I‘m in the midst of doing my Links of the Month post, and I’ve been grumbling and complaining about some of the technologies I’m using and how I’ve been unable to get them to work to my satisfaction.

So I thought instead of just whining about it, I’d ask readers if they have any ideas on how to solve them. Here are five things I want to be able to do, that I haven’t been able to find any way to do. If you have any suggestions, I’d be really grateful:

1. First, I want to be able to search three things at once: (1) the files on my Mac laptop, (2) my Gmail (which is backed up to Apple Mail on my laptop), and (3) my WordPress blog, which is not on my laptop at all, but posted to and kept on a domain server in Winnipeg. I used to be able to do this 3-in-one search with Google Desktop on the PC, back when my Userland blog was backed up automatically to my hard drive. But the Mac version of Google Desktop doesn’t search Gmail, Apple Spotlight only searches the Apple Mail version of my mail (and returns results that are dense and unfathomable), and the only way to search my blog is online (it’s backed up, but not to my hard drive). So to do a search of all three (which I do often, when I can’t remember if/when I wrote a message, blog post and/or document about a particular subject, and want to find it) I have to be online, and I have to do three separate searches. Anyone have any suggestions (non-technical, please)? If that’s too much to ask, I’d settle for a way to download a copy of my entire WordPress blog (6500 pages, about 2GB) to my laptop in a format that could be searched, so at least I can do searches of my old stuff offline.

2. Second, I am looking for the cheapest possible way, other than Skype, to make long-ish phone calls from Australia and New Zealand back to people in North America. I bought the lowest-price cellular long-distance plan from my (Canadian) cell phone company for New Zealand, and the lowest-price cellular long-distance plan from a discount intermediary (Yak.ca) for Australia, and my cell phone bill (for voice calls) was still outrageous. Is there a better solution involving some mix of sim cards, calling cards and/or temporary cell phones?

3. Third, I’d like to find a cheap way to access lots of data (email, maps, social networking) on a cell phone when I’m travelling in the US (I’m Canadian). I have a good plan for voice (Yak callback and travel card) while I’m in the US, but I find it frustrating to do without the data services I rely on on the road when I’m in the US, usually about a week per month. Roaming charges are usurious, just plain gouging.

4. Fourth, I’m looking for a simple way to compose multi-track music electronically and send the tracks to my Mac’s Garage Band software. My compositions tend to include a variety of instruments (drums, guitar, keyboards, strings and horns) and I’m hopelessly inept at playing any native instruments, and don’t have the patience to individually key in the pitch, volume, duration and colour of every single note in my compositions on an on-screen keyboard or similar scoring tool. I have an ancient Roland D5 that I used to use back when it was OK for electronic instruments to sound wooden and more-or-less all alike (I used the software’s auto-correct to fix my tempo and volume errors), but I want something that generates better and more varied sound (and besides, I can’t find any adapter that will take the midi from the old D5 and connect it to a USB port on my laptop). Any suggestions?

5. Fifth, because I’m Canadian, thanks to the freaking DMCA, I cannot listen to any of the free music services (Last.fm, Pandora etc.) that let people listen to more than 60 seconds of a song before deciding whether to buy it. Is there a comparable music service that doesn’t discriminate against Canadians? And, for the same reason, links to US mainstream media clips (like the Daily Show) are (a) not available to me and (b) though I can sometimes find them through a Canadian media distributor (the sites that block me don’t provide an alternative link, just a possible Canadian distributor’s home page), I have to search through whole archives to try to find the same clip, often in vain, and also sometimes wait for a 24-hour ‘embargo’ period to expire. Does anyone know any way around this bullshit? Can I disguise my IP address to make it appear to be a US one rather than a Canadian one? The irony is that the Canadian cable and satellite companies broadcast the US channels live (substituting Canadian commercials), so if I had a TV with a PVR (I have neither) there would be no problem. In the meantime, I’m stuck with what can be found on YouTube, at least until the DMCA lawyer-fascists start trying to block their videos too.

Those are my five technical difficulties at the moment. I’d welcome any suggestions you might offer. Now back to compiling the Links of the Month.

(Cartoon by Mick Stevens from the Cartoon Bank. You can buy his great cartoons as prints, shirts, mugs etc. here.)

I got my first “real” camera last weekend, a Pentax K-x with a regular and a 300mm telephoto lens, on Craigslist. Here are some of my first shots with it, which I’ve put up on my Picasa site:

The living/dining room, with Mt. Gardner in the background

Mt Brunswick, from the deck of the house, to the NE

Rhododendron and Cedars in the back yard

Flowers on the dining room table

Oregon Junco in the yard

The front walkway

For the last month I have been in New Zealand and Australia, looking for my “winter home” when I can no longer bear the cold of my wonderful adopted summer home on Bowen Island. It’s astonishingly beautiful here — white sands and turquoise waters, sunshine, warmth and colourful, amazing wildlife. It has been a time of discovery and self-discovery, of reflection, of learning and of love. And a time of realizing what I really need in life.

More when I’ve had time to process all this. Thanks to all those who have written asking whether I’m still blogging!

A few days ago I was interviewed by Steve Patterson for his regular podcast program Two Beers With Steve, as we talked about complex systems, dependence on industrial civilization, transition, resilience and steady state economics. Steve is well-read and a terrific interviewer, and there are some great podcasts on his site, including, recently, Stoneleigh (from The Automatic Earth) and James Kunstler. You can listen to or download the podcast here, and browse through Steve’s other podcasts here.

In an article last month I described how an unintended consequence of the evolution of large brains (the development of and attachment to ego) is that we have become “Too Smart for Our Own Good“. In that article I posted the graphic above which I explained as follows:

In the model above, which I have developed to attempt to illustrate [Eckart] Tolle’s thesis, wild creatures and human beings who have re-learned presence live the conscious, integral life shown on the right side. For such creatures, the triggers that cause suffering for most humans just bounce off; they fail to have any enduring impact. The spirit remains integral, unruffled and unpolluted.

By contrast, most humans live in the unhappy, anxious state shown in the left side. For them, triggers produce a vicious cycle of negative thoughts and “stories” (the “egoic mind”) and negative emotions (the “pain-body”). The stories we tell ourselves about the past, the future, ourselves and others are fictions, but our insatiable human egos grab onto them, and these thoughts trigger emotions like anger, fear, jealousy, hatred, self-hatred, shame, and anxiety, which fester in us and cause our egoic minds to invent even more stories to justify and perpetuate the pain-body negative emotions. Both the egoic mind and the pain-body are easily triggered by negative events (real or imagined) — in fact Tolle thinks they are addicted to them. The ego even casts a shadow over our sensory and instinctive lives, which the egoic mind cannot control and therefore does not trust. We therefore become “possessed” by our egos, which are not us. Our egos would have us believe that our thoughts and beliefs and feelings are “us”, when in fact all along we are really the consciousness that lies behind those thoughts, beliefs and feelings. Presence, then, is developing the capacity to push out and free ourselves from our egos and the negative thoughts and emotions that “normally” possess us, that we “normally” identify with.

Blogger Joe Holmes, in response to this post, sent me a paper he had written entitled Disengage the Simulator, which draws on the Daniel Gilbert TED speech on the brain as an “experience simulator”. And while I don’t buy the argument that only human brains can simulate experiences before their bodies try them in “real life” (watching birds and squirrels at the bird-feeder will convince you otherwise), Gilbert does demonstrate that more often than not, this simulator “works really badly”. Joe picks up on this in his paper and explains that this simulator actually creates a “reality” that we mistake for the real one. Our minds create a veil between ourselves and the real world that both prevents us from “seeing” the real world and gets us dreadfully, even pathologically, upset with the created (synthetic) “reality” that is stuck in our heads. So we end up believing the totally fictional stories that are part of this synthetic reality, and having the negative emotional responses to those stories which in turn convince us that these invented stories must be “true” (else why would we be so upset about them)? Our giant brains become a hellish intellectual and emotional prison in which we are stuck, pinned, unable to escape.

Hence our desire for “presence”, to relearn how to live in the now and let go of those stories. Hence the popularity of meditation and other practices that offer the promise of escape.

Joe goes further, and explains what one might call the Tragedy of the Simulator, in the important areas of art and science:

How much are the wonders of our lives worth when we pass through them in a dream? How much is it worth to see a beautiful painting and really only see the thought-bubble, really only see oneself seeing it? How can we enjoy art when our minds are caught up with what it means and with filtering it through a complex machinery of cognition? When we can’t feel things fully, we are farther on the side of curse than gift… While other animals have their eyes pointed towards things in their natural environment, going left and right and everywhere, humans are forever looking upwards into the content of our thought-bubbles.

Without the [capacity for simulation] we have within our own minds, we would never be able to be trapped inside a simulated reality. We suffer from our strength. But when the simulator can be disengaged, when we can stop mistaking it for reality itself, we have a tremendous new tool to play with…
Science, for instance, could not function without a healthy distrust of the status-quo operating system of consciousness, setting up controls and tests to keep our minds from running away with us, because it knows that our intelligence is purchased at the price of easy self-deception. Art knows it is an illusion, and no one mistakes a fictional story for anything but the allegorical truth. So the simulation is free to exhaust itself, in a way, through this safe region where all of its crevices and hidden structures can present themselves. And the mystics and sages throughout history can be read, quite simply and fruitfully, as those individuals who have fully broken free from the seduction of their simulated perceptions. In so doing they are able, once and for all, to think forever outside of the box. The tenets of mystical philosophy all reveal in their underlying structures the realization that the simulator is a simulator: that past and future are illusions and there is only now; that the isolated self is an illusion and there is only one flow of interconnected experience; that all qualities we ascribe to things are within our own minds and cannot be projected onto the things themselves. Enlightenment is a kind of lucid dreaming, where one experiences the image-play of simulations but watches them with a keen eye toward their unreality. Life becomes fun. As humans we will live in a self-made prison until we can stop [mistaking our thoughts, and the emotions they invoke (which emotions in turn evoke more fictional thoughts), for reality].

In his presentation, Gilbert suggests that this Tragedy of the Simulator can actually work both ways: It can persuade us that our fictional negative stories about our past, our future, ourselves and others (and their invoked emotions of guilt, anger, fear, shame, envy, dread and grief) are true. It can also persuade us that our “unrealistically” positive stories about our past, our future, ourselves and others (and their invoked emotions of unwarranted hopefulness, irrational denial, nostalgia about our past etc.) are also true. Both types of illusions are cruel and diabolical: the first type makes us unhappy for no reason, and the second type makes us complacent, expectant and resistant to change, setting us up for disappointment and then, when we become disappointed, more stories and reactions of the first type. And so on, in a vicious cycle.

The challenge of course, is to get beyond being too smart for our own good, to become truly and persistently present and let go of stories, without becoming desensitized or disconnected from ourselves or all those around us suffering from the unintended consequences of being so smart. That’s a difficult balancing act. Perhaps too difficult for me, and for most people. But knowing what you are striving for is a start, at least.

image from the film Baraka

I‘ve just finished Abram’s follow-up to his Spell of the Sensuous. The earlier book is one of the most important I have ever read, and didn’t feel the new book, Becoming Animal, added a lot to the earlier message. But here for the record are my marginal annotations as I worked through it:

• I liked his term for what Joanna Macy calls the healing and self-healing Work That Reconnects — it’s recuperation. We all need to do this heart-and-soul work if we are to be able to contribute effectively to the marathon transition humanity is now starting to make to a new post-civilization society.
• Amazing description of the sound of a flock of ducks flying overhead into a fierce headwind: “What had sounded like a single repeated utterance now varies subtly in rhythm and volume according to whether the duck speaking is testing the wind with its muscles or simply holding the status quo. Each voice alters its feel when the speaker is blown off course by the gusts, each duck using its quacks to inform the others about the state of the blast just in front of it while also apprising them of its precise location at that moment (since they’re unable to glance around without ceding ground to the wind), each also replying and reassuring the others, so that a whole array of nuanced meanings is passing back and forth above me.”
• The contrast he draws between humans who normally, when they think, temporarily take their consciousness into their heads and out of their bodies, and “other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, [who] think with the whole of their bodies.”
• An interesting listing of the 9 ways oral cultures differ from our modern “written language” culture:
  1. oral awareness is more informed by place, more local in its orientation
  2. the act of perception is more of a two-way communication
  3. each entity in the place of which one is a part is ascribed its own active agency in the world
  4. all things are seen as expressive, intentional
  5. oral cultures are more aware of their lack of knowledge, of the uncertainty and mystery of everything
  6. the world is articulated as a story rather than as an organized collection of data; it is “verb-al” rather than “noun-al”
  7. time is circle and rhythm and cycle, rather than rectilinear and vectored
  8. the world is the product of its collective imagination, with everything a player in the dream of its creation, fluid rather than static or conceptual
  9. there is an acceptance that we cannot ever perceive of the world the way any other human or creature does; within the a-part-ness of our individual lives there is a pluralism, a collective appreciation of the difference and uniqueness of each entity
• The final passage of the book speaks powerfully again of the grief we all feel for gaia, the collective organism of all-life-on-earth. It is written as prose but works better, I think, in more poetic form (somewhat condensed by me):

Tonight is the winter solstice, the dark of the year.
Too many species have slid into extinction, too many forests felled
and wetlands filled;
so much beauty’s fled the world.
Life’s become cheap: with more and more of us piling in,
humans keep bashing each other in ever more creative ways –
car bombs bursting bodies
and missiles dropped from unmanned drones
splintering families, searing the land
and spattering it with blood.

An addled and anesthetized numbness
is spreading rapidly throughout our species.

There are those, however, who are not frightened of grief;
dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein
a necessary elixir to the numbness.
When they encounter one another,
when they press their foreheads against the bark
of a centuries-old tree,
or their palms into the hand of yet another child
who has tasted prematurely of wrenching loss,
their eyes well with tears
that fall easily to the ground.

The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate
and our tears a kind of key
opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away.
Suddenly we notice the sustaining resonance
between the drumming heart within our chest
and the pulse rising from under the ground.

The stars glimmer in the solstice dark, their faint light
mirrored in glints off the crusted snow.
Far below these blanketed fields, deep beneath the bedrock
a lustrous power slumbers, fitfully,
like a bear in its cave.

As this power sleeps, it dreams, pulsing,
its vigor radiating outward in waves,
through the slow solidity of rock,
through thickets of feldspar and quartzite and stratified soils,
outward through stems of dandelions and trunks of sequoias,
through blossoms and budded leaves
and through the craft of our fingers,
through the gleam in your lover’s eye

and the fluted music
upwelling now from the beak
of a blackbird.

This is what I plan to read, next week, at my father’s memorial:

A few years ago, a number of weblogging colleagues and I began a practice of maintaining, and updating once a year or so, the obituary for ourselves we hoped would be able to be read truthfully once we’d died. The purpose of the exercise was and is to focus us periodically on our intentions, on the things we hope to accomplish but have not yet done. I would recommend this exercise to you, because, as Goethe once said, there is power in intention.

It occurred to me as I wrote these words that if my father had written his own annual ‘intentional obituary’ he would never have had to change a word from year to year. He always knew what he was intended to do, set his expectations low, worked hard, and achieved, quite early in life, almost everything he wanted to accomplish. Having done so, he was free to pursue his insatiable passion for learning.

For most of his life this passion for learning was his principal hobby, beyond enjoying music and the arts, and gardening, and he pursued it with a tireless curiosity and critical thinking mind, with the objective of understanding how the world really worked. His learning imbued in him a very progressive worldview, one that was out of sync with that of many of his friends and family, but which made him, for me, a mentor, an example of how to live thoughtfully, courageously, authentically and responsibly, and a sounding board for my own radical ideas. He gave me the courage to be different, to be myself, and he introduced me to the poem by e e cummings that suggested a way of being and doing that he exemplified and that I have tried all my life to emulate:

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know,
but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because
whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you’re a lot of other people:
but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting.

My father lived modestly, in every sense of the word, and abhorred conspicuous consumption. He was interested in politics but cared about action, not rhetoric. He measured himself and others on what they did, and what they did not do, rather on what they said or professed. He believed in conserving, in listening and understanding, in helping others, in seeking consensus, and in striving for peace.

He told me once that the true measure of what we do in the workplace is not the physical or procedural or financial outcomes achieved in the short run, since these are always transient. The true measure is what we have demonstrated personally, one-on-one, to others we work with and for, that changes forever what they know, that gives them capacities and competencies and understanding that will last their whole lives and which they in turn will pass on to others, and so on, for generations. That wisdom has guided me in my dealings with work colleagues all my life, and with my children and grandchildren as well, and its intangible product is his lasting legacy, and that of everyone he has touched.

Through his actions and his example I learned how to be empathetic, how to listen appreciatively, the importance of honesty and generosity, and of thinking before you speak, that showing is more effective than telling, that we need to slow down and look and really see what is happening. I learned from him the importance of home, the value of writing and imagination and curiosity and critical thinking, and, in his final months, I learned from him how to let go.

He was, in short, an extraordinary father, in a world where so many fathers are dictatorial, intolerant, impatient, demanding, abusive, ignorant, tactless, lacking in self-knowledge, or simply absent. I will do my best to exemplify the qualities that he did, to be as good a role model as he was, all his life, in everything he did.

There’s a poem by the Canadian poet Oriah, called The Invitation, that’s about being authentic and which reminds me a lot of my father’s advice, so I’d like to conclude by reading it:

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love, for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shriveled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own
without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied. I want to know what sustains you
from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

In 2010, after 40 years trying to work within the industrial growth society, Dave walked away from it. During that 40 years he advised entrepreneurs about innovation, research, sustainability, coping with complexity, and the effective use of knowledge and social media, started a blog in 2003 called How to Save the World, which documents what he’s learned about how the world really works, and how we might create better ways to live and make a living, and in 2007 authored his first book, Finding the Sweet Spot: A Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work.

Now he spends his mornings in meditative practice, alone and with others, reconnecting with all-life-on-Earth, with his instincts and senses, and with the pain so many of us feel for Gaia and its suffering. He spends his afternoons in facilitation practice, organizing and helping activists to develop innovative and effective ways to undermine and end industrial growth society, so that a new, healthy, natural society can take its place. He is not optimistic about this happening. He spends his evenings in reflective practice, play, imagining possibilities, and writing.

Not sure this will get me invitations to speak at conferences, or to collaborate on projects. But it’s who I am, now, and perhaps, under all the gunk I’d accumulated, who I’ve always been. Nobody-but-myself. It just fits.

I’ve been in BC for ten days, house-hunting on the Sunshine Coast and Bowen Island. So far, the plan I set out a year ago — to summer on the BC coast or gulf islands, and to ‘winter’ in Australia or NZ — is still on track. I’m thinking about what it will be like to live alone for only the third time in my life, and for the first time in thirty years.

I’m still sticking to the set of criteria I outlined back in March. My dream then, as regular readers probably know, was to live simply in an open space structure in the summer in each hemisphere, near forest and ocean, where heating and air conditioning (at least during the months I’m there) are unnecessary, in a peaceful, uncrowded and progressive location, with good Internet access, doing the reconnecting, activism facilitation, and reflecting activities I set out for my ‘retirement from paid work’.

But where? I’ve identified the following criteria:

• A place warm enough not to need heating.
• A physically beautiful, natural setting and house in or near forests and beaches.
• Peaceful and private.
• Not overcrowded.
• Reasonably sustainable when the economy and culture collapse.
• Good public transit, bike and walking lanes and trails.
• Good local organic food store.
• A place where the people nearby have a high sense of well-being, by their own standards, and ideally are progressive in their thinking.
• Connectivity: not too remote for visitors to access, and with high-speed Internet available.

I actually found two places that meet all these criteria, one in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast (map), and the other on Bowen Island, and finally decided on a one-year lease on the latter.

My new home is on a hilltop with vast and amazing views of the ocean on two sides, right beside a park. Bowen has a temperate rainforest climate, so I’m surrounded by immense evergreens. The road my house is on was built specifically for the park and has no street sign, and I have only one neighbour, much further along this road, invisible from where I am. It is astonishingly quiet, lush, and beautiful. The house has huge windows all around, so there is no need for ornamentation — my home is this forested hilltop.

The house is quite a bit bigger than what I thought I would want, but it’s good to have a couple of guest rooms for visitors, and even sparsely decorated every room looks complete, magnificent. The local bus, which runs 1km from the house, hooks up to the ferry, which is 20 minutes to the lower mainland (West Vancouver), so the trip to the Vancouver train station (I plan to take more trains and few planes from now on, since with retirement from paid work I now have my time back) or airport when necessary, is not onerous, and does not require the use of a car. Since it is 6.5km to the ferry (where all the stores and activities are) I’m thinking of getting an electric bicycle to serve as an alternative to the bus.

I’ve already attended one ‘community’ event organized by Chris Corrigan, and in the process met thirty of the island’s most active members, and really started to become part of the community. The local organic food store, craft shops and wellness services are excellent, and, in the summer months, there is an organic restaurant five minutes’ walk from my door.

So I’m delighted: My plans to move forward with my life and to start working more attentively and intentionally on my own reconnection with all-life-on-Earth, and to create models of a better way to live and be active trying to undermine the most destructive aspects of industrial growth society, are beginning to happen. Stay tuned.

I’ve updated my Table of Contents right up to today (now uploaded). I’ve expanded the width of the right sidebar (and moved the content that was in the left sidebar over to the right one). That allows for fuller subcategory names for my right sidebar Table of Contents, making it easier, I hope, for browsers to find similar articles. I will also in future show the subcategory of each post, with a link to the ToC of related posts.

These changes seem to display fine in both Firefox and IE, but if they don’t work on your browser, please let me know. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow.