Visit Planet SARK

If you feel Planet Earth has been hijacked by Planet Mars you might want to visit Planet SARK

It was built by Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy and she explains her mission as "international well-being and transformation". Her purpose is to be "a transformer, an uplifter and a laser beam of love" and she has created an inspirational playground for all who visit her website.  You can get newsletter and other stuff here:

image created by SARK

Her art and posters you will find re-posted on Facebook - they are delicious and wise.

Five Reasons B.C. Should Say No to the Site C Dam

1. It's bad business.
2. There are cost-effective alternatives.
3. The power isn't needed.
4. We can't afford to flood farmland.
5. The Peace has paid its price.

visit the post by Emma Gilchrist on Desmog Canada

And from David Suzuki:

(Credit: Gerry via Flickr) www.davidsuzuki.org

"B.C. First Nations chiefs recently travelled to Ottawa to urge the federal government to pull the plug on the costliest infrastructure project in the country. At an estimated $7.9 billion and growing, the proposed Site C Dam on the beautiful Peace River in northeastern B.C. has been criticized for spiralling costs, questions about whether the electricity it would produce is even needed, and concerns about the environmental and social impacts of flooding thousands of hectares of prime farmland, irreplaceable cultural sites and wildlife habitat. The government is expected to make a decision in October."

Thomas Mulcair - Full speech on Iraq // Discours complet sur Irak

This is worth 25 minutes of your time.  Unfortunately the sound is not great.

What is Love?

Beginning with Paul's letter to the Corinthians, love is patient, kind, it does not boast, is not proud, does not dishonour, is not self-seeking, is not easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs, does not delight in evil, always protects, trusts, hopes and perseveres.

So that is pretty straight forward. There are six things that love is and seven things it is not according to this Biblical passage. 

For Will Shakespeare - "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds ... it is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests ... and is never shaken.

You have to be older than twenty to appreciate Shakespeare's instruction. It is an idealistic notion and I can see how this might be true and how it might not. However he does carry some authority because of all the plays he wrote that we still love because his characters resemble a timeless authenticity. He has earned his credibility.

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu

In my life this is true. As a young child I was loved and so grew to be an adult, then was loved again. These are markers in my life where I could have discounted the love I received because it was less than perfect, or the courage to carry on when my love was also imperfect.


“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love

Weirdness is another word for the unpredictable, for diversity of experience.  Love does not attempt to prove that it exists, it is not a chemical compound, the GDP, or "jobs and the economy".  Is love the reason for these things? Not exclusively but perhaps to allow love to remain.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” 

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

And so the most powerful people on earth might have been successful at locking away their hearts to leave a clear head for strategy - to keep their lovers on a leash to use at their convenience. Or the most broken people on earth have locked away their hearts because their experience leads them to believe that is the only way they can survive. This is what Karen Armstrong calls the "reptilian brain".

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

There are so many friends around, so many people who base their work on love and truth. We are not famous because we are abundant. We don't remark on them as something distant like a news headline because we know them. Diverse, imperfect - we need your help. Need you to be clear in mind and heart so that we can get behind the trends that lead us to more happiness and less suffering.

Yes all these quotes but one are from men. Why is that? Why did I choose men rather than women? I chose those who were well known in many nations and women are not as celebrated globally in that sense. However I will end with a quote by Hannah Arendt which I think is the most profound.

"Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces." Hannah Arendt.

What remains unlearned from the first world war

National War Memorial Ottawa photo by Kristen Shane

"In addition, we must learn not only from those who fought in the trenches or from those in command, but also from the perspective of the home front. Women lost husbands, sons and fathers in the conflict. As nurses and caregivers, women also bore witness first-hand to the appalling suffering of combatants. In addition, civil society organizations, conscientious objectors and the advocates for peace all had important roles in resisting the war. But the perspectives of such groups, and of women, were dismissed at the time and continue to be under-represented in mainstream histories." www.embassynews.ca

In These Times - review of This Changes Every Thing by Naomi Klein

1. Band-Aid solutions don’t work.

“Only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed.”

2. We need to fix ourselves, not fix the world.

“The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.”

3. We can’t rely on “well-intentioned” corporate funding.

“A great many progressives have opted out of the climate change debate in part because they thought that the Big Green groups, flush with philanthropic dollars, had this issue covered. That, it turns out, was a grave mistake.”

4. We need divestment, and reinvestment.

“The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions.”

5. Confronting climate change is an opportunity to address other social, economic and political issues.

“When climate change deniers claim that global warming is a plot to redistribute wealth, it's not (only) because they are paranoid. It's also because they are paying attention.”

In These Times: 5 Crucial Lessons for the Left From Naomi Klein’s New Book. Ethan Corey and Jessica Corbett.

Holy Crow Church

Yesterday evening the opening of Jeff Molloy's art show "Reverence" at Artworks on Gabriola was an opportunity for me to view religion more broadly.

Beginning with a piece that shows a priest with a forked tongue cutting off the hair of a young naked child, surrounded by boxes containing shapes like young children behind bars - you know this show will not be sentimental.

Further along there is a series of poles made up of driftwood, canoe paddles, nails and animal bones. Each one contains a message which I hope will become clear to me if I stare at them long enough. On a couple of the poles the driftwood represents crows. One has a crown, they all have majesty, attitude. One pole is topped by a nativity scene complete with a star, holding several found objects like old brushes, twigs and such. The pole furthest to the right is adorned with a bishop's hat made of a hip joint from some creature who left this plane some time ago. I attempt to understand. It's in a language I haven't yet learned. But I am reminded that this must be how the aboriginal people tried to understand the teachings of Christianity.

Theology made of wood, bones and long nails, is not as primitive as the church who set up residential schools to warehouse First Nations' children to 'cleanse' them of their culture through ritual abuse, torture and rape.  Behind the ornaments and devices of the Christian church is the history of European exploitation.

Take away the mythologies of glory -  they came to the new world with booze, guns and germs to take the land, the bison, the logs, beaver pelts, metals and minerals.

In the anthropocene, the way to conquer the world is to wipe out the heart and mind of humanity and replace it with a dehumanizing ideology that turns them into obedient robotic soldiers trained to kill and be killed for coins, trinkets and a hoped for afterlife.

I'm not suggesting that this view is the intention of Molloy's art because I don't wish to impose my thoughts on someone else's creations. This is how I internalize the language of all things, arising as it does out of the violence of our past.

But art does contain the future too. It asks the viewer to think about what the past has to say about the future. In this art, what is made precious is the nature that surrounds us, that is washed up on the shore, how we make meaning of things that are otherwise mute. And how do we preserve it? This is the meaning of the holy crow, the holy twig, the holy paint, and the inquiring mind.