SolarClarity

How to Green the Dollar

2012-02-11T10:16:00.002-05:00

Aliens to be visiting New London

2012-01-23T15:35:00.000-05:00

"The flying saucer is an airborne philosopher's stone." - Terrence McKenna

Alien Folk will be performing gypsy jazz, folk and country swing compositions at New London's best coffee house scene, the Bean & Leaf on Feb. 4th from 7 to 10 PM. The band features Jen Taylor on vocals and ukelele, Hans Lohse on accordion, percussion and flute, Chris Devlin Brown on acoustic bass, and Justin Vood Good on guitar.

2011-10-14T22:32:00.001-04:00

2011-08-15T13:20:00.001-04:00

World Premier of EARTH SONG at the Sanctuary

2011-07-14T11:50:00.000-04:00

2011-05-23T15:59:00.000-04:00

Liquid Groove

2011-05-18T12:25:00.001-04:00

My Spirituality

2011-05-04T18:40:00.003-04:00

Spiritually, metaphysically, I feel that our whole culture, our whole civilization is lost in symbols, so obsessed with representing and picturing and theorizing the world that it has lost the real world, the experienced world. And this departure from reality cannot be healed by philosophy as rational reflection on things, even though philosophy does have its role. Socrates’ joke about philosophy is that philosophy is the cure for the very disease it causes – thinking separates you from reality, it objectifies the world, but the self that is part of the world – the world Self, the World’s self – will not and cannot be objectified. The attempt to objectify it, to control it, to set up the human ego as the Absolute, as the origin of spirit, is behind all the violence, all the pathologies of our culture. There is pervasive seething negative energy that everyone feels, is feeling all around them, even inside them. And my question is: what if I took all of my attention away from all the crises around, not forgetting them, but not focusing on any aspect of them that I cannot control. This means, for example, I’m not going to give too much thought to international or national news, not going to watch television news. And instead of focusing on resistance and opposition to a corrupt system, I were to put every second of my energy identity into creating something real and positive. And if I had the idea, which I do, that there’s a larger coordinating process going on in the environment, one that is working around you, and if you listen to it and intend to do so, it will begin to work through you. And that this process is not only intelligent, in the way that any ecosystem or complex dynamical system in nature is – intelligence being a term for the way that information-energy-awareness is stored, organized, and brought to bear on the future greater coherence of information and energy and awareness in the Universe. And that I believed, even had started to experience directly, that this whole process is not only intelligent, it is profoundly, eternally wise, it is super cosmic intelligence and awareness, pure consciousness. And simply by reaching out to it in your everyday life, patiently waiting to be utilized by it, while you develop the purity of your heart and your Intention, more and more this process will work through you, that you will feel that you Are it, and that you will be given whatever you need to go forward. My question is: what would happen?

Get Your Heart On!

2011-01-07T12:11:00.002-05:00

The Beat of Celebration

2010-12-10T10:53:00.004-05:00

Happy Hanukkah – Christmas – Hijra - New Year – Kwanzaa - Bodhi Day – Ashura – Yule and Liutha - Posadas Navidenas to You!

"I love you my brother whoever you are whether you worship in your church, kneel in your temple, or pray in your mosque. You and I are all children of one faith, for the diverse paths of religion are fingers of the loving hand of one Supreme Being, a hand extended to all, offering completeness of spirit to all, eager to receive all." - Kahlil Gibran

Music of Love of Resistance of Community of Freedom

2010-12-09T23:29:00.000-05:00

2010-11-29T10:59:00.002-05:00

"Green Riot Cops" by the amazing graffiti artist Banksy

2010-11-25T09:48:00.000-05:00

World Oil Production Peak graph: There's a consensus: we've peaked!!!

2010-11-18T12:32:00.001-05:00

Post-Civilization Studies at the Sanctuary

2010-11-08T08:52:00.003-05:00

The popular understanding of anarchism as a political philosphy, even among professional political science pundits on CNN, is silly and uninformed, but telling in its ideological naivete. Most people have been told that anarchism means anything goes, and we have partly the word itself to blame - "an-arche" meaning "without principle" - that says a lot about the Greeks who coined it, and who could only understand order in terms of hierarchy. Anarchism as a serious political philosophy is a serious attempt to understand heterarchical, or non-hierarchical, possibilities for organizing human society - ways which do not involve command-and-control structures, which can tolerate the full expression of human freedom and the flourishing of social and environmental justice. Jensen is one of the few voices speaking for greater rationality and understanding on this highly ideological issue - radicalism in Howard Zinn's sense of not stopping at the surface, but driving your thinking all the way down to the very roots of the crisis. Don't miss this special event!

Last Kirtan of the Season, Sunday, Nov. 7th 4 PM

2010-11-03T09:16:00.001-04:00

2010-09-20T20:23:00.000-04:00

Spiral Traditions: Red Tent Temple, February 21, 2010, Bloomfield, CT

2010-08-16T14:41:00.000-04:00

Spiral Traditions: Red Tent Temple, February 21, 2010, Bloomfield, CT

Labor Day Kirtan at the Sanctuary

2010-08-16T13:43:00.001-04:00

End of the Summer at the Sanctuary

2010-08-05T08:09:00.001-04:00

Growing a New World

2010-07-02T15:50:00.003-04:00

Dear Students of Growing a New World:

If you'd like to share any thoughts or images of your plant or if you have any questions about growing or sustainability, email them to vood@cummings-good.com and we'll post them.

Good luck with your new project and stay hopeful!

Yours, Justin & Leni

Kirtan returns to the Sanctuary

2010-06-23T20:04:00.007-04:00

The Sanctuary hosted its first Kirtan this June, an event which was an overwhelming success and a very magic evening. Dave Russell will be bringing his band, which includes his wife Holly - an incredible singer - back on July 9th to keep the energy going. Admission is sliding scale, $15-25 with children free. The event will begin at 7:30 again, with a potluck dinner at 6 PM for anyone who would like to arrive early, mingle with the band and Sanctuary community, wander the grounds, and enjoy some homemade falafel and pizza. ($5 donation). If you have not yet experienced Kirtan, check out Ken Simon's short video of the June Kirtan below. Om Shanti!

2010-06-17T21:58:00.001-04:00

Sacred Music Events at the Sanctuary

2010-05-31T13:12:00.004-04:00

Kirtan, Drumming Circle and the Tao of Voice this Summer

EAST HADDAM – The Sanctuary at Shepardfields will be hosting several sacred musical events this summer, including a Kirtan (June 11), a Tao of Voice workshop (July 11), a monthly drumming circle which meets on the first Friday every month, as well as other musical performances. Sacred music reflects the Sanctuary’s mission promoting interfaith spirituality, wellness, and the cultivation of mindful living through the joys of music, creativity and community development. For more information visit www.oursanctuary.org.

Kirtan at the Sanctuary

Kirtan is a powerful form of meditative music which involves the chanting of mantras, or names for different forms of divine-human energy. Meaning ‘to repeat’, Kirtan is a participational kind of music which involves a back and forth call and response between the musicians and the audience which creates a crescendo of beautiful, positive energy designed to open the energy centers (chakras) of your body. Participants can sit, meditate, do yoga or dance while they chant along.

The June 11^th event will feature accomplished Kirtan musician Dave Russell and his band (www.daverussellkirtan.com) based in West Hartford which perform throughout New England and the US. According to Russell,

Chanting calms our minds, opens our hearts, boosts our inner knowing (intuition), and energizes our beings. As explained by quantum physics, all matter vibrates and sound vibrations penetrate every cell of the body. Even black holes in the Universe have been proven to emit a sound of B flat! From a standpoint of physical healing, chanting recharges the brain cells, lowers blood pressure, balances heart rhythm, and induces relaxation and elevated moods. Kirtan is for anyone, regardless of belief or quality of voice. Any voice is perfect for Kirtan.

Originating in Bhakti Yoga, a devotional movement within the great Vedic spiritual traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism, Kirtan was primarily found within ashrams until recent decades when it broke out to become part of the mainstream discovery of yoga and meditation. There is a current surge of interest in this especially joyous form of musical meditation in the US and the Sanctuary plans to offer a regular opportunity to experience it in the lower valley of the Connecticut River.

As a healing, energizing form of music, Kirtan embodies the interfaith values promoted at the Sanctuary. Transcending denominational religious concepts, Kirtan expresses the idea that spiritual practice takes us beyond language and belief, that the potential for human wholeness is present in each individual, and that the cultivation of the deeper awareness of self can take many different forms other than traditional religious practice, including nature and ecological awareness, music and art, sports and service to others.

The Tao of Voice

In addition to Kirtan, the Sanctuary will also be hosting the Tao of Voice workshop on July 11th. Offered by author, musician and life coach Valerie Walsh, this event is designed for singers and non-singers alike and focuses on “giving voice” to unacknowledged parts of our selves. Anyone wishing to develop their singing voice or who wrestles with confidence in public speaking is encouraged to attend. According to Walsh, the workshop is

…designed to guide you into the awareness of your own body, your own instrument. Through the breath and the power of intention, we learn to re-direct out anything in our body/breath system that blocks or inhibits our authentic voice. This workshop is designed for anyone interested in understanding more about their own voice, how it may get stuck, held back, even exiled in the body and how to free it up through the breath. 

Participants are asked to bring a song to sing, or a piece of prose, poetry or writing to speak.

Additionally, the serene setting of the Sanctuary grounds make it an ideal place for a drumming circle which meets on the first Friday each month at 7 PM. The group meets around a bonfire near the Sanctuary meadow, or inside the yurt if the weather is bad. Other instruments are welcome and some drums are available.

About the Sanctuary at Shepardfields

The Sanctuary an interfaith spiritual life center and environmental education 501(c)(3) offering sacred beautiful space and educational and community resources for personal transformation, environmental restoration and sustainable living. Located on a forty acre land preserve in East Haddam, CT, the Sanctuary offers courses in yoga and meditation, interfaith philosophy and spirituality and hosts community and private events dedicated to living in harmony with self and environment.

Website: www.oursanctuary.org

Email: info@oursanctuary.org

Phone: (860) 319-1134

Visit: 59 Bogel Rd, East Haddam CT 06423

Trust: Heart

The Exit 6 Band to perform with Antigone Rising at the Kate June 25th

2010-05-19T15:07:00.001-04:00

On June 25th, Exit 6 will be performing with Antigone Rising at the Kate Theatre in Old Saybrook. Named after the exit on Route 9 where five of the band members hail from, Exit 6 is a seven piece soul R&B outfit which plays danceable arrangements of soul, rock and jazz standards. Deep stretched out grooves, soaring vocals and dueling guitar improvisations by three guitarists with jazz, rock and blues influences give the band a very warm emotional vibe, eclectic and novel interpretations of familiar tunes, and an infectious energetic rhythm. Personnel include Jason Baker (vocals), Justin Good (guitar), Chris Gosman (guitar), Joel Jacob (vocals), Brian Wilkens (guitar), Mark Zanardi (bass), Jeremy Ziemann (drum kit and percussion). For more information email info@exit6ct.com, call 617-733-9270 or visit www.exit6ct.com.

Changing the Dream: The Pachamama Alliance at the Sanctuary

2010-05-05T09:32:00.006-04:00

MAY 2nd - This past Sunday the Sanctuary hosted the Awakening the Dreaming Symposium - a powerful group meditation on the unsustainability of current human civilization. The symposium was created by the Pachamama Alliance, an organization which was arose when the Achuar tribe in Colombia reached out to activists in the United States to try and avoid the prophesied destruction of the world by their crazed brothers in the North. The meditation invites us to share our pain about the state of the world and together, to intensify and focus our intentions and visions for a more harmonious existence – to change the dream.

The event was facilitated by Janice Le Conche and Mike Harris, close member and Board member of the Sanctuary, and Chris Robedee and Elaine Lengyel, regional representatives the Pachamama Alliance, and was cosponsored by the Earth Charter of the Lower Valley as well as our new partners at the Unitarian Universalist Church through Angie Swanger of their Social Responsibility Committee.

Charting the Connections between Beauty and Ecology

2010-04-23T15:05:00.000-04:00

Exit 6 at the Ivory

2010-04-05T10:01:00.005-04:00

Exit 6 is back at its haunt in Deep River to lay down dance grooves, soaring vocals and dueling guitar madness. The band will be celebrating their new demo lovingly recorded in Killingworth by band member Brian Wilkens. Early fans may get a free copy of the new recording featuring blistering renditions of soul classics.

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory
or a truck passing by a music school?
John Cage

Alien Folk Music now on YouTube

2010-03-24T09:28:00.008-04:00

Alien Folk Music has just produced its first video single, a new version of Tom Wait's

song "Cold Cold Ground." The band, a mixture of jazz, gypsy burlesque and circus theatre,

is deeply influenced by Wait's musical mysticism and finds its own voice in this classic tune.

Hans Lohse, who sings and plays accordion on the recording, also created the video using

images he has collected and created.

Alien Folk Music is also available for gigs. For more information or to receive a copy of

their new demo, contact Kris DiErrico at (860) 526-8867.

Personnel

Jennifer Leigh Taylor vocals, guitar, ukulele

Hans Lohse vocals, accordion, percussion

Chris Devlin Brown acoustic bass, ukulele

Justin Vood Good guitar

Rich Tortorigi drums, percussion

The song was recorded by Eric Lichter at Dirt Floor Studios, Chester CT, Nov. 2009.

Vernal Equinox at the Sanctuary

2010-03-23T22:11:00.003-04:00

We went looking for faith on the forest floor and it showed up everywhere. - Neil Young

The Long Salvation

2010-03-18T22:34:00.016-04:00

Remarks on the Long Emergency with James Howard Kunstler and others.

"The American People will keep living the way they're living now until they can't live like that anymore, and then they'll do something different." - James Howard Kunstler

By Justin Good

March 6th East Haddam, CT • The Sanctuary at Shepardfields, in partnership with the Earth Charter of the Lower Valley and the East Haddam Green Committee hosted what one participant described as the most radical discussion event he had ever witnessed in East Haddam Center. The high energy discussion concerned some of the most progressive and visionary schemes for mitigating against multiple global crisese including Peak Oil, Peak Debt, unsustainable surburban sprawl and global climate change being the key threats.

Kunstler debating the future of education with a perplexed State Representative. (Pictures courtesy of Janice Le Conche)

James Howard Kunstler, visionary author of The Long Emergency and other books on near future global energy famine and the history of suburban development architecture in the US, headlined the event with sobering analysis of the unsustainable debt levels in the US, gloomy petroleum production statistics and hilarious and frightening anecdotes about social and political narcosis unable to face near certain truths about the dark state of the American economy. A discussion panel which included Linda George from the Oracle Institute, Hans Lohse, a visionary green architect and musician, Maureen Hart, a pioneer in the use of sustainability indicators to quantify sustainable community development, and Patrick Pinnell, architect and designer of the new Goodspeed Opera House project in East Haddam Center, spun a rich tapestry of hopes and dreams for a better society to emerge from the multiple stresses of an impossible situation.

Hans Lohse discussing the importance of teaching cooperation rather than competition and Maureen Hart discussing how important it is to measure what is most important to us.

Since the advent of Peak Oil and Climate Change in recent years, inspiring changes have begun to occur here in the lower Connecticut River Valley. Locally, we’ve seen a new proliferation of farmer’s markets, an interest in organic gardening, the sounds of chickens on front lawns which used to be reserved for quiet mowed stretches of green grass, clothing swaps and bartering and an explosion of interest and participation in community events, whether it be music or dancing or eating or giving. We’ve seen green committees and the development of municipal plans of conservation and development which are incorporating guidelines for sustainability and resilience. We’ve seen a Peak Oil caucus in our own state legislature and going green has become a new fad, a new lifestyle choice with broad appeal if not yet a coherent reality.

At the personal level, we are seeing people beginning to experiment with sharing, of productive resources and time as the pressures of debt and economic contraction make the maintenance of their material affluence increasingly stressful. All around I am listening to friends and colleagues rethink their lives, trying to imagine a life with less stuff and more time, less mediated entertainment and more enjoyment of the everyday, less travel and more staycations, while they struggle to pay their bills, keep up with the rising costs of food and energy, and keep the status quo on its rails a bit longer.

Nevertheless, while most of human existence has lived sustainably if not peacefully, we – the affluent citizens of the highly industrialized North - are still floating midair, like the Warner’s Bros. coyote who has overrun the mountain highway and has just realized that he is about to plunge downwards.

Local, state and national politicians still speak of economic recovery as inevitable and economic growth as inherently desirable and feasible. And most people still think of wealth in terms of financial holdings, take for granted the spectacle of food abundance at Super Stop and Shop, and see travel vacations to places like Hawaii and Mexico as necessary entitlements for the stress of their modern existence.

Our municipal leaders need to come to terms with the reality that sustainable growth is an oxymoron, and that food and energy issues – local economic resilience – needs to be placed front and center of development strategies; that emergency preparedness is broadened to include not simply avian flu but looming energy famine - a likely feature of our economy in the near future.

Transition Towns offers a helpful framework for generating consensus and community action on the twin issues of Climate Change and Peak Oil, and helps us to imagine together a society which is “energy-lean, time-rich, less stressful, healthier and happier” (Transition Town Handbook). Anxiety is what you feel when you don’t have a plan, and it can easily drain the energy you need to press ahead with your new life. But beyond the collaborative exercises in imagining a silver lining during energy descent, lies the very hard work of engaging and supporting at the municipal level boards and committees which are already preoccupied with their own daily business. All politics is local and after all of the exciting visions of a sustainable society have been discussed and digested, lies the tedious, often boring, ego-enflaming work of building trust and long-term relationships with each other that will make up the real foundation of sustainable living. Few people now are mentally prepared or spiritually willing to take up this work. Are you willing to do this work?

Personally, beneath all of the reskilling and green job training and solarizing and weatherizing and cooperative financing that is part of the mechanics of sustainability there lies the change of heart that is required to access the personal emotional energy needed to respond to the crisis-opportunities of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

In this long emergency condition which James Kunstler has done so much to help us see, and which the TT movement is helping us to organize around, we will be misled by any attachment to better or worser days. In Kunstler’s novel World Made By Hand the brave reader meets a world which at once horrifies and assuages with a vision of abundance and wholeness which slowly restores itself after violence of systemic economic and social collapse. As I see it, things will be both worse than we can imagine and better than we can imagine.

Is this a paradox? It is a paradox only if one continues to indentify with the modernist dream of a life of complete individual freedom, material affluence and total control over one’s own life. This is not just a modernist fantasy, it is the fantasy of the ego, the same fantasy of life which the great spiritual traditions have been serving to show us a way past for thousands of years. In E. F. Schumacher’s seminal essay, “Buddhist Economics,” in his class book Small is Beautiful, he argues that a sustainable society requires a new understanding of what true wealth is, and he describes this new understanding as the same as the old Buddhist understanding of right livelihood; that true happiness is not the maximizing of material consumption and individual economic freedom, but the clarification and perfection of our own attention, our awareness, our being awake and aware in the world, to others and to ourselves. And if awareness is our goal, then disaster and anything which interferes with our will, which frustrates our actions and challenges our assumptions, is our best friend. Are we ready to confront ourselves in this way?

Laura George radiating infinite love.

As Kunstler emphasized, it is misleading to speak of “solutions” to our predicament, more sensible to speak of “intelligent responses.” There is a silver lining, but it will be one which is built slowly, unfolded piece by piece, day by day, year by year, as a community joint endeavor. It will be a process that is often jarring, sometimes traumatizing, and we will slowly be deprived of the many ways that our energy-expensive industrial modernist suburban economy helped us to shut out of mind the larger processes of life. For someone committed to the ideal of endlessly growing material consumption, this change will be a long hellish emergency. For someone seeking a more meaningful life, deeper connections to nature and to community, and committed to the achieving true self-knowledge as their highest goal, the crises we are facing could not be more favorable. They constitute, in fact, a long salvation, and overwhelming proof that Universe truly loves and cares for all of its Avatars scoping out things on the material-biological plane.

(Many thanks to Mike Harris, President of the Earth Charter of the Lower Valley for all of his energy in putting together this special event.)

Balancing the Internal and the External

2010-03-16T18:17:00.001-04:00

Do you ever feel as though you share a soul with other beings in the world?

2010-02-25T10:31:00.004-05:00

“We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience – a new feeling of what it is to be ‘I.’

“The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing – with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent and isolated ego…

“The sensation of ‘I’ as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time – a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever.

“Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence ‘I’ am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.

“The difficulty in realizing this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it.”

From Alan Watts, “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”

WE ARE AVATARS OF UNIVERSE.

Leader of Clusterfuck Nation coming to the Lower Valley

2010-01-31T13:11:00.003-05:00

WHO: James Howard Kunstler, Author
WHEN: Saturday, March 6, 2010, from 4-8 PM
WHERE: The Gelston House at 8 Main Street in East Haddam.
CONTACT: Marlene Buchanan, 860-537-0292 or Michael Harris,
860-873-8989

The Long Emergency and What it Means for Your Community

Join James Howard Kunstler at a lively event on Saturday, March 6, 2010, from 4-8 PM at the Gelston House at 8 Main Street in East Haddam. Mr. Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency – Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century will discuss the implications of peak oil and the suburban predicament. He urges the reframing of expectations and the reorganization of our economic activities in the face of unfolding environmental and social calamities.

The Long Emergency tells us what to expect after we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and the end of the honeymoon of affordable energy, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale… The book asks the important question, ‘what will happen when our current plagues of global warming, epidemic disease, and overpopulation collide to exacerbate the end of the oil age?’

The event is sponsored by the Earth Charter Community of the Lower Valley (ECCoLoV). After the lecture there will be free hors d’oeurves and a cash bar, followed by a panel discussion about steps local governments and individuals can take to prepare for the future.

Admission is $20 if tickets are purchased by February 14, or $25 at the door.

Tickets are available online at www.earthcharterct.org, or mail a check payable to “ECCoLoV” to ECCoLoV, PO Box 32, Moodus, CT. 06469, include your phone # or email address for confirmation. Please call 860-873-8989 for more information.

The event is co-sponsored by the East Haddam Green Committee and The Sanctuary at Shepardfield.

Slow Latin Groove Plus Alien Folk at the Griswold Inn

2010-01-13T23:54:00.001-05:00

Live Soul for Earthlings by Exit 6

2010-01-13T23:52:00.000-05:00

The Transition Town movement

2010-01-08T15:10:00.001-05:00

In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.

Listening without Effort to Everything Around You

2010-01-07T11:11:00.004-05:00

"When you make an effort to listen, are you listening? Is not that very effort a distraction that prevents listening? Listening is a complete act; the very act of listening brings its own freedom. The more you listen to everything, the greater is the silence, and that silence is then not broken by noise. It is only when you are resisting something, when you are putting up a barrier between yourself and that which you do not want to listen - it is only then that there is a struggle." - Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

Have yourself an alien holiday

2009-12-19T09:05:00.006-05:00

Alien Folk Music will be offering a free holiday show at Simon's Marketplace this coming Wednesday, December 23rd, in Chester from 4 to 7 PM. Drop by for some late afternoon hot chocolate or coffee and some otherworldly Holiday music.

Alien Folk Music is an eclectic fusion of German accordion, modal and Latin jazz, Blue grass, country swing and gypsy circus music. Covering a wide emotional and musical spectrum, the band offers spacious, rhythmically elastic and highly syncopated arrangements of classic and original compositions held together by a melancholic mood of ecstatic pathos and spiritual searching.

The musicians are: Jen Taylor (vocals, guitar and ukulele), Justin Good (guitar), Chris Brown (acoustic bass), Hans Lohse (accordion, percussion and flute), Rich Tortorigi (drum kit and percussion).

Simon's Marketplace is located at 17 Main Street, Chester center.

Partnership of the Personal I and the Cosmic I

2009-12-13T14:27:00.003-05:00

Excerpts from Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol. 4, "The Luminous Ground"

"Somehow – whether it be in color, or in a harmonious garden, or in a room whose light and mood are just right, or in the awesome wall of a great building which allows us to walk near it – some placid, piercing unity occurs, sharp and soft, embracing, tying all things together, wrapping us up in it, allowing us to feel our own unity. What, physically, is this unity which seems to speak to us of I?

"When I look at a thing which has a living quality, sometimes I am aware of it, almost as if it is faintly glowing. I am aware of something like light – not actual light itself, but something softer, something very like it – in the thing. The more it is alive, the more it seems faintly to shine.

"In my later years, as I have encountered this sensation more and more concretely, and with more and more certainty, it seems to me, that I am seeing God, the glowing of all things, shining out from that old brick wall, or from that bush, or from that face, or from the flowers in a vase.

"It is the same life, already described so many times. But in the end, this is what I am left with, the sensation that somehow, in this living thing, there is something faintly luminous, there is something streaming from it, something visible, and something real.

"It has been said that God is immanent, that all matter is imbued with God, that God is the ultimate material of the Universe. And that may be so. But if so, why is it that this shining forth of God is visible more in some things than others; why is God visible more in some events, and less in others. What causes the life in things; what causes God to be more visible in one thing, more visible in one moment, less visible in another?

"I am going to start with the idea that the I exists physically, that there is some plenum, not part of the physical space and matter, but nevertheless there in fact, at every point of what we think of as space and matter… [According to this I-hypothesis], we postulate that there is, in the universe, and underlying all matter, a single plenum or Ground. Above all, it is single, and it is personal. This plenum is the “something” which shall simply be called “I.”

"However, I now add the idea that it really exists everywhere, it is single, underlying all things. It may exist in another dimension curled up in space, or it may exist in some other linkage we cannot yet imagine. I am viewing this plenum as being perfectly connected to all the physical reality that we know about, like a deeper reality which shadows and underlies the first. For the time being I shall say that this plenum is either “I” or “Self,” a huge, single Self, underlying all the matter in the universe.

"[This Self] is not a metaphor. It lies behind, and inside matter and space. It is enveloped by them, and communicates with them, stands behind them and beneath them. It is everywhere. Wherever matter is, this I is also there.

"Now I am going to say that some kind of tunneling can occur, to connect physical structures in our familiar physical domain with the single I-stuff of the plenum. I use the word “tunneling” in the sense that modern physics uses it, to mean a direct connection between two regions which are in different dimensions. I am asserting that some connection can occur between the physical structure of the everyday world of matter and the underlying I.

"The most common example of this tunneling would be the one which occurs in the experience of I and self which each person has. In a human body, which is at least in part a structure of matter alone, the experience of I or “self” arises. In spite of various sociological attempts at explanation, this everyday experience of our selves is not yet understood in a satisfactory way by physics. But it would be relatively easy to understand if we postulate the plenum of I, universal and general, linked to matter, and if it were a fact that the matter in a body, once organized, is able to make direct connection with this I. We would then experience the bridge or tunnel to the I as our own self, not realizing that it is in fact merely one bridge, of a million similar bridges, between the matter in different beings and the I. That is to say, in such a conception the I which one of us experiences as his own self is not a private and individual thing, as most of us imagine it to be, but a partial connection of our own physical matter (my body) to this very great, and single, plenum of I-stuff.

"Now I am going to say, much more generally, that every living center in the matter of the universe – even the smallest center which is induced in space – starts this kind of tunneling towards the I-stuff. And, the stronger the center is, the bigger the tunnel, the stronger the connection of matter to the I. That means, that every beautiful object, to the extent it has the structure which I have described, also begins to open the door towards the I-stuff or the self."

Sanctuary Philosophy: Nine Questions About Love

2009-12-03T11:27:00.008-05:00

Nine Questions About Love
The Sanctuary's monthly discussion workshop
for individuals seeking a meaningful life.

Next class: Wednesday, December 9th, 6 - 8 PM in the yurt

Our last meeting of our nine month course addresses our last question:

What would a society where everyone loved each other look like?

This class will feature a screening of the classic ecological documentary Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh which is narrated and based on the book by the famous ecologist Helena Norberg Hodge. The film offers a moving portrait of a traditional society which is sustainable, egalitarian and deeply beautiful. Discussion to follow along with refreshments. The suggested reading for this class is Riane Eisler's "Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism."

Suggested donation: $15.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields
59 Bogel Road, East Haddam, CT
860 319-1134
info@oursanctuary.org
oursanctuary.org

Spirituality free of dogma, free of authoritarianism

2009-11-30T13:11:00.007-05:00

What does spirituality look like when it is freed from dogma, freed from authoritarianism? What does a spiritual community look like which does not impose one view but supports each individual’s own spiritual quest? Many people have a need to follow and obey a spiritual leader, and do not wish the responsibility of shaping their own inner spiritual vision. Many spiritual leaders and churches are only too happy to play that role, and the consequences can be devastating. On the other hand, there are many who are searching for a place where their own inner spiritual longings can be supported – a spiritual community – but without the trappings of religious cults which impose from above a dogma which must be accepted and affirmed. The interfaith movement aspires to articulate and create such spaces which do not involve imposed hierarchical ideas of what it means to be spiritual. It is a very special and important attempt not just to end religious conflict, but to honor our spiritual longings in the context of a materialistic society and scientific world picture which has no room or respect for spiritual longings.

What is an interfaith approach to spirituality? Different spiritual communities will ultimately answer this relative to their particular backgrounds and interests, and what is key in each case is that the definition of spirituality serve to help the members of a community to explain, understand, accept and ultimately to support, each other's diverse and unique paths to the divine. Some general guidelines which support this project have been formulated by Father Thomas Keating, a leader in the interfaith movement.

Guidelines for Inter-religious Understanding

By Father Thomas Keating

1.The world religions bear witness to the experience of the Ultimate Reality to which they give various names: Brahman, the Absolute, God, Al-Lah, Wakantanka, Transcendent.

2. The Ultimate reality surpasses any name or concept that can be given to it.

3. The Ultimate Reality is the source - ground of being – of all existence.

4. Faith is opening, surrendering, and responding to the Ultimate Reality. This relationship precedes every belief system.

5. The potential for human wholeness – or in other frames of reference, liberation, self-transcendence, enlightenment, salvation, transforming union, moksha, nirvana, fana – is present in every human person.

6. The Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practice but also through nature, art, human relationships, and service to others.

7. The differences among belief systems should be presented as facts that distinguish them, not as points of superiority.

If you are interested in this open-ended, non-hierarchical view of spirituality and spiritual practice, you might be interested in the Sanctuary. The Sanctuary at Shepardfields was originally formed to pursue this beautiful ideal. The Community of the Sanctuary at Shepardfields is a diverse group of human beings, and non-human beings such as plants, animals, minerals and natural systems, who are engaged in a long-term partnership located in and around a 40 acre land preserve in East Haddam, Connecticut. Their mission is to hold sacred space for personal transformation, healing, enlightenment, and the development of a true spiritual community. This community is organized and served by Shepardfields, Inc., a spiritual life center and 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. According to its articles of incorporation, the mission of the Sanctuary is to "operate only for charitable, religious and educational purposes, and more particularly to conduct an interfaith center for prayer, spiritual retreats, spiritual formation and healing."

OurSanctuary.org

Exit 6 back at the Ivory with musical offerings

2009-11-23T16:03:00.008-05:00

After an amazing gig in Armagh, Northern Ireland celebrating the wedding of Jeremy "Wang" Ziemann, Exit 6 will be returning to its haunt at the Ivory Pub in Deep River for Thanksgiving weekend. The soul R&B group will be performing with its current line-up of three guitars, offering a funky counterpoint to its already rich funky stew of vocals and percussion. Come by for deep grooves and stretched out improvisations for dancing and listening.

Laughing Meditation

2009-11-23T15:51:00.010-05:00

Anna Trusky, Casey O’Neill and Todd Little performing “Zen Kitty Litter Box” (All pictures courtesy of Rich Tortorigi).

Saturday, November 21st - Deep River Town Hall

This past Saturday, the Sanctuary teamed up with comedy improv group Comedy on Demand for a beautiful evening of laughter, music, food, spontaneous creativity and the exhilaration of a spiritual community enjoying its own joyful harmony. The energy and spirit of the event were utterly moving and everyone was uplifted by the unity of purpose, and laughing at and with the playful antics of Comedy on Demand.

Kit and the rest of the troupe singing the “Occupational Blues.”

The Karmic Relief fund-raiser began with food prepared by friends and staff of the Sanctuary and with live music by the Slow Latin Groove Project and Alien Folk Music. Comedy on Demand performed two sets of improvised vignettes hilariously exploring various aspects of spiritual life among other topics, getting the audience involved in offering lines to riff off, singing songs, and interacting with the performers’ zany adventures.

Leah Kisselbrack, Anna Marie Trusky, Robin Fox and Michele Ridolfi O’Neill singing.

Special thanks goes out to the following people who made this memorable evening possible:

• Robin Fox for conceiving and spearheading the fund-raising partnership and for her enthusiastic support of the Sanctuary

• The Comedy on Demand performers – Todd Little, Dave Caffrey, Christopher “Kit” Webb, Robin Fox, Chris Devlin Brown, Michele Ridolfi O’Neill, Casey O’Neill and Anna Maria Trusky for their huge hearts and incredible creativity.

• The Town of Deep River for the use of the Town Hall Auditorium

• Kris DiErrico & Hans Lohse (Lifespace Architecture and Design) for energetic support & architectural works

• Janet Cummings Good & Peter Good (Cummings & Good) for the generous gifts of their design work for the Karmic Relief poster, postcard and program.

• Ilene Mitnick & Allison Baldwin for visionary support

• The volunteers who helped out with food, planning and set-up, including Bob Thompson, Steve Albrecht, Mary Murphy, Kris DiErrico, Janice LeConche, Mike Harris, Debi and John Friedlander, Virginia Carmany, Isaac Ruiz, Spruce Roden, Allan Mehlberg Susan Darnell and Casey and Candy Carle.

• Suzanne & Larry Taylor for laughter & spirit

• The Chester Package Store for generous donation of tonight’s wine

• The Sanctuary Founders

• The Universe and Our Blue Planet

The event was dedicated to a special person who is dearly missed, Monica Sakolsky (1961-2009). We love you Monica!

Scandinavian Photography, LLC.

Why couldn't the Buddhist vacuum under the couch?

2009-10-26T21:10:00.006-04:00

Because she had no attachments!

On Saturday November 21st, The Sanctuary will be hosting a fundraising event in partnership with Comedy On Demand (www.codcomedy.com). Karmic Relief: A Cornucopia of Comedy will feature comedy improv by the brilliant East-Haddam-based group Comedy on Demand inspired by suggestive episodes from spiritual and human life. To be held at the Deep River Town Hall Auditorium, this event promises to offer a full evening of spirited culture, beauty, good energy and great people.

Doors open at 7 PM for complementary hors’d’oeuvres and live jazz by the Slow Latin Groove Project.

Proceeds support The Sanctuary at Shepardﬁelds, local 501(c)(3)
spiritual life center and environmental education organization.

Tickets: $30. Limited seating. To reserve seats online visit www.oursanctuary.org
or by mail send check payable to:
The Sanctuary at Shepardﬁelds, 59 Bogel Road, E. Haddam 06423

Sanctuary Philosophy: Nine Questions About Love

2009-10-12T13:13:00.009-04:00

Wednesday, October 14th, 6 - 8 PM in the yurt

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields

59 Bogel Road, East Haddam

(860) 319-1134

www.oursanctuary.org

The Sanctuary's monthly discussion workshop for individuals seeking a meaningful life. Our next class focuses on question number 7:

What does the natural history of love tell us about the meaning of our desires?

This workshop will look at the human theory of evolution and what it tells us about the meaning of love and human relationships. The recommended text for this class is David Loye's "The Ghost at the Birthday Party" (The comments section at the end of the article is a truly enlighted discussion of Darwin and evolutionary theory.) Loye is a systems scientist, Darwin scholar, member of the General Evolution Theory group, and partner to Riane Eisler (author of "The Chalice and the Blade"). Suggested donation: $15.

Exit 6 in Ireland

2009-09-29T08:53:00.005-04:00

Chester, Connecticut's local soul R&B outfit Exit 6 will be performing at Devlin's Bar in Armagh, Ireland this Thursday, October 1st. We will be there to celebrate Jeremy "Wang" Ziemann's wedding to Carry Digby, along with 40+ members of the Chester tribe. This is going to be a very special gig. Drop by if you happen to be anywhere near Belfast.

Be Abducted by Music

2009-09-21T22:20:00.001-04:00

Nine Questions About Love

2009-09-17T13:39:00.011-04:00

The Sanctuary's monthly discussion workshop for individuals seeking a meaningful life.

Next class: Monday, September 21st 6-8 PM in the Sanctuary Yurt, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam CT (860) 319-1134

QUESTION NO. 6: What is gender and how does it shape the ways we love?

This special workshop will explore the role that gender plays in relationships. Suggested donation: $15.

2009-09-14T11:17:00.000-04:00

Exit 6 returns to the Ivory

2009-09-08T11:01:00.000-04:00

Home Grown Grooves

2009-09-01T11:17:00.000-04:00

Music of the Moment at the Sanctuary

2009-09-01T09:57:00.000-04:00

Lily Tomlin at the Sanctuary this Saurday, Aug. 29th

2009-08-24T11:08:00.002-04:00

"If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than 'survival of the fittest.' I think a better idea would be 'survival of the wittiest.' At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing." - the character Trudy in "The Search..."

An Epiphanic Community Event

2009-08-20T22:20:00.003-04:00

The Sanctuary hosted the Big Jupiter and Cirque de Lune community event this past weekend. Members of the larger Sanctuary community including parents of students from the Cirque de Lune summer camp as well as new visitors. Live music, an enormous potluck feast, drumming circle, beautiful weather and amazing views of Jupiter and the four Galilean moons, courtesy of Bob Ballek and his telescope which was set up in the middle of the Sanctuary labyrinth, made the evening magical and resonant with the spirit of community and sacred space.

The main event was a performance by students of the first Cirque de Lune children's summer program hosted by the Sanctuary this summer. The program, choreographed and directed by Jen Taylor, Director of Om-FLY, showcased the mindfulness skills the students had developed during the two week program. Designed to be an integrated educational experience, the program included: yoga, trapeze/acrobatics, meditation and mindful group interaction, music incl. singing and drumming, video production exercises; nature appreciation lessons, informal ecology lessons about composting and sustainable living, drawing lessons and art projects as well as bird house design and construction, taught by visionary architect and builder Hans Lohse. Involving the cultivation of body/mind discipline and wellness, learning to interact compassionately and creatively in a group, exploring creativity in many different modalities, direct experience with natural beauty, and mindful reflection on non-violent living, the program embodies our deepest hopes for what education should be doing and expresses our integral vision of spirituality as engaged, non-hierarchical, holistic, community-based, ecologically-progressive, healthy and fun. The parents were thrilled.

Big Jupiter and Cirque de Lune at the Sanctuary

2009-08-11T22:58:00.006-04:00

Jupiter is reaching opposition this weekend, its closest approach to Earth as we slip by it in our orbit around the sun. It rises when the sun sets, sets when the sun rises. The Sanctuary offers excellent night sky gazing and a telescope will be set up for viewing.

Viewing will be preceded by several special events at the Sanctuary, featuring:

The Cirque de Lune Children's Circus Performance, the cumination of the Cirque de Lune eco-circus summer program hosted by the Sanctuary this month.

With live music from the Cirque de Lune House Band.

And a community potluck barbecue, drumming circle and labyrinth meditation.

This event is a summer celebration of community, nature, creativity and mindful being together, for all ages and open to everyone. Dogs welcome.

Suggested donation: Food contribution or $10 or what you can afford.

www.oursanctuary.org

Local Soul at the Farmer's Market

2009-08-08T15:49:00.005-04:00

Exit 6, Chester-based Soul/R&B/rock outfit will be rocking the Chester Farmer's Market on Sunday, August 9th. The first set starts at the ungodly hour of 10 AM. Come out to catch Exit 6 at this unique venue and get your local food for the week.

Aliens at the Chester Farmer's Market

2009-07-17T08:11:00.003-04:00

Come check out Alien Folk music this sunday at the Chester Farmer's Market. Alien Folk is a fusion of Jen Taylor and the rhythm section of the Slow Latin Groove Project - an extraterrestrial eclectic mix of jazz and folk.

Jen Taylor, vocals, guitar and ukulele
Chris Brown, acoustic bass
Hans Lohse, percussion, accordion and flute
Justin Good, acoustic guitar
Rich Tortorigi, drum kit

Milk at the Sanctuary

2009-07-15T12:25:00.000-04:00

Our partnership with the bees

2009-07-05T17:44:00.003-04:00

“A bee colony is a very wise form of life. That which we experience within ourselves only at a time when our hearts develop love is actually the very same thing that is present as a substance in the entire beehive. The whole beehive is permeated with life based on love. In many ways the bees as individuals renounce love, and thereby this love develops within the entire beehive. You’ll begin to understand the life of bees once you’re clear about the fact that the bee lives as if it were in an atmosphere pervaded thoroughly by love.” - from Rudolf Steiner, Lectures on Bees.

I got stung a couple of times when I was bringing the two colonies back from the Old Orchard farm in East Lyme back in April. It was my first time, but I could sense their anger and agitation from the menacing sound of their buzzing. After all, they had taken a truck from Georgia several weeks before, and now they were being moved around again after a bumpy ride in the back of a pick-up. Now their energy – and mine - is completely different. In my bee suit with leather gloves on, I enter into the sacred bee space as I open up the hives to check on the brood and try and find the queens. It’s a truly amazing experience to be inside their space and to feel the deep coherence of their coordinated efforts to capture and share the sweet energy of the sun. They are starting to trust us, and they seem to like the nook in the corner of the meadow that we chose for them. The hive on the right above is growing much faster than the one on the left, doubling in size since they arrived about six weeks ago.

Our colonies seem to be doing pretty well, so far. Already this year, so-called “Colony Collapse Syndrome (CCS)” has destroyed one out of every three hives on the east coast; an alarming phenomenon given the fact that bees are responsible for fertilizing something like 40% of US fruits and vegetables. Quite amazingly, Rudolf Steiner predicted back in 1923 during a public lecture in Dornach, that a general breakdown of the bee population would occur sometime in the next century, due to the weakening effects on successive generations of bees caused by the industrialization of bee keeping and rearing and the commodification of honey production. In a prophetic moment during an exchange with an indignant beekeeper named Mr. Muller who was defending the new industrial methods, Steiner responded by saying “It is quite correct that we can’t determine this today; it will have to be delayed until a later time. Let’s talk to each other in one hundred years, Mr. Muller, then we’ll see what kind of opinion you’ll have at that point.” (p.178) Mr. Muller has now been proved frightfully wrong.

Only the symptoms of CCS have been studied, not the causes. Hives attacked by CCS end up having multiple bee viruses, not just one pathogen but a systemic failure, a general weakening or breakdown of the bee system which seems to point to large scale environmental causes such as increased toxification, use of antibiotics, electromagnetic activity, or stresses to bees caused by their being driven around in noisy and noxious eighteen wheelers to work on huge industrial farms – just the kind of causes that Steiner saw as interrupting the subtle harmonization that bee societies had achieved with natural systems during their long and steady evolution with flowers and plants over hundreds of millions of years.

At the Sanctuary, we are intentionally entering into a partnership with the community of life here, and bees are one of our partners. We feed them during the colder months, give them a place to stay and look after their home a bit. They in turn share some of their store of magical life-energy substance – that is, honey - that they have evolved to produce out of their own bodies and through the collective quasi-divine wisdom embodied in the hive. An exciting dimension of our partnership with the bees lies in what have to learn from each other, from our different modes of awareness, our different attunements to natural systems, our different ways of accessing spiritual wisdom, our different ways of producing and transforming energy.

Our human sanctuary necessarily is a bee sanctuary and a bee sanctuary is also a human sanctuary.

OurSanctuary.Org

Nine Questions About Love

2009-07-02T09:20:00.002-04:00

The Sanctuary's monthly discussion workshop for individuals seeking a meaningful life.

Next class: Tuesday, July 14th, 6-8 PM in the Sanctuary Yurt
59 Bogel Road, East Haddam CT
(860) 319-1134

QUESTION NO. 4: How do we steal energy from each other and how do we evolve our love?

Our next class will be examining the role of energy in relationships. Do you ever feel like your energy is being taken by someone or something? Do you every feel depressed because you cannot access the energy all around you? Do you ever feel mysteriously energized by some small thing that happens? Are there some individuals who generally give you energy when you talk to them and others who generally take your energy?

The recommended text for this class is Toru Sato’s The Ever-Transcending Spirit: The Psychology of Human Relationships, Consciousness and Development. You can order the book from Amazon HERE, or read online or download for free the book HERE. Additionally, in you want something quicker to read, Sato has recently written a short article, “The Gradual Blooming Process of Consciousness” available HERE making some of the same points he makes in the book.

Here are some quotes from the beginning of the book.

Here he raises the basic question of what the energy of love is:

“The Mohawk native North American tribe has a proverb that translates, ‘Life is both giving and receiving.’ In human interaction, we often say that we need to give and take. Sometimes we give and receive visible things from each other such as food, money, gifts etc., but sometimes we cannot physically ‘see’ what we are giving and receiving. For instance, if I say I will do our laundry if you clean our dishes, most of us would interpret this as giving and receiving. What is it that are giving and receiving (or taking)?

“In many ways it is something we seem to gain when we receive attention and something that we seem to lose when we are forced to pay attention to someone. When we receive attention from others, we feel energized and happy. When we are forced to pay attention to someone, we feel de-energized and often uncomfortable. Thus, perhaps the closest word to this thing we are giving and taking in the English language may be ENERGY.”

What is fascinating about Sato's theory is that he begins with the observation that energy level is actually relative to your perspective! Depending on their perspectives, the same individual can be energizing to one person, and draining to another. Hence the solution to energy is not to hord but to change your state of mind, from scarcity-perception to seeing abundance around you. As Sato puts it,

“The quality of our life is really just a reflection of the quality of our internal state of mind. Our internal state of mind is a reflection of where we are in our maturation process. Where most of us are in our maturation process is a reflection of where we are in the process of evolution.” – Toru Sato

NOTES FROM OUR LAST CLASS ON THE SUSTAINABILITY OF LOVE

Our conversation now has three questions in play:
(1) How can love make you a better person?
(2) Is passion compatible with happiness?
(3) Is it possible to keep falling in love with someone forever?

Our last discussion centered on the ideas of the influential relational psychotherapist Stephen Mitchell who argues that romantic intimacy often fails because we ourselves degrade it, in a self-defeating process he terms “protective degradation”. Romantic love has a special intensity for us because it unifies our two deepest primal longings: the longing for home, trust, acceptance, nurturance (LOVE) and our longing for transcendence, risk, the unknown, surrender (DESIRE). This special fusion of love and desire that makes romance so powerful and meaningful to us also makes it especially dangerous and difficult to control. In long-term relationships, the individuals involved often come to feel that the uncontrollability and unpredictability of desire makes romantic intimacy an unsafe glue for commitment. And so we try to protect ourself (from the painful possibility of our beloved’s failure of desire for us, or of our own failure of desire for our beloved) by subtly degrading the life of that romance and desire so that we will not be vulnerable to its contingencies. We neutralize the force of the fusion of love and desire by separating them – reserving love for long-term relationships and desire for fantasy and flirtation, and “segregating permanence from adventure.” But in so doing, we destroy the very thing that we are so afraid to lose, the unity of home and transcendence.

The key to sustaining romance in this perspective is also the key to living mindfully. We need to be able to desire without clinging, without attachment. We need to master our mind so that we will not undermine the life of our own life in the process of trying to achieve an impossible sense of security. Stephen Mitchell sees this as the truth behind the tragic romantic love story. In his book that we looked, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance through Time, Mitchell sums up his message with a metaphor from another searching romantic modernist, Friedrich Nietzsche:

“In his theory of tragedy, Nietzsche captures the delicate balance in the genuinely tragic, between the creation of forms and the dissolving of forms. Our individual lives, Nietzsche suggests, are transitory and in some sense illusory, ephemeral shapes that emerge from the energy that is the universe and that, in short order, are reabsorbed into the oneness. The enriching tragic in life can be missed in two ways. We can attribute to ourselves and our productions an illusory impermanence, like a deluded builder of sandcastles who believes his creation is eternal. Or, alternatively, we can be defeated by our transience, unable to build, paralyzed as we wait for the tide to come in. Nietzsche envisions the tragic man or woman, living life to the fullest, as one who builds sandcastles passionately, all the time aware of the coming tide. The ephemeral, illusory nature of all form does not detract from the surrender to the passion of the work; it enhances and enriches it.”

Is Love Sustainable?

2009-06-15T15:27:00.004-04:00

NINE QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVE

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is offering a special community philosophy seminar for individuals seeking a meaningful life. This course presupposes no prior experience with philosophy. In this seminar, we will work together to understand the meaning of this mysterious thing by looking at its natural history, cultural meanings, poetry, ethics, mythology and evolutionary possibilities.

Next class: Tuesday June 16th at 6PM in the Sanctuary Yurt, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam

QUESTION NO. 3: IS ROMANTIC INTIMACY SUSTAINABLE?

Our first two questions are now in play. They were (1) How can love make you a better person? And (2) Is passion compatible with happiness? Our next class will take up this most pertinent of questions, is it possible to keep falling in love with someone forever?

FORMAT FOR OUR NEXT CLASS ON TUESDAY, JUNE 16th at 6 PM.

We will be exploring this question through the work of the brilliant psychotherapist Stephen Mitchell. There are many theories of romantic intimacy, many of them with pessimistic views about sustaining the romantic intimacy. Freud’s theory which still influences contemporary theory on this matter, is totally pessimistic on the possibility of unifying love and desire for the same person in a sustainable way. He in fact believed that unifying our spiritual and sexual sides into a relationship was intrinsically impossible and would always degenerate into hatred, fear, loss. Stephen Mitchell’s view, as expressed beautifully in his masterful book, “Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Through Time” is the most inspiring, most optimistic book on this subject I have found. In this class, we will look at his view and try and make sense of his powerful message.

If you’d like some background on his book before class, you can read a review of this book from Salon HERE, or read larger sections of it HERE.

"Our problem with sustaining love and desire in the same relationship is because they orient us toward very different goals. Love seeks control, stability, continuity, certainty. Desire seeks surrender, adventure, novelty, the unknown. In love we are searching for points of attachment, anchoring, something we know we can count on. In desire we are searching both for missiong, disowned pieces of ourselves and for for something beyond ourselves, outside the borders of self-recognition that, under ordinary circumstances, we protest so fiercely." - Stephen Mitchell, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Through Time

Exit 6 back at the Ivory, Saturday June 13th to lay down some fierce musical love

2009-06-08T13:22:00.000-04:00

The Objective Beauty of Wind Farms

2009-06-02T12:41:00.004-04:00

This is a piece I was just asked to write for the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, which is printing a debate about wind farm aesthetics. They wanted me to write a defense of their beauty.

THE OBJECTIVE BEAUTY OF WIND FARMS

By Justin Good

To the extent that wind farms serve to heal the environment and economy by reducing our dependence on dirty and finite fossil fuels, they are objectively beautiful. How can beauty be objective, you ask? Some people find wind farms to be ugly industrial artifacts which encroach negatively on their immediate visual environment. Others love their functionalist-modernist look. Both views are superficial because they are based on mere appearance.

Superficial beauty is subjective because it is based on surface appearances, but deep or true beauty is about relationship. It is about the harmonizing of beings and natural systems, it is about wholeness, and it can be defined in terms of a coherent system. A system is coherent if its existence benefits, and is benefited by, the larger environment on which it depends. When we experience deep beauty, the beauty we experience is not in our eye, it is in the pattern of interaction. The beauty of nature, which everyone can see, is deep in this sense: nature balances and harmonizes opposing forces in ways which make even the most sophisticated of human creations seem impossibly crude.

Consequently, you cannot tell just by looking at a wind farm whether or not it is truly, or deeply beautiful. However, you are able to feel it, provided you are adequately informed about the true ecological ramifications of the energy technology. An oil derrick and a wind turbine might look identical on the surface, but the derrick would still be ugly and the wind farm beautiful. Insofar as wind farms serve to correct the incoherent patterns of development introduced by our hydrocarbon energy system, they shine with a beauty that mimics the stability, interconnectedness and harmony of a bee colony or a river or a flower.

Come Celebrate the Spring with Us

2009-05-21T08:00:00.003-04:00

On Saturday, May 30th from 3 to 7 PM we will be hosting a spring party at the Sanctuary to kick off our summer season. All are welcome, and families are encouraged to come, dogs also welcome. Live music, food and games are sure to make this event a memorable occasion. We will be unveiling our Eco-Temple composting toilet project and there will be a special presentation at 4 PM by architect Hans Lohse, builder of the Eco-Temple, called "The Origins of Beauty". Drawing from his recently completed memior, Hans will talk about the principles of sacred geometry and green design which underlie the construction both of the eco-temple as well as his amazing off-grid dwell he built by hand in the mountains of the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Suggested donation for this event is $10 (or what you can afford.)

Philosophy at the Sanctuary: Nine Questions about Love

2009-05-09T13:36:00.004-04:00

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is offering a special community philosophy seminar for individuals seeking a meaningful life. This course presupposes no prior experience with philosophy. In this seminar, we will work together to understand the meaning of this mysterious thing by looking at its natural history, cultural meanings, poetry, ethics, mythology and evolutionary possibilities.

Our next class meets on Tues., May 19th and focuses on question number 2: Is passion compatible with happiness? (or, Why do the lovers in classic love stories always have to overcome obstacles to win their love? For more information visit OurSanctuary.org.

FORMAT FOR CLASS ON MAY 19th

We will begin by looking at the story of Tristan and Iseult. If you have time, we would recommend reading Joseph Bedier’s telling of the story. You can download for free HERE or purchase on Amazon HERE. You can find a good survey of information about the story HERE at Wikipedia. After discussion the classic version of the romantic love story, we will share our favorite versions of the story from contemporary film, novels, TV, anywhere. If you’d like to bring a snipet from your favorite film to view together, please do so!

To get your juices flowing, start by listening to the famous prelude to Richard Wagner’s operatic version of the story.

NOTES FOR THE CLASS

Our first class concerned the connection between love and ethics or goodness. We began with the question, how can love make you a better person? Most people have experienced and understand the feeling of how when you are in love with someone, your love and respect for that person makes you want to be a better person. But not always. If you are in love with a person who is not virtuous, their desire for you to act a certain way to please their narcosis may lead you to morally hazardous behavior yourself. So what kind of love/desire is the kind that moves you to transcend yourself, and which kind turns you into a slave? This is the topic of Plato’s dialogue on love called Symposium which we discussed in our first meeting.

Plato ultimately argues (or seems to argue) that the only kind of love that is guaranteed to lead to complete and perfect satisfaction is not the desire/love – what the Greeks termed “eros” – for a person at all, but the desire for wisdom, the desire for the Whole of life. This kind of love – literally a kind of falling in love with the world its its truth and evolutionary possibilities – is what offers true eternal bliss, because it pulls you away from the temporal satisfactions and inevitable dissatisfactions with identifying with your Ego (or someone else’s Ego). On this perspective, our eros for individuals is actually a deeper desire to identify – to find our true non-ordinary identity – in a cosmic unity with the truth of the universe. Is this an unrealistic, grandiose goal or is it an inspiring, and urgent one?

In our next class, we pick up the theme of romanticism, and the kind of love that historically was named by the French word “amour”. Historically and philosophically, romanticism rejects the ancient Judeo-Christian-Greek emphasis on the eternity and ethicality of love, and instead focuses on the beauty and goodness of the Individual – not simply as a soul but as an irreducible unity of body and mind and spirit. Passionate desire and longing for a unique individual is the key phenomenon in romanticism.

Each concept of love carries with it a basic question, a tension or a problem which shapes and gives meaning to the struggle for existence and happiness and awareness. For romanticism, the key to passion or amour is that it transcends other reasons that bound people together, such as political alliances – the key function of marriages in the medieval world – or economics, or obligation, or something external to the experience of intimacy itself. This is the significance of why the first and archetypal or classical love story of Tristan and Iseult is a tragic adulterous and politically incorrect love affair. True passion shows itself by trumping every other reason for wanting to be together with someone, regardless it seems of the larger consequences.

2009-04-28T17:27:00.000-04:00

Free your ass and your mind will follow

2009-04-18T16:29:00.004-04:00

Exit 6 is back, performing at the Ivory Pub in Deep River, Saturday April 25th. Come down to see live soul R&B featuring eclectic arrangements and grooves to dance your ass off. First set starts at 9:30 PM

The Ivory Restaurant and Pub is located at 1 Kirtland Street Deep River, (860) 526-2528.

To contact the Exit 6 band, contact (617) 733-9270 or email vood@cummings-good.com.

Spring at the Sanctuary

2009-03-19T11:44:00.007-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – March 19th. The Sanctuary at Shepardfields announces its 2009 schedule of courses and events, and unveils its new website OurSanctuary.org.

Beginning this week, this local environmental education non-profit organization will be offering courses and workshops in yoga, meditation, circus arts, philosophy and integrated spirituality for all ages. In addition, the Sanctuary will be hosting a busy season of special community events including musical open mics, poetry readings, outdoor film screenings, a local music festival, and an innovative environmental arts circus summer camp.

The Cirque de Lune /Eco-Circus Camp is the Sanctuary’s holistic arts and environmental educational summer camp for kids ages 7-18. Activities include circus arts, trapeze, acrobatics, yoga and meditation, sculpture and video production, field ecology, architecture and hands-on green building techniques. Featuring a circus performance at the camp’s conclusion with a community potluck barbeque reception and live circus music band. Two 3-week sessions – June 29 to July 18 and July 27 to August 15. Register today! For more information, call the Sanctuary at (860) 319-1134.
or visit www.OurSanctuary.org.

Courses and events offered at the Sanctuary yurt beginning March 25th

OM-FLY (“Exercise through the Art-science of Play”) • Circus arts, yoga, meditation and creative movement for kids. Weekly, Thursdays (4:30 for 3-7 years and 5:30 for 10-18 years).

SANCTUARY YOGA • Explore the six directions of the spine in yoga, breath and play. Adults all levels welcome. Weekly, Wednesdays, 6-7 PM.

NINE QUESTIONS ABOUT LOVE • A community discussion seminar for individuals seeking a meaningful life. Each class will be dedicated to a fundamental and recurring question about love. This course presupposes no prior experience with philosophy. Monthly, Second Tuesdays, beginning April 14th. Register for all 9 classes and receive a discount.

DREAM WORKSHOP • This workgroup’s focus is to explore, through discussion and free association, the messages we are receiving through dreams First & Third Thursdays, 7-9 PM.

OPEN MEDITATION • The Sanctuary’s meditation led by someone from within the Sanctuary’s extended family of meditation practitioners. Weekly, Sundays, 11-12 noon.

MUSIC OF THE MOMENT • Drum circle and coffee house open mic. Bring your instrument or your voice. Share your music or hang out and listen. Monthly, First Friday, 7 PM.

LGBT CINEMA • Screening of movies featuring lesbian and gay themes, followed by discussion and community. Run by the Active Contemplatives of the Sanctuary which supports the needs of the local LGBT community. All are welcome. Monthly, Third Saturday, 7 PM.

SACRED CIRCLE • Experience the seasonal changes. Weather permitting, the Sacred Circle meets in the Peace Ring. Drumming, guided meditation, and the Four Directions ceremony. Monthly, Fourth Sunday, 5 PM.

POETRY POTLUCK • Share the work of well-loved poets. Discuss poetry and build community. Monthly, First Sunday, 4:30 PM.

For more information about these courses or events or to download our 2009 brochure, visit OurSanctuary.org.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is located on a 40-acre land preserve in East Haddam that features a yurt, peace circle, labyrinth, community garden, bee hives, and walking trails through fields, forests and quiet brooks. The Sanctuary 501(c)(3) non-profit organization offers environmental education for the local communities and is dedicated to the values of body-mind wellness, community development, ecological restoration, sustainability and the inclusive search for sacred meaning. Additionally, the Sanctuary grounds and facilities are available for private and community retreats and events.

The Sanctuary’s mission is to live in harmony with the environment, to build a local economy which values and protects our community’s social and natural wealth, and to share a spiritual practice inclusive of all and energized by the process of an evolving global consciousness. Become our partner in this worthwhile endeavor. Visitors are welcome to wander the grounds and discover for themselves this uniquely beautiful place near to home.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields
59 Bogel Road, East Haddam CT 06423
(860) 319-1134

Music of the Moment

2009-03-15T22:15:00.000-04:00

Slow Latin at the Brookside

2009-03-14T14:21:00.006-04:00

"Music, which may span the space between the finite and the infinite, should become fully integrated into any truly holistic approach to healing. There is much to be rediscovered about the healing effects of music and the human voice." - Edgar Cayce.

The Slow Latin Groove Project will be playing at the Brookside Steakhouse & Tavern on Friday, March 27th at 8 PM. Those of you who will remember where the old Glockenspiel restaurant used to be will know where to find the Brookside, in Higganum center, 26 Killingworth Road. The Slow Latin band is a jazz quartet that recasts an eclectic selection of classic tunes as funky, soulful, calming grooves to relax and stimulate your spiritual ears. Come for drinks or dinner.

The Brookside Steakhouse & Tavern, 26 Killingworth Road, Higganum. (860) 554-0710.

To contact the SLGP, call (617) 733-9270 or vood@cummings-good.com.

Invitation to attend the Sanctuary's Annual Board of Directors Meeting

2009-03-08T00:18:00.006-05:00

If you are interested in the Sanctuary at Shepardfields, the Board of Directors of the Sanctuary would like to invite you to their Annual Meeting held on March 12th at 7:30pm to 8:30pm in the Yurt located at the Sanctuary, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam, CT 06423. Being a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the Sanctuary's annual board of directors meeting is open to the public and interested folks are warmly welcome to attend.

The agenda for the meeting is as follows:

1. Call to order
2. Agenda review
3. 2008 Financial report – Treasurer Bob Thompson
4. 2009 Events and Programming – Jen Taylor and Justin Good, Executive Directors
5. Vote on Board of Directors
Slate of Officers
• President: Pat Gallagher
• Vice President: Shannon Hawkins
• Secretary: Jen Taylor
• Treasurer: Bob Thompson
Slate of Directors
• Laurie Alt
• Mary Murphy
• Justin Good

6. Public questions or comments
7. Closing

This meeting is open to the public and provides a question and comments section for the public.

Thank you for your support!

Stepping into the Same River Twice

2009-03-01T21:02:00.015-05:00

Vanessa, the Sanctuary's canine ambassador, studies the life of the stream which passes around and through the Sanctuary, before going for a refreshing February swim. I wish I had the same commitment to drinking up the beauty around me. She's working on me though, her and Heket, teaching me about the many billions of spirits swirling around us out here in the forest. One soul, three beings. Actually, one soul, one trillion bazillion beings around here.

The stream itself contains a least a billion centers of life, probably more. All of these beings and their fields of life are gonna tell us what to do this year, if we are patient enough to listen. Their collective wisdom and experience is is not only thousands of times deeper than ours, it is divine. This is the Sanctuary's soul and body.

What makes a place feel like a center? Out here in the forest, near the stream, it feels like the center of East Haddam, but deeper than the geometry of a Main Street, and less hectic, less confused. The human made world is part of the natural world too of course, it's just often so much cruder than the non-human world, less civilized.

Love is Metaphysical Gravity.

2009-02-19T16:03:00.004-05:00

Mateo Marinez-Good has arrived! The newest creation of Jesse Maxwell Good and Mirna Martinez, and our new nephew. This Tuesday his first day and night, I saw his first sneeze and his tiny hand squeeze his sister Olive's finger. Home-birthed in New London, the family is rejoicing.

"Love is metaphysical gravity" - Buckminster Fuller

Building an Ark at the Sanctuary

2009-02-17T23:12:00.007-05:00

"The hydrogen atom doesn't have to earn a living before behaving like a hydrogen atom. In fact, as best I can see, only human beings operate on the basis of 'having to earn a living.' The concept is one introduction into social conventions only by the temporal power structure's dictums of the ages. If I am doing what God's evolutionary strategy needs to have accomplished, I need spend no further time worrying about such matters. We can live handsomely using only daily income of the Sun's and gravity's multi-way-intergenerated energies." - Buckminster Fuller

What is the easiest way toward sustainability? How do you reduce as much as possible your energy needs? How do you grow your own food year round in an affordable way? How do you learn to see, to feel, to benefit from, the SUPERABUNDANCE OF LIFE-ENERGY that surrounds you? These are the questions we are wrestling with and the Sanctuary is our laboratory. One idea we are pursuing is a geodesic green house. The engineer-poet Buckminster Fuller discovered the challenge and promise of sustainability when he discovered that our planet is a spaceship without an instruction manual. The geodesic dome is one of his solutions to the problem of affordable, ecological beautiful, low energy housing. Many people have been figuring out how to use geodesic greenhouses to grow food affordably year round. We are looking at a company in Colorado called Growing Spaces which offers greenhouse domes which are passively heated and cooled, easy to build, beautiful inside, and perfectly shaped for growing food year round even in cold climates.

How would it look at the Sanctuary?

If you are interested in sustainability, come visit the Sanctuary to talk with us or to become our partner in building a real sustainable community in the lower Connecticut River valley.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam CT 06423 (860) 319-1134. Namaste!

The Eye of the Beholder is in the Beauty

2009-02-10T19:02:00.009-05:00

"There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart."
- Chandogya Upanishad

What is the meaning of beauty? The humanist idea is that beauty can be explained in terms of human bio-psychology; beauty is something to do with the brain. The new view, call it the deep-ecological view, is that beauty is the perception of a relation, a relation of coherence; moreover, that coherence is meaningful to us because we share an essence with it - we share a SELF with it. To be beautiful is to manifest Self.

Not ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’ but rather ‘The Eye of the Beholder is in (is an extension of) the Beauty’. Beauty does not exist because there is a consciousness there to perceive it. The consciousness is an extension of the Beauty which already exists. Consciousness is created by the Beauty in order for the geometry underlying the Beauty to be fully actualized.

At the level of physical nature, every being (e.g. an electron, planet, cat, galaxy) is attracted to every other by the force of gravitation. This mysterious ability of two entities to exert an instantaneous force on each other, even if they are billions of light years away from each other, is still unexplained by cosmology and fundamental physics. At a different dimension of reality, every point of space/time embodies a degree of consciousness, of selfness as an intrinsic feature of the universe. And like the law of gravitation, there is a cosmological law of the integration of awareness: every point or ‘center’ of space/time has an instantaneous impulse to bond with every other center, to attain a more comprehensive, deeper level of cosmological awareness.

Beauty is the perception of a moment of integration of awareness of centers of space/time. Beauty is cosmological.

In the picture above, Vanessa, the Sanctuary's canine ambassador, leads us back to the house after a walk to the beaver ponds at the Sanctuary. Come visit us any time and take the mysterious walk yourself. You will find deep beauty there. You will find a Self there, many selves, trillions of them.

Live soul music for earthlings

2009-02-08T13:47:00.006-05:00

Exit 6 will be at the Ivory Restaurant and Tavern in Deep River, Saturday, February 21st for an evening of classic soul, R & B, and blues-rock music. Transforming old and new standards with funky eclectic and danceable arrangements, the band features Joel Jacob and Jason Baker on vocals, Mark Zanardi on bass, Chris Grosman and Justin Vood Good on guitars, Leif Nilsson on banjo and Jeremy Wang Ziemann on the kit. First set starts at 9:30.

The Ivory Restaurant and Tavern is located at 1 Kirtland Street. For more information call (860) 526-2528. To book the Exit 6 band, call (617) 733-9270 or email vood@cummings-good.com.

"I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I've been running ever since
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will."
- Sam Cooke

Morning light in the Sanctuary forest

2009-02-06T17:41:00.002-05:00

In the pursuit of learning, every day
something is acquired.

In the pursuit of Tao, every day
something is dropped.

- Tao Te Ching

The Music We Are

2009-01-28T10:45:00.004-05:00

"Philosophers have said that we love music
because it resembles the Sphere-sounds

of union. We've been part of a harmony
before, so these moments of treble and bass

keep our remembering fresh. But how
does this happen within these dense bodies

full of forgetfulness and doubt and
grieving? It's like water passing through us.

It becomes acidic and bitter, but still as
urine it retains watery qualities.

It will put out a fire. So there is music
flowing through our bodies that can dowse

restlessness. Hearing the sound, we gather
strength. Love kindles with melody. Music

feeds a lover composure, and provides form
for the imagination. Music breathes

on personal fire and makes it keener." - Rumi

Learn How To Fly

2009-01-16T07:58:00.003-05:00

Jen Taylor's OM-FLY circus yoga winter classes are starting at the Tree of Life in Old Saybrook. These classes introduce students to a wide range of physical arts that awaken the body and center the mind. For more information visit Circus School Xena.

January Labyrinth at the Sanctuary

2009-01-12T13:40:00.004-05:00

"Many are attracted to the labyrinth as a healing tool because it deepens self-knowledge and empowers creativity. Walking the labyrinth clears the mind and gives insight into the life journey. It calms those in the throes of transition, and helps us to see life in the context of a path. It urges actions and stirs creative fires. To those who are in sorrow, it gives solace and peace. The walk is different for everyone, as they bring only themselves to the labyrinth. Each person comes in uniqueness, and often departs with a greater sense of connectedness." - from the CJ Holistic Health Foundation

Come walk the Labyrinth at the Sanctuary any time of the week to experience the restful peace of a winter meadow in East Haddam. For more information visit the Sanctuary website or call 860-319-1134.

December 21st, 2008: The storm slows everything down to a sacred tempo

2008-12-21T15:24:00.003-05:00

GLBT Movie Night at the Sanctuary

2008-12-18T18:52:00.001-05:00

ALL BEINGS WELCOME.

The Shortest Day

2008-12-15T16:44:00.005-05:00

WINTER SOLSTICE OBSERVANCE

Sunday, December 21st 4 PM

Observe the Shortest Day with a Sacred Circle Ritual at the fire circle.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields, 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam

Come for a Sacred Circle Ritual around the fire. Light snacks and beverages. Dress warmly. Suggested donation: Something to share or $5, more if you can, less if you can’t. Weather permitting.

ALL BEINGS WELCOME

Sponsored by the Active Contemplatives of the Sanctuary. The ACTS are the Sanctuary’s special ministry to the local LGBT community. For more information call the Sanctuary at Shepardfields at 860.319.1134

The Eco-Temple Learning Ecology continues to unfold

2008-12-13T15:43:00.006-05:00

Saturday, December 13th at the Sanctuary

"Reverence awakens in the soul a sympathetic power through which we attract qualities in the beings around us, which would otherwise remain concealed." - Rudolf Steiner

Heating our temporary tent structure with a kerosene heater to allow the mortar to dry, we were out in the blistery wind this morning working with Hans, finishing the containment structure for our Composting Toilet Eco-Temple. Hans Lohse is the ring leader of the Eco-temple Project. He runs Lifespace Architecture and Interior Design with his partner Kris D’Errico. Hans is a green architect and builder rooted in the traditions of sacred geometry, Native American architecture, and views the pursuit of Beautiful Form as a Process of Unfolding Wholeness. Good architecture designs itself, is ecologically regenerative by heaing the environment, is alive and sentient, and tunnels through to cosmic consciousness.

The Sanctuary currently pays about $100 each month to service a “porta-potty”, whose waste is collected and processed at a central sewer treatment plant. The process –centralized sewage treatment - is costly, energy intensive, not as effective as nature’s own way of breaking down harmful pathogens, chemicals and heavy metals through microbial digestion, and produces a toxic waste (sewage sludge) for which there is currently no environmentally safe way to dispose of. This is what you call a high entropy technology, since a lot of energy – both the energy used in the treatment, and the organic energy contained in the human “waste” - are lost in the treatment process. In contrast, a composting toilet - essentially a constructed paradise for worms and microorganisms - helps nature’s own digestive processes to breathe more deeply, closing a nutrient cycle and returning human excreta back to condition the soil. After we complete this project, the Sanctuary will save a cost, reduce its harmful eco-footprint, and replace an ugly industrial artifact with a beautiful shrine which will harmonize deeply with its locale, and ornament the meadow stand of trees like a some strange flower.

Built and designed of mostly local materials, labor, ideas and inspiration, the process of the construction itself will serve as a healthy learning ecology. A learning ecology is a project or situation in which individuals work towards understanding an aspect of their natural, social or economic environment which reveals something fundamental about their collective fate, their values, their identities. When one experiences a larger self, a community-sized self, an invisible bond is uncovered, through which information from a deeper pool of life activity can be transmitted to the individual. This information is a source of energy which empowers the individual to the level of spontaneous, patient, loving commitment to the long-term health of the community. This is where the Sanctuary sees the connection between ecology and spirituality.

Keep Your Neighbor Warm

2008-12-10T10:42:00.001-05:00

On Sunday, December 21st from 2 to 5 PM at the Chester Meeting House, the Chester Neighborhood Collaborative will be hosting a holiday event to raise money for an emergency fuel fund for residents unable to afford heating fuels this winter.

The fund-raiser will include warm beverages, tasty treats and live music by two local musical acts, singer/songwriter Jen Taylor and the Slow Latin Groove Project.

The Chester Collaborative represents a broad and growing coalition Chester organizations including the Chester Town Hall, the United Church Of Chester, Congregation Beth Shalom, the Chester Rotary, the Chester Merchants and Chester Village West.

Cash donations are appreciated. The fund-raiser will also be accepting non-perishable food items for the Chester Food Bank.

Stop by during your holiday shopping to warm up on snacks and listen to soothing music while helping your neighbors in need to keep warm!

First Snow at the Sanctuary

2008-12-09T23:09:00.000-05:00

"It has been said that God is immanent, that all matter is imbued with God, that God is the ultimate material of the Universe. And that may be so. But if so, why is it that this shining forth of God is visible more in some things than others; why is God visible more in some events, and less in others. What causes the life in things; what causes God to be more visible in one thing, more visible in one moment, less visible in another?" - Christopher Alexander, The Luminous Ground

Jazz Breakfast in Chester Center

2008-12-05T14:08:00.005-05:00

"Living takes place each instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest thing to do is to open one's ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one's thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or symbolical." - John Cage

The Slow Latin Groove is Chris Devlin Brown (acoustic bass), Brendon D'Arcy (piano), Justin Good (acoustic guitar), Hans Lohse (percussion and accordion, and Hillyn Natter (drums). For more information call 860.575.5236 or email vood@cummings-good.com.

Simon's Marketplace is located on Main Street in Chester Center.

Notes on the Theory of Beauty as Wholeness

2008-12-01T12:27:00.010-05:00

Notes from my Media Ecology seminar at the School of Fine Arts UCONN, fall 2008. The picture was taken November 29th on the top of Selden's Island.

§1. YOU CANNOT AVOID HAVING A THEORY OF BEAUTY. If you say that you do not want to define beauty because defining beauty limits what you can experience as beautiful, and hence what you can define as art, you haven’t avoided defining beauty. What you’ve done is unconsciously accept the Duchampian Modernist view of beauty as inherently subjective, relative, and undefinable – but that is a definition of beauty which carries its own limitations on your experience. The paradigm shift in knowledge of nature carries with it a new concept of beauty which contradicts the Duchampian-modernist view. Beauty is life and life has a specific geometry.

§2. WHAT DISAGREEMENTS ABOUT WIND FARM AESTHETICS ARE ABOUT. Despite the beauty of their ecological rationality, large-scale wind farms still jar many visual sensibilities with their industrial look. The truth contained in that nimby response is that industrial infrastructure, and often modernist architectural icons, tends to have a fragmenting effect on the unity of natural landscapes and the systems which unfold that unity or wholeness in stable patterns following multiple patterns of least resistance through time. Everyone is in perceptual agreement: fragmentation is objectively ugly. Vice versa, wholeness is objectively beautiful. Life is objectively beautiful.

§3. A NEW CONCEPT OF BEAUTY: THE THEORY OF WHOLENESS. Construed ecologically, from the standpoint of the holistic science of natural, evolving systems, the perception of beauty is the perception of wholeness. Wholeness is an objective property of nature and natural systems. This is a very deep objective quality of a place, a work of art, an organism, that affects us deeply. For a place, it is a sense of belonging, a sense that everything feels right, natural, stable, alive – most especially a feeling of life, and a feeling of being yourself. Christopher Alexander has developed a comprehensive theory of wholeness in his revolutionary study, The Nature of Order. The following is an encapsulation of his theory as it pertains specifically to the Meaning of Beauty.

§4. OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENT OF BEAUTY AS WHOLENESS. The new scientific/mystical understanding of beauty, as the cognizing of wholeness, can be explained in three, related ways. To be beautiful is:

1. To be a coherent system (to exhibit a high degree of relatedness.)
2. To exhibit living structure. (to come to exist through a continuous process of unfolding.)
3. To manifest the (transpersonal) Self.

§5. FIRST ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS COHERENCE. In a system which is good: (a) any identifiable subsystems would be in good condition, and (b) any larger systems which the system is a part of would be in good condition. That is, a system is good if its activity helps both the systems around it and those which it contains. Reciprocally, a good system is helped by the systems it contains and the larger systems which contain it. Wholeness is about the harmonizing of beings within a region of space/time. Such patterns of interaction are perceived as beautiful by us. The beauty is not in our eye, it is in the pattern. An example of a coherent system: a healthy ecosystem.

"When we speak of "healthy" eco-systems, we mean stable eco-systems: that is, both tending toward diversity and not subject to cataclysmic drops in diversity. Such conditions, also called balanced, create relationships--ever more intricate relationships-- that increasingly locate the inorganic elements necessary to life in cycles that make those inorganic elements increasingly available to life. The more extensive these relationships, the more consistently available the nutrient-elements will be to the life forms within those relationships. Expanding diversity of life forms is, relatively speaking, a low entropy enterprise. The more diverse the forms of life, the more matter and energy are kept available for use, or "work," and the less they are lost to use or work through either irretrievable dissipation or unresolvable mixing." - Abby Rockefeller

§6. SECOND ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS LIVELINESS. To exhibit wholeness is to exhibit living structure.

The wholeness of a structure is the degree of life it has. What determines degree of life?

The difference between living and non-living form has to do with the process through which the form came to be. What kind of process?

To have a living geometry is to come to exist through a continuous process of unfolding.

One can see, just by looking, that something with living form came to be by way of a process
of unfolding, where each step of the growing grew out of the prior steps, and where each development enhanced the structure (the wholeness) that already existed.

What lacks living form has the look of something that was put together. Its structure did not unfold out of itself. (e.g. Frankenstein)

Because something that is beautiful is alive, it makes one feel alive – feel deeply human. Industrially-produced structure seldom has this quality of being alive, and so of creating a sense of wholeness.

Biological versus geometrical concept of Life. This theory implies a broad concept of life: The narrow biological concept of life is: To be alive is to be a kind of Mechanism (Reactive, constructed, reducible) - Life as mechanical structure explicable in terms of chemistry, physics and: either a) god, or b) natural selection –organized chance, and/or c) symbiosis. Machine behavior which is reactive (vs. active) and constructed (vs. self-generated). A broader systems theory concept of life is found in General Systems Theory - Life as any self-organizing structure. A still broader concept is the geometrical/spatial concept of life: To be alive is to exhibit a certain kind of geometrical structure. Life is a metaphysical process intrinsic to space/time, not something that begins with biology, but which reaches a new and higher level of intensity and harmonization with biological systems.

The specific geometry of Life. Degree of life in a structure has to do with the ways it embodies the geometrical properties of stable natural systems. There are fifteen properties universally found in stable, natural processes. In fact, they are actually geometrical properties of reality found in any complex system: 1. LEVELS OF SCALE, 2. STRONG CENTERS, 3. BOUNDARIES, 4. ALTERNATING REPETITION, 5. POSITIVE SPACE, 6. GOOD SHAPE, 7. LOCAL SYMMETRIES, 8. DEEP INTERLOCK AND AMBIGUITY, 9. CONTRAST, 10. GRADIENTS, II. ROUGHNESS, 12. ECHOES, 13. THE VOID, 14. SIMPLICITY AND INNER CALM, 15. NON-SEPARATENESS.

§7. THIRD ASPECT: WHOLENESS AS BEING FILLED WITH SELF. To be beautiful is to manifest the (transpersonal) Self. Not ‘Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder’ but rather ‘The Eye of the Beholder is in (is an extension of) the Beauty’. Beauty does not exist because there is a consciousness there to perceive it. The consciousness is an extension of the Beauty which already exists. Consciousness is created by the Beauty in order for the geometry underlying the Beauty to be fully actualized.

At the level of physical nature, every being (e.g. an electron, planet, cat, galaxy) is attracted to every other by the force of gravitation. This mysterious ability of two entities to exert an instantaneous force on each other, even if they are billions of light years away from each other, is still unexplained by cosmology and fundamental physics. At a different dimension of reality, every point of space/time embodies a degree of consciousness, of selfness as an intrinsic feature of the universe. And like the law of gravitation, there is a cosmological law of the integration of awareness: every point or ‘center’ of space/time has an instantaneous impulse to bond with every other center, to attain a more comprehensive, deeper level of cosmological awareness. Beauty is the perception of a moment of integration of awareness of centers of space/time.

“The environment is good, or bad, according to the degree that its thousands and thousands of centers are pictures of the self, what we might call ‘beings.” The practical matters of fire, cost, family structure, wall construction, structural efficiency, ecology, solar energy, wind, water, pedestrian traffic – all these have their place. Function must be at the core of everything. But what governs the life of the buildings is not to be found in these matters, alone, but in a single question, always built on the foundation of these matters, but elevating them to a different level of understanding: To what extent is every building, and the whole building, and every garden, and the whole street, all made of beings?... Every center in the matter of the universe starts this tunneling towards the I-stuff. And the stronger the center is, the bigger the tunnel, the stronger the connection to the I. That means, that every beautiful object, to the extent it has the structure which I have described, also begins to open the door towards the I-stuff or the self.” – Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order

Those who can't be, do.

2008-11-29T11:42:00.010-05:00

"In this way, something begins to live within her which ranges above the purely personal. Her gaze is directed to worlds higher than those with which everyday life connects her. And thus she begins to feel and realize, as an inner experience, that she belongs to those higher worlds. These are worlds concerning which her senses and her daily occupation can tell her nothing. Thus she now shifts the central point of her being to the inner part of her nature. She listens to the voices within her which speak to her in moments of tranquility; she cultivates an intercourse with the spiritual world. All around there is silence. She must learn to love what the spirit pours into her. She will soon cease to feel that this thought-world is less real than the everyday things which surround her. She discovers that something living expresses itself in this thought-world. She sees that her thoughts do not merely harbor shadow-pictures, but that through them hidden beings speak to her. Out of silence, speech becomes audible to her. Formerly sound only reached her through her ear; now it resounds through her soul. Through her being there pours a divine stream from a world of divine rapture." - from Rudolf Steiner, "How to Know Higher Worlds"

The image above is a mandala drawing I created during a Holotropic Breathing Workshop I participated in this year. Holotropic breathing is a meditation technique developed by Christina and Stanislav Grof as a way to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness. Grof's latest book, "Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research" is a fantastic outline for what will happen to mainstream psychology and psychotherapy when the materialistic ideology of modern medicine finally accepts mystical experience as something more than merely delusional. You can listen to his presentation about this fascinating book here.

Sacred Circle

2008-11-25T14:48:00.008-05:00

SACRED CIRCLE • This Sunday, Nov. 30th at 5 PM, the Active Contemplatives of the Sanctuary (ACTS) will be hosting their monthly Sacred Circle Ceremony in the Yurt at the Sanctuary at Shepardfields.

This special event includes drumming, guided meditation, and the Four Directions Ritual of Native American Traditions.

Please join us for a unique opportunity to hold and share sacred intentions together. All are welcome!

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is located on 59 Bogel Road, East Haddam. For more information call 319-1134.

Sunday Meditation at the Sanctuary

2008-11-21T18:06:00.002-05:00

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own eyes. All is a miracle. - Thich Nhat Hahn

Sunlight On The Move

2008-11-07T09:53:00.005-05:00

Jen X. W. P. Taylor made this wonderful short film for our Start-A-Movement fund-raising party at the Sanctuary and showed it in the yurt as part of our presentation on our composting toilet project. It features footage of Abby Rockefeller's speech at the Chester Eco Arts Festival from September, Hans Lohse doing a humanure dance to awaken the soil and mineral spirits, our Pitbull Vanessa, and an original song composed by Jen which sums up the spirit of the project. Abby Rockefeller, co-founder of the Clivus Multum Company, is a world-expert on composting toilets and has been our technical advisor on this project. We owe her enormous thanks for helping us to see how ancient wisdom and modern technology can work together to produce low tech, no impact solutions to environmental nightmares produced by centralized, industrial "waste" management systems. Special thanks also to Hans Lohse, a green architect deeply connected to Native American wisdom and Sacred Geometry. He is the heart and soul of this project. Thanks to Hans, this Eco-temple will not only compost humanure in a effortless, safe and clean way, but it will be a stunningly beautiful and alive structure which will harmonize deeply with its environs.

If you are curious or want more information about this project, please call the Sanctuary (860-319-1134) or just drop by.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is an environmental education and spiritual life center dedicated to community development, ecological restoration, sustainability, localism, and the inclusive search for sacred meaning. A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the Sanctuary is located on an ecologically-intact 40 acre land preserve located in East Haddam and features a yurt for classes and meditation, drumming circle, labyrinth, community garden, composting toilet eco-temple, and walking trails through rich forest and inland wetlands ecosystems. The Sanctuary currently offers classes in Tai’ Chi, Yoga, Meditation, Environmental Philosophy and Spirituality. Additionally, the grounds are yurt are available for day retreats and other events.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields
59 Bogel Road
East Haddam CT 06423
860.319.1134

Come to the Start-A-Movement Composting Toilet Eco-temple Fund-raising Party at the Sanctuary at Shepardfields

2008-10-17T22:26:00.010-04:00

“Waste is not found in nature, except in human nature.” – Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook

On Oct. 25th, the Sanctuary at Shepardfields will be having a special fund-raising event, The Start-A-Movement Composting Toilet Eco-Temple Party.

This all ages event will feature a unique public environmental education workshop on composting toilets where participants learn about the ecology of wastewater treatment, the eco-design engineering principles of composting, composting toilets and permaculture. The educational aspect of the fund-raiser will be complemented by fun and celebration with food, dancing and live music, drumming, circus fun and games, a silent auction, and a silent walking meditation through the beautiful grounds of the Sanctuary.

Suggested donation for this event is $20, or $30 if you can afford it. Children and lower income guests are $10. The donation admission includes lunch, fascinating discussion and a great party.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields is a spiritual life center dedicated to the inclusive search for sacred meaning, community development, ecological restoration, sustainability and localism. With a special ministry to the LGBT community, the Sanctuary offers a sacred space amidst natural beauty for personal transformation and a locus for sustainable living. A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, the Sanctuary is located on an ecologically-intact 40 acre land preserve located in East Haddam and features a yurt, drumming circle, labyrinth, community garden and rich forest and inland wetlands ecosystems.

The Sanctuary at Shepardfields
59 Bogel Road
East Haddam CT 06423
860.319.1134

So why build a composting toilet?

NOTES ON THE ECOLOGY OF TOILETS

"Compost is sunlight on the move from one form to another." – S. Sides

Many sanitation experts believe that standard toilets are the most poorly designed technologies of all time. In their seminal book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Paul Hawken and the legendary engineering gurus Amory and L. Hunter Lovins discuss the engineering virtues of the standard American toilet: “In an effort to make them ‘invisible’ a toilet mixes pathogen-bearing feces with relatively clean urine. Then it dilutes that slurry with about 100 times its volume in pure drinking water, and further mixes the mess with industrial toxins in the sewer system, thus turning ‘an excellent fertilizer and soil conditioner into a serious, far-reaching, and dispersed disposal problem. Supplying the clean water, treating the sewage, and providing all the delivery and collection in between requires systems whose cost strains the resources even of wealthy countries, let alone the 2 billion people who lack basic sanitation.”

Composting toilets, now being used in parks all over Connecticut, offer restroom service without the need for expensive wastewater treatment. They are safe, less odorous (really no smell whatsoever) than conventional toilets, and an invaluable educational tool for helping people to appreciate, like in olden times, the agricultural value of human waste. Embodying the ecological principle that waste=food, they are the most advanced technological expression of sustainability, and cheaper than conventional toilets. The only barriers to this ultra-rational technology are modernist cultural prejudices about human ‘waste’.

The Sanctuary currently pays about $100 each month to service a “porta-potty”, whose waste is collected and processed at a central sewer treatment plant. The process –centralized sewage treatment - is costly, energy intensive, not as effective as nature’s own way of breaking down harmful pathogens, chemicals and heavy metals through microbial digestion, and produces a toxic waste (sewage sludge) for which there is currently no environmentally safe way to dispose of. This is what you call a high entropy technology, since a lot of energy – both the energy used in the treatment, and the organic energy contained in the human “waste” - are lost in the treatment process. In contrast, a composting toilet helps nature’s own digestive processes to breathe more deeply, closing a nutrient cycle and returning human excreta back to condition the soil. After we complete this project, the Sanctuary will save a cost, reduce its harmful eco-footprint, and replace an ugly industrial artifact with a beautiful shrine which which will harmonize deeply with its locale, and ornament the meadow stand of trees like a some strange flower. Built and designed of mostly local materials, labor, ideas and inspiration, the process of the construction itself will serve as a healthy learning ecology.

A learning ecology is a project or situation in which individuals work towards understanding an aspect of their natural, social or economic environment which reveals something fundamental about their collective fate, their values, their identities. When one experiences a larger self, a community-sized self, an invisible bond is uncovered, through which information from a deeper pool of life activity can be transmitted to the individual. This information is a source of energy which empowers the individual to the level of spontaneous, patient, loving commitment to the long-term health of the community.

Sustainability can be mathematically defined as a property of a system: a system is sustainable if its activity is beneficial to the sub-systems contained within it and the macro-systems within which it is contained. In evolutionary terms, the smallest viable unit affected by natural selection is not the individual organism, nor even the species, but the organism-in-communion with the biosphere, or Gaia. Nature ultimately selects against organisms which act as if they are closed systems. This is why ethics is an objective science. The myth that ethical values are relative and subjective is based on the myth that the individual person is a closed system whose well-being depends in no way on the well-being of the community of beings within which the individual finds herself.

“It is ironic that humans have ignored one waste issue that all of us contribute to each and every day — an environmental problem that has stalked our species from our genesis, and which will accompany us to our extinction. Perhaps one reason we have taken such a head-in-the-sand approach to the recycling of human excrement is because we can’t even talk about it. If there is one thing that the human consumer culture refuses to deal with maturely and constructively, it’s bodily excretions. This is the taboo topic, the unthinkable issue. It’s also the one we are about to dive headlong into. For waste is not found in nature — except in human nature. It’s up to us humans to unlock the secret to its elimination. Nature herself provides a key and she has held it out to us for eons…

“One organism’s excrement is another’s food. Everything is recycled in natural systems, thereby eliminating waste. Humans create waste because we insist on ignoring the natural systems upon which we depend. We are so adept at doing so that we take waste for granted and have given the word a prominent place in our vocabulary. We have kitchen “waste,” garden “waste,” agricultural “waste,” human “waste,” municipal “waste,” “biowaste,” and on and on. Yet, our long-term survival requires us to learn to live in harmony with our host planet. This also requires that we understand natural cycles and incorporate them into our day to day lives. In essence, this means that we humans must attempt to eliminate waste altogether. As we progressively eliminate waste from our living habits, we can also progressively eliminate the word “waste” from our vocabulary.” – Joseph Jenkins, “The Humanure Manual”

For more information about composting humanure read The Humanure Manual.

“I have noticed in my life that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what it best to do in order to make themselves worthy of that toward which they are so attracted, they might have dreams which would purify their lives.” – Brave Buffalo

Your Local Dionysian Music Outfit

2008-10-04T13:53:00.004-04:00

"There are people who, from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly or pityingly away from [Dionysian music] phenomena as from a “sickness of the people,” with a sense of their own health. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost-like this very “health” of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them.

"Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. The wagon of Dionysus is covered with flowers and wreaths; under his yolk stride panthers and tigers.

"If someone were to transform Beethoven's Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come close to the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man, now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbour, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as if the veil of Maja had been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around in the face of the mysterious primordial unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals now speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so something supernatural also echoes out of him: he feels himself a god; he now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist. He has become a work of art: the artistic power of all of nature, to the highest rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the transports of intoxication. The finest clay, the most expensive marble — man — is here worked and chiselled, and the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you fall down, you millions? World, do you have a sense of your creator?”

- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"

Socialism for the Rich

2008-10-01T22:30:00.006-04:00

TEN REASONS NOT TO BAIL OUT WALL STREET

Catherine, Geopolitical, Life and News & Commentary, October 1, 2008 at 6:10 pm by Catherine Austin Fitts and Carolyn Betts, Esq.

(1) Crime that pays, is crime that stays.

There is reason to believe that Wall Street and those they represent are holding loans without collateral, multiple loans secured by the same properties, and other fraudulent instruments among the “troubled assets.” Based on the secret “Treasury Conference Call” with 800 Wall Street insiders, we know the deal proposed to be passed by Congress isn’t the real deal promised to Wall Street.

(2) This smells like obstruction of justice.

Bail-out without due diligence of so called “troubled assets” is a perfect way to hide documentation of financial crimes. It is also a perfect means to launder both the past ill-gotten gains and new federal money spent recklessly and without necessary safeguards and oversight mechanisms. Be very suspicious when they tell you “we just can’t tell what’s in these troubled assets.” We can assure you the federal government has field offices all across the country that deal with significant amounts of real estate and mortgage assets. If Treasury refuses for more than a decade to comply with the laws, with approximately $4 trillion missing (and counting), it is not competent to manage $700 billion of taxpayer money while its arm is twisted by Wall Street.

(3) Wall Street owes the federal government money.

We need to get stolen money back from the banks that served as depositories for the US government (including trillions for which the Pentagon and HUD could not account) and punish them, not create another opportunity for them to game the system and engage in criminal enterprises to rob consumers. To the extent there has been regulatory wrong-doing, let’s not let the miscreants leave town with the evidence.

(4) Good guys are shut out.

A bail-out provides no way for honest leaders to come to the fore and use their creativity and expertise to restore balance and integrity to the system or for unproductive and poorly-managed banks that contribute to current over-capacity to die a dignified death.

(5) More investment in the “bubble economy.”

Spending massive amounts on non-productive uses (“buying” worthless credit default swaps, mortgages with no collateral, other derivatives) as opposed to productive uses (repairing infrastructure, creating alternative energy systems, supporting inventing and production of “green” products) is inflationary. This bail-out will drive prices of food, water and energy up for the people who can least afford it.

(6) Does not result in capital circulating in healthy ways.

The bail-out of Wall Street and too-big-to-fail banks and insurance companies that are getting bigger by the minute by swallowing up other failing financial institutions (and creating more institutions that are “too big to fail”) does not result in trickle-down to those whose money was stolen in recent swindles (S&L, dot.com, current housing crisis), i.e., the taxpayers/middle class and working poor.

(7) Arrangements that result in more corruption.

Centralized “fixes” are sure to result in black holes, no-bid contracts and other scandals.

(8) Drains the real economy, rather than invests in the real economy.

The US economy can’t be productive or grow if consumers don’t have jobs and can’t afford to purchase goods and services. Real stimulation of Main Street is accomplished through investment in productive investment, not bail-outs that shift money to unproductive sectors. We should use all of our precious resources to reinvest in our people in the real economy.

(9) It props up sectors which need to downsize and consolidate.

There is significant overcapacity in the financial and banking sectors. Brainpower and talent needs to stop blowing financial bubbles and shift to economic activities that create real value.

(10) It is a temporary “fix” to keep Wall Street afloat until after the election.

These resources are better invested in permanent, long-term solutions. This bail-out will not fix anything. Rather, it will help the perpetrators get away and ensure that the ultimate day of reckoning is worse.

The Administration wants to drain the real economy to bail out Wall Street. Seems to us that the more appropriate plan would be to require Wall Street to return $4 trillion plus that is missing and use that to rebuild the real economy.

We think the time has come to reverse the flow. Go to any business school in the country. That is what they teach. Money should move out of unproductive sectors into productive sectors. The bail-out does just the opposite.

“Just say NO!”

What is Consciousness?

2008-10-01T09:49:00.003-04:00

Ecological Philosophy and Spirituality at the Sanctuary

(2) THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE EXTENDED MIND HYPOTHESIS

Wednesday, October 1st, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
In the Yurt at the Sanctuary
Suggested donation: $15

This class will explore some of the basic questions surrounding the nature of consciousness.

Some helpful texts:

1. Rupert Sheldrake, “The Sense of Being Stared At”
2. Rupert Sheldrake, “The Extended Mind” video.
3. Famous 'Double Slit' experiment in quantum mechanics, video.

A New Social Contract for a Sustainable Society

2008-09-27T19:08:00.006-04:00

THE EARTH CHARTER

Preamble

We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.

Earth, Our Home

Humanity is part of a vast evolving universe. Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life. The forces of nature make existence a demanding and uncertain adventure, but Earth has provided the conditions essential to life's evolution. The resilience of the community of life and the well-being of humanity depend upon preserving a healthy biosphere with all its ecological systems, a rich variety of plants and animals, fertile soils, pure waters, and clean air. The global environment with its finite resources is a common concern of all peoples. The protection of Earth's vitality, diversity, and beauty is a sacred trust.

The Global Situation

The dominant patterns of production and consumption are causing environmental devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of species. Communities are being undermined. The benefits of development are not shared equitably and the gap between rich and poor is widening. Injustice, poverty, ignorance, and violent conflict are widespread and the cause of great suffering. An unprecedented rise in human population has overburdened ecological and social systems. The foundations of global security are threatened. These trends are perilous—but not inevitable.

The Challenges Ahead

The choice is ours: form a global partnership to care for Earth and one another or risk the destruction of ourselves and the diversity of life. Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living. We must realize that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more. We have the knowledge and technology to provide for all and to reduce our impacts on the environment. The emergence of a global civil society is creating new opportunities to build a democratic and humane world. Our environmental, economic, political, social, and spiritual challenges are interconnected, and together we can forge inclusive solutions.

Universal Responsibility

To realize these aspirations, we must decide to live with a sense of universal responsibility, identifying ourselves with the whole Earth community as well as our local communities. We are at once citizens of different nations and of one world in which the local and global are linked. Everyone shares responsibility for the present and future well-being of the human family and the larger living world. The spirit of human solidarity and kinship with all life is strengthened when we live with reverence for the mystery of being, gratitude for the gift of life, and humility regarding the human place in nature.

We urgently need a shared vision of basic values to provide an ethical foundation for the emerging world community. Therefore, together in hope we affirm the following interdependent principles for a sustainable way of life as a common standard by which the conduct of all individuals, organizations, businesses, governments, and transnational institutions is to be guided and assessed.

PRINCIPLES

I. RESPECT AND CARE FOR THE COMMUNITY OF LIFE

1. Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.

a. Recognize that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings.
b. Affirm faith in the inherent dignity of all human beings and in the intellectual, artistic, ethical, and spiritual potential of humanity.

2. Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.

a. Accept that with the right to own, manage, and use natural resources comes the duty to prevent environmental harm and to protect the rights of people.
b. Affirm that with increased freedom, knowledge, and power comes increased responsibility to promote the common good.

3. Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful.

a. Ensure that communities at all levels guarantee human rights and fundamental freedoms and provide everyone an opportunity to realize his or her full potential.
b. Promote social and economic justice, enabling all to achieve a secure and meaningful livelihood that is ecologically responsible.

4. Secure Earth's bounty and beauty for present and future generations.

a. Recognize that the freedom of action of each generation is qualified by the needs of future generations.
b. Transmit to future generations values, traditions, and institutions that support the long-term flourishing of Earth's human and ecological communities.

In order to fulfill these four broad commitments, it is necessary to:

II. ECOLOGICAL INTEGRITY

5. Protect and restore the integrity of Earth's ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.

a. Adopt at all levels sustainable development plans and regulations that make environmental conservation and rehabilitation integral to all development initiatives.
b. Establish and safeguard viable nature and biosphere reserves, including wild lands and marine areas, to protect Earth's life support systems, maintain biodiversity, and preserve our natural heritage.
c. Promote the recovery of endangered species and ecosystems.
d. Control and eradicate non-native or genetically modified organisms harmful to native species and the environment, and prevent introduction of such harmful organisms.
e. Manage the use of renewable resources such as water, soil, forest products, and marine life in ways that do not exceed rates of regeneration and that protect the health of ecosystems.
f. Manage the extraction and use of non-renewable resources such as minerals and fossil fuels in ways that minimize depletion and cause no serious environmental damage.

6. Prevent harm as the best method of environmental protection and, when knowledge is limited, apply a precautionary approach.

a. Take action to avoid the possibility of serious or irreversible environmental harm even when scientific knowledge is incomplete or inconclusive.
b. Place the burden of proof on those who argue that a proposed activity will not cause significant harm, and make the responsible parties liable for environmental harm.
c. Ensure that decision making addresses the cumulative, long-term, indirect, long distance, and global consequences of human activities.
d. Prevent pollution of any part of the environment and allow no build-up of radioactive, toxic, or other hazardous substances.
e. Avoid military activities damaging to the environment.

7. Adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard Earth's regenerative capacities, human rights, and community well-being.

a. Reduce, reuse, and recycle the materials used in production and consumption systems, and ensure that residual waste can be assimilated by ecological systems.
b. Act with restraint and efficiency when using energy, and rely increasingly on renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.
c. Promote the development, adoption, and equitable transfer of environmentally sound technologies.
d. Internalize the full environmental and social costs of goods and services in the selling price, and enable consumers to identify products that meet the highest social and environmental standards.
e. Ensure universal access to health care that fosters reproductive health and responsible reproduction.
f. Adopt lifestyles that emphasize the quality of life and material sufficiency in a finite world.

8. Advance the study of ecological sustainability and promote the open exchange and wide application of the knowledge acquired.

a. Support international scientific and technical cooperation on sustainability, with special attention to the needs of developing nations.
b. Recognize and preserve the traditional knowledge and spiritual wisdom in all cultures that contribute to environmental protection and human well-being.
c. Ensure that information of vital importance to human health and environmental protection, including genetic information, remains available in the public domain.

III. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

9. Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social, and environmental imperative.

a. Guarantee the right to potable water, clean air, food security, uncontaminated soil, shelter, and safe sanitation, allocating the national and international resources required.
b. Empower every human being with the education and resources to secure a sustainable livelihood, and provide social security and safety nets for those who are unable to support themselves.
c. Recognize the ignored, protect the vulnerable, serve those who suffer, and enable them to develop their capacities and to pursue their aspirations.

10. Ensure that economic activities and institutions at all levels promote human development in an equitable and sustainable manner.

a. Promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.
b. Enhance the intellectual, financial, technical, and social resources of developing nations, and relieve them of onerous international debt.
c. Ensure that all trade supports sustainable resource use, environmental protection, and progressive labor standards.
d. Require multinational corporations and international financial organizations to act transparently in the public good, and hold them accountable for the consequences of their activities.

11. Affirm gender equality and equity as prerequisites to sustainable development and ensure universal access to education, health care, and economic opportunity.

a. Secure the human rights of women and girls and end all violence against them.
b. Promote the active participation of women in all aspects of economic, political, civil, social, and cultural life as full and equal partners, decision makers, leaders, and beneficiaries.
c. Strengthen families and ensure the safety and loving nurture of all family members.

12. Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities.

a. Eliminate discrimination in all its forms, such as that based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, language, and national, ethnic or social origin.
b. Affirm the right of indigenous peoples to their spirituality, knowledge, lands and resources and to their related practice of sustainable livelihoods.
c. Honor and support the young people of our communities, enabling them to fulfill their essential role in creating sustainable societies.
d. Protect and restore outstanding places of cultural and spiritual significance.

IV. DEMOCRACY, NONVIOLENCE, AND PEACE

13. Strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision making, and access to justice.

a. Uphold the right of everyone to receive clear and timely information on environmental matters and all development plans and activities which are likely to affect them or in which they have an interest.
b. Support local, regional and global civil society, and promote the meaningful participation of all interested individuals and organizations in decision making.
c. Protect the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, peaceful assembly, association, and dissent.
d. Institute effective and efficient access to administrative and independent judicial procedures, including remedies and redress for environmental harm and the threat of such harm.
e. Eliminate corruption in all public and private institutions.
f. Strengthen local communities, enabling them to care for their environments, and assign environmental responsibilities to the levels of government where they can be carried out most effectively.

14. Integrate into formal education and life-long learning the knowledge, values, and skills needed for a sustainable way of life.

a. Provide all, especially children and youth, with educational opportunities that empower them to contribute actively to sustainable development.
b. Promote the contribution of the arts and humanities as well as the sciences in sustainability education.
c. Enhance the role of the mass media in raising awareness of ecological and social challenges.
d. Recognize the importance of moral and spiritual education for sustainable living.

15. Treat all living beings with respect and consideration.

a. Prevent cruelty to animals kept in human societies and protect them from suffering.
b. Protect wild animals from methods of hunting, trapping, and fishing that cause extreme, prolonged, or avoidable suffering.
c. Avoid or eliminate to the full extent possible the taking or destruction of non-targeted species.

16. Promote a culture of tolerance, nonviolence, and peace.

a. Encourage and support mutual understanding, solidarity, and cooperation among all peoples and within and among nations.
b. Implement comprehensive strategies to prevent violent conflict and use collaborative problem solving to manage and resolve environmental conflicts and other disputes.
c. Demilitarize national security systems to the level of a non-provocative defense posture, and convert military resources to peaceful purposes, including ecological restoration.
d. Eliminate nuclear, biological, and toxic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
e. Ensure that the use of orbital and outer space supports environmental protection and peace.
f. Recognize that peace is the wholeness created by right relationships with oneself, other persons, other cultures, other life, Earth, and the larger whole of which all are a part.

THE WAY FORWARD

As never before in history, common destiny beckons us to seek a new beginning. Such renewal is the promise of these Earth Charter principles. To fulfill this promise, we must commit ourselves to adopt and promote the values and objectives of the Charter.

This requires a change of mind and heart. It requires a new sense of global interdependence and universal responsibility. We must imaginatively develop and apply the vision of a sustainable way of life locally, nationally, regionally, and globally. Our cultural diversity is a precious heritage and different cultures will find their own distinctive ways to realize the vision. We must deepen and expand the global dialogue that generated the Earth Charter, for we have much to learn from the ongoing collaborative search for truth and wisdom.

Life often involves tensions between important values. This can mean difficult choices. However, we must find ways to harmonize diversity with unity, the exercise of freedom with the common good, short-term objectives with long-term goals. Every individual, family, organization, and community has a vital role to play. The arts, sciences, religions, educational institutions, media, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and governments are all called to offer creative leadership. The partnership of government, civil society, and business is essential for effective governance.

In order to build a sustainable global community, the nations of the world must renew their commitment to the United Nations, fulfill their obligations under existing international agreements, and support the implementation of Earth Charter principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development.

Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.

The Earth Charter Initiative

Unfolding Wholeness

2008-09-23T21:18:00.001-04:00

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION

Wednesday, September 24th, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
In the Yurt at the Sanctuary
Suggested donation: $15

Our first class will offer a friendly introduction to philosophy by examining some of the most ancient and enduring questions about the nature of perception and experience.

Readings:
1. Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye: What the blind see”
2. Oliver Sacks, "To See and Not to See"

Ecological Philosophy and Spirituality Seminar at the Sanctuary

2008-09-22T21:21:00.000-04:00

UNFOLDING WHOLENESS:
Ecological Philosophy and Spirituality

An innovative mix of philosophy and yoga in a relaxed salon setting.

This seminar offers a survey of exciting issues in contemporary philosophy. It is designed to be both cumulative and also modular, so that later classes do not presuppose knowledge from earlier classes. The reading materials for each class are available online, at the course blog, so no books are required. Students who sign up for the entire series receive a discount per course and are entitled to detailed feedback on an optional paper assignment.

SCHEDULE

• 10 Wednesdays, 6:30 to 8:30 PM starting September 24th.

• $15 per session. $100 for the whole ten week course. Each session includes 20 minutes of circus yoga mind-body relaxation and a 90 minute directed philosophy seminar. Refreshments served.

• Classes will be held in the Yurt..

INSTRUCTORS

• Jen Taylor (BA Vassar) is a philosopher, Yoga instructor and political activist who studied engaged Buddhism with the legendary Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh. Her philosophical work focuses on gender and sexual politics, metaphysics, ecofeminism and the cultural mythology of partnership societies.

• Justin Good (BA SUNY Purchase, PHD Boston University) is a philosopher and community organizer whose philosophical work focuses on the philosophy of mind, political and environmental philosophy, aesthetics and epistemology. He teaches philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the University of Hartford.

CURRICULUM

(1) 9/24 Introduction to the Philosophy of Perception

(2) 10/1 TBA

(3) 10/8 TBA

(4) 10/15 TBA

(5) 10/22 TBA

(6) 10/29 TBA

(7) 11/5 TBA

(8) 11/12 TBA

(9) 11/19 TBA

(10) 11/26 TBA

To reserve a spot for the complete course, or for individual sessions contact Jen at 860.575.1166 (jen@circusyoga.com) or Justin at 617.733.9270 (vood@cummings-good.com)

What is the philosophy of the future?