Early Spring Walk in Portland, Oregon

I went on an early spring wildflower hunt in Portland, and made this video of my photos in May of 2013, adding some of my favorite music at the time. Today, after having survived cancer treatments (hysterectomy, chemo and radiation), I am finally feeling healthy and well. I want to make note of this day, March 15, 2017. I am free of cancer, and I am well!

Yeah, thanks to my medical team, my stellar oncologist, Dr. Wingo, my friends and family, and all of the prayer support that I received and the wonderful healing support from my friend Sheila Cook, who practiced esoteric long distance energy healing on me. Also special thanks to my mother, Harriet Schiffer, and my son, James Schiffer and his wife Luna, for coming to care for me when I needed them, and for all of their financial support, too. I want to thank the community that I live in here in Spring Valley, Arizona, for all the churches who paid my rent these months, and the food banks that so generously helped out with food.

Watching this video and listening to the music was so joyous for me today. 2013 was a very tough year for me when I returned from Malaysia after seven years overseas. My health wasn't too good at that time either. Yet somehow I went for this walk in the woods and made this video, which is a wonderful memento to view for the rest of my life, so it wasn't such a lost year after all.

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Sea Change in the Gloaming

I am reposting an essay that was published in the Earth Rainbow Network in 2007. My thinking has not changed that much since I wrote this. What has changed is my sense of what's happening in the hearts of people in this Trump era:

...a sea change is happening in the hearts of Americans and people all over the world. It's largely unseen as of yet, but the consequences will change our reality... and it's going on right now. In the gloaming, as our darkest hour moves in, love lurks in corners you can't see, and love will prevail. Don't wait to see what happens... join in the paradigm shift. Make things happen that you want to see in the world.


CHALLENGING QUESTIONS THAT BEG AN ANSWER...

Date: 12 Nov 2007
From: Ariel Ky
Subject: Responsibility of U.S. Citizens for their Government's Actions in Waging War and Torture

I have been thinking a lot about how responsible U.S. citizens are for the conduct of the U.S. in the world today, specifically for the wars being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan and the use of torture of prisoners held in prisons and detention centers in over a hundred countries. I am a U.S. citizen who has left my country because I do not support what the government is doing, nor what the country has become, which is certainly no longer any form of democracy of the people, for the people, and by the people, if it ever was. Should Americans be held accountable for the actions of a government that fights wars when they want peace? Especially when they feel powerless to stop the government?

Can a people be held responsible when they have continually been lied to by the media and politicians? Can a people be held responsible for corruption of all the institutions in their country? Can a people be held responsible when there has been an extensive program of mind control and manipulation of the truth by all the mass media?

If people are guilty of apathy, passivity, complacency, and fear of losing what they have worked to attain, as they may lose their job and jeopardize their income if they speak out or show anger or seem too political, it doesn't seem so terrible on the face of it. If people decide politics is too dirty or distressing for them to get very involved, such naivete may be distressing, but it's not quite the same as actively carrying out harm to other people. If people decide to devote themselves to their family and a small circle of friends rather than being involved politically, is that so reprehensible?

There is great diversity among Americans. The truly ugly Americans who are hateful, ambitious, ruthlessly aggressive, greedy, arrogant and willing to kill others in wars so that they can go on making lots of money and having more than other people in the world have always been a minority, even if they sometimes seem the most vocal and powerful today.

As I have networked over the Internet with people from other countries, I have put together a very different picture of the U.S. than the mythology we are taught about our country. What I have come to realize is that the U.S. has always pursued aggressive wars to open markets in other countries and that the economic system of capitalism is not so much twinned to democracy as it is to militarism. Democracy only works when people work it; there has been far too little involvement of citizens exercising the responsibility of staying informed and voting to make it work. Consequently, the U.S. has not evolved into a country of more freedom, but one of less and less liberty.

Freedom and human rights for everyone are incompatible with basic erroneous principles that most people in the U.S. have agreed to: 1) that profit is the bottomline, never the commonweal (and certainly not protection of the environment, especially if you can move your production to developing countries and pollute them instead of your own), 2) that you can pretty much do whatever you want to if you have enough money (and damned little if you don't), and 3) that the violent use of force as a country (the military option) is justifiable if it succeeds in meeting your goals. As long as most people subscribe to these ideas, nothing will improve, because these are the working principles that govern the present conduct of the U.S. While ruthless aggression and the use of violence is seen as inevitable and normal, the country follows a downward spiral away from the higher good of all.

There is little all-inclusive community left anywhere in the U.S. Our car culture and computers have contributed to destroying in large degree our sense of connectivity with the larger community. The newspaper wars of the past thirty years have left all major cities with only one big daily newspaper --always the largely conservative voice of the wealthy-- which has also led to the deterioration of a sense of community that includes everyone. On the Internet, people usually only dialogue with other like-minded people. Differences do not usually get resolved, not even through the courts, only managed. The net result has been a loss of community and a dangerous disconnection with other people.

The mass media disinforms people and without knowing the truth, they collectively grow detached from reality. Last year I engaged in a daily dialogue with my students in Europe about the war in Iraq. When I returned to the U.S. last summer, almost nobody was discussing it and I could not get anyone to sustain a conversation about it for more than a minute or two. The mass insanity of people carrying on their lives as though no war was being fought was truly mind boggling.

I could go on and on with how I have considered many aspects of this issue of culpability. I now live in China, which is breaking free of the fetters of a repressive era, opening to the world in a process that is exciting to witness. From this vantage point, the U.S. seems to be mired in as repressive a totalitarianism as the Chinese suffered in the cultural revolution. Were the Chinese people responsible for what their government did to them? Are any people truly responsible for conditions when they have succumbed to fear? Are the American people responsible for what their government is doing, not only to them, but to people in other countries and all over the world?

After going round and round on this, what I have concluded is that if the American people are not responsible for what their government or military does, then who is? Who is better situated to hold it accountable for its actions? Therefore, I challenge each and every person in the U.S. to examine their hearts and souls to ask themselves if they are passively contributing to the murder and torture of people in other countries by the military and intelligence agencies of their country, and if there is truly any justification for the wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and possibly coming up, a war in Iran.

I challenge each and every person reading this to consider what you can do differently if you do not want to be complicit in the pursuit of empire of the U.S. today. Do you really want to cooperate with the megalomania of leaders of this country in attempting to force U.S. rule over the entire world? Is there any way you might express your voice and build community that can bring about effective change?

Ariel Ky

We give thanks and honor to our mother, the Earth, whose beauty and love glorifies our lives as the sun rises and sets and sparkles on the sea, as the wind blows in the trees and carries the seeds, as our existence depends on the bees.