Shimmering Chimera

Food worries

To the readers of the NN list around Portland:

What a sorry, predictable story is presented on YouTube an example of the era of media-cracy we are beginning.  There are many good points in these posts.  When there is an enormous shift of human consciousness going on, often, like the other times in which these mutations occur, 2 of which 'the west' has been a part, we must remember that the World is not anthropocentric.  In this light, we are being forced to suffer through the end of the mental era in all its deficiencies.  This has made me very afraid and I will grasp onto anything to pretend get back to 'nature', which really died 3,000 years ago, esp the last 200 years during the industrial finale of this era.  What loss and sadness this brings, even after the realization that being nested within nature and culture is gone and I must understand that I must be born to an all together other consciousness, maybe, but only through living this sad mental state out all the way to its dying, limping, weakened from bad food, confused.  Yet in this pathos, I am strengthened in surrender to it.  We cannot go 'back' to an imagined ideal, even though we can vaguely remember it.  We must suffer this in whatever wounded way we can.  Just because we cannot be totally healthy on the physical level does not mean that we are not working and articulate on another.

This is terrible for my little olde ego, which dearly wants to fight, resist and survive.  I want to set an oppositional people's movement in order, want to save the human race from its 'tendencies' and  all.  Yet this is the old way of the mental era, setting opposition and fighting in fright, reaction, much easier than being led to a greater understanding which may include moving corporation and myriad bureaucracies, business, gov, ngo from lethal and murderous, indeed genocidal to regenerative.  Just noticing and staying with extreme corruption is difficult.  We just do not know what is next, do we?

And I find not many, if any, even in the budding food movements really want to understand the soil food web, to take our place among biologies far and wide, near and immediate.  I think we are doing really OK in light of the fact that at this point the machines are autonomous as animals used to be on this earth, that biological technologies like homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, nutrition, food web technologies, holistic grazing and management are with us here, helping us move from the merely natural to the supernatural.  What we do totally depends on these technologies so that if we can stay on the planet or if we must move on or aside, we can apply it appropriately.  Or maybe it will apply itself in ways we will not ever understand, being merely human, stilled and dignified in our degeneration.

At least on this day we have not had to bow in witness to the terror of our atomic God in naked, stark revelation.  This IS a real miracle.

 

Leapfrog us, Africa! Jump!

Consciously compost your cities!  Manage your herds to stop desertification.  Keep the soils alive!

How interesting that the "charitable" arms of our economic bureaucracies are reaching out to Africa right now.  I guess our fertilizer companies need more lands hooked on chemicals.  Remember how some American and Indian farmers drank pesticides when they realized how tight was the double bind into which they had so desperately bought? How much I wish Africa well in absorbing the blows.  I hope that we all can smell any attempts to foist more industrial colonial schemes on our places.  I pray that we have learned something about soil biology in the ensuing years since the last Green Revolt that made the soil boom, bust and blow with chemical fixes and heavy metal mechanics.  I know we have.  Mr Gates' own landscaper knows more about the soil than all the bureaucrats of the NGOs involved. The service who cares for the trees atop the Rockefeller Center knows better.  Ask them to help.   I implore the Gates and  Rockefeller Families and their extentions, their Foundations to take what Schraven and Sottilo have to say before they set in motion their huge power.  I have written here of efforts that have taken the soil foodweb into account.  I suggest that these be read and the links be considered.   

Can we step out of those chemically strictured mechanics of the constricted fifties and into our ecologies knowing our biologies will work for us as we use this understanding and ground our thought?  We cannot even keep our own US rivers from dying!  Look at the Dead Zones around their mouths.  Look at the illness we cause from over refining our food!  Let us all learn.

In my letters from the Old Core to the Gap, the Seam states, yes, and even the Failed States, I would string a common thread throughout: that we get briefed on how the Soil Food Web works, be introduced to the families therein and understand how qualities of our lives depend on theirs...and theirs on us if we care to notice.

However, it seems that in our arrogance of becoming the holder of Levianthan Force, we have forgotten that our great cult agribusiness is several 20,000 leagues above the ground and headed toward the seas, Icarus in freefall.  In the industrial waves of change, we have built structures on top of wobbly structure and each more toxic than the last.  It is important now to NOT "go back" to some utopian time, but to dissemble and reassemble the artiface in ways that can clean up some of that mess, setting some best practices for people who follow as we leave.  This is live culturing.  In this way, by following the mandate of agriculture, we can fall up onto and into complexities that we have yet to even imagine.   Any body, any scale from a person to a large corporation can decide to err on the side of life, any time, aligning ourselves generatively.  The sooner the better.  Soil is blowing away as we pause to read and write this

Yet it seems that people and the orgs we form have a propensity toward ruination.  And resilience if given reflection and information.  So I say, you go, Gates and Rockefeller Foundations.  You are not the foundations of life's quality, not without the knowledge of live culture, the understanding of basic biology and ecology.  Neither are the Chinese, so GO.  No, economics does not proceed ecologics.  Business is always born to specific places, emanating from specific mores, ways of life.  Do no harm in your importation.  I have a sneaking suspicion that you are not using reflection and conscious decision making.  So if you, surprise, surprise, do some harm, know that restoration is at hand.  Or will you just rip and run once again?   Please, please prove me wrong.  Hey, and before you make any moves, check with your lawn guy and gardeners.  And show soil foodweb ways to the Chinese, to the Indians and to the Brazilians, since they will be the ones setting the new rules as they form the New Core, if you really have the reach.  On second thought, let the New Core find out and read and try for themselves and set the new rules, taking our smartest, turning to outsmart the old core, helping us in so doing.

And if you need to find out about reflection and consciousness read some of William Irwin Thompson (.org) 's astute work especially on biological machines and approaches, long supported by a Rockefeller and long the clearer of the visions at hand. 

Ground Up Aid

And again in the furious flurry of blogs and obtuse opinions out here on how we would, could and should do things, I receive interesting and arresting images from Allan Savory on headway made in stopping desertification in places he has been working for years with his careful manangement practices.  Here is a tickle from the report on Africa upon returning this June of 2006:

Only one thing will end that violence and that is to reverse the desertification of Kenya and surrounding countries. Two main things are leading to such violence – diminishing resources due to land degradation and rising populations. 

Commonly, people and organizations trying to help in such situations engage in three automatic responses that are fully understandable and come from the heart.  These are:
To provide new water points (boreholes, dams, etc)
To improve the local economy in various ways including micro-banking.
To feed the starving mothers and children.

Unfortunately:
Providing water points, without holistic planned grazing, only serves to accelerate land degradation resulting in less grass and less water.
Improving the local economy, as long as women are subservient, results in the people having larger families.
Feeding the starving mothers and children as long as women are subservient results in people having larger families.

Thus, tragically and unintentionally, the three most common measures to address the situation end up worsening it through higher populations on more rapidly desertifying land. After one of my talks in which I made this point a women from one of the major aid organizations said to me "Oh how true this is. We have been feeding these people for forty years and there are now five times as many people!"

For any development, health or food aid to really succeed, and not worsen the situation, two things are essential no matter how many billions of dollars are expended by governments and the international community:
A component of that aid must involve training people to reverse desertification as is now so clearly demonstrated at Dimbangombe.
Secondly a component of that aid must involve education and empowerment of women. It appears that only when women are educated and truly equals with men do we see a balance in family size with resources.

Both of these components are, as you know, central to the work we are doing with the Hwange community alongside Dimbangombe where encouraging results are attracting increasing interest. 

The developmental models that are being brought forth are just plain off the ground and this disconnected language between dynamic systems talk and the ecology that is essential to our physical ground is a red herring on a wild goose chase.  Yes, women must go forth and find our ways, yet without profound change in our land management, in our relationships to food, we will make as much of a mess of things that men do for the reasons articulated above.

This is true everywhere on this earth, being that soil is so important, indeed the base of all economics.

And to chant this refrain once again:

Let us learn of the soil foodweb, of our basic places in the food web and in the life/death/life cycle, our very own composting civilization.  Let's tell it in a bizzilion languages in many ways possible, as we consider Development In a Box.  Holistic Management and measuring soil life can be offered as best practices all around, within and throughout this world. 

Let us not forget that in his maturity, Maslov added two levels to his pyramid, those of cognition, acquiring and understanding knowledge and, finally, aesthetic sense.  It is odd to me that Barnett and DeAngelis bring up this pyramid all the time, for its incompleteness and then as a coupla networked guys who enjoy a woven reality.  I do understand their basic display of the security platform on which they have built so carefully, though. 

And, Mr Savory, thank you for showing us myriad ways of landing, of falling up into ecological complexity and out of mechanical complications.  Robert Sardello impresses me with a fine essay called "Violence and the Longing for Beauty" in his Facing The World With Soul, which wraps these ideas in a set of vital, regenerative images, a psychology at once more profound, dynamic and quietly fun than reductionist behaviorism.

Biological Grounding

DeAngelis has written well of resilience lately.  In this piece, he articulates his basic understanding of civil defense for this world we are in:

The goal is to create a system that blends five areas: 1) Best Practices Methodology; 2) Resilient Technology Architecture; 3) Automated Rule Sets; 4) People Processes; and, 5) Integrated Political Leadership. 

Under the first methodology he suggests:

    •  Identify Critical Assets and their enabling business processes and core functions
        for competitiveness and sustainability for regional ecosystems
    •  Identify security, compliance and competitive rules (metrics and measurements)

One critical asset that is important to all human life is soil.  Crafting food culture and systems that sustain life in and of our soils, and as well, foster deep understanding of life/death/life cycles is imperative.  We are working now to enable businesses from retailers to restaurants to households, from institutions to farmers and ranchers, middlemen that can step up to the standards of understanding the soil food web without falling into ideological skreeds and polarizing screeches about whose ways are better. 

With techniques such as direct microscopy and brix, metrics and measurements are in place.  We can now let the soil organisms and plants, from trees, to veggies to grasses, speak for themselves.  If a way is destructive of the life that plants and animals need to live, grow well and feed us, that is an unacceptable practice.  Decisions are made by all of us on our daily rounds: we can consider what our moves do to the qualities of life we need for our grandchildren to be able to eat, breathe, dance, laugh, cry, love and continue as well as we have.   We can awaken to this world which truly holds us in our whirling and busy daze, building this aspect of our lives from the ground up from whatever place holds us.

Sterling examples of Tomorrow Composting Today

First, as one might notice from my few previous postings I am very interested in the frameworks of people who understand large moves and wonderments of historic and epochal flux.  Sterling's work very unintentionally details the progressions that WI Thompson has spiraled forth.  The shifts from continental/industrial toward a planetary understanding are very carefully and accurately illustrated here.  We all know, we all, regardless of race, screed, gender orientation or what we eat for lunch, that this poor planet is groaning under the weight of our bad habits, of our short sight, our myopia into dystopia, Cyclops grinning, feasting steadily on our decadence and stupidity, monocular.  We all know this, realized or not, in our bones.  What we grasp to shore up our beliefs is killing us more than just pausing to notice, to use the great good instinct of reflection beyond the pool, to suspend our fight and flight so that we can focus more clearly on our ublopian bumbling, thinking to go with our instincts, but at the right time, synchronically, symphonically tuned in to what we need to keep and not.  Everyone of us has a piece of parochial baggage to carry forth, each a piece of the puzzle, gifts from our hearts to protect and share.  Yet the technosociety in which we dwell hosts the daily things with which we have found enough about ourselves to see ourselves beyond the local.  And it is toxic and failing quickly to hold us.  We have gone beyond several Lines of No Return and as well, as many Lines of Empire as Sterling points out:

We know there has been a revolution in technoculture when that technoculture cannot voluntarily return to the previous technological condition.  A sailor cannot be a farmer, but if the sailors from the machine era of iron and steam return to the earlier artifact era of wood and sail, millions will starve to death.  The technosociety will collapse, so it is no longer an option.  That's the Line of No Return.

We need to grab these machines and products, gizmos and spimes as they come up, tossing them into the right bins to be recycled, the right pile to encourage particular microbs to chew on what to change it, like we do with cabbages, carrots and turnips into sauerkraut to maintain our body ecologies.  Feeding this important matter back to the industrial maw is much better than asking more of the grown world in extraction.   We need mature processes of separating the biological from the chemical and keeping them cycling in their own spheres.   On the ground, we need to repair the fungal foodwebs which we blithely plow up time and time again discounting the immense amount of nutrients that plants can assimilate from these hyphae, spaghetti-like surrounding roots protection, trapping suckers, feeding those roots with their makings, saving us the oily tasks of import and its wasting consequence running off.  We need the bacteria and fungi to help make our fertilizers again.  Any corporation dealing with food is looking into these possibilities be it a company, householder, farmer and developer scoping out, scraping and scaping this land which carries us all.

We have the technological capacity to do this.  The landscapers and larger farmers are retooling fresh pesticide equipment to spray beneficials around carefully.  With the skills and help of good tea brewers crafting to the highest standards, we can work on ANY scale, from garage and backpack sprayers on our home lots to 500 gal units mounted on tractors, dripped and sprayed thru irrigation, gently shot out thru pumps onto our courses and fields, our playgrounds and parks.  If I were a corporation who cares for its own life and the lives my people, I would call up Sustainable Growth Inc hire them to show you how they care for their lands, find the best brewers and have them teach and mentor in those interested .  I would make it so sexy to not poison ourselves that people would want to work here, would make the place live up to the idea that because we do now know that our children are harmed by our practices, we can now change our ways to hand them generative places, put in renewed and attached standard operating procedures to maintenance so that entropy will not lead us in to otivion, the heartbreaking prelude to oblivion. 

And this leads into the materials with which to make these lively teas.  Good aerobic compost is possible on any and all scales.  Few places are in a position to offer it with confidence.  Training and mentoring are necessary to prepare people for this maintaining this craft, especially when taken to an industrial scale.  Since the future composts the past, let us become painfully aware from whence our food grows.  Let not a food CEO arise who does not know about basic biological processes.  This man is clueless....although he is trying to grasp something beyond his reach of knowledge and I respect him for that.

We do need to notice which kinds of composts to use when and how to go about finding definitions and standards that set the mark for others to follow.  Let us go for orientation to the soil foodweb approach for help.   Dr Elaine Ingham is a person to follow here.  Her stories of how composting works are in plain language that can be understood by all.  She is a respected scientist and teacher.  Her work can help us understand how the soil works to feed and nourish us in a more careful and intense way than we have in the past.  Play around in the information here.  It is geared to anyone from greenskeepers to householders, anybody, you, me, business, corps, anyone who knows we are on a slippery slide from descent maintenance to anaerobic soil and into entropy.

We do need to

tear into the world of artiface in the way that our ancestors tore into the natural world.  We need to rip root and branch into the previous industrial base and reinvent it, rebuild it.  While we have the good fortune to be living, we should invent and apply ways of life that expand the options of our decendents rather than causing irreparable damage to their heritage,

as Sterling suggests.  I would add that we have a moral obligation to do this, especially those who still understand and experience directly connections between well-being and food.  We have reached very high to find out what we have about ourselves.  We have built food systems that are not secure, not maintained wisely.  In our reaching, we can redirect and sense emerging sustainable best practices.

This is a small intro to this work.

Noting Psyche in Diplomacy

Here is a snippet from TPM Barnett's comment on Diplomacy as Psychiatry (second from bottom) to which I must respond:

So this blogger's basic question really is, Is there a role for national "psychiatry" in bringing a Gap nation up from the depths?
And I guess I would say, yes, there is.
And it would run like this: First in security, you need to help them understand their self-destructive behaviors and gain confidence in themselves and their capacities for self-rule and self-defense. Second, in economics, you'd need to help them understand similarly their capacity for self-development of capital (especially human through education and the liberation of women). Ultimately, you'd have to work on their political identity in the world, a sense of who they are and what they're capable of.
I say it in BFA: the journey from Gap to Core is one of youth (Gap) to middle-age (New Core) to seniority (Old Core). It really is a demographic journey as much as anything else, so remember that when you deal with national identity in the Gap, you're dealing with kids, so to speak, or very youth-skewed demographics.
This is why the spread of religion in the Gap, especially the dueling spreads of Islam and Christianity, is so vital. Youth look for guidance, and the most accepted global package for that is religion, which, like much psychiatry, is all about gaining self-control, self-awareness, etc.

This a very logical, linear and conventional way thru to maturity.  A more interesting take which would resonate much more with dynamic style is articulated by people taking archetypal pattern recognition and the new sciences further than this.   The Assisi Institute has been doing this for over 20 years.  They  give  depth and breadth to discussions of organizations of any kind from families and corporations to religions and countries as entities and how we can move within complex situations.  This approach is neither reductive nor behaviorist and often not linear unlike thinking coming out of academic institutions. 

As well, I was aiming toward a fine small book by Rafael Lopez-Pedraza, Cultural Anxiety, which offers a long riff on The Consciousness of Failure.  Here one can begin to see what patterns are in play and see how important they are to sus out and give them their dues.  These work underneath all religions, races, nations and genders.  I will go into how this gives clues to failed states, of our own and others and calls for instinctual reflection on fear, trauma and maturity.  This note will have to do in pointing these ways for now.

Handily Shaped

Bruce Sterling has recently typed out a compact little book commissioned and published by MIT with the help of Lorraine Wild.  Its name is Shaping Things.  My rough impression of it is shown in the cultural ecology sidebar, as non linear as I could get with word and line.  Closer shots are forth coming.

As a trained designer, I have worked parochially for most of my adult life.  My instincts are in order and grounded here yet terribly lacking in the sophistication and understanding of how we are going thru our times but for household scale.  In catching up to designers working large and with much more power and authority in our industrial surge, I ran across Viridian Design in the whirl of gizmos that is lifting us spinning around.  I stuck with its Pope Emperor Sterling and am heartened by his offering readers greater insight, displaying his thinking thru the trajectories in which we seem caught collectively, intervening with a solid push toward ublopia from our always constant flirtation with entropy and otivion. 

Giving a essential history of the field of industrial design, he further feathers close shading in the small periods that WIT articulated in our the larger move to planetary biosphere from the oceanic industrial age which is quickly melting behind us.  I sketch those tunings again here on the side.  They lift off from agriculture and its artifacts of pre 1500 to the age of machines with their customers, around 1900 to products with consumers, into gizmo culture with us their end users in 1989, and now in 2004 into wrangling spimes, those evasive and elusive pics that keep us glued to gizmos and speculatively into realizing ourselves as truly biotic around 2060. 

This is enough for starters.  Composting as a very shapely thing will be addressed ASAP.

Dance, Anyone?

We seem to be the blind leading the blind, which might be an interesting way to go given the darkness, from singularities to various apocalypses and catastrophes offered at this time, loosing sight as we are to gain some kind of double vision, drunk and sinking into the quick sand falling into the emptied oil fields through the hour gassing, passing glass bubbles of what is left, being our total denial of, our lack of respect for and addiction to cheap oil.

I have been reading the stories of Thomas Barnett who is offering us some kind of direction for our military reflected by a holistic view for enterprises by Stephen DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions, for the top downers of the managerial corporate set.  Their reasoning is well-presented, comprehensive, better and more inclusive than any put forth from the stagnant, often toxic ecologies in which they swim, indeed thrive, rich as those waters are.  Frankly, theirs are the only ones with which I would bother in their fields, with tactical backup from Robb and Lind .   Available as starters, we need them to lift and hold our reach for more, much more to get to breathable air, heirs to first stage wind down from industrial hyper strength, Leviathan sharpened and focused, SysAdmin crafted out of our wobbling bureaucracies.  We must remove some, not all, of our armor, get out of our cars, look around at what we are missing in our speed and greed.

My aesthetic sense moves with the tight and excellent criticism of Zuboff and Maxmim of managerial capitalism being dead and killing as it is and that we can change up into a new episode of this form, pointing to distributed federations of business, bundles of supporting entities.   Their work is The Support Economy.  Coupled with Barnett and DeAngelis', theirs are moves worth making.  Mixed in with a shot of naturally stepping capitalism, this might remedy hangovers we will have at the onset of our break through denial of our cheap oil addictions.  Oil has been our great friend and has fueled literally all kinds of frivolities and fantasies.  Now we must find our sober legs once more, pick up the beat and bogey, man, dance with this bogeyman.  In doing so we learn to respect this substance and use it both with care and fully, to find new equilibrium.  We will also find that our imaginations will be fired with tending to the everyday and not dissipated in trying to literalize delicious morsels better tasting for being left in the air. 

Yet, I could not just sit with any of these frameworks in the stunning light of the most intriguing and articulate William Irvin Thompson and the down on earth work of Christopher Alexander, John and Nancy Jack Todd, Allan Savory, Elaine Ingham, Paul Stamets among myriad others describing exciting realities. 

In the realm of story, Thompson poetically offers scope seldom seen in our midsts, through mists sensing a huge shift in epochs, condensing the worst and best of our civilized ecoplasm into form and watching it dissolve into larger patterns, revolve into smaller fractals, evolve into noetic polities, resolve into suggestions for reform of our system of governance to guide us thru instability.   In his view we are in an end time of oceanic nation states moving in vortexes to planetary biospheric consciousness, with others past and present.  I might add that this comes through heavy handed military globularization at the hands of systems, many politicians and business leaders who are at best dinosaurs, at worst active agents of the Borg Queen and Ahirman, cubing about in star studded space, numb to the beauty of even our Milky Way, much less humbled by Hubble.  In, of and from that destruction, through the attendant dark age accompanying such transformation, may arise a planetary finery able to feed off pollution and thrive.  We can build toward that if we will, build on the Visons of a Living World offered by the others. 

I'll refer and weave summaries of each in relation to this shift, in subsequent pieces.  Yet now we must take the best from the largest and most ample body, Thompson's, and hang the rest either on and from it, for its hugeness.  Barnett is a wishful kid in relation to the others, important, yes, making the moves to dynamism that are needed, putting the software in place with DeAngelis, yes, up and coming thru the military, yes.  Yet if DeAngelis means architecture, let him come to Alexander's quality reflected in his software.... But in larger scope, in light of everything else, no.  Moving, definitely, yes and not deeply grounded, that being a wider disease than either can handle.  Yet if grounding in air is what they can do, then I give them great credit for what they do.   SysAdmin can be used as war becomes impossible to maintain and gives way to the intensity of natural disasters, software running to keep up with shortages that flood both core and the gap.  We need more on which to pin our shredded and suppurating hope, maybe just letting it de-integrate, moving from the terrible cycles of false hope and despair to continuity of story and small daily mores, one at a time, small animal moves thru withdrawal and refocus on closer diets for once again a large, very not flat planet.

With great apologies to those in summarizing, thereby reducing, the imagination fully present in their individual works.

 

Philo Sophia

     Drudging thru the faux radiating light this morning over breakfast, I spy a post by my favorite Dr Camille Paglia in response to a poll of philosophers hosted by The Independent.  She had written on the demise of philosophy and as well, the exclusion of women from the poll and from our stories, women, Hypatia of Alexandra, Anne, Lady Conway and deBeauvoir, among notable others who challenged, sometimes followed, the greatest of our thinkers from Plotinus thru Descartes to Sartre...  Her endeavor to include the names she listed is so noble and notable that I hestitate to respond, yet I hear something missing from her understanding and view. 

     First, I disagree heartily that philosophy is withering in antiquity.  Antiquity is alive and well in this very modern world, archetypes still moving and motivating us beyond our small wills into larger dances.  Anaerobic academia does have its teeth around her foot, but they are rotting out and she is too powerful to let that do more than tickle, irritate, then shake it off.  Who, she?   Look carefully at the word.  She is Sophia, Wisdom, some say Queen of the World.  Her image has remained with us thru centruries of art and imagination, thru the most desperate and degraded times, to hold us in our fates and spur us to our destinies. 

     Now, granted she is stressed a bit by our ignoring of her in her radiant fullness, and yes, we have lost deep understanding of her in our race to find that we are a race, myriad misegentated tribes, a hybrid species that shares the grand imagination called dreamtime, her great realm, but that is no reason to let ourselves into a funk about this, to deny our love for her, our love, philo - Sophia, our love of Wisdom.  Yet, phobias accompany her, leagues of them, loudly chanting and chattering, keeping us in our cells by phone day and night hooked on this faux light, forgetting to see radiance in the surrounds, the miracle that there is life in our soils, our air, our water.  As I know it, she is alive in us and with us, moving from information to knowledge, and from that gnosis to wisdom. Many of us just do not see her. 

     For one instance, we have not blown ourselves into a nuclear winter, yet.  Since we do know that we are capable of these acts, she must be holding us back, or teaching us restraint, or distracting us, or playing.  I am grateful for her invisible hand and will work to keep myself in that grace. 

     Philosophy is not only in the realm of Apollo, cold, thin, ice; she moves between and amongst, more like Paul Revere, Hermes, maybe Eros, connecting, infecting, recollecting a world we seem to have forgotten, but which is there when we find ourselves to the side of the action,  paused in the midst of it, gasping, grasping for something beyond the excruciating pressure of here and now, maybe just a breath.  Philosophy is around, about, shot  thru daily life.  She does not see us only at the tip of Olympus with Zeus and his crew.  She envelopes those in the fields, thru Demeter and Persephone, in the damp vales, with Dionysus, those just off the ground with Pan, in his ich.  Then, the sea, with tossed out Hephaestes, Neptune, on and on we go, even the ones who think they are the only One are included, Jupiterian in the expansive monotonies that follow, exhausted, forever struggling that they are.  She always includes the lessers, those fallen into a gap, lost to core. 

     I wish to state that Sophia can be served from many patterns, from many ways and landscapes, not just from the thin air of spiritual heights, but ensouled depths and funky midlands too.  The rationales and strategies for ways of life that are ‘practical’ is more than ever needed, to help us thru the messes we are in, these moving information catastrophes of our time demanding that we change our ways and ideas, crafting decent ones, composting the rest and allowing levity to surface from the deep darkness of our slimmy paranoias, another day of conversation, another moment of laughter bubbling through the tears tearing our hearts.  Many women work on and play with that from anywhere, all and anyone else for that matters.  If the love of Sophia be relegated to ice regions, it can crystalize there to snow upon us that fluffy stuff, tickling our noses and sharpening our senses to spot us on to our tasks.  Thank you, Dr Paglia, for remembering these voices which get you moving...us, too.