"Vortexual"

Thanks to those who commented on the last post. Lovely to start some new conversations with people contemplating similar things at this time. Continuing on a similar note, there seems to be a central theme recurring in our reflections and dreams at the moment. That is the nature of energy itself. At the smallest level of what we consider to be the material universe, energy just keeps spinning to keep matter in form. At the largest view, the galactic view, the whole thing is spinning interrelatedly in ways we can't fully comprehend. Doesn't really matter which lens you care to look through, the microscope or the telescope, the data is telling us the same thing. It's all spinning in the same way: vortexually.

According to the Websters online dictionary, the word 'vortexual' doesn't actually exist, although 'vortical' does. However, given the prevalence of the phenomena on so many levels, the omission rather surprised me. Or maybe not. Maybe in fact it's a new way of not just how we are currently describing what we see in relation to the interconnectivity of all things, but also, just possibly, how we are seeing it. More simply, how we feel about seeing things move, including us, more spirally towards an unspecified moment in time.

Now, this all might be some random playback of influences, and I am happy to concede that the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy read in my teens, might just be affecting this.


The Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

But I doubt it. Our new view of the entirety of it all I suspect is arising from what we are actually seeing with our own eyes at this present point in time, rather than through an inculcated lens. If that makes sense. Our eyes on the material world interlaced with images from our dreamscape, both in our sleep, and more interestingly, while fully awake. 

What if, we all are spinning vortexually. Always have been, granted, but what if we are on the place in the vortex, (obviously in all the vortexes on every level all at the same time), where the spinning is getting closer to the centre, with exponentially increasing speed. The reason we might be more aware of the interconnection of things, more able to see past, present and future events with increasing clarity, is in fact that it's all getting much 'closer' together. Maybe this singularity at the centre of the universal whirlpool, feels a little more inevitably possible, because it might, of course, truly exist. If so, the notion of vortexualisation (OK stretching it here a bit but bare with me), of which as stated we are becoming more aware of and affected by, is indeed a developmental process leading to a moment in time evidently hurtling towards us with all its accompanying chain reactions, really rather quickly.  At which point I assume, everything, including us, will have been vortexualised. 

Alright enough. You get my point. "Vortexual" is, whether we like it or not, already here in our cultural vernacular at Moses. Arrived a week ago. But as you can tell, already pretty forefront. What I really want to know, is if this little word is resonating with anyone else out there.

Let me know.  

Memphis.


p.s. found an online definition for vortextual, which ironically, is a fair description of my piece, but not in a way I would have imagined. suggests verbosity and annoyance for friends subjected to listening. so i have, obviously suggested the urban dictionary publish an alternative version for vortexual. once published, i feel a fair balance will have been made to the info cloud. but you can decide for yourself. 

Wage Peace. It’s time to get ready.

What a time we are in. Today is the 10^th of the 10^th of the 2010. Those dates don’t come around so very often so I hope you will allow me the moment to share something of what drives us to do what we’re doing here, in the middle of the forests of central Portugal. I wrote the following script for a video I was intending to submit for the “Life in a day” project earlier this year. Too much was happening back then with our restoration work for me to do the job justice, but re reading these words this morning, I felt I’d like to still put it out there and see if we can start a conversation through it. Feel free to submit your thoughts and/or links to cool articles around these issues that you have found helpful. Somehow I feel the time to get ready to wage peace is close at hand. I don’t have much of an idea what this will look like. Just that it’s time to get ready.

Mankind finds itself on the cusp of an extraordinary time of change. No one really knows what the change that’s coming is going to look like. Just that it’s coming. Most of us, in fact, are completely unaware that things have already begun to shift. We are, if you like, asleep. Collectively asleep.

Busy, really really busy, but sleeping nonetheless.

Our beautiful home of planet earth seems to be going through one of its regular (for Earth we’re talking every few thousands of years) seismic shifts. Weather patterns are going crazy, polar caps melting, sea levels rising, ocean currents altering, ferocious flooding, city destroying hurricans, island crushing earthquakes, continental wide ash cloud volcanoes, deep sea oil volcanoes. None of which are new. Just right now are happening all so very very fast, in Earth clock time.

Instability, that some say, begins to take place on Earth before momentous change – ice age scale change – stuff that wipes out species like dinasours. Maybe it’s humans next. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just happening as it always has happened and always meant to have happened. Maybe we’re not helping matters.

There are a lot of us humans. Billions. We’re polluting and destroying our planet’s resources and each other with such relentless vigour, that it is a little tricky to see how things can carry on for much longer. Our life on earth, our way of life on earth, doesn’t look to be that sustainable.

Let’s talk oil. Our civilizations right now are based on the black stuff. We use oil to drive our cars, trucks, trains and aeroplanes. We use oil to make the cars, trucks, trains and aeroplanes. We use oil to power the electricity supply. Oil to manifacture a vast array of products and clothes and foods. And we know, oh yes we do, that oil is running out. We just don’t know when. Sooner than we collectively think, probably. So we’re tinkering around here and there with alternative sources of energy, with bio fuels, with wind, wave and solar power. With nuclear power. Not a thing that responds well, I imagine, to tinkering.

Ironically we will consume vast quantities of oil just to make the machines and infrastructure required to harness the energy from these alternative sources. Will there be enough? What if there’s not?

The other big unstable foundation of our civilisations today is money. We’re busy busy busy making money. Working to earn bits of paper or numbers on screens, to pay institutions for food and services that we are more than capable of growing and providing for our very own selves.

3 years ago, sensing that ‘times they are a changing’ our little family of 4 plus dog set out on a journey to find a life less ordinary, a place in which we could quickly acquire the skills we had never learnt which enabling us the chance to live a little more self sufficiently.  We found it here in the forgotten mountains of central Portugal. In some old abandoned stone houses on some terraced land with rivers running through it.

In the midst of all the talk of cataclysmic planetary change, we’re tending our garden. Growing our veggies, vines and fruit orchards and hoping we can survive in nature’s abundance after the oil and the money run out. Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t.  Either way we’ll be looking after this little piece of land and the people we find ourselves with, until the storm that is closing in passes or consumes us in its wake.

(The brief for the video project was also to answer the following 3 questions.)

What do I fear?

I fear that my children grow up in a world where humanity continues choosing to destroy itself and their days will not be filled with the peace and safety and beauty of this day.

What do I love?

My queen of a wife River, my 2 gorgeous children Josh and Eli, good music, tasty home grown food. I love sunrises, sunsets and the stars that follow. I love watching the wind make the trees dance in the forest. I love picking grapes with old people who have spent their lifetimes living in their landscape in a culture that is not my own but is quickly becoming so.

I love love.

What do I have in my pocket?

Pen knife. Pencil. Mobile. Lighter. Fags.

What a time capsule this film is for those that follow. If you’re watching this years into our future, maybe post some kind of apocalyptic change, wanting to find out what life was like for man on earth back in the days of 2010, know this. There was hope. And there always will be.

There’s hope in every seed you plant. While there is a sun in the sky, pure water falling from the clouds and earthy soil at our feet, everything is possible. Living off the land in harmony with the seasons is a good life. You really should have been here to see it.

Green Tomato Chutney and more wine making

I have a sneaky suspicion based on the arrival of a new wind today (and on hard evidence from online weather sites) that tomorrow the autumn rains will commence. We've felt and known that for a week or so now and like little mice scurrying around before a storm, we have been gathering firewood and pine cones, staining the last bits of wood around the house which are exposed to the elements, and daily harvesting and preparing more of the delicious fruits of River's labour of love, her 'horta bonita'.

Tarpaulins are on, covering a number of stacks of wood dotted around the houses on all sides, under which now reside a variety of tree trunks, branches, old floorboards and beams too rotten to salvage for building into other things and mounds of off cuts from all the new wood we used to build 2 roofs, a veranda, a green roof  and 4 floors this year, all of which we will burn in the stove to keep ourselves warm and heat our water this winter. We've not gathered it all in, but enough for us not to have to worry about dry fire wood probably at least til Christmas.

Now the rains can come and wash this land anew with its autumnal promise of a new season away from the harsh scorching heat of the summer sun. Warm, wet and windy. Boy, will the forest love it.

A few videos below from the last week or so. Guest starring Carline's brother Steven and his beautiful and expecting wife Sophie who flew in for an action packed weekend mostly involving the harvesting, making and consumption of quite a fair quantity of wine. Come back for olive harvest soon guys. You were great.

Hope all your encounters are full of lovely vibrations this week. It's much easier to feel less afraid if you turn off the TV and don't open a newspaper. Seriously.

Yours tomatoly,

Memphis.