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~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

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Tag Archives: GreenNewDeal

Psychology of Change: Growth, Decay, and Chrysalis.

31 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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Tags

awarenewss, change, GreenNewDeal, learning, metamorphosis, psychology

Perhaps the “Psychology of Change” is a label that hides too much variation in types to reveal any common patterns. Let me explain. 

First of all, what “works” or what “predicts” change in such diverse situations as: 

  1. One imposed from without by force (as prison inmates, say;) 
  2. Acquired as a child through acceptance of the cultural norms (as is normal);
  3. Enlightenment in an elderly adult through contact with a child (as in Silas Marner, Finding Forrester or Ana).

Photo by Pragyan Bezbaruah on Pexels.com

May well have nothing to do with one another. In addition, the speed of change, and even the acceleration of change, and, yes, possibly even the jerk might have an impact on what happens. Again, consider a few examples.

You are the major breadwinner (by being a bread maker) in your family of four. You are moderately “well off” financially but your business has been going steadily down for the last five years. You could relocate but you all love the private school your kids go to. Finally, your youngest is a senior, so next year, you will relocate to a part of your nation that is growing. 

Photo by Vital1na on Pexels.com

This is no doubt a fairly large change. But, it is also moderately slow. And, not only is it slow; there is only moderate if any acceleration. You will naturally see more details that need to be attended to as the date creeps closer. And, there will be some surprises. But for the most part, the speed and predictability of the change is within your capacity. If you didn’t perceive it to be so, you wouldn’t have decided on the move. 

Now, let’s change things just a bit. Same family of four. Same worsening of conditions. Only now, before your youngest even starts her senior year, COVID 19 strikes. Your business is no longer slowly shrinking. It plummets to the ground. Some people were predicting this might happen months ago, but you chose to listen to the people who said it would all go away. But now is now. You are experiencing much faster and less predictable change. Not only that; the potential magnitude of the change is much greater. Before, you realized it would take time to build your business back up in a new location. But now? You might not even have the wherewithal to survive the next six months, let alone move. And when? And to where? You had a spot all picked out in one of the more trendy and affluent suburbs in Silicon Valley. But now? It’s a hotbed of COVID!

Photo by Uriel Mont on Pexels.com



Are the same things that are important in situation one above the same things that are important in situation two? 

Now, let’s add just a little more to the scenario, but without the COVID19.

As before, you are the major breadwinner (by being a bread maker) in your family of four. You are moderately “well off” financially but your business has been going steadily down for the last five years. You could relocate but you all love the private school your kids go to. Finally, your youngest is a senior, so next year, you will relocate to a part of your nation that is growing. You are on your way to your bakery and the sky grows dark. You worry that it will be pouring down rain just as you make the 50 yard dash to the front door of your bakery.

You need not have worried because the Class Five tornado delivered the front door to a spot only two feet from your normal parking spot. That front door was the largest remaining piece of what had been your grocery store. Your house was also destroyed. And, so was the private school. Luckily, your youngest was unharmed. Not so luckily, your other child and your spouse were killed in the storm along with 73 others in the area. 

We all have the intuition that this person will make the most profound changes, but in what way? Of course, nearly anyone would be in complete shock for a time and not know what to do. But then what? It seems equally likely that the person would:

A. Decide that life is absurd and it’s out to destroy you and the only way to protect yourself is drink like a fish. And, the child’s better off somewhere else.

B. Decide that life is absurd and it’s out to destroy you and the only way to protect yourself is to never love again.  And, the child’s better off somewhere else.

Of course, A and B are not mutually exclusive. They often go together.

C. You decide that life may end at any time and that the most important thing in life is to enjoy every moment. And, that means, among other things, spending a lot of time with your remaining family & friends. 

D. You decide that service to others is the most important thing in life and you and your child both eventually become involved in a UN project to show people how to bake more nutritious bread.



There are endless possibilities of course. And, they are not fixed outcomes. The person may decide that life may end at any time and that the most important thing in life is to enjoy every moment — and to spend time with friends and then — three years later —- take path A or D instead. 

As someone trained in “Experimental Psychology,” my disciplinary reflex is to try to identify parameters and try to relate conditions of change to results in terms of outcome as a function of those parameters. 

Perhaps, however, a better approach is more like the Periodic Table. Rather than an “infinite variety”, it might be true that most cases fall into one of several dozen categories. Each category is basically a theme or premise for a story which we relate to precisely because they are common “types” of change. 

Examples might include:

 “Situation slowly deteriorates and protagonist makes adjustment.” 


“A natural disaster destroys much (or all) of what the protagonist loves and they must create a whole new life.” 

“Situation slowly deteriorates, and in turn, the protagonist engages in ever more self-destructive behavior, making the situation worse and eventually resulting in disaster.”

“Situation slowly deteriorates, and in turn, the protagonist engages in ever more self-destructive behavior, making the situation worse and eventually resulting in — enlightenment followed by a complete turn-around.” 

And so on. 

—————————————————-

Essays on America: Wednesday 

The Invisibility Cloak of Habit

The Update Problem 

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Take a Glance; Join the Dance

The Walkabout Diaries: Life Will Find a Way

21 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

ecology, GreenNewDeal, life

It’s what life does! 

Check this out. What is this? It’s obviously the stump of a dead tree. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s the dead and broken trunk of a tree. 

Or, is it? 

It took me about five minutes to convince myself that all of those yellow flowers and associated green leaves are part of that same tree! 

Here’s another example. Where did these mushrooms come from? As you likely know, they grow from spores. But where did these spores come from? I didn’t plant them. There are no mushrooms nearby. But somehow, a puff of spores wafted on the wind and found an appreciative stretch of well-shaded damp ground. 

Life is amazing. Well, after all, it’s been doing its thing for 4.5 billion years. And, when I say “it”, of course, I really mean “we” because all of life — you, me, and everyone else and every other life form on this planet, like it or not, are on this same spaceship earth.  

—————————————————

Life is a Dance

Author Page on Amazon

The Teeth of the Shark

14 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Climate change, ecology, GreenNewDeal, pivotprojects, pollution, survival

The gaping, hungry maw of a Great White Shark circles beneath unseen. 

Wolves staring their glowing, glowering eyes in the snowy woods. We feel the burning eyes but they are just beyond our ken.

Roaring forest fire burns tree and bush and flesh as we run amok with blind panic. 

Would we not protect our children from these horrors if we could?

Photo by Josh Hild on Pexels.com

I fear for our children. And our children’s children. 

But not for Great White Sharks, or wolves, or forest fires or Grizzly Bears.

High in the thin invisible air, higher than the condor soars — deep, deep in the dark underground rivers of the world and in the crushing ocean depths, there lurks a monster more terrible than these by far.

Its tiny stinging tendrils reach out from the ocean, the sky, the forests. 

They are ugly and they reek though often they snake out unseen to claim their victims.

Photo by Leonid Danilov on Pexels.com

Each year the monster grows and claims more victims, condemning them to death — not the swift but terrible death of the Grizzly’s jaws — or the snap of a Great White Shark. 

Instead, the victim succumbs to the slow, grey, agonizing and painful cancer of rotting disease. In the tumor’s desire for unlimited growth, it sucks the life from its victim over months or years. The tumor, of course, like all creatures of pure greed, has no life of its own. It cannot sustain its own life but must prey on others. That is the nature of Greed, of Cancer, and of Pollution – three names for three heads of one deadly dog: Cerberus. 

(Wikipedia, 14 March, 2021: Hercules and Cerberus. Oil on canvas, by Peter Paul Rubens 1636, Prado Museum.)

And yet, we do not choose to kill the monster. Indeed, we feed this monster. 

We fool ourselves that we make friends with it. 

In truth, we simply bribe it with Today so that it may grow stronger for eating Tomorrow. 

In our Greed, we give the monster what it wants Today so that Tomorrow it may eat more of our children and of our children’s children.

Oh, yes. 

I fear. 

I fear for our children. 

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Ugly, fetid, foul, poisonous tentacles of pollution encircle our children and they are closing in. They are closing in. 

And yet, we have all the weapons we need: our will.

We can withdraw the hand of Greed that feeds Today to the deadly beast. 

And all through the massive hall of mirrors, the countless years called:

 “The Infinite Tomorrow”, 

our progeny will thank us.  

Unlike us, their empathy will be strong, valued, and nearly ubiquitous. So, they will know that, as absurd as it sounds, this was not an easy decision for us. It was a near thing. We nearly doomed our entire species to lives of disease, disaster, and despair. 

But we cannot let that happen, can we?

——————————————————-

https://www.who.int/news-room/air-pollution

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/05/850470436/u-n-warns-number-of-people-starving-to-death-could-double-amid-pandemic

https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/freshwater/deaths-from-dirty-water/story

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/12/02/global-warming-world-not-doing-nearly-enough-un-report/6476363002/

https://pivotprojects.org

The Forest

12 Friday Mar 2021

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

forest, GreenNewDeal, poem, poetry, psychology

[The poem below is one I wrote about 60 years ago. I still feel the same way today. So, here’s an example of something that hasn’t changed about me psychologically despite all that’s happened in my world and in the world..]

I think the forest is a holy place: 

A shrine of peace for bird and beast and man;

For when I stop to rest from life’s quick place,

I journey through the wood and there I scan

With eyes and mind a palace, emerald-walled.

I see the columns, black or gray or white;

And I am thrilled and my whole being enthralled

With this great tonic of the forest light

Which casts the tender green of maple leaves

About the dark, dank, mossy forest floor;

And then the stillness of the woodland cleaves,

When some beast’s call or cry is heard once more.

But I have often seen a sight of shame:

A forest where the trees are all the same;

Where every trunk’s conforming hue is gray

And every limb and twig is set in form.

I walk for miles and see no creature gay,

For everything must coincide, conform.

I see a fiery disc set sky aflame;

The sunset throws black shadows, thin and tall; 

Yet even this to beauty has no claim —

Each tree is three feet wide and forty tall.



Some people say that would be heavenly: 

To live where each bright day the setting sun

Shall beam and gleam and glimmer flawlessly.

But I would rather see some variation:



A world where trees are not at all the same —

Where every oak its unique beauty does acclaim. 


Author Page on Amazon

The Tree of Life

19 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

ecology, Eden, evolution, GreenNewDeal, life, love, nature, poem, poetry

Life is not rigid. 

Life is flexible. 

Life does not pretend it knows all the answers. 

Life builds on what has worked before and

Forever changes just to see what will happen next. 

Life is not a bigot or a racist or a homophobe or a misogynist.


Life has an open mind. 

Photo by Elina Sazonova on Pexels.com


Life will always find a way. 

Life is a joyous dance, not a mad, manic march of machines and marionettes. 

Life is not a gun. Life is not a bullet. 

Life is not a lie. Life is full of joy!

Life is full of love. 

Or, love, perhaps is full of life. 

Rip Love out of Life and … is what still life? 

Life is choice. 

Life pushes and pulls and tries and strives. 

We learn:

“Two berries are better than one.” 

We learn:

“Red berry taste better than green berry.” 

Photo by Dana Tentis on Pexels.com

Eventually, life learns that it needs to change

In order to survive. 

In order to keep being part of Life

In order to be and to become. 

Humanity, my personal favorite on the Great Tree of Life

Has lately morphed into a cancerous growth upon the Tree.

Many of us are no longer content to be alive within The Great Tree of Life

We want to become The Great Tree of Life. 

We want all of it to be like us. 

Just like us.
Exactly like us. 

Only…

When it comes right down to it, who is “us” exactly? 

If it’s okay to privilege human convenience over all other forms of life…

If it’s okay to replace the wondrous diversity of nature

With cement & Soylent green…

If it’s okay to destroy the lives of animals who share

Ninety per cent of their genes with us,

Then why not those who share 99% or, for that matter 99.9%? 

When a part of Life begins to think like that, 

It is no longer a part of the Tree of Life.

And the Tree of Life, who has been around, you know, 

And seen a thing or two.


And the Tree of Life, you know, is 4.5 

Billion

Years old. 

And survived asteroids! And volcanoes! And ice ages! 

And its immune system will destroy any cancers 

Any cancers that threaten the integrity of the whole.

Photo by VisionPic .net on Pexels.com


You see: 

It is no longer Life if it is all human beings and their great green machines.

The very essence of Life is the dance, the joy, the variety.


A maniacal macho monoculture is not really Life. 

Something would occur


And since all remaining life would be forced to concur

POOF!

Photo by Mike Krejci on Pexels.com


Out it would go. 

Only a momentary waft of smoked ruins.

The death of all life and none left to 

Remember or to mourn. 

Photo by u041fu0430u0432u0435u043b u0421u043eu0440u043eu043au0438u043d on Pexels.com

Just as cancer untreated kills the patient, 

So too does unrelenting greed kill the planet. 

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

Hopefully, on some other whirling Eden 

Orbiting some other far-flung and lucky

Solar System another Tree of Life 

Even now is playing, dancing, singing, choosing

Even now, it is living, loving, changing, learning.

Even now, it is thriving and this Other Earth, 

That Earth has smart species a plenty 

But they enjoy each other’s company. 

I like to imagine that earth, 

You know, just in case.

Photo by Mau00ebl BALLAND on Pexels.com



But… 

I also like to imagine that we can look at what we’re doing

I like to imagine that we can look at where we’re headed.

And change course. 

Before it’s too late. 

I like to think we will.

How about you? 

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

—————————-

Author page on Amazon

Index for a Pattern Language for Cooperation 

Good Morning!

14 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

ecology, GreenNewDeal, index, poem, poetry, story

{Today, I rediscovered this poem which I originally wrote for our holiday letter on December 31, 1999. It seems apropos two decades later.} 

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

Good Morning! 

The sunlight sparkles on the snow;

Sparkles on the sea; 

On the fields of wheat; 

On the forests.

Photo by Mike Krejci on Pexels.com

A New Day:

A New Millennium.

Lids flutter open

In waves across the world — 

Minds at last awake 

From their deeply troubled dreams.

Blind ambition opens sleepy lids;

Wipes the sand away from slumber.

Humanity awakes!

At long last, 

The veil is lifted from minds and hearts.

Hands touch hands

The world round.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Everyone laughs as if on cue.

To think that we were ever so blind.

To think that we were ever so silly.

We chuckle and shake our heads.

Our teen-age years of rebellion are over. 

Guns fall silent. 

People see beneath the skin.;

People hear beneath the accent. 

We are glad to have so many brothers,

So many sisters, so many long-lost cousins. 

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

With joy, the people begin the long,

Long journey back to Eden. 

We remake our traveling spaceship jewel.

We replant the surface of the earth. 

Seen from space,

Our whirling little marble greens again.

Our whirling edge of blue clears again.

Seen from our backyards, 

The moon grows clear and huge.

And stars once more appear in night skies. 

Birds fly over Mexico City.

Dictators become gardeners.

Soldiers become poets. 

Plastic turns to wood.

Creation is re-created.

Paradise, always there —

Suddenly appears.

Our multi-millennial blindness is cured.

Our multi-millennial sleep is over.

Good Morning! 

—————————-

Other Poems —- 

The Truth Train

The Pandemic Anti-Pandemic

Life is a Dance

T-Rump Swan Song

Comes the Dawn

https://petersironwood.com/2020/08/23/listen-you-can-hear-the-echoes-of-your-actions/

Try the Truth!

Roar, Ocean, Roar!

The Ailing King of Agitate 

Who are the Speakers for the Dead? 

The Watershed Virus 

Ah! Wilderness!

Essays on America: Poker Chip

Screaming Out a Warning

You Gave me no Fangs

Blood Red Blood

Snowflake

Mother’s Day

Comes the Reign

Choosing the Script

The Jewels of November

Imagine all the People…

The Most Serious Work

The Joy of Juggling

Wristwatch

Maybe it Needs a New Starter

https://petersironwood.com/2020/09/06/my-captains-no-captain/

A Cat’s a Cat and That’s That

Fate and Late on the Interstate

Camelot is in your Heart

Peace

Ambition

The Impossible 

The Bubble People 

Race, Space, Place, Face

Piano

A Suddenly Springing Something

Hauntings across the Time Zones

Ah Wilderness!

13 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, health, poetry, politics, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

ecology, environment, Feedback, GreenNewDeal, life, poem, poetry, truth, wilderness

(I first published an earlier draft of Ah Wilderness in Peng Poets e-zine, summer 1997. I’m nearly finished with the highly recommended book, The Overstory, and so I decided to take another look at the poem and then extended it with the dissolution of form of the poem meant to mirror the dissolution of our society moving at last into prose but then, hopeful with the seed of form returning. I realize poetry is not everyone’s cup of tea. One reason I like it is that its dancing always on that same razor edge where life itself does its dance: chaos and regularity; change and stability).

scenic view of lake in forest

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Ah, Wilderness!

The words may well connote a false un-blurring
A fear, a chill — not from frozen stone alone
Or lake wind’s sweep; but from the urgent stirring
Of some soul still hiding restless in our bone.

Curse not the thorns of tasty blackish berry;
They keep fruit safe from claws less clever.
Curse not how swift the prey, how very wary;
They shaped our brain; & helped us know forever.

Curse not the winter’s churlish wind unkind
Or burning hot dry summer’s cinnamon sun.
They invented beautiful raiment through our mind
And taught us numbers soaring far beyond one.

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Curse not the change of season; or the suddenly sliding slope –
Unpredictable now and in the future as ever always
They make us search for patterns far beyond our scope of grope.
Ah Wilderness!

You are me as seen in Darwin’s mirror of minutes and hours,

And days of ways taken and untaken & lead us here at last.

We strive to take it all and make it all, all ours, all ours!

Churning every fragrant flower and pine to dust,

We must! We lust! We must! We lust!
We don’t have time for this and that.

We want everything now and that’s that!

air air pollution climate change dawn

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

 

And if in time all wilderness is bleak and dead,

Our bodies too shall wither and die and by and by

Our souls shall be but number: grey, unloved, unfed.

Asphalt, plastic, concrete & glass. None will die

Because in our endless war on nature, we are all “Undead.”

The Zombieland: machines gone mad; machines gone bad.

Swaths of humanity wishing to meld to macabre, merciless machinery!

abstract barbed wire black white black and white

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Life is what works! Life is constant change and innovation. But it’s been working for over four billion years! Look around you! It not only works! It’s marvelous! Machines don’t smell like that. Machines don’t look so beautiful as that. Machines don’t sound as melodious. Machines may be used to magnify malicious malignities if we let them.

Life is cooperative and interconnected and everywhere at once dancing on a razor’s edge between chaos and regularity. Machines are built to be efficient and effective and just tolerably presentable enough to be purchased — purchased by people who typically do not have to deal with the machine day in and day out. What do they care whether the machine is loud or smells bad or ruins your hands or explodes every so often or pollutes whole towns or scares away all the birds or kills every fish in the stream and every frog and that more trees will have to be cut down to feed it and more land raped to oil it?

Life is the invention of Love yet Love requires Life. (Maybe that’s why Love created Life; so it would have a way to express itself). Machines can be built to help save lives. Other machines are designed to kill lives. A machine that’s designed to kill lives never decides, “You know what? I never signed up to shoot peaceful protestors. That sucks and it’s anti-American. I quit.” At best, machines are amoral.

What to think of people who want to destroy life and replace it with a strict unmoving hierarchy with a life-hating king at the top? Don’t they see that they would not truly be alive in such an arrangement? They would not “decide” or “dream” or “change” or “love” or anything else without the permission of someone or some rule who knows nothing about how they really feel. And doesn’t care. Do you?

woman raising her hands

Photo by Marlon Schmeiski on Pexels.com

To destroy all wilderness means humanity would be signing its own death warrant.

The attempt to replace life, which we know works, with machine will eventually fail and fall and take damn near all of humanity with it over that cliff of ever-lasting greed.

Ah, Wilderness.

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Ah, Wilderness.

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Author Page on Amazon

Introduction to a Pattern Language of best practices in Teamwork & Collaboration

Index to Pattern Language for Teamwork & Collaboration.

The Myths of the Veritas: The Forgotten Field

The Impossible

 

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