Yesterday we were reconnoitering a spot for the Pentecost scouts’ camp of our son. They got the o.k. from a farmer to do the camp on a beautiful place called Angel’s meadow, in a forest on a hill. Since they wanted to place the kitchen tent in the forest to protect it from bad weather, they had asked the local authority to whom the forest belongs. The map showed stripes of about 10-15 m width going through the forest, and each stripe belongs to another owner. The owner of the nearest stripe refused the kitchen tent, the second allowed it. Now we had to see where there was a convenient spot. In the thick forest you just discover here and there a plug – and finally, wet from the rain, we located a spot for the tent. You think you are in nature, but is is full of mentally fixed divisions.

The same theme in a different setting:

When I was yesterday deleting old e-mails, I re-found a link about a website on Indo-European languages, which an Indian friend had sent me some months ago (fascinating how this big language group of several hundred languages has similar roots – the wisdom teachings trace the origins far more back than contemporary science).

The author of the site is a 25 year old American lady, Jennifer, who is an English Language Assistant near Annecy, France. In her blog she mentioned that she was just about to leave, because she was jobless at the moment, wasn’t allowed to work, since she didn’t have the permission, and that (yesterday) she would return back to the States. Permissions fix barriers, something so common, that we don’t even think about it and take these mental conceptions for natural.

I dropped her a note in a post. I was astonished about the parallels between her situation and that of a friend in the US. Her situation is reversed to that of Jennifer, and she also left a comment in Jennifers blog. She is studying Linguistics and Creative Writing and working as an assistant at the University of St. Cloud (and she had been helping for a while translating the Lunar Messenger). She might have to leave the US because of having just a student permission. Again mentally fixed barriers of the legal regulations.

There is so much regulation in every part of life that you forget that life as a whole is a unity, that our concrete mind is crystalising and segmenting. On the spiritual path you learn to come out of this fragmentation and at the same time live in it and learn to handle it in an intelligent way, changing thus ways of behaving.

The concrete mind – a storehouse of knowledge, of analysing and dividing

A friend sent me a video yesterday of a monkey teasing two little tiger cubs. The video is posted on several platforms, here you find one. It is named “Monkey with a death wish”, but somehow the monkey seems to be clearly calculating the risk and balancing it against the fun of winning. For each time the monkey somehow succeeds in cheekily escaping the tigers – cleverness gains over power. Enjoy.

Today is Beltane day, the astronomical midpoint between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice.

The astronomical date for this point can vary from year to year. Beltane was celebrated by the Celts around the 1st of May or the nearest full moon. It is the time of fertility, when nature displays its full beauty of spring to bring about new life.

You find more information about the annual rhythms on the website of Archaeoastronomy, where they have a countdown of the annual equinoxes, solstices and cross-quarters.

You might read in the Letters on Spiritual Astrology on Taurus about the Radiance of Beauty: “The beauty of the flower lies in the totality, not in a part of it. Beauty is caught nowhere in the form, but reflects through it.”

In the last weeks I had been working on compiling the elements for the Annual Report of the World Teacher Trust (WTT). Groups and individuals from different countries of the West, which feel related with this movement, have sent reports, about group livings (seminars) and about their good-will activities in different fields of social service activities as well as their spiritual work. The report is mostly in English, some contributions also in the local languages of the groups.

I have been doing the co-ordination and editing now since five years. Though it is quite some work, I like it. It is very inspiring to see the manifold good-will initiatives. In the course of the years several substantial activities have arisen out of the spiritual impulse of the WTT and our teacher, Dr. K. P. Kumar.

What fascinates me with this movement is that the focus on practice arises out of a deep spiritual impulse, and in general there is a hearty relation in the network of people. For me the annual report is an occasion to keep in contact with a number of persons. So it is a good networking instrument. It will be circulated to the groups and interested individuals in the course of May, but not in public. People committed to good work in silence don’t want their names to go out.

The report also makes me think of how difficult it is for many to establish a good balance between the different fields of life: Professional work for maintaining the living, family life, social contacts to keep good exchanges, then, for those who walk the spiritual path, maintaining a regular rhythm of inner work, plus some kind of a service activity. The report is for me a good testimony how people grow when they work with these essentials.

I come across others who lose themselves in fancies, in books and in imagining about sublime topics. Interested in many things they fail to focus on the essential and to go into depth. Respecting the basics is most important to gain a stable foundation. And building the foundation often takes years of perseverance.

The network of sprouting life

I yesterday came across the wibsite of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Last November they have launched a worldwide “Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign“. People, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments are encouraged to enter tree planting pledges online and help planting at least one billion trees worldwide during 2007.

At the moment there are already 10,549,705 trees planted and pledges given for 810,485,520 trees. “We have but a short time to avert damaging and economically debilitating climate change. The goods and services provided by forests are worth billions if not trillions of dollars to the global economy. Forests are natural and economically important ‘sinks’, sequestrating carbon from the atmosphere and locking it away in trunks and branches. Globally, forest cover is at least one-third less than what it once was. It is time to reverse the trends, it is time to act” says Achim Steiner, UNEP executive director.

Al Gore writes in Earth in the Balance: “The symbolism – and the substantive significance – of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.”

Many nations and individuals have joined the initiative, also artists, and on the UNEP-website you find instructions how to plant trees or animation videos (wmv) and more material. They have also beautiful sayings on “Trees and Humanity“. Here are some:

“If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed.
If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree.”
Chinese poet, 500 BC

“He who plants a tree loves others beside himself.”
English proverb

“They are beautiful in their peace; they are wise in their silence. They will stand after we are dust.
They teach us, and we tend them.”
Galeain ip Altiem MacDunelmor

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
Greek proverb

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
Martin Luther

“To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.”
Mikhail Gorbachev

“Trees are poems that Earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.”
Kahlil Gibran

“The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously the products of its life and activity; it affords protection to all beings.”
Buddhist Sutra

“If what I say resonates with you, it is merely because we are both branches on the same tree.”
W. B. Yeats

Old Olive Tree in Delphi, Greece

A friend from Belgium sent me today a beautiful powerpoint presentation entitled “Woman“, with colored images and verses of women, for women, and men, throughout the world. There is a quote of former UN president B. Boutros Ghali: “Now, more than ever, the cause of women is the cause of mankind.” Here you can see it as pdf, but without music.

I found it also on the website of WUNRN, Women’s UN Report Program & Network, an NGO dedicated to women’s rights. For a spiritual perspective ou might also like to read the Lunar Messenger on Woman and Man.

Chris Jordan was a successful lawyer in Seattle, USA. Then he decided to resign and work as a photographer. Today, he is a thriving artist with a great number of expositions. He and his wife made a deep transformation of their basis of life – the outcome is documented in most impressive photo series about the accumulated detritus of our consumption. Here are some excerpts from an interview, and also from his website:

“My spirit was dying inside, and I knew it, but I was afraid to make the leap into photography full-time because of the possibility of failing. The thing that finally got me going was a new kind of fear that crept up behind me over a period of several years: it was the fear of not living my life. This fear was motivating – it kind of pushed me forward.”

Today he is portraying American mass consumption: “The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.”

“This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.”

“As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so.”

His photo series carry titles like: “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption” – “In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster” – “Running the Numbers – An American Self-Portrait”. The pictures are showing “a slow-motion apocalypse in progress”. Have a look at the website of Chris Jordan. His pictures are now also exhibited at the Q2 Gallery in Second Life.

Cans Seurat, 2007
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds:

Partial zoom:

Detail at actual size:

Thanks, Chris, for the permission of reproduction.

I just came across a fascinating YouTube-video on the permaculture project “Greening the Desert” (you can also see the video in a better quality from here). In this story, Geoff Lawton talks about re-greening the deserts of Jordan. By applying the principles of permaculture, the Jordanians managed to salvage a heavily salted environment and turn it into a green oasis. Geoff Lawton lives and teaches permaculture at his farm near The Channon, a small community in Australia.

See also our blogpost “From Wasteland to Paradise“.

There are innumerable ways of bringing good will into daily life. One interesting initiative is “Couch Surfing“, an online community that has started 1999 in Montreal and now has over 200.000 members in over 215 countries. They are trying to network people who like traveling with others who offer on a free basis a city tour, a common meal or even a possibility to stay over night (“Couch Surfing”). They say about their work:

“CouchSurfing seeks to internationally network people and places, create educational exchanges, raise collective consciousness, spread tolerance and facilitate cultural understanding.

As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to create world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a mean to accomplish this goal.

CouchSurfing is not about the furniture, not just about finding free accommodations around the world; it’s about making connections worldwide. We make the world a better place by opening our homes, our hearts, and our lives. We open our minds and welcome the knowledge that cultural exchange makes available. We create deep and meaningful connections that cross oceans, continents and cultures. CouchSurfing wants to change not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world!”

Another way of couch surfing:

A friend sent me the photo of a beautiful celestial object in form of a red square, from the site World Science. They write: “The im­age was com­piled with da­ta in in­fra­red light from the Cal­i­for­nia In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy’s Hale Tel­e­scope at Pal­o­mar Ob­serv­a­to­ry, and the Keck-2 Tel­e­scope atop Mauna Kea, Ha­waii. A star at the cen­ter, named MWC 922, is spil­ling out twin cones of out­flow­ing winds and may be about to ex­plode as a su­per­no­va, re­search­ers say.”

Such pictures inspire awe in view of the sublime nature of cosmic expressions.

(Image cour­te­sy Pe­ter Tut­hill, Pal­o­mar/Keck)