A Gift For Any Season

I have no intention of wishing anyone at this time of year a merry this or a happy new that or a jolly anything else.

If there is one message that I would wish to offer as 2015 draws to a close, it is this:

There is nothing in what we have done over the past year
to be merry, happy or jolly about.

We have messed up.
We have begun to realise that we have messed up.
Yet we continue to mess up.

We have over-developed our world economy

We have over-populated our planet

We have overshot all relevant environmental limits

All of this is encapsulated in a book of stunning photographic evidence of our progress titled ‘OVERdevelopment, OVERpopulation, OVERshoot’.

The book is freely available for online viewing and I offer a link to view it in its entirety here as a seasonal gift to you:

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Believe nothing, merely because you have been told it or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings, that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
The Buddha

You can solve all the world's problems in a garden.
Geoff Lawton

Tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.
Bill Mollison

The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein

Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.
Albert Schweitzer

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Henry Ford

Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Henry Kissinger (Who controlled Henry Kissinger?)

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
Henry Thoreau

Many people today work jobs they don’t like, to buy things they don’t need, so that they can impress people they don’t like. But at the end of life these people will deeply regret spending their lives trying to impress other people. Be humble and seek to impress yourself only. Let other people worry about chasing status. This perspective is extremely liberating.
Simplicity Institute

What I hear, I forget;
what I see, I remember;
what I do, I understand.
Old Chinese saying

It is the microbes that will have the last word.
Louis Pasteur

We have already seen cuts to services and increases in taxes and user fees, and we can expect a great deal more of that dynamic as central authorities emulate hypothermic bodies. In other words, they will cut off the circulation to the fingers and toes in order to preserve the core. This is of course, a survival strategy, from the point of view of the core. But it does nothing good for the prospects of ordinary people, who represent the fingers and the toes.
Nicole Foss

Society is an anonymous enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions.
Josephin Peladan 1885

Without a sense of the past and its meaning, without narratives that weave the events of our daily lives into patterns that touch the principles that matter, we lack the essential raw materials of thought, and so our collective reasoning processes, such as they are, spit out the same rehashed nonsolutions over and over again.
John Michael Greer (The Archdruids Report)

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
Rainer Maria Rilke

In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession.
Thomas Stearns Eliot

Talk does not cook the rice.
Chinese Proverb

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

...western Health Care... is mostly, a method of social control and a means to generate economic growth.
William Hunter Duncan (http://offthegridmpls.blogspot.com.au/)

...gardening puts me at ease in a world where it is not easy to be at ease, comforted in the knowledge that, should the world change, I will be ready, or more ready anyway, than I would be had I pretended I am not part of this earth, that I am not part of ecosystems. I am of this earth, and every day my plants remind me.
William Hunter Duncan (http://offthegridmpls.blogspot.com.au/)

The general population doesn't know what is happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.
Noam Chomsky

Life wasn't meant to be easy, my child, but take courage: it can be delightful!
George Bernard Shaw

You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
Vernon Howard

When we think about climate change (if we think about it at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Among other things, this will result in damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies. These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly.
Michael T. Klare - The Hunger Wars in Our Future

Remember that fact and faith are mutually exclusive things. If you have facts you have proof, therefore you don't need faith. Conversely, with no facts there is no proof and faith is needed to believe something. But faith is more emotion than logic, so almost anything can be justified. And that's where the Church gets its power.
Martin I Henry - The Anunnaki (The Chronicles of the Guardians)

...from nature’s perspective, we’re simply one more species that overshot the carrying capacity of its environment and is about to pay the routine price...
John Michael Greer - The Falling Years: An Inhumanist Vision

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
Ben Okri

Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.
JH Kunstler http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/are-you-going-to-entropy-faire.html

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present.
Rebecca Solnit
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175701/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_what_comes_after_hope/

To claim that there are many gods, a few gods, only one god, or no gods at all is to insist on something about which human beings have no independently verifiable source of information whatsoever.
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/a-question-of-values.html

Knowing many stories is wisdom.
Knowing no stories is ignorance.
Knowing only one story is death.
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2006/05/knowing-only-one-story.html

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts. The Blight which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We are more wicked together than separately. If you are ever forced to be in a crowd, then most of all you should withdraw into yourself. Never trust another to do your thinking. Even a maston.
Gideon Penman of Muirwood Abbey - from The Blight of Muirwood (Legends of Muirwood Book 2) by Jeff Wheeler.

A Gift For Any Season

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