So much heaven, so much hell...

(Faithless - Bombs)

"So much heaven, so much hell, so much love, so much pain
So much more than I thought this world could ever contain"

Many many times I see this, I feel this, it is as Echart Tolle says: "Things are getting worse and better at the same time, although the worse is more apparent because it makes so much ‘noise’"

When reading or thinking about things going on in the world my feeling can be so dramatic, and at times so opposed. On the one side I come across subjects that cause me much grief and despair: there are those who are developing more and more sophisticated ways of killing people (Wired for War); those who are damaging people's health in the pursuit of profit; there is the loss of much of beauty in the world; there are those that through their ignorance hurt others so badly, that through maliciousness can destroy lives; and such like.

On the other hand there are those things that give me so much joy, that lift me up, that make me feel everything is alright: there are those developing a deep understanding of how to heal others, and freely sharing their work; there are days with friends when we all share in many ways; there are times with my niece, who shows an intelligence and innocence of being that adults could learn from; their are those developing new, sustainable, loving ways of living; there are those who are waking up spiritually, are looking at the world through fresh and compassionate eyes; and there are those moments that awareness and peace descends, being felt in the soft rain, or in the streetlights reflecting off the pavement, or the sound of birds singing in the dark.

So much heaven,
So much hell,
So much love,
So much pain.

It is hard sometimes, the problems can seem so large, so beyond our power to change. But they are not, they can never be. As ever, the words of Gandhi speak to me:

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always."

Mark's Sustainable Eating Challenge

The challenge:

• To eat nothing but food grown in the UK.

Additional factors:

• Vegetarianism and limiting dairy, eating organic.

Length of challenge:

• Four weeks.

As part of my uni course we have a nutrition module, as part of that we have to put ourselves on a diet. For mine I chose this. I believe learning to live locally is the only sustainable way of living right now and will be the only way of maintaining a secure food supply in the future. However, a large part of the food I eat is from abroad. In the last two days I have eaten food from the UK, Turkey, Swaziland, Spain, Germany, Canada, Italy, Holland, the Dominican Republic and many other countries that were not listed on the food - and this is the norm, or even better than the norm as I do already get all my vegetables locally.

I am really excited about undertaking this challenge, although after looking around my local health food shop and my local supermarket I realise it will not be easy as very, very few of the foods that I looked at were from the UK. I have a good supply of vegetables, as I am a member of an organic box scheme that delivers organic vegetables to me weekly that are all grown in the UK (Abel & Cole), but other than that it will be a real challenge.

I should be reasonably ok with getting grains, as wheat, barley and oats are grown here, but getting enough proteins will be difficult - so far all I have found is local organic eggs. My normal sources of protein such as lentils, chickpeas and many nuts and seeds are all imported and I am yet to find UK equivalents. I will of course have to cook most things from scratch and will not be able to buy snacks or anything like that as all of these food items contain ingredients from various countries, often with them not being listed.

I start next Tuesday and I will keep you updated as to how I'm doing. If you know of any good UK food or have useful recipes please let me know, I need all the help I can get!!

Where the TV Should Go

In five months I will leave the uni I am at behind and so with it the student house I now occupy. This means that at the moment our landlord keeps showing triplets of little students around.

So today as I was chopping vegetables in the kitchen I heard a voice from the other room:

"That is where the TV should go"

Amazing! The student didn't say "that is where a TV COULD go", it was definitely "that is where the TV SHOULD go". As if there was a TV shaped hole in the universe that quite obviously needed filling, that the idea of it not being filled was something that could not be comprehended. The universe would be right again when the TV was properly instated.

Wow!

In the words of Einstein: "A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?"

Anyway, walking back up to my room, soup simmering nicely, it occurred to me I could do a little product placement in my own house, see if I could influence the subconscious of all the visitors! I put some extra herbs on top of my soup so the house smelled nicely of herbs and good food cooking, rearranged my organic veg box so the name and the 'organic' showed, positioned some good books so the titles could be seen, had some of my camping equipment partially on show so it would give the impression of activeness, had the title of my blog up on my laptop. If I had had more time I could have made posters with subtle subconscious cues in them, hey I could even have had music playing with very subtle background words. Ah but I must resist the dark side!

But after all it wouldn't work - we have no TV! All I would do would be clouded by that aberration of nature!

Medicine, Money, Malaria and You!

The production and supply of pharmaceutical products is an entirely commercial venture, or in other words, your medicine is supplied by those who have to put profit before social and environmental costs. In the words of the Director of Roche in Korea "We are not in business to save lives, but to make money. Saving lives is not our business."

I have discussed before the problem of pharmaceutical companies manipulating the medical profession in order to make money (see here), but in this post I will address the issue of the provision of health care, of who gets treatment and who doesn't, of who lives and who dies.

In an article in the Independent today it was stated that the weak value of the pound could lead to a shortage of drugs in the UK as imports become less profitable and exports more profitable (see article). Basically, you may not get the medicines you need on time because the money market dictated otherwise. This situation is, however, a very positive one compared to how it is in some other countries or how it could be here in the future.

I first became aware of this problem a few years back, about the time I was becoming interested in studying herbal medicine, when I went to a seminar on using natural medicines in the tropics. The seminar was run by an amazing charity call Anamed (www.anamed.net), whose basic aim is to educate people who may not have access to medicines, such as in parts of Africa, to be able to treat common conditions, such as malaria, effectively with herbs. It was when reading up on the information for this seminar that I found out about the problems concerning the provision of medical treatment and realised how they might apply to Western countries in the future.

In parts of Africa the reasons for the lack of medicines can be many, though mainly it comes down to money. Often drugs are simply not affordable. In some cases where a person can buy the drugs even simple medication may cost a month's wage. In other cases it is the problem of infrastructure that makes drugs inaccessible - health centers are too far away, roads are too poor, deliveries can't get through. So what is done? well, a lot do the only thing that can be done: die. They may die of a serious case of malaria, or they may just die of diarrhoea. So this is where Anamed comes in - teaching simple things like oral rehydration solution for diarrhoea, herbs for malaria (Artemisia annua) and other things.

The question of poverty in Africa is a topic for a different post, but I will look here at how it relates to a specific case, that of malaria. Artemesinin is (in combination with a few other medicines) the leading drug for the treatment of malaria and it is currently extracted from the plant Artemisia annua. It is grown in huge plantations in some African countries, is purchased by pharmaceutical companies at a very low price, it is shipped over to America or a European country, the artemesinin is extracted and then sold back to the African country at a price most people can't afford - so people die. Where the drug is purchased by those rich enough, the money goes back to the pharmaceutical company, meaning the African country gets poorer. The actual herb Artemisia annua can be drunk as a tea to treat malaria and is just as effective as the drug, though taking slightly longer to have its effect.

So anyway, drugs become scarce if a country becomes poor or the infrastructure breaks down, and pharmaceutical corporations follow where the money leads. Who is to say that our country will always stay rich and function smoothly? When you consider the far reaching effects of financial instability (which is likely to increase in the long term) and the looming problems of both the energy crisis and climate change it seems wishful to think that we are immune to these problems. Pharmaceutical companies are no more stable than other industries, such as the automotive industry, or the money grabbing industry. So as things can't or won't stay the same, and as millions are already dying due to the lack of health care, what needs to happen?

Take the money out of medicine

Pharmaceutical corporations should not be allowed to profit from what they do, health should not correlate with your pay packet, essential medicine should be freely available to all whether an individual has money or not. An option may be nationalising the pharmaceutical industry with the development and production of drugs being paid for by the government. This would be easily funded by the savings gained from the NHS not having to buy drugs from pharmaceutical companies and by the profits from the sale of non-essential over-the-counter drugs. Knowledge of how to manufacture the drugs could be freely shared between countries further increasing benefit. Or maybe there is some other scheme that would work, but however it is done it should not be a profit making business. If this was done it would also have the following benefits:

• Doctors would have less bias information on the effectiveness of drugs.
• Research showing harmful effects of drugs would not be hidden.
• More holistic drugs could be researched (pharmaceutical companies don't want people too healthy, it is bad for business).
• Drugs would be freely accessible to all.
• Drug supply would be more stable.
  
• Government money would provide more medicine instead of making a few rich.
• Effective alternative treatments would not be suppressed.
  

Increase the use of natural medicines

• They can be produced where ever in the world you are.
• They are cheap.
  
• They have been shown to be effective (Artemisia annua can effectively treat malaria, with treatment only lasting a couple more days than treatment with Artemisinin).
• People could easily treat themselves for minor complaints, therefore reducing the pressure on the NHS.
  
• They have limited side-effects and are generally more safe.
  
• They can help the local economy when produced and used locally.
• They are much more environmentally sustainable.
  
• Focusing on a more holistic approach to health would mean less people getting ill in the first place.

As always your comments are welcome.

Time monster

Recently I am forced to postulate the existence of a new creature. It is quite a large creature, just a little smaller than your average cow, although it manages to fit into fairly small spaces such as a person's bedroom. It manages to remain quite hidden, but if you could see it, you would see it is quite stocky, like a softer and more flabby hippopotamus, and has a long snout that flares at the end, a bit like an aardvarks snout, but much bigger.

The reason why I'm convinced of its existence is that there is one following me around; I know this because it is using its snout to suck up time, my time. This animal that we are dealing with is in fact a Time Monster (Monasteriense vicis). I do not believe this is an unusual case either, you too may be a victim.

I believe our uni library may be a breading ground for these creatures: you walk in there in search of a few books and several hours get sucked up, leaving you wondering home in the dark, feeling slightly dazed and a little sick with only a handful of books to account for your time. It would seem these animals will follow a person back to their place of residence where they will make themselves quite comfortable in the person's room. It would appear that here they can make night time pass more quickly, meaning you have to sleep for longer and wake up late. They seem technology savvy and can manipulate computers to their advantage, with them being so familiar with the Internet as to make me consider whether part of their existence is in fact a part of cyberspace.

There is though one place were these creature appear not to be able to tread...

A place where time is felt in its entirety...

Lectures!

If only I could train these animals!

Not One Death

Not One Death

Not one death is acceptable,
Not one civilian casualty.
Not one dead child in a father's arms,
Not one freaked child at a dead mother's side,
Not one man left lying in a street,
Not one emaciated corpse thrown in a hole.
Not sad but unavoidable,
Not acceptable.




.

Sleep deprived with aching body and raw fingers, but very happy!

So it all started at midday Friday. Half way through my meditation session my phone goes, I answer, it's Tim: do I want to go climbing? yes!

I leave my meditation, grab my harness and climbing shoes and head off to the pub where we are meeting and having a bite too eat first.

Tim and Meg have already finished eating by the time I get there, but they dutifully watch me munching through my (free) veggie-burger and chips. We chat for a little while, with music videos shining down on us from the walls in the dark, relaxed Adephi pub.

Tim drives us over to the leisure centre with the inside climbing walls, and Meg signs a form making her responsible for my life and death, so that I can get in. The entrance area is warm and smells of chlorine, but we walk through some double doors into a spacious hall where the air is fresher and full of life. On all the walls going up to the tall ceiling are huge fake rock faces with ropes trailing up them and smaller rock faces with thick cushioned mats underneath them. We put our climbing shoes on, I take mine off again, remove my socks, then strap myself back in - lots of little customs to learn in this new world.

We warm up by climbing the smaller walls with the padded floor: that's fun, scaling up the fake rocks feeling like a monkey, then falling or jumping back down onto the very compassionate flooring. Tim and Meg are very good at this, flowing up the difficult walls gracefully, I... well... give me time!

After this we strap ourselves into our harnesses and tie ourselves on to ropes. The bigger walls await. This is fun, but there is nothing like being suspended by a rope a distance from the floor, trying to get a firm grip on the next handhold to make you realise the importance of strong arms - I made myself a commitment to get my weights out again! It tests your faith also - letting go of a wall high above an unsympathetic floor, when your comparatively little friend (I'm about 2 meters tall) is the only person on the other end of the rope, isn't the most natural thing to do, but still, she said it would be fine, and indeed it was. Meg did not go shooting into the air as I shot towards the ground, indeed, it was quite a leisurely backwards stroll to the floor. I however, did send Tim shooting towards the floor when it was my turn on the other end of the rope, for some reason I though that was what he would want, it didn't occur to me that he had no idea he was flying towards the floor because I was controlling it that way or because I was out of control, but I slowed him before he and the floor got to know each other too much and apologised for my rather large mistake!

A bit more climbing later and it was time to go, my hands worse-for-wear and my upper body muscles fatigued. We headed around to our different houses to collect the gear we would need for the following day, stopped of at the supermarket to stock up with food, and then off to Meg's house where Tim and Meg cooked us a tasty Moroccan dish. After munch Tim taught us how to read the details on maps, to take grid references, and take bearings. After sitting cross-legged in a quiet corridor with map and compass in my lap I finally managed to figure out in my head what was going on with all these difference Norths (true north, grid north, magnetic north) and what this meant for not getting lost. A relaxed evening chatting and watching cartoons later and it was time for bed. My sleep patterns were messed up so I lay awake in my sleeping bag most the night reading 'The God of Small Things' - I really good book that is amazingly difficult to describe!

We woke up early in the morning and the sun was shining - not quite living up to the 'severe weather warnings' of the forecasters. No worries, breakfast of eggs, beans and toast, a quick shower and a packing of bags and we are off to Anonymous-friend-who-lives-in-the-hills' place. Still sunny.

At Anonymous-friend-who-lives-in-the-hills' beautiful house in the hills we drink tea and look at maps. Anonymous-friend-who-lives-in-the-hills' sister arrives and off we go. The weather is cold and very windy now, no worries, warm and windproof clothes and my neck warmer sorts that and we begin, maps and compasses at the ready.


Walking up the road towards where we will get on to the moors Tim tells us how to count our paces to measure distances. Mine are about 54 paces to every 100m. The map tells us it is 500m to the next pub so we try it out...

1,2,3,4,5,6... hmmm the sun's nice ...33,34,35,36... I'll take my hat off ...50,51,52,53,54 100m! 1,2,3,4... why do these cars think we shouldn't be on the road ...44,45,46,47... there is the wall, the map is trustworthy ...53,53,54 300m, or was it 400m? 1,2,3,4,5... definitely 300 ...20,21,22,23... my paces are shorter, should add more to make up ...54,55,56,57,58,59,60 400m ...33,34,35... its windy, my hair is in my face, nice though ...52,53,54 500m! Yeah sweet pretty much by the pub. Not the most well looked after pub in the world that, it looks like it had be left on the bottom of a scummy lake for a millennium before being lifted out, dumped at the side of the road, and left to dry. But no worries, we have food, we carry on walking, I keep counting, 150m 'til the path we need.

Well the path wasn't obvious, but the counting meant we knew where it should be. We climbed the fence that had been inconsiderately been built across it and carried on. On the moors now, with the strange grass, and the spiky plant with flammable sponge inside that I have no name for, Anonymous-friend-who-lives-in-the-hills has a possible name for it, but I forget. Burnt patches of moorland are here too: they have strange moss and lichen growing on them, vast empires of tropical rainforest no more that a centimeter high, an ant's paradise.

Now it is time to look at maps, we look at the surroundings, look at maps again, put compasses on maps, line up where we want to go, set compasses to grid north, alter compasses to magnetic north, chanting the magic words 'grid to mag add, mag to grid get rid'. We're set, the compass points the way, we pick out land features and walk. And walk, and stop, and stare and walk again. Chat and wonder, and amble and joke and breath fresh air! And feel hungry. We head towards some rocks and find a spot out of the wind, hemmed in by the rock, a spot popular with the sheep. Out comes the stove and soup, out comes the tea, the hot chocolate, the bread, the snacks: all made twice as nice by the walk, the scenery, the company and the warmth on a cold day.

We finish eating and I step from out of the rock shelter and the wind hits me, not just the wind but snow as well. Great! I jump around on rocks a bit, then get packed to move. We head back, it's probably not best to go on, some are too cold and it is still a fair walk.

We head towards a reservoir, hats down, neck warmers up to nose, brightly colour ninjas, flying over heather. Or stomping through heather, tall heath, with hidden holes and streams. Falling, laughing, stomping, down towards the reservoir.

We are back to the road. It is a shame to walk on a road with countryside about, but it is the best option. I practice counting!

1,2,3,4,5... hmmm, hard to talk while my mind is counting, hard to use the vocal part of my brain for two things at once ...27,28,29,30... how about I set my mind counting in the visual part of it ...41,42,43,44 [seeing the numbers in my head, more than hearing] 45,46... difficult, not quite there ...51,52,53,54... hmmm, the one hundred could be a picture too ...100m [larger, in red, to the side of the picture of counting numbers in my head] 1,2,3,4... this will need practice, but how amazing if my mind could do it automatically, I could be talking, doing other things, and occasionally look back at the pictures in my mind to see how far I had come, will need a lot of practice though!

We are back to the car park, nearby is a strange dome with round window holes and a globe that reflects all. It immediately becomes one of my favorite random installations. Pictures are taken.

Back to Anonymous-friend-who-lives-in-the-hills' house where she prepares us a bean stew with dumplings. We lounge around sipping wine, with me dozing slightly, feeling very hungry with the smells from the kitchen. Jessie the cat sniffs my hand then enjoys a bit of petting before going to eat. We have a bit of an effort at a sudoku puzzle, but give up, too tired. Music is playing, we are relaxing.

Food is ready! Yum! Thank you very much Anonymous-friend-who-lives-in-the-hills!

Its time to go, sad but true.

We drive through the dark: weary, achy, happy