A story from our visit to the beach during experience week

My blog post about an experience of connecting with nature that happened in a 5 minute visit to the beach..
http://amysheartpath.blogspot.com/2011/10/butterfly-of-consciousness.html

Mushroom man

Here's Paul Stamets giving a talk similar to the one we were lucky enough to see at Findhorn
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html

Turkey Tail mushroom is being used to cure cancer

Bioneers conference

The Bioneers is an organisation inspiring a shift to live on earth in ways that honour the web of life, each other and future generations. Here's a link to video archive of the conference http://www.bioneerslive.org/ - lots of interesting and inspiring people

Nature as our teacher

There are some great eco-design principles on the Center for Eco-literacy website  http://www.ecoliteracy.org/nature-our-teacher/ecological-principles (copied below) these are a great addition to the permaculture design principles. http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles.php and can be used as 'thinking tools' to apply to ourselves and to our life projects whatever they may be...

Creating communities that are compatible with nature's processes for sustaining life requires basic ecological knowledge.

We need, says Center for Ecoliteracy cofounder Fritjof Capra, to teach our children — and our political and corporate leaders — fundamental facts of life:

• Matter cycles continually through the web of life.
• Most of the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun.
• Diversity assures resilience.
• One species' waste is another species' food.
• Life did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.

NATURE'S PATTERNS AND PROCESSES

Understanding these facts arises from understanding the patterns and processes by which nature sustains life. In its work with teachers and schools, the Center for Ecoliteracy has identified several of the most important of these. It has helped teachers identify places in the curriculum where students can learn about them.

They include networks, nested systems, cycles, flows, development, and dynamic balance.

Networks
All living things in an ecosystem are interconnected through networks of relationship. They depend on this web of life to survive. For example: In a garden, a network of pollinators promotes genetic diversity; plants, in turn, provide nectar and pollen to the pollinators.

Nested Systems
Nature is made up of systems that are nested within systems. Each individual system is an integrated whole and—at the same time — part of larger systems. Changes within a system can affect the sustainability of the systems that are nested within it as well as the larger systems in which it exists. For example: Cells are nested within organs within organisms within ecosystems.

Cycles
Members of an ecological community depend on the exchange of resources in continual cycles. Cycles within an ecosystem intersect with larger regional and global cycles. For example: Water cycles through a garden and is also part of the global water cycle.

Flows
Each organism needs a continual flow of energy to stay alive. The constant flow of energy from the sun to Earth sustains life and drives most ecological cycles. For example: Energy flows through a food web when a plant converts the sun's energy through photosynthesis, a mouse eats the plant, a snake eats the mouse, and a hawk eats the snake. In each transfer, some energy is lost as heat, requiring an ongoing energy flow into the system.

Development
All life — from individual organisms to species to ecosystems — changes over time. Individuals develop and learn, species adapt and evolve, and organisms in ecosystems coevolve. For example: Hummingbirds and honeysuckle flowers have developed in ways that benefit each other; the hummingbird's color vision and slender bill coincide with the colors and shapes of the flowers.

Dynamic Balance
Ecological communities act as feedback loops, so that the community maintains a relatively steady state that also has continual fluctuations. This dynamic balance provides resiliency in the face of ecosystem change. For example: Ladybugs in a garden eat aphids. When the aphid population falls, some ladybugs die off, which permits the aphid population to rise again, which supports more ladybugs. The populations of the individual species rise and fall, but balance within the system allows them to thrive together.    

A circular ceremony

I think I recognise some instruments from our night in the earth lodge, but it's a bit more tuneful!

Keeping the circle open...

This is a blog for participants on the Findhorn experience week Sept 17th-24th 2011 http://www.findhorn.org/programmes/experienceweek/  to share their eco-spirituality path with each other and any other blog readers who may come across it and hopefully be inspired by it. All contributions welcome.

Findhorn Sunset

I would like to share a link to an extract from 'The universe is a green dragon'
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC12/Swimme.htm a book that Craig recommended to us all, some may already know of but if not it's by spiritual cosmologist Brian Swimme here's a quote from him

"In 1543 Copernicus announced to a startled Europe that the Earth was not stationary, but was sailing rapidly through space as it spun around the Sun. This was difficult news to take in all at once, but over time the Europeans reinvented their entire civilization in light of this strange new fact about the Universe. The fundamental institutions of the medieval world, including the monarchies, the church, the feudal economic system, and the medieval sense of self, melted away as a radically different civilization was constructed.

We live in a similar moment of breakdown and creativity. The cosmological discovery that shatters nearly everything upon which the modern age was built is the discovery that the universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and is so biased toward complexification that life and intelligence are now seen to be a nearly inevitable construction of evolutionary dynamics. Our new challenge is to reinvent our civilization. The major institutions of the modern period, including that of agriculture and religion and education and economics, need to be re-imagined within an intelligent, self-organizing, living universe, so that instead of degrading the Earth’s life systems, humanity might learn to join the enveloping community of living beings in a mutually enhancing manner. This great work will surely draw upon the talents and energies of many millions of humans from every culture of our planet and throughout the rest of the 21st century" Brain Swimme

I know everyone in our circle will be using their talents and energy to help make this shift happen...