I just got back from seeing "Food, Inc." with my sons at our church.
It's been on PBS all week, but I couldn't watch all of it. Its really hard for me to watch it, because it really speaks to me, and I was so affected by the issues it discusses over 20 years ago that I became a vegetarian for 15 years.
It saddens me to see the warnings of 20 years ago become today's realities. I feel somehow responsible, because it is my generation that created this mess, trying to feed the world, and eradicate hunger, and now we have a whole new mess on our hands because with the power to feed the world, also came corruption on the back of greed.
I now feel that becoming a vegetarian was wimping out. It is too passive of an action and doesn't really address the original problems. Vegetarian eating is healthier and helps with meditation, but it isn't an answer to anything.
In movies and television I saw as a kid, people used to make fun of farmers who moved to the city. They were portrayed as gullible and clueless, and became targets of scams. I think that they had the most honorable work -- feeding the rest of us. They should be our heroes.
The way farming is done now is very different and it has lost all its honor. It has become a black box that no one looks inside of.
I had already read two of Michael Pollen's books. I know what he is saying, but watching it on the screen was difficult. This is how black boxes work. We put things that are hard to look at inside the box. Out of sight, out of mind.
The end of the movie lists things anyone can do to make a different world for the future. I have been doing some of them:
The first thing was to have my sons watch Food, Inc. and discuss it with them. I explained that the movie was what guided how I have been shopping for the last few years, so they know why I do what I am doing.
This week I doubled the size of my small urban vegetable garden. I follow organic gardening practices I learned many years ago, but never had any place to garden. I have the tiniest urban lot, but I find that to be no excuse anymore.
A few years back, we were at the Milwaukee Zoo at the farming exhibit. The master gardeners had a very small plot of land next to the barn which was filled with every kind of vegetable possible. It was such an efficient use of the small amount of space that I could see that it was probably going to produce enough to feed an entire family. I don't have much of a green thumb. It's more Chartruse, but if they can do it, I can learn.
Two years ago I began to purchase all of my food organic, and as much of it locally grown as possible. Its more expensive, but if I cook from scratch, the food is much better and the expense is less.
I cook my own food, and we have meals together as a family. I love this part. I started out in college thinking I would never learn to cook because it wasn't that important of a skill. Now I have watched a few thousand cooking shows and I love cooking. Its a very sensual and purposeful thing to do. Cooking for people you care about is a great way to love them.
By cooking more, I can buy what is fresh, looks good and is in season, instead of relying on whatever is "on sale and stale."
The kids and I visit farms.
We go to the Farmer's Markets in the area.
I read labels. We sometimes buy organic meats, free-range, local products.
I am mostly a Pescatarian now, after being an ovo-lacto vegetarian for 12 years, a vegan for one year, and a macrobiotic for one year. I do eat some meat. The word that best describes my eating style is "flexitarian" something I adopted as a label after finding that going back to eating a lot of meat made me feel somewhat sick.
Flexitarian is nice for all those times when people make fun of the various labels that people use to describe how they eat. It isn't about having rigid rules that you follow to somehow save the world or yourself. Eating is mostly a cultural thing. It affects your social life most of all, secondly your health, and then the health and lives of all those who are affected by what you choose to eat.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Optimists Live Longer
Optimists Live Longer -- Because they want to,
but also because others want them to, too....
"The Optimist Creed"
Promise Yourself
Begin each day by promising yourself to:
* Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
* Talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.
* Make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
* Look at the sunny side of everything, and make your optimism come true.
* Think only the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.
* Be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
* Forget the mistakes of the past, and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
* Wear a cheerful countenance at all times, and give every living creature you meet a smile.
* Give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
* Be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
--Optimist International
but also because others want them to, too....
"The Optimist Creed"
Promise Yourself
Begin each day by promising yourself to:
* Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
* Talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.
* Make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
* Look at the sunny side of everything, and make your optimism come true.
* Think only the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.
* Be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
* Forget the mistakes of the past, and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
* Wear a cheerful countenance at all times, and give every living creature you meet a smile.
* Give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
* Be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
--Optimist International
“So think as if your every thought were to be etched in fire upon the sky for all and everything to see.
For so, in truth, it is.
So speak as if the world entire were but a single ear intent upon hearing what you say.
For so, in truth, it is.
So do as if your every deed were to recoil upon your head.
For so, in truth, it is.
So wish as if you were the wish.
And so, in truth, you are.”
– Mikhail Nimay, Book of Mirdad
For so, in truth, it is.
So speak as if the world entire were but a single ear intent upon hearing what you say.
For so, in truth, it is.
So do as if your every deed were to recoil upon your head.
For so, in truth, it is.
So wish as if you were the wish.
And so, in truth, you are.”
– Mikhail Nimay, Book of Mirdad
DRAMA, the thing everybody says they don't want, but pay money to watch...
"How to Create Epic Drama In Your Life"
"Are you getting your minimum daily requirements of chaos?
Do inner peace, gratitude, and contentment occasionally creep up on you and sabotage your ability to indulge in your anxiety?
Here’s a quick and handy two-step process for making sure your world is full of epic drama.
1. Believe and act like your safety, security, success and happiness are dependent on other people and forces outside of you that you can’t control.
2. Try to control them.
For those of you who prefer to keep it more complex and time-consuming, here are seven practical tips for making sure you achieve a high drama existence.
Let me be your drama director as we shout out the traditional opening words…
“Lights! Camera!! RE-ACTION!!!
The Seven Spiritual Steps To Successful Drama
1. Always Visualize The Worst Possible Outcome
Everybody accentuates the negative on occasion. What if I go broke? What if I lose my house? What if I get sick? What if I’m alone forever? What if I’m in this relationship forever? It’s perfectly human to use the power of negative thinking from time to time to conjure up worst-case scenarios about the future. But as your drama coach, I want to inspire you to focus all of your attention on the most negative possible outcomes all of the time. When this discipline has been achieved, you then relax into the certainty that you can always find something to freak out about in any situation, and that fear will never abandon you again.
2. Procrastinate & Downright Avoid Meditating
Being too busy and active to still your mind is essential on your path to drama-realization. Good drama requires us to be fully lost in our roles as actors on the stage, reading our reactive lines and getting engrossed in our stories. Meditation teaches us to become conscious of the part of us that is an audience member, witnessing and even enjoying our own performance. This detachment is the death of drama, and must be avoided at all costs. So keep busy, inside and out. Have you answered all your emails today? Is there something good on TV? Who needs a shoulder to lean on? Always make sure that your life and your mind are filled with clutter and free of those empty spaces between your thoughts that can threaten and disturb your absence of peace.
3. Get Good At Repressing and Exploding
Drama majors are often found swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to another, skillfully avoiding meddling with Mr. In Between, where the boredom can put you to sleep. All you need to do is to stuff your feelings till you can’t hold them in any longer and then explode without restraint or concern for anyone, especially the ones you care most about. As a practice, try being 100% nice and sweet in a relationship. Stretch yourself to accommodate as much and as long as you can, and then take the lid off and let the steam out, like Mt. Saint Helens does once in a while. Drama Queens (and Kings) know that there is nothing as satisfying as having a totally unpredictable volcanic eruption after being good, silent, and inactive for a spell.
4. Leave Your Inner Child Alone Inside You Without Parental Supervision
When our inner kids get scared, they create some really juicy drama, but only if we are committed to denying them our own re-assurance, empathy, guidance, and loving boundaries. When we have the will power to not succumb to such self-indulgent self-help nonsense, our inner kids will have no choice but to try to get those needs met solely from others, and usually through some pretty high drama antics. When two people in a relationship abandon their kids at the same time, oh boy, that’s when the fun kicks into high gear. The adults have left the vehicle, and you can guess who’s in the front seat, banging on the horn, flooding the accelerator, yelling out the window, and playing extreme bumper cars. Yippee!
5. Set Huge Goals, Maintain Unrealistic Expectations
There is nothing as beneficial to a dramatic lifestyle than developing the habit of reaching for the stars, falling short of your lofty goals, and punishing yourself for failing. Taking big leaps and falling flat on your face is paramount for maintaining low self-esteem, which is the foundation of all good drama. Reach for the mountain-top, and on the way don’t look down at your feet. Taking one step at a time is for people who lead uninteresting lives, filled with a lackluster sense of gentleness, peace, and other dismal downers that drama majors are skilled at sidestepping.
6. Judge Your Judgments
Every human being judges, but only the ones that have learned the art of judging their judgments excel in creating melodrama. Have you ever been known to shame and blame yourself for feeling afraid and stuck, telling yourself that there is something really wrong with you for not moving forward? Good! You are on the right track. Now, take your next step. Judge your judgments! Tell yourself that you should know better than to shame and blame yourself. Heap loads of guilt upon yourself for stooping yet again to the low consciousness of self-criticism. This will make you quite an energetic downer that can’t help but suck energy from those around you. You’ll be the lifelessness of the party! Can a good, high drama soap opera be far behind?
7. Get Grounded In The 3 B’s…. Blame, Blame, & Blame
Blaming yourself has already been covered. But don’t rest there. Blame everyone else too. Life’s not going the way you want? Blame! Blame first, ask questions and take responsibility later, if at all. Appropriate targets are Mom and Dad, friends (if you still have any), your mate (if they are still around), the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, big corporations, small minds, and, of course, God. Self-responsibility is highly overrated, and leads to issues losing their charge and actually getting resolved, which flushes good drama down the toilet. Instead, let it overflow, all over the tile of your life. Blame, Blame, Blame!
Affirmations for Good Drama
* Every day in every way I am stressing out over everything, real or imagined.
* Everything is working together to conspire to bring the worst possible outcome to my doorstep.
* Life is against me and I am doomed.
* I count my bills every day, and they are always more numerous than my blessings.
* God always gives me something to complain about.
* This, or something worse, is now manifesting for the highest cost of all concerned.
* I no longer have to work to create drama. Drama happens effortlessly and naturally, all around me.
* Whatever calamity I can conceive, I can achieve.
* I am always in the right place at the right time, successfully up to my ears in trouble.
* I always have everything I need to manifest everything I don’t want.
* All is hell in my world.
--Scott Kalechstein
www.scottsongs.com
“Respond to emergencies in a causal manner.”
~Norman Vincent Peale
"Are you getting your minimum daily requirements of chaos?
Do inner peace, gratitude, and contentment occasionally creep up on you and sabotage your ability to indulge in your anxiety?
Here’s a quick and handy two-step process for making sure your world is full of epic drama.
1. Believe and act like your safety, security, success and happiness are dependent on other people and forces outside of you that you can’t control.
2. Try to control them.
For those of you who prefer to keep it more complex and time-consuming, here are seven practical tips for making sure you achieve a high drama existence.
Let me be your drama director as we shout out the traditional opening words…
“Lights! Camera!! RE-ACTION!!!
The Seven Spiritual Steps To Successful Drama
1. Always Visualize The Worst Possible Outcome
Everybody accentuates the negative on occasion. What if I go broke? What if I lose my house? What if I get sick? What if I’m alone forever? What if I’m in this relationship forever? It’s perfectly human to use the power of negative thinking from time to time to conjure up worst-case scenarios about the future. But as your drama coach, I want to inspire you to focus all of your attention on the most negative possible outcomes all of the time. When this discipline has been achieved, you then relax into the certainty that you can always find something to freak out about in any situation, and that fear will never abandon you again.
2. Procrastinate & Downright Avoid Meditating
Being too busy and active to still your mind is essential on your path to drama-realization. Good drama requires us to be fully lost in our roles as actors on the stage, reading our reactive lines and getting engrossed in our stories. Meditation teaches us to become conscious of the part of us that is an audience member, witnessing and even enjoying our own performance. This detachment is the death of drama, and must be avoided at all costs. So keep busy, inside and out. Have you answered all your emails today? Is there something good on TV? Who needs a shoulder to lean on? Always make sure that your life and your mind are filled with clutter and free of those empty spaces between your thoughts that can threaten and disturb your absence of peace.
3. Get Good At Repressing and Exploding
Drama majors are often found swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to another, skillfully avoiding meddling with Mr. In Between, where the boredom can put you to sleep. All you need to do is to stuff your feelings till you can’t hold them in any longer and then explode without restraint or concern for anyone, especially the ones you care most about. As a practice, try being 100% nice and sweet in a relationship. Stretch yourself to accommodate as much and as long as you can, and then take the lid off and let the steam out, like Mt. Saint Helens does once in a while. Drama Queens (and Kings) know that there is nothing as satisfying as having a totally unpredictable volcanic eruption after being good, silent, and inactive for a spell.
4. Leave Your Inner Child Alone Inside You Without Parental Supervision
When our inner kids get scared, they create some really juicy drama, but only if we are committed to denying them our own re-assurance, empathy, guidance, and loving boundaries. When we have the will power to not succumb to such self-indulgent self-help nonsense, our inner kids will have no choice but to try to get those needs met solely from others, and usually through some pretty high drama antics. When two people in a relationship abandon their kids at the same time, oh boy, that’s when the fun kicks into high gear. The adults have left the vehicle, and you can guess who’s in the front seat, banging on the horn, flooding the accelerator, yelling out the window, and playing extreme bumper cars. Yippee!
5. Set Huge Goals, Maintain Unrealistic Expectations
There is nothing as beneficial to a dramatic lifestyle than developing the habit of reaching for the stars, falling short of your lofty goals, and punishing yourself for failing. Taking big leaps and falling flat on your face is paramount for maintaining low self-esteem, which is the foundation of all good drama. Reach for the mountain-top, and on the way don’t look down at your feet. Taking one step at a time is for people who lead uninteresting lives, filled with a lackluster sense of gentleness, peace, and other dismal downers that drama majors are skilled at sidestepping.
6. Judge Your Judgments
Every human being judges, but only the ones that have learned the art of judging their judgments excel in creating melodrama. Have you ever been known to shame and blame yourself for feeling afraid and stuck, telling yourself that there is something really wrong with you for not moving forward? Good! You are on the right track. Now, take your next step. Judge your judgments! Tell yourself that you should know better than to shame and blame yourself. Heap loads of guilt upon yourself for stooping yet again to the low consciousness of self-criticism. This will make you quite an energetic downer that can’t help but suck energy from those around you. You’ll be the lifelessness of the party! Can a good, high drama soap opera be far behind?
7. Get Grounded In The 3 B’s…. Blame, Blame, & Blame
Blaming yourself has already been covered. But don’t rest there. Blame everyone else too. Life’s not going the way you want? Blame! Blame first, ask questions and take responsibility later, if at all. Appropriate targets are Mom and Dad, friends (if you still have any), your mate (if they are still around), the Bush administration, the Clinton administration, big corporations, small minds, and, of course, God. Self-responsibility is highly overrated, and leads to issues losing their charge and actually getting resolved, which flushes good drama down the toilet. Instead, let it overflow, all over the tile of your life. Blame, Blame, Blame!
Affirmations for Good Drama
* Every day in every way I am stressing out over everything, real or imagined.
* Everything is working together to conspire to bring the worst possible outcome to my doorstep.
* Life is against me and I am doomed.
* I count my bills every day, and they are always more numerous than my blessings.
* God always gives me something to complain about.
* This, or something worse, is now manifesting for the highest cost of all concerned.
* I no longer have to work to create drama. Drama happens effortlessly and naturally, all around me.
* Whatever calamity I can conceive, I can achieve.
* I am always in the right place at the right time, successfully up to my ears in trouble.
* I always have everything I need to manifest everything I don’t want.
* All is hell in my world.
--Scott Kalechstein
www.scottsongs.com
“Respond to emergencies in a causal manner.”
~Norman Vincent Peale
"The Ten Paradoxical Commandments"
Anyway
"People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway."
--From: "Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments: Finding Personal Meaning in a Crazy World," by Kent M. Keith
Anyway
"People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway."
--From: "Anyway: The Paradoxical Commandments: Finding Personal Meaning in a Crazy World," by Kent M. Keith
Today
"Look to this Day, For it is Life,
The very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all The realities and verities of Existence:
The Bliss of Growth,
The Splendor of Action,
The Glory of Power.
For yesterday is but a Dream
And tomorrow is only a Vision
But today, well-lived
Makes every yesterday a Dream of Happiness
And every tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well, therefore, to this Day."
-- Sanskrit Proverb
The very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all The realities and verities of Existence:
The Bliss of Growth,
The Splendor of Action,
The Glory of Power.
For yesterday is but a Dream
And tomorrow is only a Vision
But today, well-lived
Makes every yesterday a Dream of Happiness
And every tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well, therefore, to this Day."
-- Sanskrit Proverb
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