Photo album at FB: Amazon to Andes … descending over the Amazonas, vistas of jungle, thatched roof, thin pillars of smoke, winding muddy river through low cotton cloud… we land, dismounting steel, into a welcome wave of humid heat, across hot tarmac, through tin pot airport, 3 wheel moto-taxi driver hustle and away, tearing like Read More
No, not the kind of frog you might lick for it’s secretion of DMT (should you be so inclined.) That would be Bufo alvarius – the Colorado River toad. This is Phyllomedusa bicolor, an Amazonian rainforest treefrog, And talk about right of passage – this little fucker took me down! Sapo, or Kambo – frog Read More
After swallowing a shot glass full of the somewhat wretched medicinal brew, with ceremonial reverence and a personal intention of what to work on for this ceremony, we sit upright in meditative postures, on mattress pads, in the darkness of the Maloka – a large circular palm thatched structure, open to the surrounding jungle sounds. Read More
Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still. This one time upon the earth, let’s not speak any language, let’s stop for one second,
8 out of 10 (New Yorker) short stories leave me cold as a fish in space. So whilst like film, there is a degree of subjectivity, here’s five, captivating in their dark humor and edginess and for my money, rewarding in their poignancy, punch and pure celebration of life, love and madness: What you Pawn Read More
Shapeshifters (v3.0) – a short story Something catches your eye starting out of the forest below. A lone figure, it appears, coming towards you now, up the winding path towards the brow of the hill where you are standing, wolf hounds at your side. Judging by the weathered gait, it appears to be a rather Read More
#3 dusk in Fukushima wild plutonium horses ride jet-stream home
Gene Sharp, Author of the influential Nonviolent Revolution Rulebook (more here) suggests that as people develop techniques for withholding consent peacefully, regimes will crumble. This must be true whether dictatorship or western “democratic” oligarchies. So don’t vote, it only encourages the bastards – arguably a privileged notion but democracy is a failed system as there Read More
“It’s OK to be seen without your make up on, America. People will still want to fuck you, you’re rich.” (via dailyshow/mark twain controversy)
Yes, indeedy, one of the most subjective media by definition, but here in my humble view are some of the best of our generation, meeting the minimal criteria of being any or all of the following: fucking brilliant independent / non-formulaic / non-hollywood-puerile-shite sublime acting superb cinematography / lighting / sets numinous story / theme Read More
On his way back to Earth, having just walked on the moon, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced a radical transformation in perspective and thus consciousness. As he approached our planet from beyond it’s sphere of influence, “he was filled with an inner conviction as certain as any mathematical equation he’d ever solved. He knew Read More
So he rolls up our long ragged redwood road and is doing a 7 point turn at the top of our driveway in a shiny PG&E survey truck. They’d trimmed a schwag load of branches around the power lines and left them in our turnaround several weeks ago, so I walk straight out to the Read More
In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood – A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility Read More
by Ben Lerner For the distances collapsed. For the figure failed to humanize the scale. For the work, the work did nothing but invite us to relate it to the wall. For I was a shopper in a dark aisle.
Deepwater The Earth and all life functions as a continuously evolving, fluid, dynamic system that we barely begin to understand in it’s complexly interwoven entirety. Sucking out the oil and burning it off in a fashion marginally more evolved than the discovery of fire itself – e.g. the archaic combustion engine, proliferating to this day Read More
This is v2.0 – gender specific! Something catches your eye starting out of the forest below. A lone figure it appears, coming towards you now, up the winding path towards the brow of the hill where you are standing, wolf hounds at your side. Judging by the weathered gait, it appears to be a rather Read More
Google Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin disparaging the commercialization of search engines said. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They had a vision of allowing unfettered access to the sum of all human knowledge on line. However Google’s CEO Read More
Listen up! Non resistance is the key to the greatest power in the universe. Through it, consciousness (spirit) is freed from its imprisonment in form. Inner nonresistance to form – whatever is or happens – is a denial of the absolute reality of form. Resistance makes the world and the things of the world appear Read More
Inside this temple are mountains and rivers there are forests of oak, mountain lions and moss Seismic shifts and lightening bolts are inside innervating every silent thought All the dancing impulses of nature are here laughter, grief, hunger swirling in the winds and time There is ecstatic music, echoing through these chambers and starlight – Read More
bird song in the city false dawn
Oh great goddess, mother of creation, this earth What silent hunger causes big breasted women to wander in my dreams. Oh happy happy death – this fool asphyxiated in the heaving depths of the cleavage of the beloved.
“The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.” – George Santayana Lewis drives us to a deserted beach just outside of Read More
by some curious twist of unsanity, music – the very thing that 1st moved in my otherwise numbed teenage sensate body, hours spent lying on the floor, head phones on, deep in sound space, moved to tears – melancholy and joy (Bruch/Beethoven) in a way not possible among other mortals – or moved by the Read More
“People assume that in the 21st century buildings should be made of titanium, because we have a narrow definition of progress. Maybe a 21st-century building is made out of dirt used in an intelligent and beautiful way.”
An inspired remix: ‘We Are All Connected’ (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye) [youtube width=”600″ height=”420″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGK84Poeynk[/youtube] more at symphonyofscience.com melodysheep apparently uses Reason 4.0 (instrumentals), Adobe Audition (audio editing), and Melodyne (auto-tuning), but the musicality, art and inspiration is all his own. Good stuff.
Love the melodramatic ending at the end of this piece (“addicted to nonsense”) – The tragi-comic drama of reality!! It’s interesting to me that, whilst the picture is bleaker than we might care to acknowledge in our waking lives, the end isn’t necessarily nigh! On the contrary. Radical change is nigh – and the saviour Read More
And, in case nobody told you yet… thereisnospoon … And each and every one of you is being taken for fools. You work for an election or two to put chosen leaders in place, and expect those leaders to work their “leadership” magic to ram reforms down the throats of the corporate sector, failing to Read More
as above, so below (underlying cultural influence on the theme of Christmas and New Year) winter solstice is considered the strongest of the four main power points of the year. The light returns… masculine sun gains strength from this day till summer solstice (when sun begins to wane again.) Now… is when we might ritually Read More
An elegant and eloquent short. I like it because it offers (to me) a clear and honest juxtaposition of two worlds (without newagism or sensationalism) and where my values and heart truly lie – with the soil under my feet, a feeling community, and a simplification from distractions by knowing where my deepest pleasures in Read More
Do not adjust your mind – it is reality that is malfunctioning – RAW After successfully returning from Black Rock City after the 7th (or 8th?) journey to that wild and glorious place, I find my neurons are just beginning to regroup and the synapses starting to fire in the correct order once more to Read More