The media do not peddle news. They sell negative emotions to feed 'Pain Bodies'.
Here's a List taken from Simon Dale's website about the things we can do to enact positive change.

Some things we can do...

Consumption

• Avoid buying newly manufactured things, instead buy second hand or make our own.
• Avoid large chain stores and supermarkets.
• Buy things from small and local businesses.
• Favour worker cooperatives over corporations.
• Wherever possible buy direct from producers.
• Support local currencies.
• Trade or give gifts in preference to using money.

Communities

• Smile at people and meet their eyes.
• Give open-minded/hearted time to those people around us.
• Organise parties and celebrations (eg. a dinner party where everyone brings a homemade dish or a childrens party where each parent organises a game)
• Organise rotating work parties and skill-sharing events.
• Vision together the future of our communities and make it happen by a combination of negotiations with local councils and direct action. (If you think that unused roadside could make a good veg garden then get some friends together and just go ahead and do it)

Food And Land

• Propagate and plant edible perennial plants wherever possible on any available land.
• Learn how to grow food and save seeds.
• Set up personal and community food growing.
• Stick to seasonal, local and organic foods.
• Eat meat in moderation.
• Have a go at making bread, preserving food, making cheese, brewing etc..
• Enjoy cooking and eating good food. Treat our food with reverence.
• Learn what wild plants grow in our areas and learn how to use them for food and medicine.
• Protect and encourage biodiversity and wild areas (eg. a small wild patch at the bottom of your garden could be a haven for birds and small animals).
• Make a pond.

Energy

• Use wood (biomass) for heating. Install wood burners. Take firewood from the waste stream and plant local or personal firewood supplies. In a climate like Britain's, short rotation coppice crops such as willow can be fully productive in 3 years and a 30 x 50m area can heat an efficient family house.
• Heat water with wood and solar energy. (A solar water heater can easily be made from scrap materials in a day or two.)
• Use renewable electricity. Switch mains connections to suppliers who only deal in renewable energy.
• Set up and use local or personal energy production systems. Small scale hydroelectric systems in particular offer simply maintained systems with high and reliable returns for the amount of invested energy.
• Practice basic woodwork, metalwork etc to make and repair basic items and tools.
• Compost food and human waste to build soil fertility and reduce energy demands of waste disposal.

  Lifestyle

• Withdraw investment from houses. Move to a cheaper home or make our own (most cheaply done without permission).
• Work less.
• This will free up time and energy to develop sustainable ways of living as well as removing support from destructive systems.
• Do not take employment from organisations which are unsustainable or whos actions are not benefiting the world.
• Maximise our autonomy from state and corporate control structures.
• Move from urban to rural areas and start working some land.

Consideration

• Consider what elements of our world and society are of greatest value to us (air, water, food supplies, medicines...?)
• Consider what elements /service / products we could happily do without (war, this year's fashion, more DVDs, a bigger car...?)
• Be aware that the more we have of the latter, the more we threaten the former.
• Whenever we spend money or play an active role in society, take time to consider the consequences of our actions. (Buying a tank of fuel supports the violent occupation of the middle east, buying cheap clothes supports sweatshops and child labour, buying from transnational corporations funds the extraction of capital from poorer countries and the erosion of human rights)
• Consider our modern world from the point of view of our ancesters.
• Count our blessings.
• Appreciate the beauty and fragility of life, human and otherwise.
• Make time to appreciate and congratulate ourselves - we are all amazing and powerful beings.
• Smile, laugh, love and dream. Be present and don't worry.

The Voice From The Ether...

Hello!

Yup, I'm still here and the story goes on. But its time to end the black out to bring you guys upto speed on things.

First off an apology and explanation for the sudden neglection of the blog. This is down to two reasons. 1) A slip on the totem of priority and 2) the evident inability of my phone's mobile internet connection to upload the corresponding photographs. A consequence of this is that I require landline broadband and have thus far failed to bring with me my diary whenever I'm presented with the opportunity to log on. Like, now... So, sorry for that.

I do intend to post the missing entries but, I'd like to fast forward to the final entry I made in my diary before things got busy and ironically, very interesting. I don't mean to ruin things for you I only wish to sum up where I stand at this present now and why 'blogging' has become of lower significance to me when it is about documenting my physical life's events. The murder of the family pet cat, Eira, by a Human Being on the night of Thursday the 27th October was an excellent opportunity to observe my ego and all its urges to lash out, seek enemies, exact retribution. Instead I was the witnessing presence. I don't wish to sound 'saintly' but it was very easy to let go. To not react in the manner of the 'old' conciousness. To not be suckered in. We lacked proof, but the evidence was powerful enough for us to know almost by intuition 'whodunnit'. We went directly to them and had our answer. It changed nothing. Our cat is still dead. Her existence ended by enforced drowning in mere inches of water in the very same mill pond that had witnessed the demise of so many other beings. The feeling that it was most likely that Kit's wife Saara had executed her will upon the cat we named Eira changed nothing. It also was not solely the reason we ended our arrangement of volunteering for them and left Lammas (Tir-Y-Gafel) some three/four weeks later.
This non-reaction and non-identification enabled me to continue my interactions with Kit and Saara without anger, bitterness or hurt. I admit it still lurked and irked somewhat in the dark recesses where the pain body and ego still dwell, but I observed those emotions/thought forms, I did not react to them.

I forgive Kit and Saara both unreservedly. I am, and always will be, very grateful indeed to them for their part in my experiences and the facilitation of them. Had I grabbed my air rifle and shot dead their cat Gwyn, I would have perpetuated the same insane behaviour that plagues mankind presently upon this Earth. How in hell can ending the life of another, innocent, unknowing being bring justice or revenge except through the insane delusion that that being is the perpetrator or somehow was in alliance with the perpetrator. Or even that justice lies in inflicting the same injury upon the injurer, disregarding that the one that would really pay the price is faultless. The ego is cunning like that. By mere association, my mind attempted to convince me that their cats death (Eira's Sister) would make things 'fair' or 'right'.  What rubbish. Death plus Death will never equal Life. I could be ashamed to admit to those thoughts, I am not, for they are not mine, they are born of the ego.

It was almost poetic when viewed from a distance. That the cat named Eira was born at Tir-Y-Gafel, and just over a year later she died there after producing a litter of three, one kitten was an almost exact replica of her. The kitten who seemed most attached to her, despite being homed and living over 200 miles away, died shortly after his mother. Emma speculates he simply wished to follow his beloved mother to that which waits for us all.

Eira; Born 10th October 2010, Died 27th October 2011. She was a cat who walked by herself... Into a man's tent in the middle of the night, one too many times and paid the ultimate price. Her life had been verbally threatened 2 days prior. How many of us know of a cat that will heed warnings or one that ever understood the human concept of 'Private Property'?

 
I do intend to periodically utilise this medium for communicating to those who will listen, but the structure of how I do so will take on a different form.

I have begun, and am toying with finishing, writing a book entitled "Coping With Mine and Society's Dysfunction". In this book I intend to relate my observations and draw out into the open not only some of the issues I have witnessed at Tir-Y-Gafel (collective human coexistence in the micro) but also experiences before and after as well as inside and outside 'me'. There is little 'out there' that does not occur in me. Often the most infuriating or upsetting aspects of the 'out there' is often the very same tendency or aspect that I dislike inside 'me' or rather the mind I use. Just a germ of a concept...

Here is the final entry in my diary, should you wish to read it before its chronological place;

05/10/11 Wednesday

Our 'Indian Summer' is at an end. Normality, if that is what it is, seems to have returned.
Friday, Simon and Jasmine took us with them to Picton Castle where an event was being held in the gardens. The theme was light. Interestingly to me, my pleasure came not from the man made attractions. Primarily it was being with Simon and Jasmine and my family and the change of scenery, and once there, the magnificent trees and horticulture, most notably a 300 year old Cedar tree. From its trunk extended sucker like branches that grew outward a distance, just beyond the canopy, and turned skyward.
My favourite of these was one that resembled an elephants head and trunk.
I grant you that its been one week to the day since my last entry. I am finding it increasingly difficult to breakdown my life into newsworthy events. My life just is. What arises, passes. The fact that yesterday, I and others collected algae bloom from the millpond along with its brown trout victims, does not particularly change nor matter much. It is a tit bit of limited interest to another. Collectively, the entries may give my children an idea of who I was and what I was thinking, but that is of little significance to who I am. To me, each day is now a new life. Each night that previous existence fades and serves no role in the present. A death.
The photographs are images, a form of forms, it, like the other forms, will fade and whither into past. Unless one derives identity from these and other forms, their capture and/or demise are of no consequence.
I once thought it mattered to record and to remember the past. I once believed it important to be able to communicate my activities to others. It is not. Not, for me, anymore. These records are and have been entertaining. A distraction from the present.
For those who read this because they want to follow my path, to learn the secrets of how I changed my life, I have not answers, but important questions for you.
It was not particularly useful for me to ask "Where do I want to live/be?" But rather "Where am I happy to die?" I believe the latter of the two evokes much stronger imagery in the minds eye than the former. Also; "If not now, then when? If not here, then where?

"These roses under my Window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them...But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time" - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance.

M Jones