Earthing ~ Uprisings

Earthing ~ A Journey 3

My Personal Journey to connect with Earth (continued)

My workplace became a place of backstabbing. My subordinate Night Manager wanted my job and tried to undermine me at every turn. I found him (a married man with three young kids) having an affair with another employee (also married). The security police had rung to inform me that our alarm system was being turned off at 2:00 am on a series of nights and my Night Manager’s code had been entered. (basically they were using my office for clandestine bonking sessions). However, my boss actually believed that he should not be warned or dismissed. Instead she ‘promoted’ me to a new job I didn’t want, nor was I qualified to do, and gave one of her friend’s my job. My Boss gave me no choice. I knew that this was the first sign that things were going to change, and rapidly.

I juggled my spiritual journey with an increasingly more difficult physical one. My new job gave me a new office, more computer work and demanded official marketing presentations but took away resposibility for any employees. (My Boss blamed me for not controlling my Night Manager’s rampant gonads!). However, other manager’s cooperation was required, and since I had jumped their ranks by 2 grades on the pay scale (something that shouldn’t have happened), it created animosity and I could not rely on their help (and in fact, they went out of their way to thwart my work). I was a long term employee, and my boss (only a year in the job) was not experienced enough to know what she was doing, but she had a way of belittling everyone, including me, while she flouted the rules.

Worse, I was suddenly aware that a deja-vu aspect of my death dream was developing quickly in my new circumstances. Not long after my move, my Boss said that I would be required to travel to New Orleans to some technology event or other, and she and her Supervisor would be coming too. My blood ran cold. It was the exact location in my dream that I had dismissed as silly and extremely unlikely. I had just been given a Dell laptop (an expensive bit of kit for the presentations) and my death dream had showed me going through a presentation on a laptop in the hotel coffee shop, when I would suddenly experience a gripping left side pain and my coffee cup would fall out of my hand, with the obvious death by heart attack consequences.

I kind of went into a meltdown of fear, but said nothing. Coincidence maybe, but many other incidences of the dream scenes were occurring for real,  and I began to panic.

I spent more and more time trying to meditate and ground myself. My world felt like it was spinning out of control and I could only watch and observe it doing so.

The real reason my boss wanted to go with me to New Orleans was to get an all expenses paid trip. It would be a junket on the public purse as our business operated under ancillary services of a University. It was all wrong, and I knew it. The venue would not benefit us or the University! The Provost, (her boss) was going along with this grand deception. I had to think of something to get out of it, but I was worried about income so I couldn’t just quit. I had several months before the New Orleans Technology Conference, so I did have some breathing space.

I thought I needed some time to think about my life without the stress of work. I requested an unpaid leave of absence for 10 weeks. I was entitled under the rules of my long term employment, but I still had to have a reason. I used ‘relationship problems’ as an excuse. My boss actually agreed (to my surprise).

My partner was going to visit his aging parents for six weeks, (and, as I would later learn, to play around with an old girlfriend on the side). My relationship was definitely on the rocks anyway.

I spent my ten weeks with my new friends, pursuing weekend Reiki courses, shamanic rituals, sacred dancing and special workshops that took me to an even higher awareness of connectivity and taught me more healing skills. I almost went to the ‘witch’ lady’s full moon celebration, but when she said they would dance naked around the fire and then sit in a sauna all night to purge their physical bodies, I wasn’t sure, and didn’t go. Perhaps I should have. In hindsight, dancing barefoot might have been very grounding, and the sweat lodges (a kind of shamanic thing), were built over bare earth.

During my solitary days, I sat on the grass in my garden, planted vegetables amongst the flowers and had my arms wrapped around trees on long walks, some barefooted. I was in heaven. All my stresses were out of my life for the moment. It was a blissful and healthy time for me. I ate salads and prepared lovely food from local organic shops and didn’t drink any alcohol. I was really grounded and happy. It was the best summer of my entire life.

But, I had to return to work, and while I needed a new job, I also needed time to implement a course of action to get one, so I continued playing the game.

The New Orleans trip was still three months away and I made a premature risky move to try to avoid going. It was one that didn’t pay off. In fact it backfired spectacularly…

I did a little research on the Technology Conference in New Orleans (coincidently occurring at the same time as the February Mardi Gras festival) and found that we were only given a small insignificant slot. It was hardly worth paying the flights, hotel and food expenses for  three (or as it would turn out, four people) to attend for four days.

And I told my boss in no uncertain terms that “We’ d be wasting our time there, and tax-payer money.”

My boss looked at me with thunderous eyes, walked around her desk and slammed her office door shut, (a sign to the staff on the other side of it, that she was about to tear strips off me). The blast of anger I received could be heard up and down the building. Then she said she would send another Manager in place of me and told me to ‘get out!’

I walked back to my office with staff eyes following me, burning holes in my back. Ten minutes later, my office door opened and my Boss walked in. Her anger, it seemed, had worsened. She was clever, no one heard this conversation and I couldn’t prove it (I did try, and even consulted a lawyer), but she growled in a low voice  that I was to go home immediately (it was a Friday morning). I was to think very hard about my options over the weekend and either come back on Monday with my resignation on her desk, or to grovel for my job (her words) but in that case, she would make my life a living hell for the rest of my work days.

I had not expected this at all. The stress for me was huge…

I had to  figure out what to do on Monday? … And I didn’t intend to go home to tell my lazy partner that I had virtually been fired. I spent the rest of the day in a nearby woodland trying to connect with the earth… And to plan a new life! I meditated and grounded myself all weekend. I was so grateful that I had this in my life, because without it, I think I would have had a complete mental breakdown.

(Incidentally, two of my previous staff were assigned to give the New Orleans  presentation in my place but when they all arrived that following February, the they had been relegated to 30 minutes in a general interest booth, outside of the conference proceedings – along with the trinket sellers – and they did their presentation to ten bored attendees, with five of them wandering away after just a few minutes. My Boss had not even made an appearance. The four of them spent the rest of their time partying day and night at the Mardi Gras courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer).

(To be continued… )

Climate Future?

Climate Change has troubled me for years now. I remember back in the late 1970’s a huge hole in the ozone layer appeared due to the use of CFC’s (Chlorofluorocarbons) used in everything from air conditioners to propellant in aerosol cans.

As the years rolled on, I remember quite a few warnings about acid rain destroying our freshwater lakes and rivers. Then, in quick succession, it was nuclear accidents, oil and chemical spills, and PCB’s (polychlorinated biphenyls) polluting our drinking water, causing terrible cancers. The world seemed doomed as we realised the extent of damage we’d created. But suddenly, the media reports all went quiet.

I, like most people, didn’t give it a lot of thought at the time… But mainstream media dropped the stories about such problems and focused on the 1980’s with its rebounding economics, new music tastes and outrageous fashions. The world was focused on opulent, narcissistic living and corporations cashed in on the rush to buy, buy, buy. The madness of ‘material acquisition’ continued well beyond the 1990’s until abject greed caused economic collapse to start rearing its ugly head.

But the environmental  problems were, and are still there and worsening. Lots of hard working scientists knew it. So did the polluting industries. But until the whistle blowing by frustrated, (and government silenced), scientists began, the general public was kept intentionally, uninformed….

So here we are, nearly 40 years on and still nothing really constructive has been done to mitigate any of these pollution predicaments we have created. In fact, we have added more nuclear, more gas and coal, more oil, more chemicals and more aerosols to the deadly mix of atmospheric pollutants that now holds our planet in its grip. 

Scientists have suggested that we are now living in a different geological epoc, (The Anthropocene) and concurrently living through the sixth mass extinction period known in the Earth’s geological history.

We receive messages about clean energy and changing our ways…and that is great. Many governments are spreading the ‘clean up’ message.

Climate change scotland

Mission Climate Change

The UN is suitably worried and is encouraging everyone to keep with the game plan to reduce global emmissions.

10min climate change update
April 2017 by Scientists.

And CBS news reports on the climate trends seen so far in 2017
But is all this now just ‘arranging the deck chairs on the ‘Titanic.’
The most recent news is worrying…

Permafrost Thaw

Oceans warming 70% more than previously thought

So do climate scientists agree?

It would seem that most climate scientists do agree.

But one particular scientist says that we are not getting the whole story.
Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He says that we have entered into the unknown territory of Abrupt Climate Change and predicts that Human Extinctions will come in as little as in 10 years. Yes, you read that correctly – TEN YEARS…maybe even sooner!

So generally, people are not really taking climate change seriously. There are so many videos, talks, news items, scientist speaking out (risking and even losing their jobs), but we just aren’t getting the message. Instead, we ridicule and berate their dedicated work of decades and reduce it to a number of clichés. How awful that we can be so arrogant. But we will pay a price for that. Even the renowned, bubbly Biologist, David Attenborough, is extremely gloomy about our future as a species. But we are not listening.

Instead, we rave about Artificial Intelligence and a robotics dominated world. Why? While those people developing these technologies are surely doing so out of some sense of helping humanity, can they not see the awful potential of these new technologies as powerful weapons against us by the future powers that would single us out as the enemy?
I recommend watching this next YouTube video by Guy, on his ‘Nature Bats Last’ channel (although you can find lots more at https://guymcpherson.com/ ). It perhaps sums up how we should perceive the sudden, and now abrupt climate change for the unknown and unstoppable force it has become. 

What can we do, if anything?

Guy recommends reading ‘End Game’ by Derrick Jenson   http://www.derrickjensen.org/endgame/ Written in two volumes, it is an account of the end of civilisation.

And Guy also recommends an online resource for free download at https://underminers.org/ written by Keith Garnish. The name here, ‘Underminers,’ implies the sort of anarchy we might require to adjust society to being one that actually serves our existence. 

These recommendations might appear extreme, and I cannot say if they give us any solutions (especially as I have not yet read them), so… I would say, live as kindly as you can, connect with your neighbours, try to be ecological, use manpower wherever possible (ride a bike or walk instead of using a car) and live simply, reduce your waste, but also reduce your purchase of anything unnecessary or wasteful. Try if possible to learn how to do things as if you were on a self sustaining camping trip with only the barest of essentials. This will all help you to adapt during the worst of the climate change events to come. You need to be resourceful and capable of surviving extreme and fast changes, especially if you have to move away from future flooded coastlines. As Guy McPherson says, ‘I do not know your personal extinction date.’ Make your life count now! Love yourself and everyone around you.

If we could do everything possible to mitigate climate change right now, this year, do you think we might just stop the worst? That we might just keep our climate stable? I like to think so, but what are the odds that it will happen? They are so slim as to be negligible. A hotter world is coming whether we like it or not!

What else can we do, if the climate is going to keep heating?
Well, let’s start being kind to the animals who will face these awful times with us! My previous post on ‘Why Do We Hurt Animals?’ gives some insights on the importance of learning to communicate with our fellow ‘Earthlings.’ The other species we live with have much more to offer than the objects of food and trinkets that we have turned them into for our own selfish pleasures. 

My previous post on ‘Vegan Future’ offers a dietary, and optional choice, but is it really optional? I think it is an inevitable and necessary one if we are going to survive. 
The current trend to factory farm animals is unsustainable, cruel, and contributes to climate change and ecological destruction. 

Consumption of factory farmed meat is also dangerous to human health. If you do not believe me, you would likely learn for yourself by watching ‘Lucent,’ a 2014 documentary on the factory pig farming industry in Australia. The scenes are typical of the factory farm industry in other countries like the US, Canada, Spain, Britain and many European countries. These are the high industry standards. You wouldn’t want to see the poor ones! I actually had to watch most of this documentary in 15 minute slots at a time. It was the only way I could make it through the whole (and tragic) life of a pig raised for our food.
‘Lucent’ by Aussie Farms

Warning, this is very Graphic Content!

Next post up will be about learning how to be better human beings…