Shopping Carts in Ravines

I had two ideas for books to write. 

Then I read this book, and only had one idea left. 

I strongly encourage you to get a copy and absorb it. 

(I bought it at a York U textbook store…
I really should’ve noted what course it was for!)

From the book Wholeness by Alex Gerber Jr.

DISCONNECTION

Reductionist, overspecialized education, information overload, and a host of other social, psychological, and economic factors have led to a society that is disconnected from wholeness.

Bombarded on all sides by “communication,” real connection that is fundamentally honest, open and forthright is hard to find.
Disconnectedness is exacerbated by the mass media, especially television and movies, which feature endless themes of violence, greed, murder, manipulation, deception, and domination. The fact that such behaviour exists in “real life” is no excuse for its relentless reinforcement.

At the same time, our desires for connection, certainty, and fulfillment are constantly stimulated by advertisements that combine state-of-the-art consumer psychology with sophisticated and seductive production techniques.

This disconnectedness has enormous social and psychological consequences. The philosopher Ivan Illich expressed the situation well: “So pervasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences, but actually our sense of possibilities.”

The theoretical physicist David Bohm (1917 - 1992) suggested an alternative:

Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, i.e., his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the human mind itself.
If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, than that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken and without border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to mind in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

…

Many people sense a void in their lives, an absence of purpose or meaning. Education, counseling, and meditation (for example) can address this situation. As people learn about wholeness and experience it directly, personal transformation occurs. A psychological/spiritual window opens and purpose appears or is rekindled.

As one group of students at an alternative high school learned about the holistic options that already exist for humanity’s success, in one hour their collective attitude transformed from lethargy, apathy, and cynicism to excitement, relief, and hope for the future.

Although hopelessness seems to engulf many people today, this outlook can change very quickly.

The energies associated with the direct experience of wholeness are transformative.

Big scandal, some poor folk living in a middle class area (no, NOT the building pictured above!):

The quiet street that runs off Danforth Ave. near Broadview Ave. has been in the news since it was revealed that three houses there, valued at nearly $500,000, are owned by the Toronto Community Housing Corporation and are rented to low-income families.

The issue is that Case Ootes feels taxpayer money could house more people for less cost in ghetto highrises, while others argue that healthier communities are built out of better integration.

Neighbour Tom Allen said that he had no idea his neighbours’ home was TCHC-owned social housing, and would not have otherwise found out. The difference between The Bridle Path and Jane & Finch, on the other hand, is pretty immediately apparent to anyone from either.

Just like the difference between the horrible building pictured above, located in a miniature ghetto between Spadina and Bathurst on the south side of Sundad, and these TCHC-owned homes that so tastelessly camouflaged their residents’ worthlessness amongst the fantastically-moneyed citizenfolk who belonged on the street.

Simply dumping all the city’s poor in hidden areas, like the anti-grid Regent Park now under reconstruction, is one thing… but in areas like Weston, that low-cost housing specifically replaces industrial employment on a mass scale, and the huge numbers of penniless people are left choosing between working at Tim Horton’s or drug dealing and gun crime (those are literally the only sort of employment options left in the area).

Weston’s food bank is closed more often than not and lacking pretty much always, Weston has more jobs-for-youth services than jobs to give those youth, and if people in this and similar areas weren’t isolated from the rest of the city, it would’ve been damn obvious a long time ago that we need to do something!

via Neatorama.

I know I’m not the only person I know who can relate to this, and the fact that it’s an ’80s take-off makes it that much more relevant today.

I’m proud of this girl, if that’s fair to say?

Well, it’s been nearly a month since the Om Re:union Project’s Re:treat festival took place (around the summer solstice) and it’s about due time I come back down to Earth and put into words what I experienced.

Well, actually, if you know me, you know I tend to compile things… so here’s what I actually wrote by hand at the festival, bearing in mind that I haven’t actually hand-written anything in literally years:

One day after the solstice, 2007

I’m sitting on a cliff’s edge overlooking a rocky pair of ponds.

Really, it’s more of a wet rockbed than a pond or lake.
It’s quite nice though.

I’m here for the Om Festival Re:Union Project.

I haven’t been to an Om since 2004, which was the final year for the broadly-publicized festival, open to the public.
In the years since, Om has transitioned into being a closed community, though it remains open to applications.

The moon’s exactly half-full.

I’ve been picking up cigarette butts, as for some reason smokers don’t realize butts are litter. Just an aspect of a whole habit of denial, I guess.

The joints, on the other hand, are rolled with birch bark filters… they’ll decompose, unlike the synthetics and carbon of the cigarettes.

It’s getting dark and the bass just kicked in. Time to go party.

We talk pure Earth but sleep in plastic tents.

At least at Om, the stages are powered by solar panels (very impressive) while teknival’s 15 radical stages require 15 radical gas generators.

Understand that we’re trying our best, though, genuinely.

We’ve been born into a horrid plastic system and at this point in our history it’s literally almost impossible for people to break free, in psychological, cultural or lifestyle activity terms.

I wonder what life will be like for Haven, the 6-year-old boy here who volunteered to be a model for a Mark Jenkins-style tape sculpture body cast. It was pretty funny watching him be wrapped in saran wrap and tape.

Again, people even commented on the waste, but decided it was alright based on its artistic value.

It’s the same thing with computers. They’re disposable, deliberately obfuscated toxic contraptions that consume ever-increasing amounts of electricity.

But they’re helping us break free.

It’s literally impossible to be separate from the system when born into where we are. But we know that and are fighting it… Unfortunately every move we make, at least initially, does damage.

Eventually, we may own land, grow crops, use solar and be thoroughly self-sufficient, and we are trying…

The Om people have long had the plan of buying a piece of land.

It’s also something I’ve thought of alot. Two of my friends have family farms and could conceivably be down, Cowboy in particular, given his description of his lifeplan.

Several quick notes:

• The food (made from the random array of donations everyone brings in and prepared by continuously-changing volunteer groups, then served out freely at regular meal intervals and with snacks out at all hours of the day and night in between) is fucking incredible.

  So much larger servings than 2004 and even more than I can eat… which is a limit that barely even exists. Sushi, salad, rice, soup, chili, lentil stew, bread with pesto, tortillas, and oh my god melted vegan chocolate with granola and mixed fresh berries. One of the best vegan desserts I’ve ever had. The guy making the soup threw some of my ginseng in to energize and revitalize everyone. Very cool.

• I had a wicked conversation with Solomon who gave the hugging workshop and 2 other people about free parties, free culture and the post-society waste niche it exists in, as well as the oft-ignored fungi kingdom, the decomposers with incredible and unique properties that exist in an overlooked niche gap.

  I was telling Solomon that animals are actually closer to fungi than plants, and while I only meant taxonomically/genetically in an evolutionary sense, I just realized that we free radicals behave quite like the fungi, especially the ones that had colonized a tree stump up amongst the camps on the ridge and were glowing bioluminescently in the dark.

  I told Solomon, “You can build a kingdom from the things Toronto throws away.” Free culture, like fungal culture, is often disregarded from outside and thrives on that which is discarded.

• Paranoize came on late and then dropped the best set I’ve ever heard him play. He’s actually like one of Toronto’s best DJs. Given that he knows so many Guv people, it’s very respectable that he isn’t a big sell-out.

I’m very impressed with how much ORP has developed on Om, which felt special but also seemed like a hippie-leaning yuppie commercial weekend escape. This is so much more of a genuine community of this type than I’ve ever seen.

It makes Petra’s assertion that Teknival is a DIY party, not festival, (at least as it exists now) ring true.

I really like the announcements system here. A combination of a walkie-talkie network, message boards + signage, and group-hollering to make good use of word of mouth.

I also really like how much new technology has been integrated. Steve Mann has brought up his hydraulophone, which I’ve only seen at Nuit Blanche 2006 and the Ontario Science Centre. Also, the solar panels (though there definitely is a gennie down at the Home Bass stage now) and geodesic dome tents all over the place.

What with my mom giving me this ‘hippie gothic’ article about a commune that’s still around from the ’60s (not to mention free everything-important-in-life!) and my dad taking me to the cottages with Chris Brown back in the day and other things……. You know, I think I might be a bit like Haven after all.

This genuinely seems like a sustainable (or at least headed in that direction) model for an alternative lifestyle that is neither urban nor rural, but naturalistic.

If the Baby Boomers have infused their children with the energy and ability to divorce ourselves from the suicidal global machine and I’m experiencing this junction in history out of which evolves a synergistic, co-dependent sustainable lifestyle framework, then infinite blessings upon them.

If not, they fucked us all over for SUVs.

I’ve got faith in my mom + pop, though. I think they’re owed some karma.

2 days after the solstice, 2007

I went to Moon Bass to find it littered with shimmery ribbons. I started picking them up to clean them up, then decided to make bracelets from them.

And it turns out Steve, the first person I met at my first genuine party experience, produces and live-PAs some of the best techno I’ve ever heard in my life.

Mike Soma’s set was awesome too, much talked about around the fire while corn roasted.

I feel like I’ve broken through from my individualist hard ghetto sense of social relations and really connected synergistically with alot of people here.

The feeling of operating in a smooth and totally positivity-oriented direction is beyond euphoric.

I think I’ve discovered secular spirituality through this idea of being a part of a greater whole, which is self-aware and consciously synchronized and harmonious with both itself internally and its surrounding environment.

The internet’s a pretty good one for that, too, and really I think it’s an important part of all this.

I always wanted to be a superhero.

“Everybody works and nobody gets paid, because we love it.” That’s the slogan…

I just finished duty as a garbageman…

…which brings to mind the often-hurled attack on anarchism of “who will take out the garbage if everyone does as they please?”

I know plenty of people who are more than happy to do such dirty work, and when I feel like I’m part of something good and positive, I can actually enjoy it myself. I enjoyed scampering through the festival collecting garbage and recycling, assisting people with random things along the way… and when I came home, I enjoyed doing the dishes too, which had been piled high and colonized long enough that I ought to be signing rights agreements with them.

Om showed me, for the first time, what it really meant to be a perfectly-functional part of something…

My entire life to date had been one of ghetto contraryness and cynicism fused with a reductionist education and worldview.

Previously, I’ve always conceived of the world in relation to inner Toronto, my anchor point. Now, I feel much more detached and floating free but as a part of a broader whole, and the bad attitude seems simply stupid to me.

Where I grew up taught me to fight against others to get what I wanted for myself, both in terms of the ghetto childhood and the capitalist system.

Om showed me that, rather than being a bratty cancer cell, I can be a key part in a beautiful and all-encompassing whole.

This is the part where I don’t use the word enlightenment.

Some Om photos, more Om photos.

Now I’m off for a couple days on a site-scouting mission for Northtek!

Bike Pirates, a collectively run, not-for-profit bike space is now open Saturday and Monday at 457 Bathurst St 1292 Bloor, just south of college (right across from the beer store)

Attention all swashbuckling cyclists! Corsairs on cranks! Freebooters with freewheels!

Though we haven’t battled with imperial navies (yet!), doesn’t mean we don’t know the thrill of top speed sailing through a sea of concrete and asphalt, of banging together a ramshackle vessel and pedalling it to the ends of the earth, of realizing we don’t need THEIR transportation, THEIR tools, or even THEIR laws! And for those of us who’ve more than once thought that those two skinny tires sometimes feel more like a roaming pirate republic, we present our most ambitious project yet;

A new bastion, one part workshop, one part renegade trading port. This is our pirate utopia.

-Recycled bikes sold on a sliding scale
-Free access to tools and recycled parts (we’ll show you how to use them if you don’t know)
-Anti-car infoshop

Bike Pirates will be open every Saturday and Monday from noon til 5pm at 457 Bathurst St 1292 Bloor

As well, the Secular Freethought Centre is now open daily from 1-9pm at 216 Beverley St.

The SFC is quickly becoming a headquarters for different atheist, humanist, and skeptic groups, and a place to hold meetings and events. However, an even more important purpose for the SFC is as a drop-in centre. We hope for it to become a place for individuals to drop by to peruse the library, use the wireless internet, have some good philosophical discussions, or simply hang out. The SFC has opened to the public this week and things are already looking very positive!