Jonny Nomad

At the moment of waking up,
before getting out of bed,
get in touch with your breath,
feel the various sensations in your body,
note any thoughts and feeling that may be present,
let mindfulness touch this moment,
Can you feel your breath?
Can you perceive the dawning of each in breath?
Can you enjoy the feeling of the breath freely 
entering your body in this moment?
Breathe in I smile,
breathe out I calm my body,
dwelling in the present moment,
it is a wonderful moment.

Thich Nhat Hanh.

GOAL SETTING: a book a week.

Inspired by the Buried Life post below, I am setting a goal of reading 1 book every seven days, for 52 weeks. Reading more is something I’ve told myself I need to do, and this is a good way for me to achieve that. The first book I will read is “Notes from the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I am giving myself until Sunday night to finish this. If anybody has any suggestions for good, inspiring, philosophical books, I would love to hear them.

THE BURIED LIFE: 20 Things I Should Have Known at 20.

The myth of freedom in the land of the free - Opinion

And so it begins…

So i’m sitting here, 2 hours early, at the far end of buffalo airport. I made the executive decision last night to not bring my laptop on this trip. I think it’ll turn out to be the right decision in the end, but at the moment it’s really annoying to have to type this out on an ipod touch. Whatever, i guess i’ve got time to kill.

Anyways, i was meaning to post more leading up to this trip, but i guess that either life got in the way or i just didn’t have anything worthwhile to say. Actually that’s not true. We should all always have something interesting to say, i think most of the time we’re just to lazy or too scared to share what’s going on our heads. So i’m going to try to push past that right now and get something out.

I did a reading for DEVS 240 yesterday and it was all about consumerism and how it was a wholly created cultural phenomenon. It really got me thinking about the effort that a certain segment of society would have had to put in to shape a world like this. To create such a strong culture of finding happiness in material goods and of turning so many wants in to needs.

I really started to notice it once i was home from school. Its manifestions surrounded me. On tv, in my fridge and cupboard, on my clothes. I noticed how well my suburban “community” (what community?) is tailored to its ends. And i notice how consumed myself and everybody around me has become by consumerism.

Honestly, i’m scared by this realization. Scared that this is the dominant trait of our culture, and that it is spreading as this world becomes more global.

Yet, as much as this scares me it makes me angry. Angry that this culture is forced upon us, and even angrier that we so readily accept it as natural. What will it take to change our course? What steps will we need to take to forge a new culture? Obviously changes like this require time, that is a given. But they also require a growing shift in our mass conciousness, and that happens one person at a time. So from here on out i plan to make myself as aware as possible, taking every opportunity to resist the pull of consumption, in doing so working to forge a more sustainable, more satisfying future.

I can only hope that you’ll do the same.