Dunno but nice to see another ecopsychology update by my colleague below.
I’m going to add my usual minimum here and just post a photo. I rarely have a lot to say anyway. Well that not entirely true as I am prone to running my mouth on occasion. I’m just too lazy to type it all out.
More of Ashley at Noirotica.
Pace my feet slowly
Speed of light, speed of leaf drop
lets tears of freedom
I have not written a haiku in years. Interesting. I wondered if there was a specific purpose of a haiku for this activity. I realized that haiku’s are total creative freedom in the context of a format. This reminded me of nature. Total freedom in the context of natural laws. If I don’t know the context of my experience, then my freedom becomes disconnected from nature and can be destructive. I had always avoided haiku’s because I thought them unnecessarily limiting. I see now that this is not accurate. I feel a connection to many human practices that are seemingly connected or derived from nature.
To read the rest click here.
Hello guys, it’s Charles again. I also write for The Examiner 2-3 times a week about Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games. Here’s the first paragraph my first post entitled “The Art of MMORPGs.
Until the late 20th century art has always been a one way street. A person or group of people create a product to be consumed (listened to, viewed, watched, or read) by an audience. With the advent of video games in the late 1970s and early 1980s people were able to interact with an imagined environment via an avatar (be it a plumber, cyborg, ninja, etc). Instead of passively reading a book or watching a film, the audience can actually take control, albeit somewhat limited, of the story itself.
You can check out the rest of the article here
Hello guys. This is Charles Wood. I have written for publications like Go Triad, The Carolinian, as well as the Coraddii. My blog, gatecityblues.blogspot.com, is dedicated to journalism on and about Greensboro with topic ranging from homelessness to live music. I also occasionally post poetry as well. The following excerpt is the first stanza from a new poem I wrote called “Selling Salvation”
Drug dealers
and preachers
they’re not that different,
selling salvation
one dime at a time.
Holy water and heroin
communion wafers and cocaine
the road to heaven has never been higher…
You can read the rest here
If anybody’s gonna do it, it’ll probably be me. Yes, I have vices and deviations to make more than a few cringe.
My opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my fellow bloggers (the secondary six) though sometimes they might. They may not reflect your own opinions. Tough shit.
Leave.
No don’t please.
I’m usually polite. Sometimes cranky. I take photographs. There are naked people at Noirotica.
There’s other shit out there if you want to look at other shit.
I could give a flying fuck whether or not a tree is grateful for my presence.
Oh yeah, I’m famous too. I’ve been interviewed by noted blogger Charles Wood of Gate City Blues. What else do you really want?
And fuck a bunch a Wizard Shit.
I’m MartiniVision.
Last night I was walking with my girlfriend and her dogs. As I was paying attention to the dog, I was thinking about the documentary we had watched earlier called “no impact man”. I saw the dog come to attention, senses alive, she turned her head and then turned in the opposite direction. I followed her gaze to see a rabbit three houses in back of us. As we turned to go on down the road, I looked up at a massive tree and felt so grateful that I have the opportunity to be alive with that tree. I thanked the tree and felt gratitude back. It was like the tree was telling me that the story/drama we live in day to day is not a natural attraction, yet the love in the form of natural attractions is always present and that’s what grounds me when I get upset about the story and it’s effects on nature, those I care about, and me. Nature is designed to produce happiness and love in the form of our senses. Anything that does not promote that seems to be part of our nature-conquering story. I now understand more fully the Buddhist idea that being free from suffering is not the absence of pain, hurt, or death, it is fully experiencing what is real in the moment. So, when I feel disconnected at work, I know that it is accurate. Knowing that and being able to stay with that sensation is what leads me to connection with nature. It’s telling me what I don’t want/need. It’s telling what I’m not attracted to.
When I started this program, I had little knowledge about nature and had not made many significant connections to nature. Now I know that this was the missing link in my life. I have been well trained in psychology, which lead me to ecopsychology, but had not made the connection with nature. I had also studied Buddhism and eastern philosophy for years, which in retrospect helped me to understand RWN (reconnecting with nature) and even more RWN helped me understand Buddhism. It’s weird, I feel like the same person only almost completely different.
An example of this for me occurred while running the other day. I had been connecting with nature and then running. I was feeling the importance of paying attention to my surroundings for survival purposes. I was attracted to this level of attention. As I ran in this park, I came across a basketball. This object seemed so foreign and out of place that much of my attention was drawn to it. I thought “an unnatural ball of rubber just distracted me from paying attention to my survival attraction, that’s what happens to me (and us) so much of the time”. All of these industrial things are wranglers (wranglers are anything that promotes the nature-conquering story of our culture).
I started to feel bad: depressed, hopeless, trapped like I needed to flee into the forest. I realized that this is also not part of nature. Nature nurtures mutually beneficial relationships to produce harmony and love, which are natural attractions. That was not what I was feeling. I realized that I could connect with nature and feel those attractions come back. I can still know about what is going on and how I am being affected by the industrial world, yet the way to heal from this is not through thinking about how I can fix it. It’s how can I be more and more connected to nature and let nature guide my thinking. This develops a supported ground to meet these wranglers on and a feeling that I can joyfully connect with nature in all places.
ed to feel bad: depressed, hopeless, trapped like I needed to flee into the forest. I realized that this is also not part of nature. Nature nurtures mutually beneficial relationships to produce harmony and love, which are natural attractions. That was not what I was feeling. I realized that I could connect with nature and feel those attractions come back. I can still know about what is going on and how I am being affected by the industrial world, yet the way to heal from this is not through thinking about how I can fix it. It’s how can I be more and more connected to nature and let nature guide my thinking. This develops a supported ground to meet these wranglers on and a feeling that I can joyfully connect with nature in all places.
Do I get to be the one to pop this blog’s cherry? It feels so wrong… and yet so right.
My fellow sinisters and I are a quirky tribe. Some of us are artists, photographers, writers, musicians, and judgers; some of us enjoy prancing and and doing a little dance; some of us will save the whales; some of us aggressively participate in Wizard Hate, and publicly harass emo hipsters and scifi dipshits alike; some of us dig the fuss of a typewriter; some of us have something against dead christmas trees; maybe three of us seem like upstanding citizens.
Most of us are drunks that sit on rooftops; most of us have an innate sillyness that even medication can’t smother; most of us never went to charm school; most of us love inappropriate laughter. You can see where this is going. We have a lot in common, but this especially: we’re pretty much dorks.
Hooray for us! Now it’s time to get this rolling. Somebody else, it’s your turn.
The Sinister Seven 