Marya Mann : Blog : 8 MIND-BLOWING LOVE TACTICS THAT PASS THE 8000-YEAR TEST

8 MIND-BLOWING LOVE TACTICS THAT PASS THE 8000-YEAR TEST

Many of us regularly ask ourselves, “What do I want my day to look like?” Or we peer a little further: “In one to three years, where do I want my life to be?” Or we gaze 10 or 20 years ahead, or backward! Some of us are so often looking backward that we neglect the present and accidentally step on the jasmine blossoming at our feet.

I’m going to ask you to pause, take a breath and frame up the next 8000-years of life. Not just your life, but life in the sense of the Universe, or the Earth, if there is an Earth as we know it. Stephen Hawking thinks the Earth with its floral ecosystem may not even exist in 100-200 years! So, for our children’s sake, it’s a good time to start thinking ahead and from a new perspective.

1 – LOOK FOR THE REAL – Just while you’re reading the next few paragraphs, dare to imagine what life will be like in 8000 years. Why 8000 years? Well, it’s a little cheesy. One time I edited a story about cheese for Ke Ola Magazine. It was an interesting, well-told story, and yet the author hadn’t answered completely a question that kept coming up as I read about the culturing, coagulation and draining required to make cheese. When had cheese originated? Where and how and who had made the discovery? What was the first taste like? How was cheese invented?

I researched a little and found that cheese is an ancient food found long before recorded history, at least 8000 years ago as agriculture was spreading around the Fertile Crescent. Cheese was popular during the Roman Empire and seems to have been eaten in Poland 7500 years ago. There is a legend that an Arab trader discovered cheese while crossing the desert some 10,000 years ago. After storing milk in a container made of an animal’s stomach, he found the liquid turned to curds and whey from the action of rennet in the organ and the heat of the trek. The merchant must have been repelled at first, but somehow he came to enjoy the subtle variations of taste in the new food.

2 – APPRECIATE POSSIBILITIES – I think about that Arab trader as I ask what I want to bequeath to our heirs 8000 years from now. He — or she — must have found an ugly, yellow, mass, stinking worse than anything. But through observation and care of the substance over time, through repeated alchemical experiments part chemistry and part magic, cheese ultimately became a real delight for people 8000 years later, or now. Cheese went from vicious to nutritious to delicious in a couple of thousand years, and no matter what your opinion about the impact of dairy toxins on the body, one has to marvel at the sequence of well-intentioned decisions various of our ancestors made to produce delicious food out of what at first looked like lumps of scary mold floating in spoiled milk. That Arab trader is still affecting our lives because he thought to notice natural processes. I wonder if 8000 years ago he was thinking about us, his heirs 8000 years down the road. Did he feel a sense of generosity for the future?

3 – IMAGINE THE BEST- The big question is: what would be significant and meaningful and generous for us to discover and nurture now, I wonder, that will benefit people in the future? What will our heirs need to live healthy lives? What kind of “cheese” ought we to be cultivating so that our heirs, 8000 years in the future, will receive benefit?

A mind-blowing love, in my humble view, is the big cheese to give to the future. Generosity, compassion, whole-hearted caring for natural solutions and sustainable practices that can evolve healthier societies.
Looking down the road to 8000 years from now – even just 8 years or 88 years from now — we can choose to be good stewards of our planet and each other. The great heritage which our ancestors and the universe have offered to us deserves our full attention.

But we really don’t know what the world will look like in 5 years, much less 50 years or a 1000 years, so there’s unpredictability, and that may frighten us, but the good news is this: that unpredictability means there is hope for positive outcomes and an amazing need for creativity.

4 – LIFE’S A DANCE: TAKE THE STEPS – That’s what led me to develop and teach Yoga Dance in Hawaii and wind up last summer leading a tutorial at Project Hawaii’s Summer Camp for Homeless Keiki.

What I found astonished me: whenever holidays like the long summer or Christmas come around, homeless keiki living in unsheltered areas, in cars, tents and deep in the bushes suffer even more than usual. They often don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

Magin Patrick, Project Hawaii’s tireless director says, “They will go days without a meal over (summer or) their long winter break from school. They typically won’t have healthy meals outside of school either way.”

The homeless keiki summer camp in 2013 ran out of fresh, green produce on the third day of summer camp, she said. The sugary foods remaining filled their tummies but confused their brains. The mostly hyperactive, unfocused and defiant 6 – 15-year olds were smart kids and eager to play and grow, but they had difficulty concentrating for even a few minutes. They seemed hyped up on sugar and unable to exert any control over behavior. This was definitely not the fault of Project Hawaii, which has for 12 years provided thousands of holiday meals and programs to children in the islands. Everyone knows any food at all, sugary or fat or otherwise, is better than starving to death. But with surplus in nearby home gardens and farms overloaded with produce, why was it that the children were being fed cupcakes, pies and cookies.

5 – ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY – The responsibility goes directly to the incoherent thinking that has addicted our entire species to sugar. The system brainwashes people into being consumers rather than creators, tells them they don’t need to know what’s in the food they’re eating and then pushes its poor and hungry kids into ever- tighter corners while making more billionaires than ever. I don’t think this kind of incoherent thinking is what we want to pass along to our heirs. We want to change our thinking so that life on our planet will flourish now and in the future.

To challenge the incoherent thinking, we need first, good nutrition for healthy bodies and brains. But we also need creativity, exploration and meaningful education.

6 – NURTURE CREATIVITY – “Creativity in our children is as important as literacy,” said Sir Kenneth Robinson in a 2009 TED Talk. We need to give creativity the same status as reading, writing and arithmetic. We’re all given extraordinary talents but we often squander them, or our educational systems diminish them. (www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)

How do we restore the good nutrition that includes not only healthy food but vigorous support for creativity? Look at the roots of creativity – the brain, the heart, the sensitivities, the stories we tell ourselves. A brain, every day taking in little drops of poison – sugar, GMO foods, milk past a certain age, wheat, corn syrup — is not going to function very well. But that’s the way we’ve created our consumer economy. Unmindful corporations give us “food-arettes,” which like cigarettes are advertised as beneficial, and say, “Here, eat this. And don’t ask questions.”

7 – ASK QUESTIONS — How are we going to shift the paradigm? How do we partake of and give to and participate with this bountiful ecosystem without killing it? Can we look right in front of ourselves and appreciate that natural foods and clean water, soil and air are the mind-blowing love itself incarnating? What can we do to lead ethical, balanced lives in a healthy environment and be good stewards of the future when corporate culture seems hell-bent on hijacking innovation? Even though civilization at this particular juncture looks like scary curds of milk, we must be like the Arab trader 8000 years ago and extend imagination and that delicious mind-blowing love into every facet of the present moment, and that will also give great gusts of hope unto the future.

8 – FOLLOW YOUR HEART – After returning from the Homeless Keiki Summer Camp, my heart said I had to do something, so I called my friend Randyl Rupar, a farmer, futurist and leading-edge Ph. D. exploring the boundaries between ecosystem health and psychology. He said, “I know a lot of farmers who could help feed those children.” And we set out on a quest to “Feed the Children.”

Science has actually shown now that all 15,000 human tribes have common ancestors. These are our brothers and sisters. With the realization that we are one family, it simply makes sense to use our talents to serve each other. We are connected. What is suffered by one is suffered by all.

Yes, we are one family, and it’s sometimes a big arguing, rambunctious, alienating, awful family we only want to see at Christmastime, but what’s more significant is that when we feel our affinity for all people, afflicted or not, all animals, human or not, and all beings, plants, marine and angelic realms, we become a little more relaxed, feeling the mind-blowing love that brought us here, the love that keeps on giving after billions of years of celestial spawning, mastodon collisions and human misadventures, the mind-blowing love is still here. After all these years.

And where does it exist? In our hearts. When my heart finally accepted that nearly one in four children in the U.S. lives in households that struggle to put food on the table, that in Hawaii, there are 30,000 people living in food and shelter insecure conditions, and that on our island alone there 1500-3000 children under the age of five living without regular food or shelter, I knew we had to put these children first.

They may look no different than other children. Child hunger is often invisible because a child often can’t or won’t speak for themselves. They are hurting, just the same. What kind of society doesn’t feed its children?

Every day, millions of children go to bed hungry. Actor Jeff Bridges, who started the nationwide www.nokidhungry.org campaign, says that if any nation did to our children what the U. S. does to its children, we’d go to war against them.

We are seeking help for their fundamental needs! These children just wish for personal hygiene care and food, but we want to give them an extra nudge, a holiday gift that will remain with them, a memory of abundance and good cheer, a warm-hearted day of comfort and joy, that they can take home food bags of five more meals and learning toys and gifts. Our Feed the Children Christmas meal and gift-giving event is set for Monday, December 23, 1-4 pm. It responds to an immense need these innocent children have for nourishment and support, and it also passes the 8000-year mind-blowing love test. If there’s one main nourishing quality I want to bequeath to those living in the future, it’s the value of learning to give and receive love. That’s the delicious food that will sustain our heirs. Being lavishly generous with our good will and love, we create a delicious future. And if you’re thinking the moral of the story is that what looks at first like scary moldy curds, may some day, with a mind-bending kind of love, turn into a big, delicious cheese, you are both right and wrong. The real moral of the story is that it’s up to us. We are the beneficent, generous, giving, awestruck gods and goddesses we’ve been waiting for. @@@@@@@@@@@@

“The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.” – Elbert Hubbard

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FEED THE CHILDREN HOLIDAY CELEBRATION!
December 23, 2013, 1 – 4 pm, Kealakekua, Hawaii

WHO: Homeless keiki, teens and their families in Kona, Kealakekua, Kainaliu and Captain Cook are invited.

WHAT: A free holiday buffet filled with nourishing dishes including a variety of entrees, side dishes, desserts and beverages on Monday, Dec. 23,
at 1 pm, serving 200 keiki and families, with 100 take-home gift baskets supplying 500 meals for the children during the rest of the holiday when school lunches are unavailable, gifts and school tools provided upon departure.

FUN activities throughout the day include a TALK STORY WITH SANTA, a clown, live music with Bosco, acrobatics with Ben, and painting with Susun so the children can make gifts for their families. The event will begin with a traditional Peace Blessing and festive entertainment will be provided throughout the day.

WHERE: New Thought Center of Hawai`i ~ 81-6587 Mamalahoa Hwy, C302, Kealakekua, HI 96750

WHEN: Monday, December 23: First Seating – 1 p.m; Second Seating – 2:30 p.m.

HOW: To receive free tickets to attend, please call 808-328-0171. Seating is limited. If you would like to volunteer, give food or make a monetary donation to this charitable event, please call 808-345-0050. To donate online, please go to: http://www.maryamann.com/store/feed-the-children-christmas-buffet-festive-entertainment-and-take-home-food-for-homeless-keiki/

WHY: To end childhood hunger on the Big Island, one keiki at a time. Please spread the word to all hungry children and their families in Kona, Kealakekua, Kainaliu and Captain Cook. Anyone interested in helping with transportation to the event?

Thank you to our current donors!!! Sanctuary of Mana Kea Gardens, New Thought Center of Hawaii, Holistic Hawaii, Amy Greenwell Garden, Mon Ami Catering, KAPA-Radio, Susun Gallery, Koakane Green, DC, PC911,
Kona Coast Wellness ~ marya@loomoflove.com ~ # 808-345-0171