The speakers definitely made me feel, this is probably why I was so impressed. And I think I have been doing some creative thinking today. Hopefully this will all go galactic.
The first speaker was in my Native American studies class. This dude showed up and I thought he was just a friend of my teacher. Little Crow. I have met him before because he comes into brothers sometimes. I always thought him a bum, which he said he was, but also that he was a father and other things which made me think he had a home, what I would guess makes you a bum?
He said his job in life was to live the life taught to him by his ancestors. He was a rebellion to the American way of life. To the industrialized world and the behaviors of humans that reflect it. He said all kinds of things that were not believable, but I made choices to believe them. He played dumb at times when I thought him smarter; and smart at times when I naturally wanted to underestimate him. Most importantly he was filled with emotion. Some of it that could be seen from his nervousness to be on stage, but also a level of openness that I think resulted from that.
He was asking for me, for us, to open up to the possibility, to say to ourselves: this does not fit with the reality of the world I know, but I still think it possible.
Then tonight I went to the Unitarian church and listened to a lady named Helena something, I dont remember, speak about the reasons to localize our food source, as opposed to further globalizing it.
At first she was hard to understand and talked of things I had not heard of. She would ask how informed we were by what books we had read. I didnt like it, then I decided she was not judging those books or the ideas presented as information that we needed, but as things to be aware of. She wanted us to learn about many technical things in the world and ideas and solutions and not believe in them, but judge them. At least this is what I wanted to think at that moment.
Later the talk progressed into something that I have always liked the idea of but was always told it was not feasible in this day and age, a new way of living through small communities. There were questions about money and though the thought was based on food it related to an entire culture. Her basic way of looking at it was this. You must judge the overall efficiency of the way you get your food. If you buy a potato grown in Idaho, wrapped in plastic and sent 600 miles, that is less efficient than buying from your neighbor. She also commented that tests have shown that diversified land can produce more per acre than the corporate crops of one food. I learned of an ancient Indian technology of growing corn, then beans with it to grow up the corn stocks, then squash to shade the land and stop weeds from growing. This is 3 types of plants in the area of one, each helping the other. This is rad.
She also talked of misleading transformative solutions. Basically back to awareness. Judge these ideas and possible solutions because they can backfire. And she said that she believes most corporate people and governments (I think) to be doing what they think is good for people, they are just arrogant and put their beliefs in the wrong places. Very few people raised their hands to agree with this, but I do. Then at the end people from the community stood up to plug themselves, or to be inspiring about what is going on in our community. There are a lot of people out there with big plans going on. My favorites was something called edible schoolyards, where a school grows its own food, and then maybe feeds the homeless with it. This is good schooling. Oh and Helena also said that the elderly need to be changing society, and not to put too much burden on kids in school. She said college was overfilling our lives with busy work and basically dumbing us into competitive cocks of the business world. I see this plenty at school.
Check out THRIVE, slowfoodusa, the Global Eco village network, a book called Solvida, and siskiyoucoop.com, which i talked to one dude Don about for a second and sounds real cool.
Thanks.
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