Last week April 15th not only marked the day for our collective Taxes to be mailed but it was also the day where teabagging rallies/protests and tea-parties were happening across the country.   This post is not politically motivated, so I’m not going to talk about the virtues/vices of these events or whether either of the two political parties in the US are right or wrong in their position on the Obama stimulus package.  If you’ve read any of my posts on the economy you’d know where I stand on the way the government spends money.  What I want to talk about is another tea party of sorts I performed on my own last week, totally unrelated to the teabagging events that happened around the country but in a mystical kind of way it is very much related.  This particular tea “non-event” happened in fact prior to me even knowing about the tea party protests happening in the US.  This synchronous coincidence alone made it all that much more special.
Here’s how the story goes: I have been working diligently for the past few months to simplify my life and shed all attachments to the past that have been weighing me down energetically…attachments to my old jobs by keeping around old job related documents, old pay stubs, staionaries from my old company, etc.  all in order to move forward with a clean, confident slate.  Parallel to this process, I had also been looking at getting rid of clutter by identifying anything that I hadn’t used in more than 6 months to a year.  I was getting rid of these items by both giving them away for free as well as selling them on Ebay and Craigslist.   As I began to purge, I found a new sense of space, both in my physical world but also in my psychic space.  What I didn’t realize was that this new found way of bringing about a shift, wasn’t limited to all the items and junks in our storage space, but it was just as applicable to our drawer full of tea bags.  I noticed last week that we had been keeping a particular number of tea bags that my wife and I had received a few years ago during a trip to Montreal. These were all flavors that neither my wife or I liked.  Needless to say, these tea bags have been sitting in our cabinet for over a year and a half.   I can’t speak for my wife, but I had always held a belief or fantasy that one day, a guest in our house was going to want tea and magically select one of these bags. On the 14th of April, I decided that once and for all, there was no reason to hold onto these old bags of tea for the sake of some unknown future event based on a thought-form or fantasy in my head.  What made this a guilt free decision was that we have a composter in our backyard, so all the bags were “recycled.”
With the bags gone, our drawer is now more spacious and I don’t have to expend another ounce of energy thinking about those bags as I did in the past every time I came across them in the drawer.  The moral of this story is that sometimes we get things in order to fill a void in the present moment and later in the future we hold to those same things for way too long.  Our attachments to Inanimate objects and forms really get us into trouble sometime, least of which is our identification with them (ie. sense of self).  Ironically all forms and objects are transient.  Everything in time will either decay or die, either physically or in our conscious mind(at least between birth and death).  To that end, it is futile to hold on to forms.  In this particular case I held on to those bags of tea way too long and I learned that even bags of tea, the ones I held on to for so long for reasons I didn’t even fully understand, had no business staying around and taking up mental space.  How does my tea bag story dovetail into the current economic crists you ask? Our individual collective acts in buying “stuff” that we didn’t need, and holding on to them in ways that only filled up our garages, storage spaces and even tea drawers, is what got us into this financial mess.  When we can free ourselves by releasing these “things” into the world, either to people who have a more pressing use for them, through recycling or back to mother earth via composting, we will allow the circle of life to continue un-impeded.  This purging process is a great way to re-learn how to spend, what to store and how, why and where to re-distribute.

Just like the saying “be the change you want to see in the world”, then “have your own conscious tea party at home” and leave the silly politics to the poleticians and the protesters.

I came across this amazing video about dolphins a while back and have been meaning to share it with you. To me it represented what is whole and sacred in our world, those which we all have so much to learn from and who we still know very little about. Yesterday I came across the news of the mass killings of dolphins off the coast of Taiji in Japan as part of a seasonal slaughter of dolphins both as meat and as a way to reduce overeating of fish by the dolphins. I was contemplating whether or not to combine the two trains of thoughts. This video is so empowering and beautiful yet this latest story is so tragic and sad. Needless to say I decided that these two threads must go hand in hand if truly we are to chance our consciousness around these magnificent beings.

First, the good: If you only have a cursory understanding of dolphins then this video will blow your mind. This video depicts the amazing capabilities of dolphins, from their ability to clearly communicate with humans through language and art, to their ability to help children recover from paralysis due to strokes. What really blew my mind was seeing the amazing hydrodynamic capabilities of dolphins exemplified by how they blow these bubble-rings (it’s worth waiting through most of the video to see this). This capability showed me how we humans have much to learn from these dolphins. I am reminded of the work by Janine Benyus around biomimicry and how we can harness the intelligence of all beings(plants, animals, minerals, etc.) in nature to create new products. After watching this video, I can’t help but believe and trust that we have teachers in Dolphins.

Now the ugly: This latest news out of Jaiji Japan is another chapter in the already wagging battle with Japan over Whaling. Today many westerners are in Taiji to help halt/curb the killing of thousand of dolphins. I’ve included the link to the CNN article out Feb. 11,2008 with a link to the video of what is happening at Taiji(I have to warn you that it is both graphic and saddening). Here is where consciousness of the past (alive with this particular group of Japanese fishermen) and the consciousness of the now are going head to head. Who is right in this argument? The Japanese claim that they have been doing this for 400 years. From the video it is at least clear that the dolphins are not being killed humanely, which is how any animal that is being killed in the name of food must be treated.

Now the questions: If dolphins were killed humanely(ie. for food) does that make it right? should dolphins as a species be killed for food? Positive videos like the one attached and the negative ones can be instructive and give us the mental paradigm, but at the end of the day the heart knows if it is right or wrong. Clearly this is an issue that is ripe for re-evaluation and a shift in consciousness. Sitting with these two ideas/concepts, one of light and the other of darkness, and by shifting and ever modifying our perspective can we begin to bring about the necessary change within ourselves. The change necessary to work towards true preservation of our oceans for the animals that call it home or perhaps the change necessary to finally pay a fraction more for dolphin safe tuna at the supermarket.

See the CNN LINK to the Dolphin video here.

If you are not familiar with the benfits of Raw milk, I encourage you to explore it for yourself. I’ve included a few links that go into further detail the benefits of raw milk.

Also check out this video from Mark McAfee, the CEO and founder of Organic Pastures Dairy explaining why he switched his dairy from pasteurized to all Raw.

Click here to view the embedded video.