So I've been invited to stay here in Southern Alberta for a Sun Dance Ceremony in mid-August. At first I was reluctant, I told myself that I'd rather come back for Sun Dance in a few years, I felt it was something to come back for, something that somehow I should wait for. But I've come to realize that all these feelings were due to some age-old pattern of not feeling deserving and feeling that I have to walk a hard road. And, if the hard road doesn't appear before me I should always create it though self-denial or an unwillingness to receive beautiful experiential gifts. I wasn't conscious of this at first, but when I dismantle myself, I come to see that the only thing blocking wonderful gifts, is me.

I'm over all that now;-)

Everyday I see that I'm still here for a reason. Doors keep opening up around me, and me being here also opens doors for others. It's a beautiful thing to honour an intuitive path, a path we usually don't understand, a path filled with fear and uncertainty, yet somehow just feels right. It's all about following our feelings regardless of outside pressures of manufactured timelines, expectations of progress, or constructed ideologies of a 'right' way of being.

Or maybe I have no idea what's going on and it's all just medicine someone has made to keep me here. It's very possible.

peace,
d

A little flow from my editor Dave Shea out in Ottawa. Also some new vids up online at My YouTube Channel.
peace,
d

I was talking to my brother last night. We were talking about how life is often a series of ups and downs, and how sometimes in looking at our reality, we can find ourselves falling into states of despair.

I'm often pretty bleak regarding the future of humanity. I honestly feel we're headed towards a dangerous precipice and nowhere is there a slowing down to avoid the fall. This is my day to day reality. This is what I truly believe.

Yet in talking to my brother, I tell him the world is a beautiful place, the world is filled with love, the world is magical, it's simply a matter of faith and perspective. And somehow, this too, is what I believe.

A few years ago, I went and saw the Dalai Lama speak in Toronto. After speaking, the floor opened to questions from the audience. Once man asked, "Your Holiness, in a world filled with death, destruction, torture, pain, and a tremendous amount of suffering everywhere around us, how do you maintain hope?" The Dalai Lama responded, "The world isn't filled with death and destruction. The world is filled with love. There is more love than anything in the world, and as evidence we see people having children and our global population increasing. Love is abundant and everywhere around us." I often consider this in light of a media and a reality where we repeatedly reinforce awareness and ideas of violence, brutality and negativity, versus an awareness of love, beauty and truth.

I've been a lot of places on this journey thus far, and everywhere I go, without exception, I'm surrounded by amazing and loving people. Sure, like everywhere there are moments of tension, moments of disturbance, moments of violence, but overall I find people are openhanded, giving, nurturing, loving, and caring when it comes to the place and people around them. It seems to me, that the words of the Dalai Lama ring true.

This isn't to say that we're not in VERY serious trouble!

I think it's all a question of perception, a question of focus or a question of gaze. I've said before, that with our language we create the world; we bring the world into being with verbal vibrations. I would also say, we bring the world into being through our gaze, through our perceptions and through what we choose to look at.

But what do we see in a world where we're force-fed our reality through news programs, television shows, and a constant barrage of mainstream media manipulation. Most of this mainstream media builds a gaze of sadness, of death and destruction, and a violent reality. And as I upload videos onto YouTube, I think, does any of this matter? I'm one miniature media machine in a world already filled to the brim with media madness, so even if I was creating videos of optimism, videos of change, would they really make a difference?

I also feel we create in ourselves that which we see around us. We are mirrors for the world and the world in turn mirrors us. If you peer into the mirror you see a world plagued by sickness, a world in which we are destroying ourselves as we destroy our environment, a world of disconnection and a world of confusion. In a world of confusion and chaos, it becomes much easier to just follow the herd. But, if we were to shift our gaze to a new perspective of hope, faith, joy and love I also have to think the world around us would respond accordingly.

I think to shift ourselves to a hopeful viewpoint takes an extreme amount of discipline and I think in our world of comfort, lavish luxury and media sedation a shift is highly unlikely. But this is not to say I'm not hopeful, since I think regardless of the outcome, love will endure.

I think humanity is subject to the ebb and flow of nature, and I think that on some deeper level, destruction might be part and parcel to a loving plan for the future. A good friend of mine always says that true faith is to struggle with doubt, true faith is a process of doubt and questioning, faith is a process of grappling with both the light and the darkness, and yet still believing deep down that there is a larger design at work.

I have faith, but feel the road ahead will be bumpy as hell.

peace,
d

It's 35degrees here today.. 45 in Nevada.. you could argue that summer is here.
peace,
d

An article for you.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070709/watch_your_foodometer

The music is coming.. just wanted to toss it up raw for now...
peace,
d

Sunday, July 1, 2007
Traveling down this road, I’m encountering some amazing people. It’s fascinating to watch as reality brings people together out of a series of small serendipities. You find yourself in unknown places that seem familiar, places that somehow seem like home.

I just returned from a brief encounter with Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk. As with hauntingly familiar places, Andrew is the kind of person you somehow expect to meet, a person who in their awareness of what's occurring around them, give you hope.

I think that’s what it’s all about. Awareness. Building awareness, both in ourselves and in those around us. Removing the ubiquitous distraction from our lives, so that we may truly see.

There’s a lot going on in Canada and the world that most of us remain unaware of, or perhaps we're simply choosing not to see. It’s hard to see sometimes, our gaze held captive by the day-to-day grind, but the fact still remains, it will always be up to us to open our eyes and question the larger movements of our society.

Personally, I believe in my bones we’re headed for disaster as a result of simple flaws inherent in the capitalist paradigm, flaws worked into our nature, perhaps even flaws of humanity. These are the flaws that resulted in the collapse of countless civilizations before us, the safeguards installed to ensure an ebb and flow within nature. The insatiable human appetite for material wealth and a lust for economic expansion is sending us headlong towards environmental crisis, economic depression, and a loss of democracy. These are hard statements to make, but it’s how I feel based on an increasing awareness of my reality, based on the writing on the wall. As always, perhaps there are things I’m not seeing, and if that’s the case, my doors lay open in waiting.

Andrew his wife Doreen and I covered a lot of conversational ground in our short time together, and I’m very grateful for the exchange. One very relevant subject of conversation was the concept of the First Law of Petropolitics, coined by Thomas Friedman.

The First Law of Petropolitics posits the following: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states. According to the First Law of Petropolitics, the higher the average global crude oil price rises, the more free speech, free press, free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and independent political parties are eroded. And these negative trends are reinforced by the fact that the higher the price goes, the less petrolist leaders are sensitive to what the world thinks or says about them. Conversely, according to the First Law of Petropolitics, the lower the price of oil, the more petrolist countries are forced to move toward a political system and a society that is more transparent, more sensitive to opposition voices, and more focused on building the legal and educational structures that will maximize their people’s ability, both men’s and women’s, to compete, start new companies, and attract investments from abroad. The lower the price of crude oil falls, the more petrolist leaders are sensitive to what outside forces think of them.
- Thomas Friedman
(You can read the entire article posted by Thomas Friedman by clicking the quote)

In light of The First Law of Petropolitics the question becomes, what does this mean for Canada? I think it’s a very important question to be asking, especially when you consider Alberta tar sands have become the largest capital project in the world, and when you become aware that the driving force behind this unbridled development and the heart of Canada’s new oil economy all rests in the cost of a barrel of oil. There are important questions we should be asking, regarding not only the future of our environment in the wake of rising emissions and failed Kyoto targets, but we should also be concerned about our democratic institutions in the wake of big oil. In the end these are two sides to the same coin, our environmental predicament and our entire future all tied into big business/government and an overly complex system built upon fossil fuels.

I believe if we do look up and take stock of our world, we will clearly see where we’re headed, but I think the question is, will we continue to dig deep attempting to grasp a hard truth that may inspire us to investigate alternatives, or will we return our focus to a softer denial, to a softer comfort, or a softer and easier sense of entitlement? After all, ignorance is bliss.

You can learn more about Andrew Nikiforuk by clicking HERE! There’s a good chance I’ll post some video content from our conversation sometime soon.

peace,
d