Inner and Outer Revoloution

Revolt - destroy corpocracy before it destroys the ability of the Earth to support life

How amazing it is to see articles like this by Naomi KLein in the New Statesman, scientists calling for revolt and Russel Brand making mincemeat of Jeremy Paxman. A revolution is definitely coming - it will come in the form of collapse, devastating collapse of environmental systems, the ice sheets for one, and collapse of the financial system for another before long anyway.
I'd just add  that our way of life in the developed world is part of the problem. I'm all for protesting about fracking AND let's stop using cars too. It isn't us and them, it's just us. While we still use the convenience of the fossil-fueled way of life, the supermarkets and motorways, we are part of the system and complicit in all its hellishness.
The governments and corporations need us more than we need them. It's time to for everyone, everywhere to build a very simple, Earth friendly way of life. The other revolution is the inner revolution, thinking for ourselves, finding our individual power to make change by our own actions, whatever that is for each of us.

NO TIME TO LOSE

This is an extraordinary time to be walking the Earth, our choices and actions now may draw us back from the brink of mass extinction. A change in attitude is urgently needed - an evolved partnership with the Earth.
You see this in the world of farming where giant fields are treated as factory units - energy, chemicals and machinery used to extract units of produce from the land with no feeling or respect for nature. Our attitude to life has soaked into the ground, literally and energetically.
We can make a difference by focusing on this attitude because we hold it too when we take part in the developed world craziness, so far removed from a way of life that the planet can support.
What do we each need to do and what do we need to stop doing? What is the best use of our time and energy? Ask the Earth. Whether we make inner or outer changes they ripple out around the world.
MALE - FEMALE BALANCE
I got a strong feeling in the last Thursday Lightworkers Group session that our personal power must change. This is a time for female strength, firm gentleness. The way we gather and produce our food, materials, clothing must become radically different. It isn't even a case of just going back to a way of life from a few hundred years ago with horses drawing ploughs, the plough is part of the problem too. To reach a way of life that is truly sustainable means developing abundant local woodlands, orchards and forests, including open spaces grazed by animals - a huge variety of interconnected life with many yields for us and many features that simply support the whole network.
QUALITY OF LIFE
Finding a simpler way of life needn't mean going back to the stone age. The Thursday Group has shown me dramatically that we have abilities we can tap into and develop which will help us to keep the wonderful connection we have achieved through the internet for a start. What else do we want to keep from the modern world anyway? Music, travel... I think we'll still be able to do those.

Grangemouth - when are we going to put the Eco into Economy?

I'm familiar with the Grangemouth refinery having lived in Fife for many years and as my daughter Amanda and her family live just a couple of miles from the place. At night, its flare stacks light it up like a vision from Heironymous Bosch. I used to drive around Fife delivering furniture from my shop, travelling through the strings of grim-looking villages left in an economic bog after the collapse of the local coal industry, a striking contrast to the posher parts of Fife like St Andrews, where people could afford to spend more on furniture.
So I've got mixed feelings about Grangemouth, the immediate local effect of the place closing would be devastating for so many people, but if ever there was a symbol of the Earth-devouring craziness of our oil-powered times here it surely is. There's only so much oil in the ground, it's bound to close one day, so, even leaving aside the dire warnings from the IPCC and others, isn't it time to start thinking seriously about making the transition to a truly sustainable way of life?

Appley Abundance

And still the apples keep on coming... I've been amazed at the sheer quantity of fruit just one tree can produce and when you have a few trees of different types you can have a serious supply for a useful part of the year, and you can store them too. One of the challenges is finding the time to do something with them all, there's barely time to pick up all the windfalls.
We are pressing lots here at the farm as part of the excellent Incredible Edible campaign - Facebook page here:

Stacks and stacks of apples for pressing here at Treflach

First Apple Day nice and sunny...

...second Apple Day rainy but three presses going all the same

Kerry and Janet selling some of the juice in Oswestry

Another nice idea - seeing how much you can grow in a crate

This is Silver posing in front of the old apple tree in our garden...

...still absolutely loaded with apples

This is just a day's windfalls from our tree

Thursday Lightworkers Group - 24th October 2013 - Connecting Earth, Human and Cosmic Energies

All sorts of patterns and possibilities, join in via Facebook here:

The signs of the Zodiac laid over the human body - intriguing...

 Let’s ignore scale, (which I think is an illusion of our 3D view of space anyway), and imagine that the Earth, our individual human bodies and the whole cosmos are each three spheres of energy, all the same size and all occupying exactly the same infinitely small and also infinitely large space. If that’s too much to visualise why not just relax, clear your mind and ask your subconscious to take over the journey for you:-)

...the Zodiac laid over the Earth

I’m particularly interested in just how connected we humans are, one thing this group has shown me is that distance is no object, if we choose to connect with each other in different countries we can. I think we can develop this ability to share information, find design solutions to problems and much more. This is going to be so useful as and when our technological-industrial way of life collapses. This is a conscious evolution into a more peaceful, aware and co-operative state.
Ruth has observed how plants seem to communicate, even in an 8’ by 4’ vegetable bed. Basil and chille plants seem to act as communicators helping other plants to find and absorb nutrients they need. How do they do that? Well let’s explore that this Thursday. The mycellial network is a vital part of forest systems, doing a similar job and also recycling dead plant material back into the soil. I was delighted to see this article: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-fungi-responsible-carbon-sequestration-northern.html which describes how fungi, the fruiting bodies of the mycellial network, are responsible for most of the carbon sequestration in northern forests. This is a bit mind-blowing for me as it suggests that there is at least one system that we can encourage that will help to draw carbon out of the atmosphere and to draw us back from the nightmare cliff edge of runaway climate change.
I feel that there must be other kinds of life scattered throughout the cosmos, some much more developed than our own. Maybe there are other planets where life has been through a similar stage to our own and there are beings who have had to learn to lead a different way of life so as not to destroy their environment – so why don’t we also ask for their advice on how to do that?

Thursday Group 17th October - Earth Energy in Cities - Trees and Us

Our Thursday Lightworkers session was focused on connecting with Earth energies and was really interesting. It feels vital to connect better energetically with the Earth but how best to go about it? I got the feeling that it's important to approach the Earth in a gentle, thoughtful, neutral, listening way. You know how unpleasant it is when you meet somebody who bombards you with their energy - I guess it's the same for trees, Earth spirits. Also I feel we need to be aware of our speed, some Earth energies have a much slower rhythm than us, we're never going to make contact with them at our usual pace.
EARTH ENERGIES IN CITIES
I never felt comfortable in most of the parks down in Brighton, it was if the Earth had been hammered into submission or driven out and I longed for some wilderness. It's wonderful to be living where we are now, surrounded by all different kinds of woodland, some of it hardly visited by people at all - an amazing opportunity to explore all this stuff. I feel every drop of rain and ray of sunshine so much more intensely than I ever did living in town. We're aware of so much life about us, especially the birds. All the same, most people live in cities and I'm sure you can still connect with the Earth there. Apart from anything else, the Earth has the potential to revert to it's natural state where you are, look how plants are making a comeback in Detroit, so it's possible to tune in with potential forest or other states wherever you are. Anyway, all kinds of life have evolved to the state they are in at the moment in a network, as grass eating animals and grasslands evolved together. When we realise that we are part of the network of life and not separate from it then we can start to rebuild true wealth, natural wealth, the diversity of life and local abundance, in our cities and in the countryside.
TREES AND US
We can have a wonderful partnership with trees. Watching everyday life here you see how much trees are part of a network. A cow comes along and eats some of a trees leaves, or scratches itself on its bark knocking off small, low shoots. A branch of a tree is blown off in a gale or breaks off under the weight of fruit it's carrying. Fallen apples are eaten by all sorts of shape and size of creature and by fungi. So when we care for trees and use their products we're doing some of these same things, pruning, eating fruit. I was pruning one of the apple trees and felt it would be a good idea to chop up some of the twigs and leave them around the base of the tree, which would happen naturally. I was so pleased when a while later I saw that there was a frog in amongst the thinnings. I would say that the trees enjoy a partnership with us, it feels as if they are happy to be useful and of course the more useful they are to us the more we will care for them.