Read Charles Eisenstein

Thanks for posting about us, Charles: http://www.thenewandancientstory.net/

A common question: how can the average person help?

This is a response to those of you with the question of 'how can the average person help?'

We are experiencing a strong wider circle of folk who don't live here but resonate with the vision/mission and are participating in unique ways. Ranging from the structuring of the trust and conservation aspects, working towards getting codes changed to accommodate low-impact living, to more immediate matters including relevant phone calls/emails. The understanding has begun that this project is for more than the folk living here. Inspired people with activated and busy lives have begun to show up, physically, to sit in council together and vision great things as well as sit in a more left brain way in a 'meeting' with lots of writing and 'brainstorming' (and other left-brainy kind of stuff). 

Someone said recently "how are you guys gonna chop wood and change laws?". An answer: a wider circle of folk other than those living here who see the greater benefit is how! 

Come sit in council, and pass a stick.

Contribute to the magic hat.

Write an article to your favorite publication.

Share the stories of this process unfolding, your own and ours.

Contact any rich folk who would like to give some of that money to a good place and get a deduction.

Sign the petition to get One Planet Development in Oregon under way.

Whatever!

Last summer when we launched this liberation project loads of ideas came flooding in, too many for us here to realistically embody but any dreamer can do the manifesting too! 

So, there is a spectrum. The least one can do to 'help' is to click like, but the most one can do, and this one is radical and has the potential to make a massive world change, is to stop paying your rent and mortgage! Just plain stop. You do not owe anyone anything for your place on this rotating planet. Know that, and claim it. We belong to the earth and we actually owe  *her*  if there is any owing to be done.

And one more...... Those of you who have an arrest to give, consider Tipi Village. Seriously. 

Fearful Gates That Love Can Break

So it appears that some folk are attempting to put a gate at the end of the driveway here. I suspect it is in preparation for our eviction come September 1st. Usually, in the circumstance of eviction from a building, the locks will be changed. This is where we maintain agency and power in our lives because no-one can ever lock us out of our home. We can carry it on our backs and bring it to stand where we like. So it makes sense that fearful folk (most likely the buyers that I won't name yet although  it may come down it to bring some direct communication)  would put a gate across the road. However, I can't shake the feeling of being not only disregarded (no-one asked me about the gate even though we have lived here for the past seven summers, before the monument designation and have a legitimate place here) but also just plain pushed around. Our presence here is harming no-one. We are trespassing no-one. There is no physical or moral harm being done. And actually, from my perspective, I am seeing the forest around me flourish from the touch of the hands of people who care.  If I am oblivious to a harm I am causing, please, bring it to my attention! (And honestly, if its regarding ownership and money, I'm not sure I consider that true harm).

As we approached the place where two new gaping holes have been dug to receive the intended gate, Sequoia, our three year old daughter says quietly "the birds are sad about these holes that people dug, the birds want us to live here".

The really sad part of all this, the part that brings a painful heavy feeling in my gut and heart, is that money and land ownership have become more valuable than human relationships. There was a time in our history when it wasn't an option to be so rude and plain mean to our fellow humans because our life depended on each other. Our relationships mattered more than anything and it was the greatest benefit to maintain healthy and considerate ones. There was a recognition that the woven web of all our relations was (and still is) life itself, and that damaging a strand in that web, damages the self and the whole. At the end of our lives, this is all we have, the quality of our relationships, of how we related to this web of life. Think about it, what else do you imagine caring about on your deathbed? 

The circumstances we find ourselves in and the people involved are not special or unique  here. I'm not sure special and unique even exists. Or maybe its the opposite, maybe it's our uniqueness and specialness that unites us all. Whatever the case, I stand in solidarity with all the people of the world, now and throughout history, who stand strong in the face of so much fear, hatred and oppression. Who speak out for basic human rights, peacefully and powerfully. Who risk and give their lives to make a way for the world's children, the world's future. 

I keep hearing that this is a powerful time to be living as humans on the earth and every time I hear this I wonder what makes this time more powerful than any other. I'm getting glimpses of it now. It's a ripeness of the altruistic nature in all of us, of the love that binds us together, of the circle that brings power to every person's voice and life to be the guiding paradigm, of the realization that we humans are a keystone species and have a massive effect on the earth and are at a point where we get to consciously live a life that is in harmony with all that is, including the future. We have the beautiful opportunity, right now, to live an absolutely epic, un-compromised life, directly and completely un-mediated through money and false ideas of power and land ownership. As William Kotke puts it: "This  is the watershed logic. For the humans and planet to endure, a completely new human culture must be created. This is not movie and books. This is the whole world view and all of the content by which we relate to each other and to the earth in belief, practice and ritual. This will be a most amazing adventure. If one has heart and courage and can move out of virtual reality onto the fact of the living planet, our future will provide one of the most exciting challenges we humans have faced, with the greatest benefits, if we are successful."

It is our birthright to have a place on the earth. We have the capacity to live with the earth and take care of her. It simply won't work to "save" wild land and keep people off.  Understand this! There actually is no separation between the two!! 

As I sit here in these wild woods, writing to a larger community in hopes of generating beauty, inspiration and support, the cement hardens around the posts for the gate that may lock us out in only three weeks. A community of people, including children who have been born on this soil, who are cultivating a wholesome, connected culture. When I say "us", I mean it. You and me, because you see, there is an open place here that we maintain for any and all who are inspired to collaborate and dance together a new dream. 

Please get in touch, especially if you know a lawyer who is keen on taking on a human rights case. Or perhaps there are other ideas and input. We are asking for it. Thanks.

In love,

Kayla

Moving the Gateposts

The BLM authorised a feller to put gateposts at the end of our driveway on Soda Mountain Road.
Seems like an act of aggression from where I stand.

Police Major Ronnie Robinson, speaking about a shift in tactics following the Ferguson riots said,
“Any time a community and a people are willing to break the law to get the law, you’ve gotta pay attention to that. They have cried out to us and now we need to give them the attention they deserve.”

We're reaching out in a civil way and asking for communication. We know that this blog is read widely and we have been sending messages to the relevant parties with no response. Hopefully we can come to a consensus before calling in mediation. We don't want to break your laws and we don't really want to start naming names, but if you're passive-aggressively denying access to the ancestral homelands of my children, I honestly am running out of ideas of ways forward here.

Getting Along with Living

Look, to the people who define their relationship with the Earth that sustains them as 'property', you people with your acres with which you have little or  no real relationship, you people with your bank accounts with zeros that you worship, I have no quarrel with you. You are welcome to play your game of little pieces of paper of 'ownership'.

But when you start to push me and my family and my community around then I don't know what to do other than make a stand.

You know?

I know that the conception and birth of my children means nothing in your courts when it comes to tenure in a place.

My blood, flesh and tears mingled with the soil are not admissible as evidence in a trial of legitimacy of place.

But I can tell you that not only do I not own land, neither do you. It's not possible, even if you doug up bucketsfull and guarded them day and night with your life until the day you died and buried them with you, you never owned it, because it endures and you don't and you will become one with it again. The best you could hope for is an acknowledgement of belonging, that you belong to the Earth.
Your pieces of paper with your signatures, your abstract constructs of human laws, are unjust and immoral. Justice strives to interpret morality otherwise it is meaningless.

So, with the example of the Tipi People living on the otherwise uninhabited summer spot of remote wilds of Soda Mountain, who's neo-indigenous presence tends and stewards land otherwise neglected. Land that was, until five generations ago, husbanded by bands of families, wiped away, displaced and straight up brutally killed by a new and pernicious consciousness of ownership, settler ownership. In our case, dear reader, I can tell you that even though this is the twenty-first century, that story continues and I find myself, not through choice but through following a life of inspired love, I find myself resisting displacement.

I find myself in court, again, answering to a judge presenting two options; vacate the land where I have a bond of stewardship and deprive my children of the chance of living a connected life, unencumbered by the fragmentation of mainstream industrialisation, or go to trial, with no legal representation.

Under duress (even though the Judge was, on this occasion, open and kind), we opted for the former. So we have until September 1st before men with guns, kevlar vests, mace and cuffs might come out.

No-one here wants to obstruct any sale of land, because we love the currently documented owners with full acknowledgement. However, the prospective buyers, whom we love as adversaries (yet long for this to develop), have a contingency written into their contract that we must be gone. They have told us that they intend to sell or give the land we call home (and hope for the keystone species Homo Sapiens) to the government in exclusion of human habitation.

I think that there are laws to help people to maintain basic human rights, like a place to be with the Earth, but I don't know what they are yet. I think, or hope, that there are laws to give our children the right to grow up in a healthy and wholesome way.

If you are a lawyer or know of one, please get in touch; this is a high profile case that can set a precedent for the future of human place in relationship with Mother Earth. If you are thinking of coming for a visit, now is a good time, though dynamic. Come and witness the front line of the transformation of the paradigm!