Heinz Meanz Care4Care.mov

Guesstimate the percentage of people around you who are....

- Time Rich and Money Poor?

- Money Rich and Time Poor?

- Time Poor and Money Poor?

- Money Rich and Time Rich?

How would you encourage people to better use their time/money to co-create a more caring and sharing community?

How about this approach to addressing the unevenness that creates so much (relative) misery?:

"No more do you have to save up for so many consumer items, the things you want and need are increasingly on streetbank.com or, for those not using the internet for sharing, People are now getting to meet their neighbours more and daring to ask to borrow stuff and help each other. Wonderful news, as long as it's done responsibly."

Skills get traded and new skills learned through your local Timebank. 

This is how people can afford to get services from others that they couldn't before:

1) the philosophy is "your hour is as valuable as my hour" 

2) you don't have to find a direct swap of services; the timebank broker finds creative ways you can earn your timebank hours, including for attending community meetings and delivering these leaflets or doing what you most love to do for others. 

3) It's easier to earn timebank credits than you think.

I'm particularly interested to hear from you:

1) a view you have about your local community 

2) something you'd like someone to offer to you

3) a skill you'd like to develop 

4) a grief or grievance you have?

5) your first name (& first letter of your surname?)

6) your photo?

#CommunityDevelopment sayings

STREETBANK:

I'd like to make it easier for people to get hold of tools and DVDs and books and transport and party items on our street without buying them. That's only half of why I streetbank; the rest is all the wonderful connections and unexpected benefits that come from knowing neighbours better. (http://streetbank.com)

TIMEBANK:

I like what you do and I'd like some hours of your time, please. Do you #timebank and what is it that you want our timebank to do (for you)? I love how the Timebank events build local skills whilst banking hours that go to serve marginalised members of the community. Thus we prevent evictions, boost family life and direct where there is need the energy of the surplus hours we accidentally create just by doing what we love to do with others.(http://stleonardstimebank.blogspot.co.uk/)

CARE4CARE:

It's likely that I'll be older in the not too distant future and in need of help with shopping, cooking, caring in order to be fairly independent in the home I have. I timebank Care4Care hours and thus become a shareholder in Freelending Community Interest Company, in which I now have a vested interest to ensure this care service (that wonderful Heinz Wolff devised) rolls down from generation to generation.

more caring and sharing community

Enrich your life thus?

1) Put your books, DVDs, Skills to share etc on streetbank.com

2) Make new connections and share your sharing stories at freelenders.blogspot.co.uk

3) Let Paul Crosland ("#FreeRange #Buddhist" & "Lend-It-All Man") know what items/skills you want to be able to borrow through streetbank.com rather than buy anything ever again?, like the "Moneyless Man" has managed for 3 years now.

Less ambitiously, perhaps just share your book "wish list" or list the tools needed for some repairs; food, rent and care for the elderly/"needy" are longer term ambitions to be provided by timebanking.

4) Dare to dream of living a better quality, more connected life that costs you less and together we'll co-create the more caring & sharing community around us.

Meanwhile, if you want a taste of the Buddhist (and Pagan) Enquiry /practice driving my contribution to this work  prepare to find it confusing and esoteric:

A visual flavour of my work

#FreeRange #Buddhist - Search Me!

"#FreeRange #Buddhist"  walking and searching for soul and being available to give time, whilst making the YouTube Channel "toothpaste007" films that are integral to who I am.
This persona seems really integrated and appears both sustainable and growthful, a balancing act that the economic-political world hasn't got yet.
There's a long way to go yet before we get enough re-balancing.

Look me up?

Look me up? -Please. And thank you for following...



The "Search for me" link is here again; keep coming back & pressing it!

Barclays, Stock Devaluation, Pensions, Credit Unions, Church of England, Bank of England and Buddhist Door-Knockers led by Jayaraja building community - some synergy please!

Whistleblower on the unsustainability of the Monetary/Debt/ Capitalist/Unethical "System", Paul Crosland, visits former Bank of England Director, Sir Mervin King to discuss Barclays losing 8% of stock market value yesterday, parallel Pension fund loses, and proposes that one way the tide could turn is for institutions like the Church of England sacrificing some capital to support Credit Unions setting up pension schemes involving money and twenty year Timebanking investments in a Care4Care scheme, inspired by Prof Heinz Wolff on http://YouTube.com/toothpaste007

(This film is the first part of a journey to meet my influential neighbours & encourage you to build your economy around you with your neighbours in good time.)

Phone me on Zero7807066202 for interviews including the work of Freelending CIC which I co-direct and has been brought in to provide strategy advice for Timebanking UK & has been said to be years ahead by the leading(?) UK Sustainability Think-Tank.

The film about this below really gets going after a minute that may seem bizarre; to keep my credibility I embed the relevant YouTube footage of the referred to Woodpecker below this film:

Sharing my values and my stand for generosity

I value being part of a team working on a joint project. I so want to belong somewhere and feel both useful and nourished. This is an example of what I might do once embedded in a new community context: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuZSt1gsD2g

What do you wish for from the coming year?

What am I doing with 2013?

My main interview themes these days:

1. "What does getting to be 100 mean to you?"
2. Are you on track with fulfilling the purpose of this life of yours now?
3. What does British mean to you?
4. Do you know anyone whose life I could change for the better by my presence at the right time and/or £250 from the cash machine (& if not, why not?)

Here's the key link to my selected stream of recorded consciousness
I'm taking Buddhism seriously now after 14 years of meditation (allegedly) i.e. to use Vessantara's phrase, I'm entrusting more and more to the three jewels (The Buddha, His teaching and the community following that path). I'm grateful that I can eke out a small inheritance to support me for another year in regular visits to the London Buddhist Centre and to a retreat centre in Norfolk whilst I continue to work -at the most personal level yet- on conflicts in my life (& supporting others in conflict around me, I hope). I plan in 2013 to go travelling and enquiring of people I meet what "getting to be 100" means to them. Let's meet up and incorporate into that meeting an interview on this topic, please.

More specific goals/working grounds are:
1) 6 points of family harmonisation
Here are some of the background films relevant to my December 2012 commitment:

"I stand for working together responsibly with family resources and needs within the family."

(March 1st 2012) (March 26th 2012) (June 11th 2012) (July 6th 2012) (October 24th 2012) (November 13th 2012) (December 22nd 2012) (December 23rd 2012)

2) Development of my work on "Loving & Healing Mistrust & Fear" such that it is in a format useful to others experiencing mistrust & fear.

Dedicated spaces for having conflicts from Restorative Circles on Vimeo.


3) 6 Actors willing to improvise the story of "King Lear and a right pair of mediators" & have it filmed.


4) Research into Britishness & Ageing for "2066 -the movie"


5) Preparation of a course on Buddhist Ethics
- Buddhist scripture on purifying the gathering of those listening to the Buddha's words - How being a hermit helps others

6) In preparation for ordination into the Triratna Buddhist Order (one day in the next 10 years, I guess) Deepening my Sangha connections & going for refuge



7) Some walkabout/pilgrimage eg living on £3/day and picking litter in every East Anglian village through which I pass.


8) Some new skills eg guitar or mandolin, so that I can better play the troubadour, replete with unrequited love.

Paul Crosland 1966-2045?

My wished for Memorial Service: For the programme cover:

The videos for the service are on the playlist entitled "My funeral Wish List" at http://YouTube.com/toothpaste007
Here's one that I hope will be played towards the end: And here's one not officially on the list (due to risk of misinterpretation) that holds up a kind of mirror to me:

"A Time of Ashes" (as referred to in the blurb below this blog's title) comes from Robert Bly's difficult (for me) groundbreaking book about men, Iron John. In this third chapter (which I got into having twice given up after reading two chapters over as many years) Bly took up the issue of naïveté, numbness, depression and katabasis. The full chapter title is "The Road of Ashes, Descent, and Grief".

The Greeks spoke of katabasis as an abrupt drop when a man no longer feels like a special person. My video on this loss of specialness is from Timeon in the "My Buddhafield" playlist & is also on my funeral playlist; hopefully not to be played by my human remains until 2045?

Bly states that these days katabasis comes about through addiction to alcohol, drugs, food, sex, etc. “The man loses his health and ends up with thin legs, flat energy, deprived of wife and children, deprived of friends, house, money. He loses his job, self-respect, and every mark of his former art and life.”

Bly goes on to say that in the nineteenth century, men characteristically failed to notice the female suffering, and in this century, men have added another inattention: they characteristically have failed to notice their own suffering. Men endeavor to stay above it, away from it rather than dealing with it by going down and into it, to learn from it. He encourages men to take the downward path as an elective to avoid the crisis or potential disaster that can arise from katabasis. Depression is a form of katabasis. The epidemic of anxiety is wreaking havoc in the lives of millions of men. Exploring one’s grievances and getting in touch with one’s grief can be the antidote.

It appears that psyche arranges a severe katabasis if the man does not know enough to go down on his own. Bly suggests that, “With intitiators gone from our culture, we do not receive instruction on how to go down on our own… To live the life of ashes is very different from dropping into katabasis. It doesn’t require a fall in social status. It is not so explosive; there is something about ashes that is steady, even lethargic… Ashes and cinders in fairy tales are code words for the ashy, sooty, depressed, ‘out of it’ time.”

“The word ashes contains in it a dark feeling for death; ashes when put on the face whiten it as death does…some men around thirty-five or forty will begin to experience ashes privately, without ritual, even without old men. They begin to notice how many of their dreams have turned to ashes.”

Bly gives us, “…By contrast, the old men in traditional initiation lead the young men to the Beneath Father, near where the ancestors live and where snakes are… Initiation asks the son to move his love energy away from the attractive mother to the relatively unattractive serpent father. All that is ashes-work. When a man enters this stage he regards Descent as a holy thing, he increases his tolerance for ashes, eats dust as snakes do, increases his stomach for terrifying insights, deepens his ability to digest evil facts of history, accepts the job of working seven years under the ground, leaves the granary at will through the rat’s hole, bites on cinders, learns to shudder, and follows the voice of the old mole below the ground.”

Underneath the title

How do you sum up your life mission (or even just your intermediate aims & objectives) in just 500 characters. "This is the wording that I have just removed from the beneath the blog title, as it is now out of date, though I still stand for the same things: I set up my St Leonards studio/office (at the Southwater Community Centre) as a result of the 2010 Pier Fire. I work as a Community Development Artist/Activist, promoting 3 non-monetary economies: 1) gifting eg freecycle and "please take", 2) sharing everything we own eg via the acclaimed freelender website & 3) timebanking. I'm recruiting & joining teams who co-create community; innovating in getting stuck communications unstuck & taking responsibility."

My team won the award for mobile/web app most likely to reduce youth reoffending and custody

The award was in 2010 and the team did not find the right piloting conditions; members being stretched between too many other projects. Now that I've ended most of my projects in Hastings & St Leonards it is time to look in particular at finding new partners in London for a co-created development based on the ideas that won the Jailbrake competition. If you work for a Youth Offending Team or other location where Restorative Justice seems particularly relevant, please phone me (Tel 07807066202) to discuss my presenting to your team and/or how else we might take this forward:

Jailbrake 2010 from The People Speak on Vimeo.