friday afternoon update! 22: the here and there edition

 

local props

sitting in mocha java espresso bar and cafe, dedham square, drinking a cup of joe courtesy of sumatra, still untangling this local/non-local knot, still amazed after all these years at the synchronistic power of intentional attention, to wit: my week has been flooded with this here and there energy, with a bit of a lean toward the power of here.

like for example when i walked in here this morning and reached into my pocket to locate the cash for my coffee and suddenly discovering that it wasn’t here…it was there…meaning at home, where i left it after taking it out of the pants i was wearing yesterday (which is an argument for the simplicity of owning one pair of pants! and that is a story for another day!).

well, if i’d been at starbucks i suppose i would have pulled out my starbucks card and never even noticed that i was cash-free, which would have been a bummer later in the day when i went to the garden store to buy seeds for the garden. and it’s friday so i’m here at mocha java, and i got to tap right into the power of local, when the owner offered me a wimpy deal: i will gladly pay him next friday for a coffee today!

the rights and responsibilities of the non-local

big conversation brewing this week with james bartley at the hub re: good and evil in the realm of marketing, and it got me of course relating it all to  the here and there thing, in the sense that it’s a pretty standard tactic to use the full battery of contemporary media, words-music-images, to incite the notion that we aren’t enough, or don’t have enough, and that there is an elusive something over there that we need to get here right away. or maybe we just need to get ourselves from here to there. 

of course, this plays into the whole need, should, want discussion from last week, and there you go…it’s all connected. and this is the real power in the local/non-local dichotomy…it all relies on the fiction of dis-connection, which rules the monster of lack.

another bill hicks moment

today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration; that we are all one consciencness experiencing itself subjectively …there’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s tom with the weather…

wow, did you see the news? something about how we’re god’s perfect and holy thoughts and we live in his mind, and there’s no reason to suffer or lack …ever.

back to our regularly scheduled program

and so it seems that politically, economically, religiously, and pretty much anything that looks, smells, or quacks like a corporationally, the rules of the road today are that there is ruling here. of course there is no there there, as gertrude stein said, and that is another story for another day, and still yet…this seems pretty topsy turvy to me.

this sort of divide and conquer strategy has been going on throughout human history, of course, and just because i haven’t died yet doesn’t mean i’m not gonna. and just because there has been telling here what to do, which is another way of saying that they have been telling us what to do, forever, doesn’t mean that we can’t put a stop to it.

it starts with awareness

here is a pretty physical thing. you can touch it, brush up against it, perhaps smell, taste, and hear it. there on the other hand is pretty conceptual. you can think about it, or engage with it via media of some sort. local then, works well as the province of stuff, and non-local works best as the province of information and communication.

when we forget this, when we use 540 calories of energy to put 80 calories of california spinach on a plate in boston, well…i’ll let you work the permutations.

on the other hand, when we transmit thoughts, which were formerly sent across the world via the printed page, and all of the deforestation, pollution, and energy use that entails, via electronic media…

of course electronic media are not all clean and green: in my perfect world it’s all telepathy…and still, i’m just going to shout out my two intertwined ideas here.

1. local rules stuff; non-local rules ideas and communication.
2. local is best taking care of itself; non-local makes a better servant than master.

and that’s it for today and this week. i’m off to celebrate equinox: walking a labyrinth, offering some hair to the birds, balancing eggs on a counter, planting sunflowers. spring is here! a good day for me to be on this side of the equator. viva la local! long live the here and now!