Some thoughts: What is Life?

09/21/2010 in Living in Beauty, Reflections & Discoveries, What Matters Most by Curt Siters | No comments

To indigenous cultures – those that still follow the old ways – the question isn’t “what is life?” but rather “what isn’t life?”

The Lakota have a prayer that begins “Mitakuye Oyasin ” which means all are related. We are all one. Everything is connected.

Working with the understanding that indigenous cultures are centered around the family and tribe – everyone does what they can to help everyone else. Everyone is related and helps.

This concept can be extended to everything around us because the creator created everything to be of help to us. Stone helps us. Trees help us. Mud, deer, bear, firefly, shadows.

Since these help us they are imbued by the creator with life.

Everything is life.

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Curt Siters

Webmaster

Shoals Creek Village - a new build intentional community.

My Eco Oasis - the hub for what will be a network of many ecovillages.

Big fan of living simply

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. ~Albert Einstein

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard. ~Standing Bear

Tags: indigenous, it matters, living in beauty, old ways, thoughts

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Soil and Community

• It takes roughly a millennium to build an inch or two of soil.

• It takes less than 40 years, on average, to strip an inch of soil by farming in ways that are more focused on current yield than on sustaining fertility.

• A third of America’s topsoil has eroded since 1776.
In the 1970s, the United States lost 4 billion tons of soil per year.

• Roughly a third of all farmland in the world has been degraded since World War II, with annual soil erosion worldwide equivalent to the loss of 12 million hectares of arable land, or 1 percent of total arable land.

• About a third of China’s 130 million hectares of farmland is seriously eroded, and Chinese crop yields fell by more than 10 percent from 1999 to 2003, despite increasing application of synthetic fertilizers.

Featured Bird

Gunnison Sage-Grouse The Gunnison Sage-Grouse is a spectacular but declining bird of the western sagebrush. It is restricted to seven isolated locations in Colorado and one tiny population in Utah. In early 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed it under consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act. The males have an extravagant spring display in which they puff out their bodies, fan their tails into a starburst, and make low, gurgling sounds with bizarre frog-like air sacs in their chests.

Inspirational Quotes

“Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be solved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints.” ~ Wendell Berry

“Has it ever occurred to you that beauty depends on something being identified as ugly? Therefore, the idea of beauty produces the idea of ugliness, and vice versa.” ~ Wayne Dyer

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.” ~ Helen Keller

Some thoughts: What is Life?