Completing the circle
Uncompleted things in life become energy consuming baggage.
Most people who gather large quantities of disordered clutter in the home have the stress of losing things and the sense of being under siege by a mountain of junk. In the same way when you leave things unresolved in your life then they won’t vanish, they will lurk in the shadowy background calling out to you to resolve them. Imagine tens of thousands of these unresolved issues crying out to you? You can quickly drown in stress of so much unresolved junk.
There is a German word called gestalt, which is a philosophy about completing the circle, resolving the unresolved issues in life, so that they no longer are calling for your attention, they vanish as issues like the morning mist. Everything you fail to resolve ends on the junk pile to weigh you down. The idea is to resolve all these issues before taking on new projects, even the smallest. List them, then work on them. They can be physical or emotional issues.
Prevention is better than cure. By keeping life simple, by filtering out junk, by restricting what is taken on, then you have the resources to cope with completing the circle rather than an ever growing mountain of unresolved issues.
Finally, in order to resolve the many unresolved demands upon me in life I am reducing for a few months my blog posts to one every few days. I will be back to daily postings when I have found a new home and a stable internet connection.
Grow from challenges
Every challenge has a hidden blessing.
Metaphorically everyone will face angry bears on the road of life, these are challenges that you can grow from.
Life is to be lived, new experiences, new challenges that keeps old age from the door of both body and mind. Perhaps for me life has become too challenging. I feel I am in a maze with many doors, behind each door is a chocolate cookie (good experience) or an angry bear (bad experience.)
I live in a rented house, which is now sold, thus any day now I will get my two month eviction notice, which means I have to find a new home. Cancelling my telephone and internet package with Virgin Media opened two doors to two angry bears, they hammered me with cancellation charges, and then cancelled my telephone and internet connection today rather than 1st July as I instructed them. Two angry bears now face an angry Alex (me), who cancelled his direct debit with Virgin Media, and will be asking for compensation for the aggravation and costs this has caused to my business.
I am making this post through a USB stick internet connection, which is a third of the price compared to Virgin Media, but with only one gigabyte bandwidth that has got to last me the whole month. This impacts my blogging experience, so no more videos or visits to high bandwidth sites. I know there are a couple of bloggers I follow who have high bandwidth postings which means for a few months I will be unable to follow you, since I need to ration my internet bandwidth in favour of my business activity.
I conclude this post by suggesting there are lots of wisdom and personal growth available from dealing with angry bears, every challenge in life comes with a hidden blessing as a reward for overcoming the challenge.
Do action for a reaction
Only through doing does prosperity come.
Doing creates magical outcomes, a becoming with unexpected results.
If life is a pool of water, doing nothing won’t create many ripples in that pool, you have to throw rocks into the water to get the ripples. Part of the energy of the ripples you make feedback at you, so you need to be ready for reaping the harvest you created with your splash.
Through the doing is a becoming, for instance you are alive because your heart is involved in the doing of pumping blood around your body, and your lungs are pulling oxygen into your body, you are conscious because your brain cells are firing electrical impulses. All these parts of your body are working, throwing rocks into the pool to achieve a becoming from the ripples they cause to sustain your life and consciousness.
If you are in a hole in life, the only way to get out of the hole is work, do, climb out of the hole. Painful, anxious and challenging it may be, but you have the choice of doing or running away to the many escapism activities like watching television.
Someone started a dance class in Colchester, and paid me to promote their business. Being new the numbers of students did not pay hall hire, so through the doing they printed flyers and I went into target outlets in Colchester asking if they would display those flyers to customers. Every contact I made with an outlet was a doing that resulted in ripples of reaction.
Once you throw rocks into the pool, you throw a little bit of chaos out, which results in a degree of unpredictability, so you should be ready for anything. Luck and miracles rarely happen sitting on your bottom, and they can come in unexpected ways. A tattooist asked me to promote some of their flyers in exchange for the flyers I gave them, a reasonable trade-off; a women’s clothing boutique took me by surprise by saying they would be putting a flyer in customer bags, I should have given them more flyers; I was sceptical about a doctor’s surgery accepting the flyers, but they did and I gained a customer for the dance class.
First day of Summer
Today marks the first day of Summer in Britain.
Today is the first day of Summer in Britain.
It is May Day today, my ancestors call Beltane, the first day of British Summer. Although there is still a tinge of cold in the background it was a bright beautiful day today. I am back to blogging.
The trees are now manifesting their verdant greenery, and every animal is thinking about procreation. I can safely say that the land is wide awake and it is party time here in Britain in the realm of nature.
Here is a live link to a nest of peregrine falcons at Nottingham Trent University. Better than watching moronic television or hanging out in Facebook, this is a live view of nature raising young. Two chicks are hatched, a third egg is still to hatch. The mother is currently keeping their young warm, the father is out hunting. There are two live feeds of this peregrine falcon family. The site warns that this is unedited live footage so expect the raw aspects of nature to be on display occasionally when mice and other prey is brought in by the parents to feed their young.
Back on Wednesday
I am away from blogging for a few days.
I have reached a busy moment in my business and I shall be away four days to give this my full attention.
I consider that having a break from anything is a good thing to do to recharge batteries.
I wish you all a healthy, happy and abundant week.
The last daffodil
Everything has its moment, a beginning and an end.
This Colchester daffodil exists in a brief moment of becoming.
Passing a ruined old church yesterday I noticed the sea of daffodils had vanished, their task of being pollinated by insects completed. I became aware of the cycle of life, that all has a beginning and an end, that the flowers we enjoy are in a state of purposeful becoming.
Everything has its moment, and I arrived on the scene to photograph one of the few remaining daffodils that in a week will fade into history for another year.
Being happy, health and abundant, all qualities of prosperity, is a state of becoming, that exists now rather than past or future. This becoming follows the same cycles of life as the daffodil, a beginning and an ending, a brief reign of time before renewing into a new cycle. To attempt to control such a cycle, rather than let it be can achieve the reverse of what we want. My cycle of time at this house where I live is drawing to an end, it is being sold, as to where I will move to I have yet to decide.
Good communication for prosperity
Good communication avoids trouble and supports prosperity.
Communicate to others your needs and boundaries.
I took a photograph yesterday of a male blackbird in full song. The blackbird sings to inform the world of its territorial claims, which will be the basis for attracting a mate and raising young. On the same day I saw male blackbirds fighting over territory. By way of singing the male blackbird is communicating to all other blackbirds its existence and territory, thus it avoids considerable conflict with other blackbirds that might enter its domain.
Good communication is part of good strategy for personal prosperity. If you are unable to communicate your needs or boundaries to others you will be ignored, your boundaries invaded. Good communication avoids unnecessary conflict, misunderstandings and problems. Someone was to pick up items from my home yesterday, but they arrived at my front door when I was not at home; had they rung in advance I would have been around to meet their needs rather than them waiting 40 minutes for me to return home to meet them.
Summer is here
Reconnect with nature.
Reconnect with nature.
It was a shock after a long winter to be sunburnt yesterday here in Britain. It appears that Spring was cancelled and the UK went straight from Winter mode to Summer mode. The butterflies and bees are out in force. There are discarded remains of bird eggs scattered around. The leaves are finally starting to sprout. Blossom is showing. The natural world is awake.
Prosperity is more than money, it’s about being happy, and what better than to reconnect with nature by going out amongst it. You only need to reconnect to one thing, self, a person or nature, to reconnect to everything, rather like turning on a light switch. I shall be working out in the villages from Colchester soon, and I shall make the most of it to reconnect with nature at the same time.
Gain prosperity by cutting expenses
Rebel against the present economic paradigm to increase personal prosperity.
Try cutting your weekly food bill.
The current economic paradigm demands that the individual works long hours, to buy products produced through the exploitation of people and nature, which they don’t need, which they throw away to pollute the environment. Makes no sense to me.
Food has recently been my target for being sustainable. For the last week I have switched to drinking only water. As I am so active the water is like drinking the liquid of paradise when I get dehydrated. All my body needs is water, nothing else, and I save a fortune by now no longer needing to buy the milkshakes, milk, soft drinks and other liquid junk.
My basic staples at the moment are eggs, bread and potatoes. The bread I buy at 25% of its original price if I manage to time my visit to the food markets well, when they reduce their excess food down for quick sale at the end of the day. Eggs I regret are caged hens, but that is how I get the price right down for 12 eggs. I get my potatoes from a potato trader two miles away, a large sack of potatoes I drag home on foot with great difficulty. In addition I get a healthy but low-cost form of butter for the bread and low-cost honey. I hit the supermarkets when they make food price reductions at the end of the day, and enjoy a random selection of purchases on whatever was on offer at the time. I believe my food bill has been slashed 75%.
My strategy is too extreme for most people, but ironically my body will be healthier for it, thus healthy body means happier person, and of course the savings means I am wealthier having cut 75% of my food bill. The present economic paradigm hates people like me.
The oak that fell to entropy
Being sustainable now will be the difference of who survives and dies in future.
The sun is setting on this age of civilisation. Climate change is adding to the entropic collapse of global energy systems.
Besieged by snow and wind for weeks, a great storm sent a 1,200-year-old oak tree crashing to the ground. The Pontfadog Oak growing in Wrexham in Wales was one of the oldest trees in Britain, a meeting point of the ancient Welsh armies who fought the English, recorded as far back as the Viking Age of 802. This tree, which had been a source of shelter, meetings, feed for animals and fencing for the community was cut down by entropy.
The Pontfadog Oak could be a metaphor for what human civilisation is now facing. If the oak tree is human civilisation, then the storm that brought it down is entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is behind the idea of if you take too much energy out of an energy system, and damage its ability to renew itself, then entropy is the result. An energy system that loses too much energy without replacement collapses to an ever increasing simplicity through disorder. Social, political, economic and environmental systems are like the Pontfadog Oak, all energy systems that will crash to the ground when entropy reaches a certain tipping point.
By degrees the Pontfadog Oak had been weakening due to the siege of climate change conditions, then the tipping point emerged without warning that smashed the tree to the ground. Plenty of warnings had been made that the tree needed support from its stewards and stakeholders, but nobody wanted to give the tree the love and attention it needed, so it died. Everyone now misses the tree they neglected and took for granted.
It no longer matters what is responsible for climate change, it is too late to do anything about it. Any historian or anthropologist would be aware climate change has been behind the evolution of humanity, it killed the Neanderthal and pushed our present human species to the technological progress it now has. Climate change has always been the game changer, unsustainable human waste, greed and inefficiency will be laid bare as climate change wipes out food, water and energy sources in a world of seven billion people.
Whilst I try to be the optimist, I am the realist. Like the Pontfadog Oak the decision makers and citizens of this world will carry on in their unsustainable ways, they will be negligent and blind to the obvious, then the energy systems that are already crumbling will collapse. Large numbers of people will no longer have access to the basic essentials of life, they will use the only options open to them, they will begin to move and fight.
In nature some plants depend upon wildfires destroying wood and grassland, destruction that triggers new growth. For a better future the human race is going to face a period of anarchy and violence of a magnitude that will seem horrific. The human race is going to have to experience a good kicking to experience a paradigm shift of the type needed to survive. For those of you like me who are on the ball, making sustainable choices now which benefit principally you, your family and the community assists you in surviving what will be a challenging and dark time ahead.
