Some thoughts: The Land

09/28/2010 in Living in Beauty, Reflections & Discoveries, What Matters Most by Curt Siters | No comments

Seminole Kids The land is very important to indigenous cultures. They live on it. They derive sustenance from it. When they die they become part of it physically.

Native cultures believe in interconnectedness and interrelations of all things. That we are all one. We are all related.

Some take it a step further and believe that we are each other.

The Dhammapada stanza 5 says “… If you see yourself in others then whom can you injure?” Other cultures may have similar concepts.

Bringing the Dhammapada together with Mitakuye Oyasin you then get the concept behind… “The land I stand on is my body…”

The land is sacred. My body is sacred. We are both created by our creator. We are one, the land and I.

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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: discoveries, indigenous, it matters, living in beauty

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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: The Land