Her(m)etic Hermit

Hormonally Challenged

“For the sake of your soul and the planet, don’t be normal
– normal is atrocious.”
- R.H. Ayana

“Dad – why is it that I don’t see anyone who’s married having a good time? Why are they so depressed and depressing and hardly anyone is sane?”

There are many ways these questions could be answered, even considering the fact that they’re asked by a very bright twelve year old Beamish Boy who visits his hermit father on weekends. Honesty is always the best policy.

“Have you heard how the sperm count of all species has dropped by half in the last human generation?” It may seem like a roundabout reply, but bear with me as the boy did, nodding with puzzled concern. “You have?”

“No… not really. Why’s it happened?”

 “Chemical pollution. One major culprit is PCBs – polychlorinated biphenyls, in case you want to know.” He looks at me blankly. “You see that transformer on those power lines?” My finger points to the ubiquitous ugly metal wires defacing the view. “You see all this plastic insulation here?” – Indicating the spaghetti junction of wiring cascading down from the dashboard of the Jackaroo Deva. He nods.

“Well this stuff is full of toxins that have been found in the Antarctic and Arctic and are in the tissues of every creature on Earth – along with a number of other toxic, carcinogenic and radioactive compounds. As a result the sperm counts of most species have dropped dramatically. Many people might consider this to be no problem – there’s still plenty of sperm, right? But actually many of the remaining spermatozoa are damaged and functionally useless.

“There are a lot of substances that do this – many are called ‘endocrine mimics’ that utterly confuse human hormonal systems. Most plastics are full of them. You with me so far?” He nods.

   “So – if these chemicals have damaged the males, imagine for a minute what they must be doing to the far more complex and delicate hormonal systems of females!”

   “What would they do? Make them infertile?” he asks.

   “Among other things. If your hormones are out of whack your emotions are totally screwed up. You’d expect to see randomly changing emotions with no real relation to anything – people would go emotionally haywire, reacting differently all the time in mad ways, with no apparent explanation for their behaviour – and while men are hardly immune, woman are even more strongly affected.

“Does this make sense?”

“Totally.”

            “That’s not to say that your emotions aren’t always under your control – if you meditate and examine yourself and your motives. But of course, most muggles don’t, and so the guys are left scratching their heads and both sexes end up mistaking the other one for an entirely separate species.”

“Okay – I can see that – but how long’s it been going on?”

“Since the late eighties or so – for about fifteen years now the whole relationship thing has been broken and no-one’s had any idea why it’s all been so weird…”

“Is there anything people can do about it?”

“Sure – they can leave civilization and stop using every product it produces, while carefully examining their motives.”

“Great. That’s not going to happen.”

“Oh, it can for those who want to do it. Everyone makes their own choices – usually from fear rather than good sense – another reasonless reason. But for those that want to change and get out of the evil system, there’s always a way – if there’s the will.”
  
Time flows on…
-                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           - R.A.

-
images – author’s                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Real Faraway
Higher High

The unlogged mountaintop rainforest of ancient Brobdignagian trees has survived for thousands of years. It’s the only intact stand of diverse old rainforest you can actually drive through for at least hundreds of kilometres, as far as I’m aware – and I’ve looked extensively.

Everywhere else, where there’s a road there are no old trees – certainly none as rare as these. Everything in easy each has been cut and grabbed. At the headwaters of the creek that flows past this her(m)etic hermit’s shack (spring-fed sources way up at the top of the mountain ridge that extends to the heart of a fifty million year old volcano, the hub of all the rivers in this entire region of the east coast of Oz)  the huge buttresses of mighty and extremely rare trees have held up against all comers – humans, storms, tidal waves…

In the last twenty years this swathe of intact forest has been encircled by destruction. So-called ‘selective’ logging has decimated most of the surrounding land, forests that we few feral hippies were unable to save from the Earth rapists. We didn’t have any help at all from anyone else, so saving a hundred thousand hectares of rainforest around here was a pretty good result – but we couldn’t save everything that really needed preserving. Some of it was devoured while we were engaged elsewhere, being arrested, vilified, prosecuted, fined and/or jailed while everyone else continued to watch their blithering screens. We saved the extremely endangered sphagnum and barred frogs while everyone else watched Hypnotoad and now the region still has flowing rivers and rare animals and plants as a result – unlike most places.

We’ve been waiting for dry weather to visit the ancient headwater remnants for weeks, and last weekend all the circumstances fell into conjunction and all ten of us (five adults and five children) were able to make our way up the precipitous narrow mountain road until we’d reached two and a half thousand feet in altitude (sounds better than eight hundred metres) and the smashed canopy of weed-choked regrowth finally gave way to the massive multistory hotel trees that have somehow protected themselves and the myriad species living in, on and under them for all this time.

Only two of the kids had ever been here with me before; the other newcomers have all moved into various shacks and caravans over the last few moons, forming the beginnings of a new community that threatens to give lie to my self-description – I’m a hermit with friends and partners, now. We climbed out of the two four wheel drives and in less than three paces we were completely enclosed in another world, fully enclosed within trees that were around when Moses was a gleam in Amram’s eye and Romulus and Remus had never tasted wolf’s milk.

Even the small palm trees all around us – slow growing plants, few taller than two metres in height – were hundreds of years old. The Walking Stick palms had already dropped their festoons of sweet pink berries and the Black Apples had already given their fruit to the rare (and some unknown) birds and marsupials. We brought a picnic lunch and wandered through the friendly forest for a while before eating the provisions. The subtropical rainforest is so easy to negotiate that the two and three year olds had no difficulty keeping ahead of most of the adults.

We explored around and within trees as wide as or wider than our dwellings and breathed in the cool, vital, blessed atmosphere of millennial time. As massive as this canopy is, it exists at the windblown top of a high ridge; all the valleys have been cleared by and for meat animals, and down there in the fertile protected vales by the pristine waterways the canopy was once much, much higher and the forests were far more diverse.

The old timers say they could gallop a horse from our place to the coast – about thirty klicks away as the eagle flies – at full speed, and only have to slow for river crossings; the forest was so massive and it was so lightless below that there was no ground storey of underbrush to impede travelers and only a few massive trees fit into each acre, shading the ground for unbroken centuries. Their limbs were intertwined and tied together with thigh-thick vines, so that the early loggers (they found this place only two human lifetimes ago) couldn’t cut down a single tree – nothing would fall unless an entire section of forest was cut, and then it would all come down at once.

At least four thousand species of plants and animals shared every acre of rainforest. Now you can easily count them, in the barb-fenced paddocks; cows, humans, a score of grasses and weeds and a few remnant ground animals and birds; the fish are almost all gone, too.

Now it’s almost all grassland down there in the ‘fertile’ valleys – bumfluff sprayed thinly over unprotected desert. It’s the same almost everywhere that the tentacles of the trans-human hive cities can reach. The only reason the cow farmers are still there is that not quite all their soil has washed into the sea – yet. They started off with quite a bit of topsoil, but now clay and rocks are beginning to shine through the compacted disappearing remnants of soil, after only a century of brainless reflexive ‘farming’.

Don’t admire the ‘man on the land’ if all he does is destroy your natural resources for you; most farmers are little better than thoughtless burglars, stealing whatever trees, water and soil they can grasp and sticking it down their insatiable gullets. Hard workers, but penny wise and pound foolish; most are fundamentally damaged and damaging people.

Of course, miners are even worse – but worse still are those who use and buy their crap without thinking about where it comes from at all. Without ‘consumers’ (suckers) living amid all their toxic supposed comforts and eating their poisonous and unethical products (not foods, I hasten to add – the concoctions most people eat now are merely toxic products of heartless, greedy, malicious money-grubbers), the world would still be mostly Paradise . You’d still have a Paradise to live in.

Now you’ll have to regrow one. Now even the Amazon rainforest is gone, kaput – stolen while you weren’t looking or too busy making; money to care. If you don’t believe me take a look – oh, that’s right, last week the Brazilian government passed a law saying you can’t go to the Amazon. Too many foreigners have been meddling with the loggers and miners and giving the poor people and natives dangerous ideas. Now you’re not allowed to go there; look that up, if you care.

Do you know how long it takes a two thousand year old tree to grow? It’s not actually a stupid question – it takes at least ten thousand years, barring calamities and destructive events. A huge tree can’t grow tall unless it’s already part of a huge forest. Planting trees is a good start – what we really need to be doing is planting forests full of fireproof trees, not the low-maintenance lazy eucalypts and conifers people are so keen on. You’ll bequeath firestorms to your grandchildren by planting fire-prone trees, even though any tree is better than none at all; but rainforest doesn’t burn very easily at all, and fruit and nut trees are usually pretty wet, too. Planting an ecosystem is something you must consider deeply before sticking your dirty hands into the soil and veins of the Great Mother.

It’s a good walk to the heart of darkness, but not when you’re carrying a small tribe of kids uphill – so we took the recycled vehicles. The high point of our excursion to the mountain was a visit to the Faraway Tree. Fifteen years ago we established a fauna and flora survey camp, both as a front for our other forest saving activities and as a major goal in itself; in most areas around here, the logging was being undertaken in places where no-one had ever looked to see what might live there, and camping in the remote rainforest we were ideally placed to locate, identify and prove the existence of over fifty extremely rare and endangered species of animals in places that were about to be utterly destroyed for a pittance worth of wood. We even found creatures that don’t officially exist, and a few that we don’t discuss in writing much, if at all; they’re part of the oral tradition around here.

Of course, rare trees worth tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars each were being illegally stolen all over the place by the unsupervised ratbag logging teams, who paid bribes to overseers and politicians to turn a blind eye as well – but that’s another, more dangerous story for another time. If this is happening in a wealthy ‘developed’ country, think again about what’s happening to the Amazon, and the irreplaceable forests of New Guinea and Indonesia , for instance.

When we established our teepee forest camps over a decade ago, we brought reputable scientists into the camps to stay with us and verify our findings, and proved irrefutably that these bits of Paradise were too valuable to trash. That didn’t stop the loggers, the businessmen or their government stooges, of course – we had to blockade their machinery and hold off their sometimes violent and murderously angry crews, and fight them (successfully, at great cost) in the courts as well. But it was worth it. We saved the Faraway Tree and all its friends, a mountaintop seed-source that makes regenerating the valleys possible even now.

To keep this remnant intact we had to save as much as we could around it; even so, the unparalleled storms of the last decade have brought down a few millennial old timers, now that the wind isn’t slowed as much by the logged forests around these untrashed fragments – and fires come closer now.

This was the first time Beamish Boy and Wonder Boy had dared to climb the humungous ancient strangler fig. The Faraway Tree is hollow, but very much alive; the Strangler (or Port Jackson fig) often grows down around an existing tree, and over the course of centuries completely surrounds it within it’s Bodhi-like body, dropping tendrils from the upper branches of its host that enwrap it on their way to the earth and soil. There they can eventually become the roots of a truly massive structure that envelopes the inner tree and reaches over its upper branches to climb way up into the high canopy.

Sometimes the inner tree eventually rots away entirely, leaving a living, hollow strangler fig that forms a wide, hollow womb within itself – like the Faraway Tree. But the Faraway Tree is thousands of years old, a hollow tube full of handholds and footholds that adventurous boys (and even pregnant women) can easily climb barefoot up into the canopy, to peer from its high windows and doors to distant horizons. And, almost like the Faraway Tree of the children’s books, when you return to earth from the crown or thereabouts you find yourself in a slightly different world.

There was always only one narrow entrance into the heart of the tree up the mountain; until last weekend. Now there’s another – but there’s no sign of cutting, no way the tree has been altered by human hands to make egress easier. The second ground-level opening has a fresh, small, well-used track leading up to it, but no animal has made the gap. It’s a space where the tree has grown apart; an opening in the fabric of the world.

The last few times I was here I wished there was an easier entrance.

Time appears to flow on…

Choose life. Turn on. Tune in. Opt OUT of the lie. Leave the poisonous fruits of the cities to wither on the vine and find reality. Save the world to save yourself and your children. Together we can create a much better Millennium.

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author – and please include a link to the original along with this notice

The globe of the Earth is the Real Estate, the reality behind all of Humanity’s virtual fictions. We draw imaginary arcs around its myriad bounties and parcel the living land up between us. We draw lines and fences, walls and barriers of language, race, religion, custom and patronage and say ‘don’t cross this imaginary line’ to each other. We exclude or kill or imprison or deport those brave or foolhardy enough to try. We invent notional nations and countries with no more real legitimacy than football teams, based on nothing more than the past conquests of barbarians and egomaniacs.

Land is the first mother and the planet Earth is the homeland of us all, even when we live within a global city, a world economy, a shared genepool and common heritage of billions. The cost of simply living on the land rises everywhere in our false economies of fictitious endless growth and the destructive rights of economic might. People think they’re becoming wealthier as they price themselves and their children out of a worthwhile existence and pay for once free and plentiful natural benefits that mindless greed and profligacy has made scarce. The natural right to simply live somewhere has to be ‘bought’ from someone who has somehow come to ‘own’ it.

Rents and rates and government charges rise to the point where life is not living, where people have to struggle to survive even in the wealthiest countries of the early third millennium. The basic cost of living – land itself – doesn’t just rise in cities; any place with water, soil and forest is highly valued, often for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong, greedy, pig-ignorant ways. Only those who profit from destroying the ecosystem are wealthy enough to ‘buy’ large areas of land and control the Earth, the common wealth.

Yet this is a world full of hard-working people of broad intelligence, who have created a highly advanced technology, replete with mass automation and many ways to generate free power for us all – which could easily translate into freedom and leisure time for everyone. We have created a world filled with the trappings of high civilisation; organisation, social, political, educational, transport and communication systems unparalleled in human history. With all the skills and wisdom at our disposal, is a ‘modernised’ version of tawdry feudal hierarchies the best we can do? Are the pointless regimentations and archaic self-serving hierarchies good enough to satisfy our evolving sense of justice and fair play any more?

So much of the fossilised organisations of our civilisations are based on imperial, militaristic mind-sets that must be discarded like last millennium’s battered battle armor. We live in a world where clean and ‘free’ energy is available – not just slightly cheaper energy, but freely flowing electricity that pours into and out of the Earth. Energy is power and power is what it takes to raise ourselves up the evolutionary spiral of real prosperity, to a world where everyone has free healthcare, inexpensive, energy efficient and comfortable shelter, cheap, clean mineral-rich food and pure water. With the globe freed from the economic shackles of the Cold War we have more than enough wealth to create a world where all the old, the young and the needy are looked after with good social security benefits, and in which everyone is free and empowered enough to live peacefully in a healthy ecosystem.

We can create a world in which our major dilemma is to wonder what to do with all our free time. We can do it today if we simply give up the hypnotic thrall of false patriotism and stop making weapons of war. We can divert all that money, time, inventiveness and energy to really interesting and useful ends. Otherwise we’ll have to wait a lot longer than tomorrow; it’s a clear choice.

New generations are now rising into a New Aeon, blinking in the grandeur of a new dawn where peace is not only possible – but has become the norm for decades all around an ever more prosperous globe. A new Renaissance is coming, whatever we do or believe. We can be and create everything we can dream of – if we work and play with wisdom and compassion.

Billions of people all want the same simple things; we want to be free to be ourselves and share healthy, happy lives with our loved ones, lives that are free of needless burdens. We want to be happy and to be allowed to pursue whatever lifestyle and means of ‘work’ that fulfills us and provides for our needs – whatever time-filling contribution to the prosperity, wisdom and wit of Humanity we feel impelled to engage in, so long as it harms no-one and is ecologically sustainable; whatever any person chooses to do with their time will enrich us all. Humans want to love and be loved. We want to regenerate ourselves and the planet, to live in a healthy world where we can breathe the air, drink the water and eat the food – without a real danger of shortening our lives with military and industrial grade poisons.

Modern urbanised people spend far more of their time working to have shelter, food, water and other essentials (not to mention a whole swathe of superfluous and irresistibly addictive luxuries) than their ‘primitive’ ancestors ever had to undertake in most ‘primitive’ village communities. In these modern times, workers often spend more time at work and commuting than feudal serfs living on medieval farms – and they usually pass on less land (real estate) to their children. The changes that have already arrived on our doorsteps mean that people are no longer defined by their jobs – which have a tendency to slip out from under them or transform into hitherto unimaginable forms. We can all experience a myriad of experiences and skills in today’s world – if we settle for reduced security and working conditions, wages and freedom. Some deal.

It’s the same old same old in a world where people pay money so they can have a legal address, from which they can vote to banish other people from the island. People gather before screens and worship the quasi-existence of a universally loved Big Brother, ignoring the wisdom and evanescent brilliance of their children, telling them to be quiet and bury their bright dreams in the overwhelming avalanche of televised crap. Instead of learning how to accept more people into the circle of our shared horizon – which we’ll all have to do if we go on having more than one baby each – we’re still practicing the tenets of the ancient tribal mindsets that usually lead to death camps and firing squads. It all starts with calls to patriotism and salutations to flapping totemic banners, and we all know where it ends; it all ends in tears.

Let’s not go down that path. Let’s aim for the stars and we may achieve Mars – and a healthy planet Earth. Let’s dream of a world where we can grow progressively smarter, healthier and more compassionate, with long enough lifespans to learn how to become the kind of Humanity we all want to be. Let’s heal the planet and get into each other’s art, food, music and cultures. It’s not as if we have much choice in the matter – we’re already becoming a global hegemony of ever more enlightened beings living in an ever-expanding exotic chaotic mix of dreams and values, beliefs and isms, technologies and miracles. We’re going to meld and live and love together or we’re going to be an extinct species of hairless ape.

We have a rare and probably narrow window of opportunity, while the world is buoyed on a bubble of prosperity, to start a whole new ball game. We can kick out the bums who want to rule us, whether in the name of god, ideology or efficiency. We can all decide for ourselves. As Brian of Nazareth said, ‘We’re all individuals.’ Those of us who want to can even ultimately cross the Great Water and pioneer new spaces and places in the cosmos. We have no idea what we’re capable of doing and becoming if we can drop our falsehoods and fears and get on with having a great time in this, the best of all possible worlds. We can become immortal wise weavers of endless possibility on a verdant green planet, creating, nurturing, building and bringing a really wonderful world and Humanity to flower.

It’s easy to lose sight of the optimistic essentials when you’re in an office or school or a gutter or mine or shop or some other dark satanic money-making mill of Mammon. They’re places that are designed to make you forget your real heritage and lose sight of the glorious, fleeting, pulsating here and now – to encourage you to give up today’s real life and living for the tenuous fear-driven promise of tonight’s brief moment of rest. It’s easy to forget that you were born free – and that you still are, right now. It’s easy to remember, too; all it takes to escape from the cocooning illusion is to wake up and really take a look at the absurd structures and fossilised patterns all around you, mental and material garbage that clogs up everyone’s lives with control-freak crap. When you’re awake you can keep your eyes on the real prize – the freedom to use time as you will. It’s a freedom that money’s bright promise never really brings, a natural right that slips through the fingers of the powerful overlord and time-serving wage slave alike. The tyrannical class, caste and power systems of old orders can only perpetuate terror and inequality. We’ll do far better in the new millennium. We’ll invent something different for a change. You can bet on it.

It’s never too late to turn on, tune in and opt out. The younger you decide to change the easier it is, and the sooner you start the younger you’ll be when you do. Open your eyes and step outside the comforting illusion – you actually live in an astoundingly beautiful world.

- R.A.

See http://newilluminati.blog-city.com
http://gonow.to/freeenergy
http://newilluminati.blog-city.com
http://gonow.to/ringwood
http://gonow.to/rampage
http://gonow.to/timespace

Time appears to flow on…

images – author’s

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author – and please include a link to the original along with this notice