I cleaned a boat today with the voice of Rush L. blasting from across the canal.  I fully understand why some people need him and it is fine that he has a following but why the heck do you need to sing it from the rooftops?  Tattoo him on your chest, print him on your tee shirt, eat what he eats but please give the rest of us an opportunity to listen when we want and only when we want.  If he was reporting on the news around us I might be able to stand it but constant bitching does nobody a bit of good.  He said today that he loves the country.  Where is the love in his words?  It seems like he hates half the country.  Think for yourself people!!  Do the research.  Don’t listen to either of the extremes, left or right!  Go to sources with the least agenda.  Ask yourself if the dialogue is bringing us together or tearing us apart.  If he is successful we will forever be half a country and that might not be good enough to survive in this world.  Any other form of input that only tells half the story is usually considered brainwash.  Again, this goes for the libs too.

I saw this on the Tiny House Blog.

The EDAR, a cross between a shopping cart and a pop-up camper, is a step up.

EDAR (Everyone Deserves A Roof) provides shelter to the homeless in an innovative cost and usage effective way. The EDAR unit is a purpose-specific, special four-wheeled enclosed cart, very roughly reminding one of a covered shopping cart.  Check out the website.

“If you’re tempted to keep something because it was expensive, remember the difference between value and cost. Value is what something is worth. You spent a lot of money on it. To throw it away would mean admitting that the money was wasted.

Now you need to think about the cost. What is it costing you to keep this item? How much space? How much energy? What about the peace of mind that comes from having a clean home full of things you use?

You made a decision to purchase this expensive thing that you never use. Now, if you keep it, you’ll be throwing good space after bad money.”

–Peter Walsh, It’s All Too Much

The Greatest Risk

© 1988 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs

Everyone has at one time or another shrunk from a growth opportunity because with it comes the Unknown.  The Unknown!  What’s out there, anyway?

Disappointment?  Derision?  Danger?  Defeat?  Death?

Those are all bad, certainly, but none of them are nearly as bad as nothing.  None of those things can possibly be worse than the horror or Complacency that creeps like a psychic tapeworm into the mind, demanding a steady diet of the bland to let it propagate and infect those nearby.  It’s insidious, evil, and epidemic in America.  It slithers out of TV sets; it crawls from the pages of popular media.  It hides in classrooms and slips unnoticed into vulnerable young brains.

And it does all this while masquerading brilliantly as knowledge and truth.  Complacency is the adulterant of passion, the assassin of curiosity, the lobotomizer of life itself.

A friend’s mother once listened to me talking excitedly about my upcoming journey and shook her head in protective maternal fright.  She summed it all up without even realizing it:  “But honey, there are things out there… there are things out there we don’t even know about!”

Right on.

It’s possible to have growth without risk, but it is growth of the slow, vegetable kind, rarely yielding those magical breakthroughs that make you light up with understanding.  It doesn’t take anything quite so radical as an epic bicycle trip to do this, of course, only the courage to risk the Unknown.  Any kind of Unknown — be it intellectual, geographical, cultural, scientific, physical… whatever.

Because the greatest risk of all is taking no risk.  That’s the one that can really get ya, the death worse than fate.

So.  Curious about something?  Restless?  Hungry for knowledge or change?  Got a dream?

Go for it.

The guy that started Outward Bound had his own thoughts on when things went bad.  His seven forces of decline that effect the modern world were the decay of:

• fitness
• care
• skill
• initiative
• self-discipline
• imagination
• compassion

He felt like we were shielded from the true forces of life and the lessons contained therein.  Engagement with nature was no longer considered civilized and the combination of all this put us on a path to “spiritual death”.  This was some good stuff taken from an article in Wooden Boat Magazine.