This essay explores the role of story-telling about food in culture and its importance to knowledge about sustainability and cultural tradition.

Food for Thought—Knowledge Chains around Food Cycles
by Brenden MacDonald  Read More

The intro subject says it all! I am a musician and have been learning to compose and produce electronic music and hip hop instrumentals. The links are within the main text of this post.  Read More

This is the first of two essays about Spinoza's philosophy and its application to other thinkers and other thoughts. The essay below this one is focused on the contemporary state of ecological imagination, and this one is devoted primarily to re-interpreting Spinoza and Romanticism together, with just passing, though hopefully insightful, reflection on the current day.  Read More

I am down. I don't want to be as inactive anymore.  Read More

This essay was written over the last few years, touched up several times. Enjoy and be informed!  Read More

This poem I wrote over the last several years, editing it slowly.

I hope you enjoy it and learn something from it!

It is about my experience of schizophrenia and what I feel like inside myself: like a beautiful bird who could be flying but whose spirit is trapped in a cage.

I don't feel like I'm trapped now, except in the society which I mention in the poem. But I'm an activist and a writer, so I have ways to the means with which to interact with that society, hopefully changing it for the better!!

Without further ado, here is the poem:  Read More

This essay is about my case of schizophrenia, some interpretation of my symptoms, and some reflections about how to be healthy as a schizophrenic.  Read More

This is a paper I wrote for my First Nations Literature class.

I haven't been around on NCN for a while and thought I should show my face and contribute something. Hello all!

I hope you appreciate the thoughts!  Read More

Hello there, you with eager free minds that some philosophers would tell you that you don't have. I've been busy busy with my second year of university, but I've written lots and would like to share. Here is my final essay for Phil 361 - philosophy of mind!

Enjoy  Read More

Hey all. I've moved in and am attending classes, 2nd year university! Yay! English and Philosophy are fun! Here are some thoughts I wrote after thinking about a philosophy lecture.  Read More

This is fare well and see you later.  Read More

Enjoy!

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Sometimes in epistemology class last semester, I had a feeling that if one earnestly and sincerely bears witness thru-out time to the philsopher's arguments, poet's conveyances, artist's renditions, mystic's visions, shaman's discussions, psychologist's advice, scientist's questions, and in abstract, the being's expressions, and if that one who witnesses these does so intelligently, articulately, and charitably, then that one will invariably develop a strong assumption that 'reality itself' was housed in form of diversely avid communicators posing that one a proposition most deeply interesting and pertinent, to describe moderately....  Read More

Can you imagine never giving up differences?  Read More

(Herein is a final essay for an introductory ethics class I took this preceding spring semester; my choice for writing topic. I have edited to make the flow of ideas cleaner and clearer. ((It wasn't an A+ paper :)))
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"All over the earth, faces of all living things are alike. Mother earth has turned these faces out of the earth with tenderness. Oh Great Spirit behold them, all these faces with children in their hands." Standing Bear, Lakota

May we remember and revere the primacy of life,
and lovingly care for and make free the children in our hands
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I often wonder how common my experience is to that of others. On NCN, I have found more in common with you than I would with people who attend roudy pubs, war or corporate planning rooms, sport hunts, or the shopping mall.

And I've also gone on to question how common my experience is to that of the others solely within this network. I see a common ground we share that is the intention of creating peace, truth, and life, and I appreciate you...  Read More

From Tah-CO Belle's new commercial on numerous channels, exhibited is a celebration of an ability to eat more food than is necearry while it is unhealthy, unbalanced food, at that!

Thru the commercial, 1) a concept of "full" is emphasized as a desired outcome satisfied by the ecologicallly unhealthy animal business 'dealt with,' and also in the commercial this "full"ness is uncompromisingly applauded and accepted for being attainable by possession of 2) a concept of "value."

This value is expressed as "ninety-nine cents."

"Get full, on value..."

This is so explosively aggressive toward every partnership social value and ethical insight which has existed on Earth that I wonder how there could be need to tear this statement and visual correlates apart, how there would be anyone who did not question this and bark at this!

One would think you could manage selling a taco without endangering the stable ecosystem or threatening the social fabric of peace, but not Tah-CO Belle! (and this is merely quite exemplary of a common perspective many looking have clearly seen) Right away, I notice three things in this commercial which are messed up and contradicting the objectives of peace, harmony, and beauty for all beings; all this for selling a taco by certain methods and with certain contextual images:

1)Applauded be that western stomachs be infatuantly bloated feeling, while it is common knowledge that millions of humans on Earth are starving and empty stomanched. Nah, who cares, you be "FULL"! is their message in this commercial.

2)The great "value" offered (besides which I have a linguistic/philosophical incompatibility with their use of this word) is a larger amount of beef. This is unhealthy at current rates of consumption in the target demographic for these commercials AND ALSO this is ecologically, socially irresponsible, as vast amounts of south american rain forest are being clear-cutted for cow-pastures for the greater "value" of land that could feed Earth with farms instead of fueling fast food unhealthiness...

3)The final blur of audacity is the maker of the commercial's reluctance to include any notion of these things even tho the CEO's have undoubtedly been informed by eco whistle-blowers and eco-media to the current risk of proceeding as this. They forge straight ahead...  Read More

.Is this the innocent face like of any cultural psychotic??
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.I think so, myself :)
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What is the world and its life to be for? What is it that we seek by name of freedom? What are we to make as our social objective, and what form of balance do we value as the basis for peaceful relation? A prevalently lived out response to these questions is known to be destroying diversity in our ecosystem and society.

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...from my year 2000 smatterpoem-journal, entitled within as Calculus and Thought.
As such, this was from a time punctuated by great confusion and transformation,
marking the phase of onsetting social/spiritual symbiophrenia following perceptions of my role here.

Some of this may be dark, yet progressed into me, and other things have happened in multiplicity, too.

I guess I'm trying to make a disclaimer for this stuff. It came from another me, yet the me I was once.



"kept a certain pace, with synch-steppers all surrounding
................we make a safe place...............
but a commander's fear to lose us, to be left under attack, all alone
or just left all alone.........when we question out of face
.........and don't consent dismissal from this space
........brings hate and oblivion........cut from compassion

.....renders war motionless, holding both sides...let GO,
let ME! hear both.......let me out of here, this mind
..............our economy, virtual reality, and real virtues!
won and the same....... thE Saim onE.....unknown.
...........what to do...paying for freedumb makes sense"

"This is true despite a discouraging silence part part of some of the concipients."


"look at it in too2to level"  Read More

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"where does one go from here?
what are our sailing orders?
by what azimuth do we set course?
what are the landmarks?
the perils? the methods? the clues?

fortunate the wayfarer who is briefed
by those rare pioneers who chart
the uncharted
who brave the depths & spaces of being
&
offer future generations
the topology of internal states
& further spheres"

-from his book "Toward the One," Pir Vilayat Khan, one considered a Sufi master by many: 'one who understood and continued to love,' perhaps... .) Same for quote in suject.

"Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew.
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground.
Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.
Neptune, Titan, Stars can frighten.

Blinding signs flap,
Flicker, flicker, flicker blam. Pow, pow.
Stairway scare Dan dare who's there?
Lime and limpid green, the sounds surronds
The icy waters under
Lime and limpid green, the sounds surronds
The icy waters underground."

- from Syd Barrett for Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine
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