Witches Brew

No question: counting my blessings has become a chore. It’s hard not to descend into satire or parody. In active rebellion, my brain wants to start a curses list as well–and if Pumpkin Head, the alcoholic who lives across the hall, wakes me up tonight for the third time running–well, I am tempted to wish him an intervention he won’t soon forget.

I am having an easier time with my “Accomplishments” list. A tool of my own devising, I keep myself on a forward track by making a list every evening of five tasks I accomplished during the day. Some days I may not make all five–some days just taking a shower is an accomplishment–but that’s okay. I can do six or seven tomorrow and back fill. I can’t do seven today and put down two of them for tomorrow. Un-uh! I have to start from scratch each day. Even worse, writing down an “accomplishment” that I have to get done the next day. That’s a sure indicator that it won’t get done at all.

Among blessings that I can count today:

My CDs by Dawn Dance by Scottish fiddle-player Alasdair Fraser and Drum Medicine by Dave and Steve Gordon.

The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand. I don’t know how long this book has been sitting on my bookshelf, but it’s a compact paperback, so I threw it in my bag before I went shopping yesterday. What an amazing book!

Stewart Brand is the author of How Buildings Learn, The Media Lab, and the Whole Earth Catalog. He is is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation and co-founder of the Global Business Network. According to the blurb on the back of the book:

Using the Millennial Clock–a supremely slow computer that will keep perfect time for the next 10,000 years–as a paradigm for the Long Now, Steward Brand, called “the least recognized most influential thinker in America,” offers a practical manual that introduces us to the concept of long-term responsibility.

Each pithy chapter is chewier than a chocolate-covered caramel. From the Ancient Greek notions of kairos (opportunity or the propitious moment) and chronos (eternal or ongoing time) to the marvelous workings of Big Ben to a brief survey of burning libraries to the building of the 10,000-year Library, which will include the canon of human culture (and the instruction manual on how to reboot it if we are foolish enough to engineer the collapse of said culture). this little book is like a gourmet fruitcake, soaked in intoxicating ideas. And the website www.longnow.org has a mind-boggling collection of seminars offered by Paul Hawken, Paul Ehrlich, Neal Stephenson, Verne Vinge, and a host of others available on DVD.

And if that wasn’t enough to keep me from ever adding anything of note to my “Accomplishments” list, I have found “The Archdruid Report: Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society.”

From the website:

The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of some eighteen books, including “The Druidry Handbook” (Weiser, 2006) and “The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age” (New Society, 2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Blog entries for May: “Rethinking the Rust Belt,” “The End of the Information Age,” “The Economics of Decline,” and “A Guide for the Perplexed.” And I haven’t looked at April’s entries yet.

I have a premonition that Brand and Greer will be at the top of my Blessings list for the week to come.

To keep my mind properly prepped for job-hunting, I have elected to keep a daily blessings journal. Every day for thirty days, I have to write ten things, big or small, that I am grateful for. Reportedly, at the end of 30 days/300 acknowledged blessings, I will be a new person.

Now, I know I can do anything for 30 days. Not a problem. Then it’s back to business as usual. After 90 days, I will have successfully trained my brain to look on the bright side–maybe. 900 blessings…

So, right here, on schedule, comes Blessing #1, my cat Sweetie, who has decided that I have become “lost.” Meow! Meow! Meow! She is now sitting on the mouse pad. Only 899 to go.

My Blessings Journal (in no particular order)

1) My cat Sweetie
2) Mass Transit (six days a week, and I’ll keep hoping for 7)
3) Pizza
4) Rob Brezsny’s “Free Will Astrology Newsletter”
5) Jose Cuervo Margaritas
6) Global Village
7) The Internet
Haagen-Dazs Carmelized Pear/Pecan Ice Cream*
9) Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake books
10) My DVD/TV combo

Phew! That was tough.

*Word Press has awarded Haagen-Dazs a smilely face. THAT’s synchronicity, folks!

In a few hours the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure kicks off at the Metro Center in the magical heart of Peoria. Many people know about “ley lines” that link up prehistoric monuments and megaliths in Britain and the miles long Nazca lines in South America. Reputedly the points where ley lines cross resonate with psychic energy. I don’t know if anyone has ever searched for ley lines in Peoria, but I am willing to bet that there’s a big hot spot at the intersection of University and Glen. There’s a second node at the Water Tower in Peoria Heights and a node at University at Lake. I suspect there may be other points along the railroad line that comes out in Peoria Heights near Grayboy Motorsports.

Within this area are two libraries, two farmer’s markets, Lakeview Museum and the Planetarium, Peoria Players (where celebrants flock several times a year to that Modern Mystery Play, The Rocky Horror Picture Show), The Owen Center–home rink for figure ice skater Matt Savoie, the YWCA and the Peoria Regional Center for the Girl Scouts. And then there is the Race for the Cure.

Almost 18,000 walkers/runners and cheering supporters have signed up for the 24th Peoria Race for the Cure. That’s a huge outpouring of healing energy charging this small area of Peoria. Where does it go? Who does it benefit? Well, obviously it flows through the participants–the breast cancer survivors and their loved ones–who carry it home with them–but it also goes into the “spiritual aquifer” as it were of this special place within the Heart of Peoria. And a guess: it accumulates in the Lakeview Wilds, that patch of nature behind Lakeview Museum.

I heard there was a “Prayer for the Cure” event the other evening. I don’t remember hearing about a prayer service before, though I expect there usually is one. But I believe the race itself is a prayer, and that prayer goes to the Goddess Artemis, who may walk Lakeview Wilds. Artemis, a Greek Goddess, was the virgin huntress, Goddess of the Moon, protector of children, and the matron deity of women in childbirth. Women made offerings to her for a safe delivery, but Deities give and Deities take. Sometimes Artemis’s arrows took women during their “lying in.”

Goddesses evolve, Goddesses go out into the world. Not many western women die in childbirth these days, but they do die of breast cancer (and ovarian cancer and cervical cancer). Men die, too, from breast cancer. But the Goddess gives as well as takes. And she sends her blessings to all those–whether they know her or not–who run or walk or simply stand witness to the Race of the Cure.

In September 2008, the citizens of Ecuador approved a constitution granting inalienable rights to Pachamama, the Andean earth goddess. Concerned citizens of Macomb who are trying to save the remmants of Chandler Woods from strip mining and Peoria Families Against Toxic Waste (PFATW), who are trying to prevent the Peoria Disposal Company from polluting local aquifers might take note.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in Pennsylvania helped the San Francisco based Pachamama Alliance frame the new constitution. The CELDF was building on work they had done in Pennsylvania. In 2006 the organization helped Tamaqua, PA, a coal-mining town, “draft a sewage-sludge ordinance that recognized natural ecosystems as legal persons for the purposes of enforcing civil rights. The ordinance in Tamaqua, which has a population of about 7,000, also stripped corporations that engage in the land application of sludge of their rights to be treated as ‘persons.’”

The Ecuadoran constitution goes much farther The constitution says:

Ecuador’s Rights for Nature

Article 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Article 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems. In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation on non-renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Article 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect toward all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Article 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles. The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.

Article 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow well being. The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.

We really don’t know what this document will mean for Mother Earth. Ecuadorian constitutions only seem to last about 10 years and it will be a long time before these articles have been thoroughly tested. In January 2009 The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and regional campesino movements, citing the new constitution, attempted to prevent the expansion of foreign mining.

In an interview Robert Percival,the director of the University of Maryland School of Law’s environmental law program, explained, “The constitution outlines broad principles, and what impact they will have depends on how they are treated by the president, the Legislature and the courts. Certainly, a number of courts have taken very vague environmental provisions and used them as justification for intervention in environmental matters. This constitution goes even further by offering much more extensive and explicit provisions, but it will still require action by the president, lawmakers and the courts to implement.”

What will happen if this idea catches on? If India decides to recognize the rights of Mother Ganges, for example, or Native American people demand recognition for the “personhood” of their sacred lands?

Stay tuned. Tonight 60 Minutes has story on oil drilling in Ecuador.

Jennifer Koons, Following Pa. mining town’s example, Ecuador OKs constitution giving rights to nature, Posted on September 30th, 2008, http://www.earthportal.org/news/?p=1750, referenced 05/03/09