Philosophy

Here is where I (Don) get a chance to give vent to my views on the world. Hope you find they strike a cord or somefing.

Well the big issue is where are we as a species. Particularly those of us with the affluence. Now is the time for effluence.

My view is that we have raced to our present position sometimes giving scant attention to technological solutions we have adopted before rushing on to the next. Our challenge is to pull our heads back from the plethora of information "out there" (out here?) and save ourselves before its too late. To me its a case of rescuing my attention. The place to start is with my own body waste. The food I eat already comes from too great a divergence of sources for me to give it sufficient attention at present but at least my body waste is something on a more manageable scale. Previously I happily pushed the button and let the flush take my waste to join that of others around me before gathering at a place controlled by my local council for 'treatment'. It needed no thought. It also gave the council incredible power over me. Maybe if I can take charge of my own body waste I might feel confident at taking charge of other areas that rightly are my own responsibility.

The rewards have been incredibly palpable. In Aotearoa (NZ) we have some incredibly wild and beautiful places. More and more people are finding these places and coming to stay. What was once OK when only a few came was a 'long drop'. A hole dug in the ground below a seat placed in a wooden shelter. The 'long drop' is still there but no longer able to cope. The feeling to be had returning home with all our own faeces for compost in our own back yard after spending a whole month in that wild place is well worth having, and unable to be priced.

More later........

Now later ........  peak oil is looming on the horizon and we may all be needing to pay a lot more attention to our immediate environments than any of us anticipated. If you aren't aware of what peak oil means then a google search will reveal a wealth of information. Should solve tourism. It seems likely that it won't be many more years before if we don't grow it we don't eat it. I am hopeful that we in this county have the sense to gather ourselves into manageable units and to work together for our joint survival in time to establish a crop base to live off. Can we really reinvent community and sacrifice our individual freedoms to the good of the many? Challenging times.

A bit on reality. 52 years hasn't tort me much, least of all, how to spell; but I believe that everything pulses in every dimension. Some of the dimensions are pretty big in both time and space. My definition of reality is that which captures most of my five senses the most. This no doubt is why we feel most alive when making love. Touch, taste, smell, sound, sight are all very much engaged. Conversely any one sense or two senses over used are clearly bordering on the unreal. Our culture has become adept at making facsimiles of reality and representing them as the real thing. Movies, reality TV, this internet whatever. Only a few senses short but increasingly good enough. So I better stop writing this and return to the five sense reality before I find myself with tunnel vision. Children and parrots are great teachers.

Even more later....... We have established a solar energy system capable of running our home and have reduced our energy bill by much more than a half. We will eventually achieve our goal of total independence but need to wait for a lot more of these bogs to sell before this is realised. We have also installed a solar water heating system that delivers almost all our summer hot water. In winter we use a wet back. We would love to build an eco home but our health not being wonderful leaves us where we are for the time being.