Being right or being happy: your choice

Blue skies, sunshine, fresh snow cover, temperatures in the mid-20's, we need more of this kind of Winter and less of the cloudy, bitter, birthing cold and/or freezing drizzle or fog. Meanwhile, we'll enjoy this afternoon's weather as long as we have it. Plus, it's becoming noticeable that days are lengthening and, slowly, warming. One week from today we say good-bye to January and this year's February is one day shorter than last year's.

Meanwhile, half of the country isn't speaking to the other half, except to hurl insults and threats. It does seem we need some sort of mental health screening for those who would become "public servants." Promoting "alternate facts" makes it difficult to find common ground. News media could help a lot, but probably won't, by dropping the "here's one side, here's the other, you choose" framing. We keep looking for an approach that we believe might help US bridge some of the growing differences among US. So far nothing's appeared that seems to resonate as having a probability of success.

Looking at the rest of the world, many species have their own niches, reducing competition, except for predator-prey relationships. One the other  hand, we don't think we've ever discovered the equivalent of a "natural corporation." More and more we are discovering cooperative relationships, such as that between trees and fungus, a mycorrhiza symbiotic association. Perhaps we could find a way to frame politics such that the good of the country supersedes the good of the party, which supersedes the good of the individual politician. How do we get there? By adjusting our own priorities and value systems? By recognizing that communities and individual members need to be mutually supporting? By focusing on overly simplistic, to the point of being trite, sayings such as "there's no I in team." (But if you fiddle around, you can find a "me.")

urban agriculture: cooperation or competition?

Photo by J. Harrington

The other most significant aspects of the natural world are the lack of concentration of power and the lack of wasted resources. We need to break up any entity that's "too big to fail;" we must reduce the waste we create and find better uses for the waste we produce (right to repair would be a good step); and, we need to create incentives for cooperation more than competition so we can better protect the commons (air, water, land, living systems) on which we all depend. We know, we know. If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

Therapy from the Garden

By Glenn Morazzini

Panic attacks your pain-porous skin?  

Imagine the layers of onion, Sufi-circling  

and circling until there is no tear-making body.  

If the issue is anorexia, taking starvation’s  

dark spirit-flight, or anhedonia, running from  

the skin’s having fun, consider the mushroom’s  

fleshy erection, and the pumpkins, earth goddesses  

and rotund Buddhas sprawled by compost’s funky aerosol.  

For social phobia, desensitize among the rows  

of corn’s parade, ticker tape leaves and Rasta tassels  

that wind-strut and bring on the crows’ hop and rap.  

Too much affect: meditate on potatoes, taciturn  

as overturned stones. Too little: visualize the hanging  

tomatoes’ insides, the soft hearts, sentimental ornaments.  

From the lettuce there is common sense for narcissism:  

acceptance as side dish, garnish for a meaty sandwich.  

If that leaf isn’t the dose, there’s always the soil  

people shovel and level, rake and make wishful with seed,  

feed leftovers from the compost’s vegan sewer,  

the soil that wants for nothing and yields and yields.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.