#connection

wicked-and-divine:

Old as the universe itself

I wish you all could witness this median strip. Because we are all so tangled up in each other. And we are all so far away.

Life is openness. We go through life with our eyes open; aside from sleep, we close our eyes only to cleanse them, and keep them safe from intense light or physical harm. Walking around with our eyes closed would be ridiculous.

We go through life with our airways open; we seal those only to protect ourselves from inhaling what we shouldn’t. Walking around with our airways closed would, equally, be ridiculous.

We go through life with our palms open too; we ball our hands up only to hold onto things, or to defend ourselves. To move through the world with permanent fists would be — you guessed it — ridiculous.

And while we may not go through life with our mouths open, what would happen if we kept them always clenched completely shut? How would we ever sustain ourselves? Opening our mouths lets us LIVE.

So what about our hearts? Some people think that a heart’s default state should be “closed.“ That we should only open our hearts under special circumstances, or only after we know with reasonable “certainty” what awaits us down the road, or only after others in our lives have “proven” themselves to us. But no. The heart, too, needs to be open if we truly want to live. Hell, “open-heart surgery” is the name of a LITERALLY life-saving procedure. Do you think this is an accident?

Leave the heart open, and the other details will fall into place. Leave the heart closed, and how can they ever? This might sound silly, but return to the hands. How do THOSE work? Leave the hands open, and you can receive gifts into them. Leave the hands closed, and it just isn’t possible. The heart works that way too. Go through life with your heart open. That’s how it’s meant to be. Treat anyone in your world with the same respect as you would treat someone you love, and the same willingness to care as you might show to people you’ve known your whole life. People don’t need to “earn” that you open your heart. YOU deserve your open heart. So relax and just let it BE that way. You can shield it later, at any time, if somebody shows you that you should. Like closing the eyes, or the airways, or the hands, you can close the heart too when it needs to be protected.

But the heart, like any of those other organs, was created for openness. Leave it closed by default, and you lose so much. You impoverish your experience. You create MORE of the pain you might have been hoping to avoid. You rob it of the chance to do what it was made for, what fortifies and nourishes it:

Love.

And you deprive yourself of the same.

What is cabin fever and why does isolation — being cooped up in one place too long — make us feel so bad? At Longreads, Kara Devlin shares six stories about loneliness and isolation to help connect us by reading.

Of course, isolation is not just found through a physical landscape. The most harrowing form of loneliness can occur in a crowded room. Edward Hopper famously explored the loneliness of living in the big city through paintings like “Nighthawks.” This ubiquitous depiction of urban isolation, a diner with no entrance and no exit, serves as a memorable illustration of loneliness. When you are inside of this feeling — the metaphorical diner if you will — there is no perceived beginning or end, and no consideration from those around you, as nothing exists beyond this world-swallowing experience.

I am drawn to the idea that reading can connect the isolated — that one story on loneliness can link together hundreds of confined minds to think, Maybe I’m not alone. The stories on this list do not just seek to analyze and dissect the effects of isolation; they serve as a powerful tool of connection.

We’ve all been blessed

With the ability to connect

Virtually, physically, telepathically

Blessed to live in this reality

socalledunitedstates:

plaidaemander:

socalledunitedstates:

vodcar:

vodcar:

vodcar:

when the capitalists die out either thru global warming or revolution will we be able to start homegrown internet

been reading about dual power and how to grow my own tomatoes and i’m wondering how and if we’ll be able to start commie internet lol

like obviously the internet is this huge electric capitalist controlled hardware infrastructure thing so after all that shuts down is there a way to do it ourselves lol

i want to come home from a hard day on the communal allotment, kiss my Wife, crank up my generator, and start sharing meams!

GOOD NEWS: the homegrown commie internet is in the works! Across the world, people fighting against censorship and for a more democratic internet are building mesh networks (meshnets) of long-range wifi (LoRa)

Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!

Small antennae, like for connecting across the neighborhood, can literally be built out of trash

And a larger, more accurate one can be built pretty cheap too

(You can also reuse an old satellite TV dish, or really anything else that’s roughly parabolic)

There are LoRa meshnets in places like New York, India, and all over Europe: Spain (pictured below), Greece,Austria,Germany, etc

As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc

What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing

You can read more about this kind of stuff here(orhere if it’s cloudy in Barcelona)!

there’s also the work being done by the DCPT, left-behind Detroiters meshing together their neighborhoods to share overpriced high-speed connections among the community and producing these good good educational documents, especially this rad resource page. building meshnets to share a global uplink is very similar to building meshnets for the purpose of intracommunication and these resources are useful in both cases

I’ve had a couple people ask about how to join/organize something like this, which is great! The best list of active projects I know of is here, though you should also do a search online if you don’t see one in your area in case they missed it. For those without a nearby group, put a pin here and try contacting nearby pins as well - you can use the instructions on buildyourowninter.net as well as the DCPT’s resources as linked above to get set up!

Please reblog this version so others can get involved!

This is how it spreads

Big poem today. I started writing about remembering childhood and how memories stay with us and it turned into some musings about interconnectedness and non-duality.

It’s so easy to see ourselves as an entity separate from the world around us, but this is far from the truth and the cause of so much unnecessary suffering in our lives.

I’ll come back to this theme with more poems soon, but for now, stay with this quote by John Muir that also speaks of this interconnectedness I’m talking about: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

I wish everyone the beauty of understanding that comes from having other leftists to talk to and connect with. It fuels me.

  Because someone out there is waiting for you to find them! – Guest Submission

(Please don’t add negative comments to these posts.)