Estelle's Blog 4

Entry 4 : Saturday, 6 December 2008

It is Saturday evening, and i’ve returned after a relaxing gathering around the fire. Some visitors have arrived today, and we’re sharing & getting to know each other and contemplating our life experiences.

I have been experiencing a lot of changes during the past few weeks. Physically & mentally. It has been a month since I arrived & i’m feeling very intrigued with the notion of extending my stay here.

Physically, I have been partaking in many activities that requires quite some muscle power, & getting down and dirty working on much needed projects around the community. I can feel my body adjusting to the new environment. My hands are not quite as delicate as they used to be, my feet have been thoroughly re-acquinted with the bare soil beneath them & I can feel my muscles and back strengthening by the day.

I feel an overwhelming sense of empowerment. I am learning essential skills, vital to survival outside the city. From sanding & treating wood, making fires, to transplanting veggies, seed harvesting & using the abundance of nature to the fullest.

Mentally I am also feeling much stronger than before. Daily meditation, yoga sessions & regular talking circles helps keep an open mind and heart. I have become quite interested in the Vipassana meditation that is the central practice here, and have decided to enroll in a 10 day Vipassana course in Grahams town. This will entail 10 days of silence, meditation & introspection. The course runs from the 10th to 21st of December, I will give updates as soon as I return ;-)

I couldn’t help but notice the front page of a local newspaper the other day, it read something in the line of “Angry mob attacks suspected ripper”, “Economy collapse” and picked up the distinct air of doom & gloom, doom & gloom. I thought about the degree of truth behind these reports, how many people read to newspaper as gospel, how it possibly consistently affect their perception of reality and how these images and messages compare with the influences of a life lived off the grid. At this point in my understanding of the our situation, I can only say that the only way to move forward (survive) is by systematically unplugging ourselves from the system as we know it.

Turn off your tv. Put down your newspaper. Grow your own food. Get independent transport (bicycle). If you buy products, check the labels. Know where your products come from. Excercise your right as a conscious consumer, or better yet, cut down on your consumption. Buy less. Buy local. Most importantly, get to know yourself. Become familiar with the inner workings of your mind & spirit. As Russel E. DiCarlo quotes in his book Towards a New World View, “You have to recognize that what you think not only affects the world-it is the world.”

Thus I can not help but wonder how we are to create a positive future, if the majority of the population continues to drown themselves with fear & negativities on a daily basis. Quoting Andrew Harvey in his book, The Return of the Mother : “We do not have the time not to face what we are living in : a concentration camp of reason where we are lied to about everything important, starting with our essential divine identity, and where we are policed by nihilism and depression, systematically reduced to addicts of sex, money, power and status, whose incessant stiumulation fuels the very system of imprisonment that paralyzes us...By banning the awareness of our transcendent nature and banning the healing powers of the sacred feminine, and spiritual wisdom in general, our culture deprives us of our true selves, our true hearts, and our true wholeness. We are encouraged to view ourselves as dying and grieving animals, and by killing ‘God’ in the Nietzschean sense we have come close to killing ourselves...By deriding mystical truth we have merely severed ourselves from any source of divine wisdom. We no longer know who we are and who we can be. ”

So for now, I will end off with some simple but truly fundamental thoughts to ponder :

“Our lives follow the flow of our thoughts”
“As you believe so you become, as you become so you believe”
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”