These are some of my first Holistic Science notes that I took at the Schumacher College in Devon, England. The late Henri Bortoft joined us on our first week of focused study and took us on a journey through and introduction to phenomenology and the science of Goethe. These notes are a collection of the images and words that he shared with us and point towards topics and facts and ideas, yet defy a logical form of explanation.
Henri Bortoft was a massive inspiration for many of the students of the Schumacher College. I brought his work into many of the papers that I wrote during my year of study. This was especially the case with my dissertation where I related the concept of authentic wholeness to upcycling as well as community engagement and activism. Below you will find a link to the work of another project of mine that focused on music: a song that I wrote in tribute to Henri Bortoft and his ideas.
I will be drawing up similar notes during my upcoming fellowship program in New York City with the DO School, and sharing them every two weeks with my crowdfunding campaign supporters. Access the campaign here to learn out more.
The many hours of writing, painting, singing, bead-work, metal bending, web design, talking and editing, the crowdfunding campaign for my NYC Do School Fellowship has been released from my humming computer to the vast world of the wide web!
I am excited to post regularly during this month of crowdfunding with photos of the new paintings and artworks that I have made, samples of notes from past educational programs, a random video or song thrown into the mix, and some explanations for why I have chosen to focus on these certain offerings and styles.
Below and here you will find a link to the Indiegogo campaign, the links to the pages I have set up here onsite with a sampling of the artworks that I have made to exchange for your generous contributions, as well as some of the text from the campaign. Thank you kindly and please share it on your social networks and such!
Greetings! My name is Jo and I am from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Two years ago I initiated work in South Africa to “upcycle” an old dumping site into the home of the Trash to Treasure Festivals. It is my passion to show people how they can use “trash” beneficially for the upliftment of their communities. I am also a passionate artist and am gladdened by the opportunity to make more art.
I recently was accepted to the Sustainable Cup Challenge Fellowship in New York City with The DO School. The main goal of the fellowship is to prepare and guide young entrepreneurs through the challenges of starting and sustaining a successful project in response to a pressing issue in their communities. I want to build upon the work that I have accomplished in South Africa and establish an eco-brick program in Santa Fe that addresses local plastic pollution.
Your contributions to this campaign will provide me with the support I need to participate in the NYC fellowship, to take my upcycling projects to the next level, and to produce a new series of artworks as well.
Yesterday dear friend Rob Woodford put the final touches on the video for my upcoming crowdfunding campaign which will go live in the next 24 hours or so and run through the month of February. The video features some awesome acted parts with friend Nicole Hogan, a song and rap that I composed for the project, and a bunch of the artworks that are on offer as campaign perks.
What is the campaign for you ask? A few months ago I was accepted to a fellowship in New York City with The DO School. Even though my flight and tuition is covered and housing subsidized, I need to raise some much needed money for living expenses and transport in the Big Apple.
The fellowship is designed to give young entrepreneurs like myselfthe tools and knowledge to implement and sustain projects such as those of Only Green Design with my brother James Stodgel and the Trash to Treasure Festivals in South Africa with friends like Candice Mostert and Nicola Vernon.
This is one of the drawings (inverted) that I made in 2013 for Jason Horsley’s investigative work entitled Crucial Fictions. The website can be found at http://crucialfictions.com/ The piece depicts a bit of what is covered in through the writings and project, such as the possibility of high level Governmental involvement in top-secret projects involving the Grey aliens, and the creation of autistic children to serve as a medium for communication and exchange with such entities.
I am releasing this now again in part because I am now reading a very fascinating book by Bob Frissell entitled “Nothing in This Book is True, But It’s Exactly How Things Are”, wherein these subjects are covered in some detail. The main aspect worth focusing on is how Frissell arrives time and again in the book at the conclusion and realization that we are all on this Earthship together, and are challenged to find a way to make everything we do a win-win situation for everyone.
So the key concept within these writings is that we are a much larger being – Gaia – having a human experience. Because our internal worlds are so interconnected and interdependent with our external worlds, changes within one world correspond with changes within the other. Thus, the loss of biodiversity in our surroundings has corresponded with a loss of internal biodiversity. It is a well known fact now that by number there are more bacteria inside of our bodies than our own cells. As we have homogenized and drastically reduced the wealth and vast array of plants and animals on this planet, surely so too we have lost an internal biodiversity through the ingestion of fewer and fewer plant and animal foods and decimated internal bacterial populations through the heavy usage of antibiotics on a daily basis in medicine and regular doses fed to farm animals.
The population of certain humans has swelled in our exterior world, while the numbers of certain other peoples, animals and plants have dwindled and in all too many cases been completely exterminated. What could this correspond to within? Perhaps it is a loss of a wealth of all sorts of qualities and perspectives that we once possessed and had access to on some level. Perhaps it is a mining of health from our various organs for the sole benefit of the analytical brain. Perhaps it is a weakening of the internal beneficial flora and with that a prior held immunity and strength that has led to the current levels of sickness, disease and cancer that humanity is experiencing. Perhaps it is a hole being dug into a space where only the human voice can be heard; no longer the roar of lion, the flutter of hummingbird, the melodies of birdsong or the croaking of frog.
Let us look to a factory feedlot cattle operation. Fenced-in partitions stretch to the horizon, packed with no life save the fattened cattle with numbered plastic earrings. Soon they are headed for their sure demise, dismemberment and polite packaging on the fluorescent lit shelves of super markets. At an early age they horns are cut, and they are made to grow in the way that seems fitting for their human masters. If they have been granted the honor above others they have a tiny space to move in, and I imagine grow terribly bored with their situation. If they lie down, they choose to do so in the accumulated shit of their peers which can be smelled for miles in every direction. They live in fear of their masters until the day they die.
These beings turned to meat are then fed to and consumed by people as some of the cheapest, and in the cases of public schools, subsidized meals in the USA.1 We can certainly find the internal parallels in a great deal of the youth today. At an early age children are circumcised in one way or another, cut down so as to grow in a way that seems fitting for their masters. They too are packed into boxes where they are the only things living, are immunized and fed mixtures of antibiotics. Many become obese just like the cattle, grow terribly “bored” with their situations, and sadly live in fear until the day they die. To see those contributing to and laying in the accumulated shit of their peers one need only look at a modern day comment board on a popular video website or in response to a polarized article.
Could you imagine that this act of eating feedlot cattle is one of the major factors that will determine the future of humanity and life on Earth? “According to a 1996 report… 72 acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute, mostly by impoverished people working for multinational corporations, who are cutting and burning the forest to create agricultural or pasturelands to grow beef for the export to the United States.”2 Now, nearly 20 years later and with more than a billion people added to the surface of the Earth, do you suspect that the pace has slowed? Around 70% of rainforest deforestation is said to be the result of cattle farming.3 “The United States imports two hundred million pounds of beef every year from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama – while the average citizen in those countries eats less than the average American house cat.”4 The lungs of the planet are being destroyed, and with that the last remaining buffer to runaway climate chaos, to keep the Fugue States of American populace well fed with the confinement, laziness, boredom, obesity, fear and death also known as feedlot beef. Truly, what you are is what you eat. Please come back to life.
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann, Three Rivers Press, 2004.
Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General quoted at http://evolvecampaigns.org.uk/evolve/environment.aspx Full quote: “70% of rainforest deforestation is the result of cattle farming. “We have all heard of the web of life. The way we live threatens to trap us all in a web of death.“
Diet for a New America by John Robbins, H.J. Kramer, 1987
LOVE TREE PRODUCTIONS 