The North Fork Vipassana Meditation Center is located in the foothills of the Sierras, just south of Yosemite. Not a bad place to do a retreat. I wasn’t, in fact, sitting for this one, though, just serving. 10 straight days in the dish pit, though, was enough to leave me feeling just a bit not my self, which of course is somewhat of the point of the path of the Buddha, the no-self thing, etc. So a service retreat is sort of its own form of growing process.
We had some wacky weather: snow, sleet, heavy rains, and even a bit of thunder storm. All that plus a good soaking of sunshine. The place was starting to green up and will soon be popping with spring colors, what with the mix of rain and sunshine.
North Fork Vipassana Center, Sierra foothills, March 2018
I’ve always been fascinated by the Manzanita trees. They have a burnt red color that is especially bright after a good rain or in the light of the sunshine, due to the waxy residue on the limbs.
Manzanita Trees, March 2018
Manzanita trees, close up
Manzanita trees, controlled chaos
Selfie in the foothills of the Sierras, March 2018
Namaste.
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Not sure if this is the best place to share, but I thought you’d find this worth a read:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product
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Liz, as a socialist, my ideal is to nationalize Facebook and other similar entities that are very much “public.” The idea is that social institutions work best under the democratic control of society. Facebook would work better under public control, run by the public and accountable to the public via robust democracy. This would eliminate the profit motive, which would 1) make Facebook less egregious and 2) eliminate the billions that investors are making — these profits contribute nothing to a healthy economy.
Here’s a post I did to that effect.
https://erdman31.com/2017/11/14/democratize-facebook-and-everything-else/
The broader issue is that it was public funding that led to the invention and development of the Internet, so in effect, we paid for the Internet twice: first with our tax dollars funding the R&D, then we gave the Internet to corporations and now we pay corporations. It’s like we socialists always say: capitalism privatizes profits but socializes the costs.
https://erdman31.com/2017/12/01/take-it-back-free-the-internet-from-capitalism/
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