All Dress Rehearsals Are Over, By Carolyn Baker

All Dress Rehearsals Are Over, By Carolyn Baker

Before writing another word I want to thank all of you who have reached out to me through my website, on Facebook, Twitter, and by email to check on my status during the horrific Colorado floods of last week. At this writing, over 12,000 people have been evacuated, nearly 18,000 homes destroyed or damaged, 5 confirmed dead, and hundreds more missing. I consider myself extraordinarily blessed not to have been harmed or have experienced any damage to my home; however, all around me in every direction is devastation—evacuated families, schools closed, and people who still cannot return to their workplaces.

Where In The Hell Is Artemas, Pennsylvania

Today is Memorial Day, created many years ago with the intention of honoring the fallen in battle. While we hold them in our hearts alongside the horrors of war, what must also be remembered and cherished on this day is the earth community in which we are innately and organically embedded. Whatever you believe about NTE, which is really of little importance in the larger scheme of things, we are losing this planet by way of the actions of our very immature, uninitiated, unwizened species. If you can, go out in nature today and reconnect with some aspect of it. Hold it close to your heart as you would your child or a beloved. These are the good ole days, and this is as good as it is likely to get.

Collapse Is The Transition Of Consciousness, By Gary Stamper

Collapse Is The Transition Of Consciousness, By Gary Stamper

People who are interpreting the collapse – it’s going to be this, it’s going to be that, and myself included – are all operating under the belief systems of the current paradigm while we’re still  in that paradigm, and there’s no way we can fully understand a new paradigm until we’ve moved into it, and even then, it will probably take some time for it to truly reveal itself…and who we’ll be. 300 years later, we barely understand The Enlightenment, and there have been two major paradigm shifts since then (oh, you didn’t know about those?).

The Sixth Great Extinction: Beyond Transition, The Long Emergency, And The Great Turning, By Carolyn Baker

The Sixth Great Extinction: Beyond Transition, The Long Emergency, And The Great Turning, By Carolyn Baker

Climate change is real, and it is human-caused. We engender climate change in different ways—overpopulation, using fossil fuels, and above all, by consuming. Before the advent of industrial civilization, humans used to consume, for the most part, what they actually needed. Today, consuming has become an addiction. In answer to McPherson’s question, “What underlies our drive to consume?” I would answer: the profound emptiness that inhabits the psyches of human beings in the modern, industrial world. Yes, many aspects of the industrial living arrangement force us to consume, but whenever those aspects are threatened by any talk of creating different living arrangements because those arrangements are creating climate change, both the politician and the ordinary citizen begin recoiling in terror. In other words, we consume voraciously because we cannot imagine another, more satisfying way of life, and we know that if we do not maintain our consumption-saturated lifestyles, we will be forced to confront our sense of emptiness and lack of meaning.