Awareness: Natural Resilience
[Exploring Life] The embrace of life is not without struggle. Obstacles and challenges are inevitable companions as we make our way through time. Our approach to the emergence of turbulence in life partially determines the character of our personal narrative. There is no life that avoids adversity. The story of our life is influenced and stylized by the nature of our response to the adversity that visits us. Adversity is not something that is desirable, but it is also a phenomenon that none of us can completely avoid. When adversity pays us a visit, it inhabits our body, mind and spirit. A resilient person describes someone of a firm persuasion in life, an individual that ultimately confirms adversity as a means to engage with the mysteries of life. Resilience means that we move through the heart of our misfortunes in life in order to discover what awaits us on the other side.
In nature we discover the most inspiring examples of resilience. Grass is amazingly resilient and can often be found growing in what appears to be an inhospitable place. Our side-walks are often wonderfully punctuated by small inlets of grass that grasp onto life in the slightest crack or crevice within the concrete. All too often, we view this as an unwelcome invasion and proceed to physically or chemically destroy the life of the grass in order to “improve” the appearance of the walkway. In our destructive pursuit of artificially manicured landscapes, we often miss a vital and essential message from nature and ignore the wisdom it communicates to us. Perhaps at times in our lives we too feel as though we are grasping on to a life within the cracks and crevices of an inhospitable world. In conversation with nature we can learn to creatively embrace the power of resilience so that we may approach adversity with wisdom and grace.
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[Exploring Life] Ageism is prejudice or discrimination against older person simply because of their age. More specifically, ageism is a belief that older persons are unworthy, incompetent, low is status. The term ageism, coined in 1969 by gerontologist Dr. Robert Butler, is modeled on the pattern of racism and sexism. Butler states: “Ageism allows the younger generations to see older people as different than themselves; thus they subtly cease to identify with their elders as human beings.” Ageism is just as vile and virulent as discrimination by race or gender. Though ageism has only been in use for approximately forty years, it has already found its way into the social arena.
[Exploring Life] We live in an age of instantaneous global communication. We also live in an age of mass somniloquence. Each of us secretly desires the intimacy and art of a deeper more compelling conversation that authentically explores the alluring mystery of being alive. When we engage in authentic conversation we explore and exchange our thoughts, feelings and attitudes about the nature of our lives. The various masks we wear and various roles we play within culture and society have no place in authentic conversation. Hidden within the wonderful inventiveness of our new technologies are the seeds of isolation, dislocation, and superficiality. Even though we communicate with each other more and more, we seem to have less and less to say.
[Exploring Life] Anger is a strong emotional reaction in response to a perceived provocation or injustice. The emotional reaction consists of an often unintended improvisatory abyss of displeasure, irritation, resentment, outrage, and enmity. Anger is an extreme reaction that takes our body and mind to the very edge of a threshold in which rationale thinking and clear reasoning begin to break. Of course, there are times when anger is a necessary and effective response to a situation – no emotion is purely negative. Acute anger occurs in a specific moment and is a short-term response to an antagonizing situation; it may be a helpful response or not. Chronic anger is more mercurial in that it tends to shift our perception of our circumstances so that we look out into the world through the lens of heart-felt irritation. And what we tend to perceive in the world we also tend to attract.
[Exploring Life] Culture may be viewed as a universal tendency for people within stable geographic populations to create sets of beliefs, values and expectations that serve to create a sense of social coherence. It may be that culture is an offspring of the innate human need to belong. Perhaps culture originated as groups of people sharing the same situations and circumstances found it advantageous to solve the problems of survival. Whatever its origins, culture is built upon an integrated and extensive pattern of assumptions, beliefs, and ideas about how to live. One of the greatest problems with culture is that it tends to be static rather than dynamic, that is, cultural beliefs, traditions, and patterns of thought are resistant to change retrieving the old adage that it is easier to remain in the familiar than to change. We are immersed in culture from the moment of birth and are silently influenced by it throughout our lifetime. In our minds, culture shapes our presuppositions often in ways that lie outside of our own awareness. We are immersed in the code, programs, and language of our culture, which in turn establishes the core medium for all learning. Culture is a total surround, an immersive environment, that shapes our identity and behaviour.
[Exploring Life] Nature is a vast system of interaction between all life forms and organic material of the planet that provides the foundation for existence. From this perspective, it the destruction of the planet is equivalent to the destruction of life. Capitalism is an economic and political system that embraces the notion of private ownership as a means to produce and distribute goods and services for a profit. The raw materials essential to the capitalist come from Nature, and in this way capitalism is also a accepted means to exploit the natural resources of the planet in order to perpetuate consumerism and materialism. The real purpose of capitalism is to continually intensify the presence of need and want in people. Without people addicted to consumption and the ownership of stuff, capitalism would fail.
[Exploring Life] Bolivia is posed to create a law that grants nature equal right to a humans, and have also suggested that the United Nations adopt a 
[Exploring Life] Ecopsychology embraces the essential task of healing our relationship with the Earth and with life itself. Ecology is at its core the study of interconnectedness, the exploration of relationships, and the synthesis of belonging. Psychology is the study of the workings of the human mind and how we think, feel, and behave. Ecopsychology is the confluence of ecology and psychology and proposes that the path to healing the mind is the very same path to healing the Earth; that is to say, the human mind is inseparable from the natural world. The landscape, terrain, weather, plant life, and animal life that surround us are as essential to the development of the mind as are thoughts, emotions, and behaviour.
[Exploring Life] One of the most basic principles of all corporations is that they are allowed to intentionally lie and deceive the public without being responsible for their actions. A great deal of this deception takes place in what we might call a gray zone, or a place in which there is some degree of confusion of lack of clarity. A corporation views lack of clarity not as an opportunity to help clarify, but instead to manipulate, lie and deceive. Behind the lies and deceptions are the corporate dwellers who base their success on increasing revenues rather than making a valued contribution to society. Oddly enough, these people somehow avoid feeling shame and guilt.
Do schools kill creativity? This is the opening question of an interesting interview with Sir Ken Robinson, an “expert” on creativity and innovation. The answer is deceptively simple: “Yes, of course they do.” Though this may sound somewhat sarcastic, the reality of schooling is the systematic obliteration of the individual including their creativity, and their element. The reason for this is quite simple – all schooling originates in the concept of the prerequisite, that is, that one group of people who are deemed to be more knowledgeable enforce a system of knowledge and skills on those who are considered less knowledgeable. What is most surprising about education is its persistent inability to question its own assumptions denigrating all “innovation and change” to mere passing facade.