attention

Life as it is, here and now, is as good as it gets.  When something catches my attention and I want to turn toward it, I also turn away from the rest of my life.  I have to be careful with my attention!  (Zen contains a corollary message.)  When I follow the necessity of transient circumstances, my life is best, and it flows more smoothly.  By allowing myself to be receptive to the changing needs of life I become more accepting, appreciative, and compassionate.  And my thoughts and actions reflect this attitude. 

It used to be that we could only satisfy our basic needs; an ascetic lifestyle was the norm for our early ancestors.  Then, when culture and technology rapidly changed our lifestyle, we learned how to satisfy almost any need we could imagine, faster than ever before.  But we lack the native wisdom to know which desires should be satisfied and which should not, which impulses to act on and which to restrain.  This wasn't a problem before, we simply couldn't satisfy most of our creative desires, so the temptation was much less.  But now, in our instant gratification society, being careful with where we place our attention is more difficult than ever.  Perhaps the contemplative traditions like Buddhism arose to remind us that it is now up to us to impose on ourselves the control that the environment can no longer exercise over us.

The last few days I knew that my circumstances necessitated that I attend to various work and chores, but I became infected with a desire to watch episodes of the television series "Firefly." It was easier to do this than my work, so I easily caved and watched them.  While enjoyable, my work still needed to be done, only now I had even less time to do it in. 

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"To study Buddhism is to study the self.  To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to become enlightened by all things."
"When other sects speak well of Zen, the first thing that they praise is its poverty."
"If he cannot stop the mind that seeks after fame and profit, he will spend his life without finding peace."
- Dogen

"My sermons are criticized by certain audiences. They say that my sermons are hollow, not holy. I agree with them because I myself am not holy. The Buddha's teaching guides people to the place where there is nothing special... People often misunderstand faith as kind of ecstasy of intoxication... True faith is sobering up from such intoxication."
- Kodo Sawaki

"No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself."
- Tilopa

sustainable community

Last night after watching Food Inc. a few disparate ideas began to coalesce in my head.  I wondered what it would be like if we got all our food locally.  I wondered if peak oil would be followed by "peak food".  I wondered how all the different businesses and people in my community worked together to provide the services and materials that were needed to sustain us.  Our community is like an organism, or maybe a cell.  What work do the people do?  What do they need to know?  How does it all function?  The most appropriate buzz word for these ideas is "sustainable community".  Sustainability really occurs at the community level, or at least I think that this is the smallest body capable of long term survival.  An individual cannot sustain itself, it eventually dies.  A nuclear family cannot sustain itself, but a community is a working, breeding population.  It can supply a wide variety of services and work together to meet the needs of everyone from the strong to the weak.  Traditionally a "community" has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location, in social units larger than a household. These interacting people are individuals in every sense of the word, who interact by necessity and due to proximity.  A community is composed of diverse individuals. 

There must be a balance between the needs of a community and the indivuduals of which it is composed.  I am only thinking of community in terms of the smallest unit of long term sustainability and self-sufficiency, or in other words within the context of the global environment and anthropology.  I'll avoid insinuating any political ideas as they would seem rather irrelevant to solving these very basic problems.  Or at least I do not see how they can.  Even today, when governments do not work to meet the needs of the people, it is the leaders of cities and towns, the mayors and council members, who (sometimes) set the example of higher standards.  Cities have programs devoted to improving the well-being of its members, such as job centers, and the overall functioning of the city itself.  I know of people who are active in a field of study called "comparative civilizations".  While a civilization is on the larger scale of nations and cultures, usually a grouping of many communities (the only larger grouping is humanity as a whole), the basic lessons learned are similar.  I want to know more about my community so I can help to make it sustainable, and to the extent possible, self-sufficient.  I hadn't before thought of my life as depending upon the health of my community more than anything else, but perhaps this is true.  Even more so in times of change.

Postscript: I would love to eat food that is: not "processed", in season, organic and not GM, and local.  Satisfying just a few of those criteria is difficult.

An appeal to behavioral change over technological advance.

Dynamic carpooling- I've brought this up before, whether here or elsewhere. Now I see a description of it on Wikipedia. This is the social side of a combined social/technical solution to optimizing transportation efficiency. If you have a long commute it would really pay off. Just the other day I heard Daniel Sperling bring it up during his interview on NPR.

I think there is a misconception about the right path to a more efficient or globally responsible way of life. People tend to conceive this as a problem that requires a single solution. Of course, it requires many different solutions and approaches to the problem. I think the reason for this is that few people are willing to change their behaviors and accustomed way of living, and accordingly, if they wish to reduce human caused pollution, they hope to achieve this almost exclusively through technological innovations that make their consumerables less polluting. When it comes to vehicles, these are the people who see solar-electric and fuel cell technology as the answer to a healthier planet. I think this is very narrow thinking. Before I am accused of being a Luddite, let me state for the record that I would be the last person to say we do not need to develop better technological solutions and find ways to affordably mass produce them to get them into the hands of consumers. However, if we remove resistance to social change and our engrained behavior patterns, we do not need any technical advances to acheive the goal of sustainability. I know, it is easy to say, but it is also easy to forget. Sustainability is more a behavioral problem than a technological one. Answers that address our way of living can provide solutions right now. Technology will provide us with new possibilities, but let's not sacrifice our past in the race for the future. Let's do what we are already able to do right now.

A few more misconceptions I see:

Few people seem to know what waste really is. Waste is not waste if it can be used as a resource or fuel at the next step down the chain. Just because it isn't used right now doesn't mean it won't be put to use later or by someone or something else. Waste is better defined by it's social and environmental costs, which need to be understood first. Before we can understand efficiency or recycling we need to know more about waste.

More is not always better. This assumption often goes unnoticed. There is a futurist periodical called "Infinite Energy"- maybe I should coin the term energy lust to describe this, because I have no idea what someone would do with infinite energy were they to actually get it.