October 22, 2006

Deep thoughts

Ownership is a very strange word. The connotation is one of responsibility, yet some of the things we think we own are things that will survive us and our posterity. As i wandered the back forty with my dogs yesterday, i was taking note of the trees that i planted and some that i didn't plant, that many people locally would call merchantable. The large pine near the upper fence sticks its crown way above the firs, madrone, cedar and oak - yet there are not many other pine due to the shading. Two shore pines we planted this spring 10 feet from each other showed one dead, the other thriving - the dead in constant shade of an oak (although an autopsy might show that the soil setting was worse, or the roots had been gnawed.

So as i wander the property, which i call mine because i have a mortgage that supports a deed that somebody else issued to somebody else and i bought from my capital savings, i note how the symbiosis of me and my trees will create a slightly more comfortable habitat for some nebulous future owner that i likely will have never met. The likelyhood that this property will be held by my family for a great period of time is based on too many coincidences of relationships and economies - will the kids wish to stay in the area after they have seen the world from an adult point of view - will the economy allow me to remain in the area as the means to provide sustinance in rural areas is slowly strangled by mass production agriculture. will the larger scale economy remain as dollars are printed and shuffled around without solid backing. Or will war, pestulence and famine greet out shores, as people have lost grounding.

i wish i had my crystal ball that would tell me what the world will look like at the end of ownership society. working for wages should be ancillary to working for common values; peace, love, respect, truth, wisdom. But how does one find the common, when we feel in ourselves that we are uncommon and wish to stand away from the sheeople, the masses, the teeming throng. going back to Hair, the 60s, peace love and the song lyrics - how can people be so heartless ... easy to be hard... : it just demonstrates how a right idea in a wrong time can lead to a mismatch of form and function.

now it seems we are back at the 60s mentalitywise, but with the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. rather than liberation, we have conservation : but they are two sides of a political coin. The call is to depoliticize governance and to restore the power of the people to the people. From Godspell lyric - when whilst God save the people ... our work will never end. But who are we - when society breeds isolation into a lonely cubicle, a hop in the car to the drive through, and a evening spent staring at motion and nonsense courtesy of the mind-control box. Belief has become what somebody tells you, not a rational synthesis of ideas based on knowledge gathered by self and others that have developed the capacity to reproduce phenomenon.

Science and religion are not antagonists at all - it has just been played off that way to create an opposition evil for each other, as a distraction from having to pay attention to the details of support for the other's beliefs.

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