"... work is love made visible." Paul Joseph

Discussion in 'The big picture' started by helenlee, Jun 10, 2014.

  1. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    "It is a true dilemma we all face and decisions are required urgently. The end result of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism is the displacement of the very people who are both enslaved and engorged by the system.
    We have literally worked ourselves out. Part of the agreement between capital and labour was the need to work to live - some take that to the extreme and live to work. It seems the dominant argument is becoming climate action or economy, in other words, the planet or jobs.
    Is our choice becoming so stark that it is work OR live? Maybe there are other ways to view our wealth and position and other ways to provide for our needs and desires. It is time to unlock our creative potential and embrace the idea that work is love made visible. It sure is time to do what we love and love what we do. Trust our humanity and we will find a way."

    One of my idols, the amazing Paul Joseph, posted this on facebook just now. I love it so much I had to share it with you guys : )

    I wanna find my tribe & work my way to being deeply, truly, hopelessly, irretrievably in love : ) How awesome would that be, to see the-rewards-of one's-love-made-visible (aka as one's life work) appreciated, valued, & shared by all, for the benefit of all : )
    Thank you for writing this Paul. You inspire me : )
     
  2. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

    Joined:
    Feb 9, 2009
    Messages:
    5,925
    Likes Received:
    9
    Trophy Points:
    0
    You won't be finding your tribe if you look in Canadia right now at what Tony and his new BFF are up to. He reckons you can't look after the environment as there will be no jobs. Just try having an economy when there is no environment left dear Tony….
     
  3. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    Yeah I saw that. A lovely young woman I went to Djanbung with is living in Canada now, she posted it on fb. Seems everyone is talking about it.
    I don't get it. I truly don't understand who it was that thought he was a good idea in the first place. Paul Joseph is campaigning on his page as hard as he can to get him out real soon.
     
  4. Unmutual

    Unmutual Junior Member

    Joined:
    Feb 28, 2012
    Messages:
    599
    Likes Received:
    3
    Trophy Points:
    18
    Down here, they're discussing fracking. Shell(I think) has a commercial about how many jobs fracking will create, and how safe it is. Which got me thinking...wouldn't we create more jobs by getting rid of cheap energy?
     
  5. 9anda1f

    9anda1f Administrator Staff Member

    Joined:
    Jul 10, 2006
    Messages:
    3,046
    Likes Received:
    200
    Trophy Points:
    63
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    E Washington, USA
    Climate:
    Semi-Arid Shrub Steppe (BsK)
    We ARE getting rid of cheap energy ... quite rapidly! And fracking is quite expensive way to extract oil/gas. Next "big thing" will be to drop a nuke down a hole to "loosen up" the resources.
    = (
     
  6. 9anda1f

    9anda1f Administrator Staff Member

    Joined:
    Jul 10, 2006
    Messages:
    3,046
    Likes Received:
    200
    Trophy Points:
    63
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    E Washington, USA
    Climate:
    Semi-Arid Shrub Steppe (BsK)
    Ok, help me out a little here. I'm not seeming to find anything on Paul Joseph you speak of. Google search of Paul Joseph "work is love made visible" gets me right back to this thread!
    (excuse my ignorance)
    = )
     
  7. adiantum

    adiantum Junior Member

    Joined:
    Jan 4, 2012
    Messages:
    121
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    16
    I think that "work is love made visible" is actually a quote from Kahlil Gibran....
     
  8. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0

    Attached Files:

  9. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    1. View attachment 2638 View attachment 2639


    And moving forward to the present, these are my favourites : )

    He's a beautiful, warm man with a precious sense of the wonder, fragility & resilience of life. A bit like you in that sense : )
    We had an instant recognition or "knowing" of each other when we met. Dunno what it is, but somewhere we have a connection : )
    Perhaps its just that we're 2 old hippies? : )
     

    Attached Files:

  10. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    Thank you for shining the light on that : )

    I just read it & loved it in the fb post : ) Paul didn't say he said it, he just wrote it in that sentence where he says it's time to embrace the idea.

    I did ask Paul if it was OK to repost it on another forum before I did it, but he wouldn't have known I was going to use that line as the thread title ... so it's me who's the trouble maker, not him ... sigh. I'm sorry if anyone felt I misrepresented anything : (
     
  11. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    I dunno if you partake in the dreaded facebook, but here's his page :

    https://www.facebook.com/paul.joseph.oz?fref=ts

    : )
     
  12. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

    Joined:
    Feb 9, 2009
    Messages:
    5,925
    Likes Received:
    9
    Trophy Points:
    0
    I don't think Kahlil's lawyers will be knocking on your door complaining!
     
  13. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    Sorry Unmutual … I've been thinking about this, trying to formulate a response. The wheels turn slowly these days : )
    I was trying to remember something I read about the Great Depression. It said that the thing that dragged the economy out of the depression was the abundance of cheap energy - the cheap energy enabling jobs to be created & the ocean of consumer crap (which we are now drowning under) to be produced. It said that without access to that cheap energy, we are never going to escape from the economic slump we're in now.

    Our politicians are loudly shouting the warning that without access to cheap energy we have no access to jobs. They're relentlessly pushing that band wagon, using scare tactics & economic "reforms" to bully the people into submission, because the common people not having access to jobs is certainly a big problem for them. The reality behind the smoke & burning towers is that without cheap energy there is less access to jobs, but more access to work. Jobs produces "stuff". Stuff that rich men can package & sell for profit that goes into their pockets, instead of the pockets of the worker. Jobs fracture us, separate us & deplete us. Work is something different entirely. Real work sustains us, rewards us & makes us whole. It connects us & weaves our individual lives into a fabric that is larger than ourselves. Work unites, jobs separate.

    I love to embrace the Mad Max 2 vision of post peak oil because it appeals to my thirst for fun, & anything that inspired such awesome costumes can't be all bad can it? ; ) But the truth is that there was a very long period of human settlement before ol' Jed (to cite another film reference) shot the hole in the ground that spewed black gold & rocketed his healthy, happy, backwoods family to Beverly Hills, & the silliness of cement ponds in the back yard. We don't have to die in a Mad Max road carnage horror, & we don't have to grab the shiny toys Jed's mob coveted in Beverly Hills. There was life before oil. For a long time before oil. Hell, the period of cheap fossil fuels is but a tick on the clock of infinity.

    Before we had oil we had the richness of other types of "gold". Things like family, community, connection, support, a sense of place, a sense of purpose, a genuine interest in & commitment to each other, time, serenity, fresh food that wasn't pretty on the outside & dead on the inside, & hand tools & the skills to use them. We worked hard ourselves, & we used animals to do a lot of work for us. Draft horses, oxen, camels, donkeys, mules, camels & dogs transported us & our goods, ploughed the fields & drew water from our wells. The old Lister motors could run on cream from the dairy (& if they could I'm assuming other motors could? I don't know anything about motors). Animals were also used to passively harness & convert the energy of the land, by clearing the scrub, grazing the pastures, & controlling the parasites. And while performing this service they were consuming that which was abundant & plentiful (cellulose), into a form humans could thrive on - protein & fat. At the same time as clearing our land & turning grass into, literally, "the fat of the land", they were providing us with other by-products - their fleece, wool, hair, feathers &, ultimately, hides, sinews & bones, giving us clothing, shelter, tools, weapons & adornment. Their body heat gave us warmth at night & over winter, their manure gave us fertiliser & fuel, they controlled parasites & competing predators for our food, & their behaviours & patterns gave us clues & messages about the natural world we shared with them.
    But none of this work could be made shiny & pretty & instant & jammed in a box & sold to us as something we desperately needed & never knew it. It was just work, the same ol' work we had done all our lives, & our parents before us had done all their lives, & somehow, by some evil voodoo I still can't quite comprehend, we decided the stuff in the box was more valuable by far than the land under our feet, the water we drank, the food we grew, the air we breathed, & the family we were born in.
    This is why the Khalil Gibran quote appeals to me so much. Before cheap energy, work was love made visible. After? For most of us it's a life sapping disease, spread deliberately by those whose only goal is to enslave us for their own gain. (Another level of animals enslaving less fortunate animals, but that's another thread.) It's blood chilling that the privileged & powerful keep us sick by pretending they have the cure to our disease, when in reality they ARE what ails us. Them, & our own greed, our impulsiveness, our inability to think beyond the next pay packet, the next Friday night at the pub, the next football grand final, the next plasma screen, the next pizza & can of Tooheys.
     
  14. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    If they do they would be advised to bring a swag, because there's a bloody long queue : /

    : )
     
  15. adiantum

    adiantum Junior Member

    Joined:
    Jan 4, 2012
    Messages:
    121
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    16
    I think the idea of "energy slaves" might be helpful at this point. "Back in the day"....whenever we want to look at, until perhaps before agriculture when hunter-gatherers were possibly more egalitarian; there was always an elite somewhere who were living the easy life on the backs of everyone else. These people were envied and their values were emulated, and whenever there was a dump of excess resources into society, more people moved into middle and upper classes. This happened before the discovery and use of fossil fuels in the course of the expansion of world empires, such as the discovery and exploitation of the New World by Europeans, and shortly thereafter, AU and NZ as well. The indigenous peoples of those places, and the land itself, were "mined" for the benefit of Europe.
    Ultimately though it was all running on energy. It all comes back to that. Europe was also just about out of forests by the time coal began to be used. Not so much for timber...valuable timber was one of North America's early exports, but for fuel. Fuel for smelting metals, for instance.....to use wood for this purpose is a very profligate use of it....coal is much more effective because it's energy density is greater. So the whole adventure of expansionary civilization might have stopped a lot earlier if it hadn't been for coal, and then oil.
    In America, it's an interesting point to ponder that the first oil well came on line in 1859, I believe, just before another form of 'energy" was about to go out of fashion.....human slavery. Which brings up energy slaves. If all of the "work" that the average American does in the course of a day, with the help of energy-driven machinery, had to be done by human labor, that person would be in effective command of quite a troop of slaves. I've heard estimates of up to 100. And numerous things can be done now that could in no wise be done by anyone in 1860, no matter how many slaves he owned. Like getting somewhere many hundreds or even thousands of miles away in a few hours.....
    So, fossil fuel has enabled many many more of us to live lives like only the truly rich and famous could live 'back in the day'. Life for most people 'back in the day' involved a lot more backbreaking work than many modern people can even conceive of enduring! Until, maybe, once again, you go so far back in time as to leave farming behind......but there are way too many of us here now for that.
     
  16. Terra

    Terra Moderator

    Joined:
    May 16, 2007
    Messages:
    757
    Likes Received:
    23
    Trophy Points:
    18
    Exquisite post Helen well written it would take me a week to put anything like that together .
     
  17. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    Awww : )
    Thanks mate : )
    It'd only take you a week 'cause you're outside working ... I was bludging in bed late because it was cold & wet outside this morning : )
    Very naughty : )
     
  18. helenlee

    helenlee Junior Member

    Joined:
    Nov 9, 2006
    Messages:
    1,519
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    0
    For goodness sake see my post about the axe head please Terra, or it will be a chilly argument here tomorrow.
    To make things worse I smashed the hell out of a couple of fingers on my right hand tonight trying to cut kindling with the block splitter : /
    Add that to my sore right elbow & I'm pretty useless at the moment : /
     
  19. adiantum

    adiantum Junior Member

    Joined:
    Jan 4, 2012
    Messages:
    121
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    16
    wow...cold and wet (helenlee)! and chopping kindling! I just got reminded that a lot of people on here are on the complete other side of the world from me, where it's actually winter! Imagine that! And here it's pushing 40 C and I'm harvesting wheat and keeping stuff watered. I just thought of something way cool....when AU people look up at the night sky, they don't even see the same stars! All the patterns are different!
     
  20. Terra

    Terra Moderator

    Joined:
    May 16, 2007
    Messages:
    757
    Likes Received:
    23
    Trophy Points:
    18
    The later sown crops here are just emerging and we had 60mm overnight its as wet as a shag , if your harvesting you probably don't want any of this . I think we see the same stars 8) but at a different angle of course .
     

Share This Page

-->