WE ALREADY PAID

We Already Paid

In the wake of loss of net neutrality, as the internet becomes super slow to sites that aren’t paying what Google, Verizon, and Comcast do through their political purchases and tax incentives, I want to point out that we already paid for the internet. We paid through our taxes and additional fees for services per month to lay fiber optics and spy-lines. It should be free. 

Who Paid?

Annie Leonard, in her brilliant “story of stuff” films takes us through the production of a $4.99 radio at Radio Shack, and asking, “Who Paid?”  For 10 years, she researched that linear production line, noting that it missed many points, the most glaring, its effect on people and planet. She shows how government keeps businesses happy, ignoring their main job of caring for the people.

People all along toxic production lines paid with the loss of their natural resources, and with the loss of homelands that have kept them sustained for generations.

We already paid with the loss of a clean livable planet.

People and planet already paid with the loss of our clean air, clean water, and healthy living soil. We paid with the loss of our health from the toxic industrial food system.

We paid monthly premiums and co-pays at hospitals and clinics keeping us sick for profit. We paid with the loss of healthy lives because we can’t afford to go to the doctor. We paid again for alternative and traditional health not covered in our expensive health care plans.

We paid through the loss of connection with our families, communities, and each other. We paid with the loss of time and energy we spend to keep ourselves housed and fed.

Those of us who have toiled, gone into debt, educated ourselves, worked, raised our families, or just tried to breathe and eat and live have already paid.

Those who have had to give up homes that have sustained them and move to cities for scarce jobs have already paid.

Children who lacked the presence of unstressed caring adults already paid. Those parents who couldn’t be there for their children already paid.

Leaders who were threatened, corrupted or killed by the oppressors already paid.

The war-torn, who have lost lives, homes, land, resources, environment, freedom, and safe sleep at night already paid.

Those employed in jobs they knew were killing people and planet, but put food on the table, already paid.

Those stuck working too hard to do anything about it, because they don’t have enough to meet their family’s needs already paid.

SO LETS JUST STOP

We’re kept on a treadmill, running so fast, working so hard, with systems in place to keep us thinking it’s just the way it is. But we can just stop. We can learn a new way. The monetary system is just an idea.  Ideas can change to align with the ways that mother nature provides resources.

Our bodies are fed by the soil beneath our feet. We are of and continue to be part of the soil, water, and air. A healthy earth loves and sustaining us. What we put into our mouths and on our bodies should be healthy love from our mother, not the toxins of greed.

We live in a lie that the source of our natural resources has no value. The resources we extract cannot have more value than their source, but that is how our economic system is set up. It is time for change.

We can regenerate degraded environments.

SO WHO SHOULD PAY?

It is time for those who have benefited exploiting our oppression and the destruction of our planet to pay for the transition into better. This film is long and pretty shocking. Watch it anyway. 

Big Commercial banks wrestled the power from the people for profit. They make money out of thin air, entering numbers in electronic ledgers counting debts.  But there are huge flaws in the system. The interest is not created, so there is never enough. The banksters can, at their whim, expand or shrink the money supply to rob us of homes, properties, farms, and livelihoods.

They pressured politicians they bought to bail them out when they mess up, so that we are continue paying taxes for debt outside of our control or influence. Oh, and the banks make the interest loaning the government to bail them out of debt.

Our oppressors have deep pockets. It’s their turn to pay.

We already paid with the loss of a clean livable planet.

SO, HOW SHOULD THEY PAY?

Anonymous hactivists break in to make a few tweaks to provide a number for all those oppressed to charge it to the Rothchilds and their like. For as long as it takes, until we establish systems aligned with nature to support the needs of people and planet, the Rothchild’s and their friends in the 1%, will repay with their vast fortunes stolen from the masses.

For cleaning up the environment, charge it.

For transitioning into a healthy food system, charge it.

Needs for your family; food, housing, clean water, education, communication, transportation, livelihood, charge it to their accounts, because we already paid.

Can I have an AMENdMent?!

True wealth
Billions of life-giving micro-organisms. Dirt is our true wealth.

Deep Listening in the Circle of life

Krista’s notes at the birth of the Holy Church of Dirt

The Holy Church of Dirt celebrates the circle of life. It is about beginning, re-beginning, recycling, re-shaping, and evolving, so we could start anywhere. So, we are here now. We have no time to waste. Let us get to work turning the current course toward the extinction of humans on our planet toward our natural love of life. A livetime of work awaits everyone in a worldwide mission to rebuild soil. So let us begin.

Many hopeful examples demonstrate how we can rehabilitate degraded eco-systems. With good design, we can turn them into lush life-generating ecosystems. (See Green Gold, Greening the desert, and we can have fun doing it. It is empowering to make a difference. It’s enlightening to know and to grow. Deep listening to inspiration in co-creation with nature is magical.

Learning from stones to hear

Although people describe someone as “stone deaf”, stones taught me about deep listening. With zero experience, I decided to build a staircase of stones in a yard rich in stones deposited from a melt at the end of the last ice age. With sand and mortar, trial and error, I discovered that if I asked from my heart which stone wanted to be next, one would stand out, and inevitably fit perfectly into the space that I was filling. I believe that rough stone staircase gave that home character that became a key selling point of that house. It wasn’t up to code, but it felt good.

Chaya plant

Sensitive instruments monitoring plant activity have proven that plants communicate. (See the Secret Life of Plants) 

Given that plants have been evolving eons longer than humans, we shouldn’t be surprised. We can learn from plants how to evolve and thrive. When you ask a plant from your heart what it needs, know that it knows your thoughts and is hoping that you will get beyond wondering if you are crazy, to hear the answer.

Like plants, our own connected, truthful nature-self is waiting to be heard. When we touch a leaf, put our feet in the sand, wade in the ocean, watch the sunset,  and walk in wilderness. We are one with all of it. We are the power of all that is, in the form of a human.

Our mobility gives us options

We have choices. Some more than others, but each of us can decide to bring about better health and prosperity. In big ways and small, local and global; wherever we have influence, we can act. It will take time, but where will we be in the time it takes if we don’t? So, take care to keep your energy charged so you can get back to this important work, renewed and amplified.

So, back to the dirt. For, it all begins and the ends in the dirt. Zillions of living microorganisms feeding the soil nourish us. Our health is completely dependent upon how we treat soil. Empires rise and fall based upon how people treat the soil. (See the movie, Dirt, the movie)

Making fertilizer from food scraps
Mixing our kitchen waste into life in the soil

I invite those living without a close relationship to soil, to join your friends in dirt. Start by making compost. Leave out the chemicals sold as fertilizer that just simulate life. True living soil; with the bugs, worms, nematodes, bacteria, fungi, and mycelium, feed us real living food. Even if you live far from soil, you can support life by turning your kitchen scraps and shredded paper into living healthy soil. Even someone living in an apartment 30 floors up, can keep a bin in the kitchen. You may need to dig around to somewhere for some worms. Feed your plants with some of that soil, and your plants will absolutely perk up.

.Make your own indoor compost bin 

3 indoor bin designs

Apartment kitchen compost design

Come along as we explore how we get down and dirty in the Holy Church of Dirt, transformed and grounded, aligned with all that is.

Can I have an amen-d-ment?!

Magic Rainbow worm
Look closely at an earthworm in the sunlight. Do you see the rainbow?

Eating and Being Eaten

Greetings beloved fellow Earthlings from here in the compost heap of the Holy Church of Dirt.

Let’s dig right in. I’d like to draw your attention to how in nature, things are in a constant state of eating or being eaten, and often, both at the same time. For example, here in this compost pile, zillions of bacteria are heating up the pile, eating nutrients, mixing nitrogen and carbon, and feeding other bigger creatures in the soil. It is alive. When this pile is ready, it will nourish healthy plants and animals, large and small, all of us, that are eating and being eaten from this pile.

Compost tea. A mix of nutrients to support life in the soil.

You and I are eating, and being eaten, by bacteria, mosquitoes, viruses, and interactions rubbing us the wrong way. Beauty and positive interactions feed our soul and give us energy.

The bird-party song off the deck, of surprisingly shy grey necked wood-rails feeds my soul. While the neighbor’s machines blowing herbicides on their fields sap my energy and make me take stock. I won’t go right now, into the threat of erosion on steep slopes that used to be rainforest in a country that is supposed to be “green”. Today, I’ll focus on the underpaid brothers out there, being eaten in just about every way imaginable by blowing poison to kill large swaths of life in the soil so that their boss can plant more of one type of grass to feed cows.

Over Eating- Killing Swaths

The same toxins that they absorb through their unprotected skin and noses, goes into the grass to be turned into toxic cheese. Toxins in the soil leach into the water, and with the rain, dump toxins into the streams and oceans. Toxins are now found in every system along the chain ending up in your cup, on your plate, and in your breastmilk. These brothers will die young and sick from those poisons, as countless others dependent upon the meager hourly wages to do that dirty work.

So let’s back up. Why do the neighbors think they need to spray poison to get the right stuff to grow?

I think my neighbor figures it is a quick way to put food on his table. And for a time, that will work, but eventually, all life in the soil is dead. So, then, he strips more forest and sprays again. But, I want to point from the bigger picture, that it looks more like greed on tables in boardrooms further up the chain in a giant global toxic industrial food system.

Profiting in quick money, while killing soil life on a large scale, they are disrupting the natural systems of eating and being eaten that feeds life on earth. In our extractive consumer, status-seeking culture, we have become detached from the dirt that feeds us. We live on a finite planet. This cannot continue.

True wealth
Billions of life-giving micro-organisms eating and being eaten.

The Intelligence of Dirt

I’ve heard it said, that one teaspoonful of soil has more organized intelligence, than all the other known planets in the universe. Modern science has barely begun to even unwrap the complexity of all of that micro-life community. I can tell you with certainty that until we understand quantum mechanics and interactions between enzymes, fungi, bacteria and their cohorts, we will fail to appreciate how their life feeds us through the soil. When we begin to understand these relationships, we will begin in earnest, to regenerate soil health, along with human health.

Food that is rich in nutrients feeds us, in addition to little entities feeding on us, digesting and metabolizing the food in our bodies in a healthy state of eating and being eaten. The Holy Church of Dirt is here to remind us to notice our nature. To feed our guts, our souls and our soil.

Krista’s notes at the birth of the Holy Church of Dirt

Take time to notice how you are eating and being eaten. For kudos and karma, you might find a way to feed a system you’ve been over-consuming.

We’re interested to hear your lessons learned. Keep your comments nice, please.

Here’s to building healthy living soil.

Can I have an AMEN-d-ment?