(no subject)

Sep 30, 2005 11:23

Last weekend I went to the Green Festival in DC and got to spend time with my mom and brother, Gabe's girlfriend, my roommate, and a friend who lives in DC. On top of visiting wonderfulness, the festival itself was informative, inspiring, exciting and fun:

The Green Festival is a two-day party with a serious purpose: to accelerate the emergence of a new economic paradigm that is life-affirming and life-restoring. Together we are cultivating a culture of sustainability and social equity that honors our interdependence with all life. Green Festival unites green businesses, social and environmental groups, visionary thinkers and thousands of community members in a lively exchange of ideas, commerce and movement building fun.


Terressentials
* Toxic chemicals in personal care products provide major portions of annual environmental pollution.
More info: The most recent National Water Quality Inventory reports that runoff from urban areas is the leading source of impairments to surveyed estuaries and the third largest source of water quality impairments to surveyed lakes. (http://www.epa.gov/owow/nps/facts/point7.htm)

Blue Canoe and Earth Speaks vendor
* There exist yellows and oranges I can actually wear.
* Organic yoga clothes = heaven. half-priced organic yoga clothes = sinful.

Gift of Enlightenment
* My intuition is superior to the "feel the heat of the color through the card" method of finding the face-down red chakra card.
* When I "won" the mock-game we ran through, it was with the pair of balance and the orange sacral chakra.

Light Impact
* Bauxum Ore Alum stones make good deodorant.
* Rock salt lamps and tealights are beautiful, purifying, and promote a feeling of well-being.

Nora Pouillon
* 1% of the 900 some million lbs of pesticides used annually in the US reach the intended pests, while the remaining 99% are left to damage the environment and the lives it ought to be supporting.
* Beautiful food is not necessarily nutritious food (ie, pesticides and hormones just lead to better looking food products, not healthier ones)
* Take 1 step at a time to incorporate organics into your life: eg, switch the food you eat the most of to organic first, whether it's chicken, vegetables, cereal, etc.

Brian Nattrass
* Life-supporting resources are declining while consumption of life-supporting systems accelerates. We must reverse this trend to move towards a sustainable society [or, obviously, the society will cease to be sustained].
* In cyclical natural systems, waste does not exist. Waste created by some becomes food for others.
* Linear industrial processes produce waste faster than it can be reconstituted into quality resources.
* Stop doing things that are unsustainable!
* Nike and Clif Bar both completely changed their policies and practices to be sustainable, including producing less waste, dealing responsibly with created waste, reclaiming, reusing, and recycling.

Al-Kemi
* In ancient Indian texts, Turmeric was recommended to practitioners of Yoga as an aid to the better flow of energy through the joints, opening them so that greater flexibility can be achieved.
* Spagyric solutions can be ingested effectively by holding them under the tongue for a quick second - long enough for the life essence to transfer.
* Taking more of a concentrated plant essence allows the plant to influence you more according to its own tendency, while taking less allows you to work with the plant and craft your experience.
* Dry, crackly joints can indicate a deficiency of essential fatty acids, which can be found in flax and hemp oils.

Make Trade Fair
* Did you know that every time you buy something made or grown in a developing country, you take part in a billion pound scam? As it works today, the global trading system rips off people who are already poor.

Marian Goldberg, Alexander Technique Centero of Washington, DC
* Most adults do extra work (in the form of unnecessary muscle contractions) to perform normal movements, such as sitting down, due to bad postural habits.
* I don't know which way is up after too many years of "pulling myself up" and slouching: when she put my spine in correct alignment I fell like I was hunching over and/or falling forward.

NotJustSkin
* The foreskin contains three to four feet of blood vessels, 240 feet of nerves, and between 10,000 and 20,000 specialized nerve endings.
* No national health organization in the world, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Medical Association (AMA), recommends circumcision for healthy male infants.
* Approximately 80-85% of the world's male population has intact genitals.
* The circumcision rate in the United States has dropped over 11% in just five years. The current circumcision rate in the U.S. is about 50%.
* We all care deeply about the well-being of the children in our lives. Yet in the United States alone, more than one million boys, thousands of intersex children, and an unknown number of girls are subjected to surgical alteration of their genitals every year. These surgeries violate the individual's right to an intact body, endanger safety, and interfere with healthy sexuality.
In countries where circumcision (male or female) is performed, most people have been told that circumcision surgeries provide health benefits. In reality, genital surgeries do not significantly reduce the chance of infections or diseases, and the operations are associated with significant risks, including the danger of hemorrhage, infection, severe deformation, and even death. Circumcision of infants interferes with mother-child bonding and can have damaging consequences for sexuality that last a lifetime.

I came home and bought all organic foods, from which I made a fantastic dish of stir-fried seitan with baby bok choy, ginger, onions, garlic, and this soy-ginger sauce Julia and I called magic sauce, all over wonderful somen noodles.

I also contacted a couple people about possible career paths and found a whole lot of resources to continue to follow up on. I started lists on 43things (currently I guess I only want to do 17 things with my life) and del.icio.us.

To my great disappointment, I found out this week that 1 of my yoga teachers is moving to Oregon and another's starting a new job that will prevent her from teaching the class I take, both within the next couple of weeks =(. I wrote this entry yesterday and it was completely erased when I clicked on the question mark information link next to the tags box, so this is my attempt to re-create it.
Previous post Next post
Up