-bioregionaly focused community economicly is an important way of making a firm non compromising stand so that animist life ways can actually be manitained, and a real sense of community developed...

"THE GIFT ECONOMY

The extent to which our lives are dominated by money and the preoccupation with money is incredible. Personally, I would like to see our social and cultural consciousness less dominated by money and more thoughtful of the real wealth around us—clean beautiful environments, family, good food, leisure time with children, and so forth. Richard Heinberg writes that, “At its base, economics is about how people relate with the land and with one another in the process of fulfilling their material wants and needs. In the most primitive societies, these relations are direct and straightforward. Land, shelter, and food are free. Everything is shared, there are no rich people or poor people, and happiness has little to do with accumulating material possessions. The primitive lives in relative abundance (all needs and wants are easily met) and has plenty of leisure time.”

Instead of a social environment dominated by money exchange and transactions, I would like to see a society with more casual, friendly, and community-oriented relationships. Anthropologists call this a “gift economy”—an economy based on gift giving as a primary means of social interaction and exchange. Indeed, the entomology of the word community suggests this more informal and generous relations among people. Cum means together. Menere means to give. Collectively they mean to give among each other.

The importance and ritual of giving and exchanging gifts is the glue that binds communities. Anthropologists call this reciprocity. Whenever the reciprocity and the gift-economy break down, so does the community at large.

Modern industrial civilization has replaced the gift-economy with a highly individualistic economic system that is all but devoid of ritual, reciprocity, respect and love between the exchangers. Thus we can see the breakdown of communities the world over not as a random, unconnected process, but rather as a systemic effect of an imperfect and immoral economic system.

Describing the evolution of a community currency system in Takoma Park, Maryland, Lietaer writes that, “It turns out that the complementary currency and the directory are just the oil to lubricate the imagination, an excuse to make the first contacts. Most actual exchanges use the complementary currency only for part of the transaction, sometimes not at all, and involve exchanges that weren’t even thought of as items to be listed initially in the directory. Gradually, neighbours get into the habit of just helping each other out as gifts, without any currency exchange.”

Thankfully, there is an easy way of reviving the gift economy. Make and give gifts. Make up new holidays with families and friends. Celebrate more often! Emma Goldman once wrote that if you can’t dance, it ain’t the right revolution!

Many of us have also become disillusioned with this so-called “capitalistic” economic system. For these reasons many people are calling for the complete destruction of all economies and money systems. But these suggestions that we should abolish all economic systems are unrealistic, as forms of trade, bartering, and money systems have historically evolved in practically every culture and seem to be almost a natural evolution within human societies. Rather than abolishing money and monetary systems, we should look to transforming and harnessing their power to create a more just, sustainable, and satisfying world for the two-legged, the four-legged, the swimmers, the fliers, the creepy crawlies, the rooted, and all of our other brothers and sisters."

http://www.ohiopeakoilaction.org/action-communitycurrencies.html

Much thanks to the bioregional activists of Ohio for all of the great work they do!

Deity from a Bioregional animist perspective

Just another other than human person....

This is a subject that we have discussed a bit on the Pagan bioregional animist tribe, relating to deities from a bioregional animist perspective.
Graham Harvey calls deities other than human persons... and I don't think that can be argued... at least not well!
When bioregional animism was first coming to me I started to see how bioregions and places as well as cycles and forces of nature were what people traditionally knew as deities or gods... lots have been said on this on that tribe... I recommend checking it out... I remember telling people once who were setting up a sort of eclectic neo-pagan ceremony once, who were trying to help the land they were going to attempt to get to know their local deities... or Deity from the point of view of their particular bioregion...
as i pointed out before many Tibetan Buddhist deities were forces of nature as well as places in the animist pre-Buddhist Tibetan landscape.
From a bioregional animist perspective deity could be considered an other than human person who is just really big... a larger system of intelligence that is composed of smaller persons or smaller systems, all self emergent and at the same time interconnected and reliant upon each other.
A good example are the Apus in the Andes these are deities who are also mountains... this shows a really good example of animist polytheism as well as how deities are part of the landscape and universe as well as how humans relate to deity from a bioregional perspective.
This draws some question as to how we relate to deities formed from other bioregions and from peoples unique co-creative forms of relating to the other than human persons that compose their bioregion. Its not an entirely bad thing to have relationships with deities from other bioregional perspectives... there is a sort of universality to all deities regardless of where they are from or how they are partially shaped by the co-creative human person relationships formed around them... but seeing deity from a bioregional animist perspective gives us another angle to view deity from, as well as grants us the ability to form relationships with perhaps new deities.

Lately Ive been quite in love with Terry Pratchett's disc world novels... i love how describes how deities are born... it makes allot of practical sense in a humorous sort of way... for example the deity of toe stubbing... so many people have stubbed their toe and said god dammit to that which they stubbed their toe on or have said '' Ouch oh god! oh GOD my toe!" that a deity was born!
He goes on to say that theologians in the disc world stay very busy because new gods are being formed all the time, and old gods die once people stop believing in them... this is humorous and a bit insightful really!

Do you have relationships with Deity's as a bioregional animist if so tell us about it and them...

Bioregional animist : Desert spider

bioregional animist expression By Desert spider New mexico.
found a crown of bird feathers.
the birds have been circling.
caterpillars have been dropping on my front porch.
this is an ode to the new mexico birds
may they be well fed this fall
may they keep circling and inspiring...

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