Farmers Feed Ego's

I recently was hired at a local gas station (not really my cup of tea when it comes to work), but one thing I have learned from this job is that farmers drive big loud trucks, love to brag (beep) about it, and are all apart of one giant cult of friends. They are the type who drive daddy’s Lincoln to school, actually the Lincoln daddy bought for their sixteenth birthdays, and with their glamorous Lincoln they choose to take up three parking spaces by parking diagonally. To me this just helps me put into perspective just how much their ego's must be compensating for.

But here's the twist: I have met one of these cult members, and he is genuinely a nice guy, but it's not as if all of these cult members are alike. He told me that he has friends that will not stand to associate with people unlike him. Talk about fitting the profile. But he also told me that several of his friends have their lives planned and ready to go. Along with daddy's Lincoln, they get daddy's farm, and the millions that reside within it. They get so much, that it's easy to offer a 16 year old friend a job and the house in the future. Holy shit I can't imagine living in such a way. Obviously no spontaneity and or any dreams of the future.

When did farming become so popular? This "farming cult" is never ending. I realize I live in a small town which industry consists of farming and tourism, but honestly, I have never been aware of just how many of these glamorous farming cult members there were. Significant enough for me to feel it is important to write this blog about it. Don't get me wrong, I am extremely interested in local agriculture, but this is clearly mass production, a multi-million industry which individuals and their giant ego's thrive from.

To conclude this pointless rant, I have just come to realize that the only reason my awareness of these cult farmers is because I'm working at a gas station that borders the part of town the turns into farming territory. Yes the multi-BILLION dollar gas industry, which blood-sucking politicians egos thrive from.

The End

Le concert

Patrick Watson & The Wooden Arms

12/12/2009 8:00 PMatToronto w/ THE LUYAS
@ Queen Elizabeth Theatre
190 Princes Blvd, Toronto, Ontario

new bands and lots to hear.

The Magnetic Fields
Hope Of The States
Architecture In Helsinki
The Mahavishnu Orchestra

Baby I love your beard.

GOOD NEW GOOD NEWS

BEIRUT
July 9th
Phoenix, Toronto, Ontario

ROBOTS

I need love too, and I want to be loved by YOU Dan Mangan.

Home

Sustainable homes made out of trees

AMAZING

Whole tree buildings can compete favorably with conventional construction while offering a more durable and fireproof structure and a higher level of craftsmanship. From the perspective of the community – whole tree construction invests a greater proportion of its costs into local jobs and materials than conventional construction and also promotes healthy forest management for local timber resources.

Love or Life?

This man, please, can I marry him?
This video, can I be in it, please?

Live off the Grid:

Step 1:

• Find a remote location
• Moderate climate conditions all year
• Natural resources (fresh water, vegetation for food and shelter, livestock)

Step 2:

• Build a shelter
• Gather materials
• Power sources (solar power, wind power, water energy, none)
• Handmade furnishing

Step 3:

• Recruit a team of like minded people
• Adapt harmonious responsibilities (agriculture, structure deveopment, resource management)
• Create music, love and magic

The idea of "Living off the Grid" is not to form a secret society or cult with a mission to shut out the rest of the world, but rather to create a balanced community with a sustainable way of life that does not include industrial goods and international trade. The environment chosen will provide the resources used for survival.

So who's with me?

Embrace Me

I have come to realize that I now feel much to old to be in my highschool, even though I am only doing a semester victory lap. It's not as if I'm literally that much older then the majority of the students, besides having the ability to be served at the bar before them all. But I'm really feeling that the time has come to end these "special" highschool memories. The rest of the world is finally beckoning me inside. Some of it is so welcoming; the culture, opportunity, the people.. But I also don’t want to become immune to the sound that is created to covered up natures truth. I wonder how many people travel into the world feeling lost, mindlessly being sucked into the sound, no second thoughts, just lost. 

Mother Nature, please embrace me.

Hillside Inside Performers

Ani DiFranco (only Southern Ontario appearance)

Hawksley Workman

Martin Sexton (only Ontario appearance)

Final Fantasy

Basia Bulat

Woodhands

Bahamas

Delhi 2 Dublin

Elisapie Isaac

Socalled

If I wasn't afraid I would:

• wink at all sexy men
• be free of insecurites
• fly in my dreams every night
• substitute walking with bellydancing
• have no worry all my life

tell me what you would do

new music new music new music

http://www.myspace.com/saidthewhale
http://www.myspace.com/thevioletarchers
http://www.myspace.com/thebuttlesschaps
http://www.myspace.com/danmangan

Rainy Hillside Festival

Final Fantasy


Lightening

Our Own Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old Harvard-trained and published brain scientist when a blood vessel exploded in her brain. Through the eyes of a curious neuroanatomist, she watched her mind completely deteriorate whereby she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Because of her understanding of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human form, and an amazing mother, Jill completely recovered her mind, brain and body. In My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, Jill shares with us her recommendations for recovery and the insight she gained into the unique functions of the right and left halves of her brain. Having lost the categorizing, organizing, describing, judging and critically analyzing skills of her left brain, along with its language centers and thus ego center, Jill’s consciousness shifted away from normal reality. In the absence of her left brain’s neural circuitry, her consciousness shifted into present moment thinking whereby she experienced herself “at one with the universe.”

Based upon her academic training and personal experience, Jill helps others not only rebuild their brains from trauma, but helps those of us with normal brains better understand how we can ‘tend the garden of our minds’ to maximize our quality of life. Jill pushes the envelope in our understanding about how we can consciously influence the neural circuitry underlying what we think, how we feel, and how we react to life’s circumstances. Jill teaches us through her own example how we might more readily exercise our own right hemispheric circuitry with the intention of helping all human beings become more humane. “I believe the more time we spend running our deep inner peace circuitry, then the more peace we will project into the world, and ultimately the more peace we will have on the planet.”

This incredible story played a part in my personal when my mother read the book while recovering from a severe Brain Aneurysm. She was deeply inspired by Jill's experience, and it helped her refill her life with hope, happieness and meaning. My mother being a musician decided it was time to bring the creation of music back into her life. She wrote a heart felt song about her own enlighting journey through pain and strenght.

Almost a year later, my mother has been recovering miraculously, performing her music, including exercise in her everyday life, and living life to its fullest. She also found an amazing amount of ambition and decided to email the women who helped her fight through her near death expereince.

Recently in late October my mother performed her song, Colours of Me www.myspace.com/noniecrete , at a conference that Jill invited her too and made her wildest dream come true.

COMMING SOON!

Baby I Love Your Beard

Sustainable Bamboo

Bamboo is the stuff of green dreams these days. Not only is it a winning combination of strong, lightweight and flexible; it also scores highly in the sustainable stakes, being super fast growing and easy to harvest locally in many parts of the world.

GREEN BUSINESS

Small Green Business Ideas
By robertludvig on Aug 19, 2009 In Getting Started, Jobs

So you want to start your own green business but you don’t have the necessary capital to get something off the ground. You don’t need to be rich to start your own green business, just make it a small green business. Ideas can be hard to come by at times, so the focus of this article is to offer a few ideas to budding green entrepreneurs. My last post about SPIN farming got me thinking about what people can do on a smaller scale to make extra income.

Clothing made from organic material is becoming very popular. I often visit local farmers’ markets in my city, and the amount of booths dedicated to selling clothes made from environmentally friendly materials has at least doubled in the past year, in my estimation. One such business that I stumbled across at a farmers’ market is Monkey 100. Their t-shirts are made from 70% bamboo and from 30% cotton. All of the t-shirts come with an environmentally conscious message. Environmentally friendly gift-baskets are also exploding. Fill them with organic and ethical facial creams, soaps made from goat’s milk, or flowers and organic fruits - just use your imagination. After coming up with the perfect idea for a small green business it could be challenging to find a place where to sell. The key is a farmers’ market.


http://www.futureofbusiness.info/

Celebrate

Here, in this timeless moment, we experience life.Where the essence of one may decease, while the other is born. We celebrate the lives we have lived, and the lives we will come to live; and this celebration is our life. We must choose to experience existence, otherwise the core of creation becomes meaningless. These tears do not leave us empty, they merely form a depth of realism we cannot visualize. This laughter echos trust, for it's purity endures darkness. And when we reach into our hearts, we find that love cannot be forgotten.

Hollywood Responsibilities

Although we live on one earth together, we all live in separate realities. A family who affords to take a vacation each year, owns two televisions, at least one computer, and two family vehicles that sit in the driveway of their beautiful suburban house, can hardly stand to imagine themselves in the position of a family that build their shelter out of mud and straw and can barley manage to feed themselves from day to day. They can hardly imagine it, so why would they have to? Of course we have infomercials, non-profit charity organizations and magazines readily available to inform ourselves of such families in need, and we are even handed every opportunity to make a difference, but the beauty of luxury, is all the splendid distractions it has to offer. Who would rather sponsor a child when they can buy the Movie Network instead? And why on earth would anyone give to a non-profit charity organization when they could give their child an opportunity to play on a sports team with that money? And the magazines, don’t even get me started on the magazines, there’s just too much going on in Hollywood to bother subscribing to anything that doesn’t give the latest low down on Brangelina!It is just too incredibly easy to forget about all the people in the world suffering from injustice, poverty, hunger, and disease. It’s almost as if we have to suffer with them when asked to stop and think about their lives, with the guilt pulsating through our vanes, and the greed in our fingertips and even the envy hanging off the tips of our tongues as our minds wonder to that brand new pair of shoes we long for, regardless of any slaves hands that may have perfected that swoosh that we so love to wear.

“People everywhere enjoy believing things they know are not true.It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves And taking responsibility for what they know.”

Brooks Alkinson

Lust of the Libertine

Are we striving for things we already have? A misconception of desire perhaps. Not your new cellphone, but the ability to communicate. Not a new video game, but the depths of imagination. More money? Or abundance? We seem to sell ourselves to a materialism in a desperate attempt to seek things we are manipulated into believing we don't already have. Technology is an incredible resource, as is gasoline, but our greed seems to drive us as society into a cage that won't let us explore the world for what it really is and the beauty we possess. Possession, wow what an interesting definition:

• the act of having and controlling property
• anything owned or possessed
• being controlled by passion or the supernatural
• monomania: a mania restricted to one thing or idea
• a territory that is controlled by a ruling state

Hm, so does it really make sense that we humans possess inanimate objects? Controlling, owning, restricting, ruling these things with no power of thought, action, or life for that matter. It seems to completely contradict itself actually. The power lies entirely in our hands. We restrict ourselves, by using fear and authority. And believe me those who have the power of authority, know exactly what they can do with that power. Manipulate hundreds, thousands, millions of people? It doesn't seem too unlikely knowing that we are bombarded with advertisements and numerous forms of media every single day of our life. The power has even left the hands of those in charge. Life has been given to these inanimate objects, in such ways that we fiend for them, we rely on them, and for most of us, we need them to survive. We can only make a difference if we help the majority of people to enlighten and free themselves of their cages. It's almost as if these cages aren't even locked at all, we choose to stay in them because of fear. Lets help eachother out of these cages.

“Where is wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

T.S Elliott

Two Simplistic Choices

Is it fear that lets us fall? And courage that ascends us? As if divinity offers us two simplistic choices: hide or expose, mask or reveal, open or close ,exhibit or conceal.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Nelson Mandela

Constant Change

Change, constant change. A deep abyss of our minds credibility, waves upon waves of dreams. Do our thoughts manifest into the reflection of our faces? And do the stories of our lives become the ink against the pages? The plans we make for the future, a life of never ending branches, do we really mean to strive to afford survival? My eyes define so much more then words, and my heart is bearing so much more then descriptions. What is life when a soul is empty? Eyes that are drained of all meaning. Does the bullet kill us? Or is it the one pulling the trigger that really dies? We see ourselves as fragile, but our essence will never decease. It's the choices that we make that lay the paths beneath our feet. Such great power in our hands. Shall we choose to lay down the spells that create the enchantment, is for each of us to seek.

Confession of a Consumerist

Maybe the whole world should play reality on repeat until we finally start to hear meaning under our screaming egos. Or maybe we should reach beneath our name brand clothes and feel the bruises labourers bare for their own survival. Or perhaps we should look at our hands to find precious diamond rings that have been replaced by missing fingers.

Conscious Coma

Everyone consists of a past, and they all hold mistakes big or little, that some may like to consider regrets. As much as beliefs and values change and surroundings evolve, this word does not seem correct. Everything brings something new, and carries life in a constant journey. The child within that is hiding, unknowingly blinding love. No pain ever imagined, no reason to ever seek. But as times change, sacrifices are unwillingly made, and translucent lessons taught through nature rather then knowledge, which create a part of this path that can seem so beautiful. Awaken and examine the false steps taken, to learn from them is to grow. When darkness is acknowledged, may a light then shine to cast only shadows that contrast illumination.

Disease of Darkness

A fight for desperate attention fades into blank expressions, seen on the faces of mannequins in store windows pleading carelessly to be consumed. Greed infects the hearts of those blind souls, only looking to snatch what ever they can get their hands on next. A closet full of toys which joy has seemed to be forgotten... somewhere a child yearns for a friend, comfort, bliss. But yet, the disease of darkness forbids it! Those who have lost the euphoria of life, for the price of the material, have also misplaced their morality you see.. To ignorant to realize that all those possessions caught in a cycle of replacement have freedom sewn, printed, sculptured, nailed, glued into them. Yes you, yes me, and certainly your bff Paris.