Green Chemistry

"Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with natures recipe book.

 It's not easy because life only uses a subset of the elements in the periodic table. 

And we use all of them, even the toxic ones." -Janine Benyus

Green chemistry is a concept and set of principles developed to reduce the amount of toxic substances in the products we use. It includes considering the product from 'cradle to cradle', or from the choice and sourcing of ingredients and materials through the lifetime of the product, to the final recycling or reuse of them. One of the guiding principles is that it's better to not pollute in the first place than to figure out how to clean it up later!

I used to dread projects in which I had to use toxic materials. In my work I often use building materials, paints, and other volatiles. So I was amazed to learn that I don't have to poison myself. Years ago, when these products were developed, fossil petroleum oil was plentiful and cheap, so that's what they used to make these products. It's not that toxic oil was required, it was simply what they had lots of.

But now green formulations are popping up based on renewable plant oils. For example, expect to see all sorts of hemp products to come along soon, containing oil as high grade as whale oil, and even hemp fiber building materials. And they not only aren't poison, they smell good! Now it's a joy to work with them, plus I don't have to strap on all that protective gear.

Just like with organically grown food, if I pay a little extra for a new product that hasn't been scaled up to cheaper than everything else, it is an investment in the kind of world I want to live in. It's a down payment on the flower child's garden planet future.

Stop Working!

Most work today is boring, irrelevant, stupid, corrupt, underpaid, if not outright dangerous, toxic, exploitative, and destructive. Setting aside the fraction of jobs that are needed, good and helpful for the moment, we would all be better off if most people just stayed home from work today. Think of the unburned gasoline alone.

If you are not happy in your job, don't go to work. You have more freedom than you realize, but you will not believe this unless you take it. Freedom cannot be given. If you want your freedom, you must take it. Paradoxically, the way to take one's freedom is by taking response-ability. One responds to the needs, the passion to be part of, the impulse to help, the ethics, and the intuitive.

So now that you are home for the day, make a list of all the things you love to do for others, and try out some. Perhaps you can find the freedom and courage to do it more. Big things can grow from small, beautiful seed ideas. Just take the first step.

One by one, we are changing our work and making it play. We can afford to be playful. In fact, it is one of the most important jobs I can think of. It is high time for humanity to relax, back off, and chill out. A guaranteed basic income can easily be afforded in this rich economy for the world's poor if we only desire to make it so.

So explore. Never before in history have so many had so much freedom of choice. Our freedom of choice is for most of us, far greater than our freedom of mind to appreciate and use it. What would you do if you could do anything?

We all need for you to be the most authentic you possible, because you are the only person on Earth who can be you.

“Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is nobody else who is you-er than you.” ~Dr. Seuss

The Muse

“Instead of discussing with myself every morning whether I feel inspired or not, I step into my office every day at nine sharp, open the window and politely ask the muse to enter and kiss me. Sometimes she comes in, more often she does not. But she can never claim that she hasn’t found me waiting in the right place.” -Peter Prange

We hear the good and well advice to forcefully affirm our visions and dreams into being. But well we might consider who is this one who proposes to create? 

If our affirmations and magical machinations with the law of attraction do not seem to work, perhaps it is our vision that is not in harmony with the universe. Perhaps these magical attraction manifestation things only work with visions we receive from the muse, not just stuff we think up.

The muse comes when it wants to. It is not up to us to make to muse show up. It is good to use the creative muscles so that when inspiration shows up we are ready to catch it. It's good to have a surfboard, and know how to use it, and to keep showing up of course, when the wave arrives.

  It is the ego that worries when the muse is not around because it is invested in being someone who creates. Silly ego, you are the shutting door; that keeps the muse away!  

Let go of the need to be that whatever it is, and just wait.  Be patient, tend to the garden, do the chores, practice the techniques, and relax....Make space in your life so that when the muse does show up, you are not too busy to respond.

Nothing New Under the Sun

"Whoever thinks an idea can be copyrighted has already forgotten its source"

-(doesn't matter, right?)

I've probably never had an original thought in my life. Have you? Really?

Yesterday I get this great idea for a picture, a melting ice cream cone earth. Quickly, I sketch it out. Suddenly, I wonder if anyone else has ever thought of this, so I google it. OMG! (Hint: Someone has.)

What is an original thought in a time of the global brain? There's an ivy league professor now who teaches his creative writing students by assigning them to go plagiarize an essay from the interweb and then, to defend the content as their own.

Every little cultural bit rests upon the entire edifice that has been built under it. Without all the bits that are quite similar, a new bit makes no sense to us. But without a different new little twist it is not 'original'. So culture is a fractal creature, ever evolving, self similar and repeating endlessly, yet never exactly the same, gradually emerging into new patterns by successive iterations.

How absurd to think that we can individually own these little bits that we create for one another. What use is my puzzle piece without the rest of the puzzle? What use is art unshared? Poems unheard? Books unread?

Are these creations of ours not our gifts to the world? Did we not receive the context, the language, the skill instruction and opportunities, verily, even the inspiration itself, from others, from spirit? Shouldn't we share this creativity freely instead of paywalling everyone out?

Surely we deserve acknowledgement, appreciation, and support from that same pool of culture.  How do we support artists in an age in which everyone can be, is, or will soon be an artist? Oh yeah, about my great idea, the melting earth ice cream cone? I didn't bother finishing it.

Purple Rain and Violet Fire

The mystic color violet sits upon the threshold of your imagination, laughing, "I am not a real color at all!"

But, backing up a bit, no color is 'real'. Color is by definition an illusion. When we say that something is colored by our perception, we mean it is off somehow from the truth.

Violet is even more tricky than the other colors, however. Violet is the color that is not there, except as a concept in our brain. You see, the wavelength of visible red is the longest wavelength of light we can see. Violet is the shortest wavelength we can see. 

When we bend the rainbow around into a circle, when the long wavelength, red, laps over the short wavelength, purple, and they hold hands, viola! Violet. Purple. Magenta.

Have you ever noticed that these colors are simply not present in your sky rainbow, or the rainbows you can make on the wall with a prismatic crystal?

Purples and violets seen together in various mixtures can be quite mind-bending. I use purple for this, it tickles my perception. Some people even get uncomfortable with these colors but do not know why. If you average the wavelengths of red and violet, you land in a number that usually denotes green. Yet your brain invents this other color...

 Flowers are the best purple makers I know of. I find it absolutely euphoric to gaze upon a garden patch of mixed colors of purple pansies. Flowers are about my favorite way to enjoy color. Flowers often flash colors in the ultraviolet range as well, that bees and birds and a few unusual humans see.

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it". - Alice Walker

(Links to fun sites about color, how special purple is:) (and here:) (cool utube:)

Art and Money

“ I love gifting people my work and having them let their heart decide how much to give.” Ankur Aras

Why do artists even want money?

Why are we artists and musicians and writers even trying to monetize our gifts? Do you really think you are the next Picasso, the next Beatles, the next president? Because only a very few can be greatest and best. 

This is the age of standing on shoulders. Nowadays, everyone can benefit from knowing the work of the great ones, then we take it all on from there, in every direction at once, apparently exponentially. Normal everyday state of mind greatness, not super celebrity greatness. The age of everyone is an artist.

Why do we not advise our young people, you have a gift of sexuality, how will you monetize that? Maybe they do hear that, now that I say it like that...sigh.

Why do we need to monetize everything nowadays, so suddenly and for the first time in history? 

I'm not sure it's even cool to sell your art anymore. It's about the gift. To understand why, we must pay attention, (our greatest power), to interest. Interest is of interest here. Small adjustments in big systems, amplified, have big effects. This is the impact of adding debt every time we bring money into being using the current money system. 

This is only stressful to the money system if it is deprived of its fuel, which is continual growth. Without new bets in the form of newly monetized products, (such as your art, or rain forests), enabling the previous debt to be paid off (by creating new debt), the pyramid game will collapse. But there remain very few pockets of not yet monetized resources to exploit in this finite fragile ecosystem Earth.  (See Eisenstein, Sacred Economics)

The good thing is, the money system is just a game, and just some tweaking is needed to reverse the negative effects. You need not throw your art, or your sexuality, or anything else into the fire of continual growth!

Some ways to fix the game are: free money negative interest, guaranteed basic income, backing money with the wealth of the commons, and the sharing and gift economy.

 

But the real revolution is our evolution, our evolving attitudes about why and for whom we create with our gifts. How we think about our relationship between ourselves and others. Also, how do we want our gifts to be received, and what harmful magical conceptions we may still harbor about money and our worthiness.

Free Range Kids

"The best way to raise kids is to lay off" -Shulamith Firestone

I'm a free range kid who made it to grownup-hood with my creativity intact. I am so grateful to have had a long, free childhood because it made me confident and able to follow my own inner prompting.

 I ran around all day, mostly outside in hills and creeks and forests, with the neighborhood gang of kids and alone, building forts and treehouses, playing games we made up ourselves, climbing, jumping, fighting, hiding, and exploring. We made up shows and songs, captured bugs and frogs, and stayed out until it was too dark out to see.

We did dangerous things, and learned to be careful. We got hurt. There were tears, stitches, X-rays, disputes and dramas. Mostly when we could handle it ourselves, we were allowed to, knowing the grownups were around somewhere if we needed them. We felt we could pretty much knock on any door for help. We were trusted to take care of ourselves and each other. In this way, we became resilient.

Oddly, even though there has been no rise in actual danger to children going around in public, there has been a huge increase in awareness of all of the dangers to them. This has resulted in children in our culture being shut into colorful, safe boxes, er  'play spaces' and set in front of programmed electronic educational screens to safely and passively absorb processed information to utilize optimal educational efficiency goals, blah blah blah...

On behalf of shut in children everywhere, I cry, HELP! Whenever I did have to go to school, I did not like it. Every day as I sat in school, bored, I dreamed of getting free somehow. My child self actually promised that my grown up self in the future would help liberate children because I saw how helpless they were, while children, to get free. 

There must have been a few more like me because now there is a movement. Free schools, free range kids, the slow parenting movement, forest kindergarden,  all of these have sprung up.

The Circle of Children is a school that embodies these concepts. From their statement of purpose:

"We believe children can be trusted to identify and pursue their passions when supported by the proper fertile environment. Learning is a natural process which children are drawn to and enjoy when they are allowed to follow their own inner guidance..."  (Watch their four minute video here:)

We Are the Mainstream Culture of the Future!

"It's truly time for humanity to move beyond a world of separate little egos fighting for their slice of the pie to a world based on our deep interconnection, and infused with grace, magic, and beauty." The Shift

Time was, we thought that we who wanted to change the world would have to drop out of mainstream society, and go back to the land to start over from scratch. In the last few decades many versions of this experiment were tried.

Initially, many of these experiments were inspired by psychedelic revelations. But that was just the doorway. These paradigm shifting experiments ranged from visionary art and music, natural foods, organic farming, natural medicine, eco-building, sustainable energy, alternative schooling and relationships, comfortable clothing and hair styles, eastern philosophy and yoga, spirituality instead of religious dogma, cooperatives, and most recently the burgeoning sharing culture online.

All of these things helped us deepen our relationship to our authentic being, with ourselves, each other, and our larger world. The appearance of the image of the whole Earth from space is the best symbol of this process. We became aware of us all as sharing one spaceship earth together. We truly began to develop a sense of planetary citizenship. 

(The above drawing by Cat Carney)

The changes are inevitable and the hardest part is already accomplished. All over the world little lighthouses of people doing enlightened things are linking up. Everyone is in place, and at the ready. We are becoming aware of one another. I see it as a lattice of connected lines, the skeleton or armature of the new sustainable world. Against all odds, it is growing, building, filling out. 

It is no longer a time of dropping out, and going off somewhere to do things better. First, there is no more off somewhere left. But more to the point, we are not rebels anymore, we are the ones responsible now. Everything we dropped out and went off to develop is ready, and already demonstrating benefits. On subtle planes the battle is over.  It is a done deal. All that is left is mop up. We need only to color in the lines.

We are the mainstream culture of the future. The future is now. And the whole world is our little community.