Five Ways to Become Happier Today
Allow your painful emotions. Give yourself time. Spend unstructured time with your loved ones. Exercise a few times a week. Cultivate your gratitude. Simplify, slow down, quality is more important than quantity.
Sometimes it takes an expert so we can hear the obvious.
Perspective Shift
Stepping “behind the camera” often creates a feeling of immunity and separation from what’s happening right in front of us.
What are YOU avoiding when you step behind the camera? Or remain in the moving car? Or stand behind the window? In front of the TV?
It is not enough to just know about it. Not anymore.
Goofy people running in slow motion
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Living Without Money, Since 2000
Daniel Suevo has been living without money for almost a decade. His website is a fascinating read. Here’s an excerpt:
“Tyrants Retaining Their Own Waste (Anal Retention)
Often when you are caught at a dumpster by store owners, you are treated with contempt. What is contemptible and inexcusable is the waste, and what is both contemptible and ridiculous is locking up your waste (called anal retention) to keep hungry people from eating, and having the gall to act self-righteous in the process. This is mental illness, institutionalized and whitewashed. Notice how they almost always tell you it is “for your safety”. Notice that tyranny in all its forms all over the world is almost always done “for your safety”, “for your security”. The corporate tyrant is turning the tables to look like the compassionate one, the intelligent one. The tyrant is telling you you are not smart enough to take care of yourself. Simply because the tyrant is a have and you are a have-not somehow makes the tyrant worthy to treat you like a child, when in actuality it is the tyrant who is living in ignorance and needs educating.
The tyrant is also not speaking his or her own mind, not speaking from the heart, but is speaking a script programmed into him or her by the corporation that is paying him or her. Notice how the tyranny in humans is not from reality, not from human-ness, but is scripted programming, paid programming. A human running from the heart and not from a program is not going to guard a dumpster from the hungry. A human running from the heart has common sense, because he or she is not motivated by dollars and cents. This is the secret in human relations, learning how to see the human beneath the scripted program, and appealing to that human. Believe it or not, there is actually a human beneath the facade of corporate managers and cops and their lackeys. Learn how to be totally real, totally sincere, with these robots and, as a result, you learn how to wake up the sleeping human within them. I mean, respect them, as humans. Never respect them as robots. You can love a human. You cannot love a robot, so don’t pretend. Try it. Be bold, be brave, be real: be wise as a serpent, gentle as a dove.”
Read more at http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/
A Letter from a Shelter Manager
Found this on Craigslist. Painful and truthful.
Original at http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/aus/960931196.html
I think our society needs a huge “Wake-up” call. As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all…a view from the inside if you will.
First off, all of you breeders/sellers should be made to work in the “back” of an animal shelter for just one day. Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don’t even know.
That puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it’s not a cute little puppy anymore. So how would you feel if you knew that there’s about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at? Purebred or not! About 50% of all of the dogs that are “owner surrenders” or “strays”, that come into my shelter are purebred dogs.
The most common excuses I hear are; “We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat).” Really? Where are you moving too that doesn’t allow pets? Or they say “The dog got bigger than we thought it would”. How big did you think a German Shepherd would get? “We don’t have time for her”. Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs! “She’s tearing up our yard”. How about making her a part of your family? They always tell me “We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her we know she’ll get adopted, she’s a good dog”.
Odds are your pet won’t get adopted & how stressful do you think being in a shelter is? Well, let me tell you, your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off. Sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy. If it sniffles, it dies. Your pet will be confined to a small run/kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it. If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers in that day to take him/her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose. If your dog is big, black or any of the “Bully” breeds (pit bull, rottie, mastiff, etc) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door.
Those dogs just don’t get adopted. It doesn’t matter how ’sweet’ or ‘well behaved’ they are.
If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed. If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed it may get a stay of execution, but not for long . Most dogs get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression. Even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment. If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.
Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”.
First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash. They always look like they think they are going for a walk happy, wagging their tails. Until they get to “The Room”, every one of them freaks out and puts on the brakes when we get to the door. It must smell like death or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there, it’s strange, but it happens with every one of them. Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs depending on the size and how freaked out they are. Then a euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process. They will find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk. I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood and been deafened by the yelps and screams. They all don’t just “go to sleep”, sometimes they spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves.
When it all ends, your pets corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back with all of the other animals that were killed waiting to be picked up like garbage. What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know and it probably won’t even cross your mind. It was just an animal and you can always buy another one, right?
I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head I deal with everyday on the way home from work.
I hate my job, I hate that it exists & I hate that it will always be there unless you people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.
Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.
My point to all of this DON’T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE!
Hate me if you want to. The truth hurts and reality is what it is. I just hope I maybe changed one persons mind about breeding their dog, taking their loving pet to a shelter, or buying a dog. I hope that someone will walk into my shelter and say “I saw this and it made me want to adopt”. THAT WOULD MAKE IT WORTH IT
Evelyn Glennie, Redefining Music
Evelyn is deaf and a musician. I cringe writing deaf next to her name because in her case the definition is simply not true. She hears differently, feels sound with her whole being.
Her music is touching, honest and profound. In Touch the Sound, the documentary about her work, I saw her fascination with music, her playfulness, humility and surrender.
She listens when she plays. Her appreciation and gratitude of what comes through her is palpable. Sometimes tears roll down her cheeks.
There is a door to inspiration and creation that Evelyn has opened, showing the way for everyone ready to listen.
Open your door today, for a minute, and surrender to your creativity. Feel it and receive it as the gift that you are.
Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do
For some, adulthood comes with full amnesia of what felt like fun during childhood and a full investment in preventing anything risky from happening. Not for this man and not for us, right?
What are the “dangerous” things you avoid playing with?
The Cops are a Slideshow
This is a comment from indymedia’s page showing the film of police attacking peaceful protesters in London at the G20 Climate Camp.
The cops are a sideshow
Published: Thursday 02 April 2009 23:50 by Cascadian
At least in Seattle the non-violent direct action protesters and the sheer numbers in the streets that day actually prevented WTO business from going forward. Usually the meetings go forward as planned AND everyone wastes time arguing police vs. protester tactics.
The essential point is this: the cops are not your enemy, even when they’re going out of their way to beat you up. They’re just the instruments of power, designed to maintain the status quo and hopefully maintain order at the same time. Most of the individual cops don’t have an opinion about the G20 or the WTO or whatever it is at all. They’re a tool that either is used for you or against you.
Challenging the cops just makes it easier for them to line up for their appointed role as protectors of the status quo, which currently means the interests of global capital. The way you make revolutionary change is to bypass the cops, or if that isn’t possible, turn the cops to your side by changing the underlying balance of power. Except in rare circumstances property destruction and violence doesn’t change that balance of power, because the powerful will always have more tools of coercion. Instead, real change requires you to persuade enough people both inside and outside the existing power structure that things have to change. When that happens, all of a sudden the balance of power is on the side of the people in the streets, and it’s the bankers that have to worry about being dragged off to jail.
But that’s hard, and not as viscerally satisfying as chucking a bottle at a black-clad storm trooper.