Question: Peak Oil?
stable solid line | stable divided line | stable solid line
stable divided line | moving divided line | moving divided line
Earth over Fire evolving into Wind over Fire
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36. Wounded Brightness |
37. Family Members |
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Being weakened. It is good to work diligently on the situation. |
People are there for each other. |
Moving Line 5:
Viscount of Ji’s hidden brightness.
It is beneficial to persist.
Tactfully feigning ignorance, in order to avoid being hurt by someone. It is a good idea to persist doing that. (The viscount of Ji feigned madness, in order to escape the abuses of a king.)
Line 6:
Not brightness, but darkness.
At first ascending to heaven,
then going into the earth.
Things seemed so bright at the start, but are turning unlucky.
Forging ahead with the Beauty Platform … what is the beautiful response to Peak Oil?
The reading is “Wounded Brightness” in the idiosyncratic translation I have been using … also known as the darkening of the light.
As my friend Billy B in grad school would say, Huh.
Evolving into Family Members, also known as “the family”.
As far as the moving lines, the moving line six, asking about Peak Oil and getting a tendency reading of “at first ascending to heaven, then going into the earth” is just … well, lets just say that its a good thing that these readings are efforts to provide random reframings of these issues to avoid thinking through the same old rut. Because if they were, like, divinations, that would just be spooky, man.
However, its the other moving line that rubs against the grain for the blogosphere: the Viscount of Ji feigned madness to avoid the abuses of the King (dya think Shakespeare read the I Ching? I’ll have to ask his sister sometime). Tactful feigned ignorance.
Of course, the “as literal a description of the Hubbert’s Peak as you could imagine getting from the I Ching” combined with Viscount of Ji evolves Wounded Brightness into Family Members.
Hmmm … what about this, as a reading? Sometimes, when we look at Peak Oil, and look at the consequences of Peak Oil, and see things that ought to be done to prepare for life after Peak Oil …
… we step back and ask whether they are things that are good to do for their own sake? Can we think about fighting for them, for their own sake? As the decline off of the Peak accelerates, they will deliver the same benefit even if we don’t get to say “I Told You So.”
Actually, come to think of it, I guess I have some experience doing that. I spent quite a lot of time and effort while in Australia fighting the removal of the passenger rail line that goes to the heart of downtown Newcastle and the harbor Foreshore. The push for removal was based locally on ossified 1970’s type thinking and in State Government by a Transport Minister with an anti-rail political agenda.
However, while the removal of the line was a terrible idea from a “Green” perspective … it was also a terrible idea for fostering small business growth in the old downtown, which even then was experiencing serious parking headaches as new water-view apartments and new professional offices fought with retailer and restaurants for space. But, of course, the lack of cars looking for a space because their owners took the train into town was invisible, while the ugly tracks and overhead electric lines were quite visible. And motorists waiting in cars at the railway crossing for a train that appears to be quite empty … cannot see that adding another hundred cars on the road they are on will leave them waiting even further back, as already bottlenecked traffic intersections back up even further.
But we fought them, and were relatively successful … several efforts to (ahem) railroad the move through were sent back for further evaluation, and with oil prices as they are, the sting ought to be going out of the tail of the drive to pull up tracks.
So that is what comes to mind when I see this evolution. We need to radically restructure the relationship between suburban housing and our transport system if people are going to be able to get from one place to another as we slide down the Oil Peak. However, knowing that … what if we then put Peak Oil itself on the back burner, and ask how we can make Suburbs better places to live?
There will be a wide range of answers to that question … and many of them will have to be compatible with a response to Peak Oil, given that the traditional sprawl development looks like it was intentionally designed to waste as much energy as possible.
In my mind, this evolving into reading “The Family” as “Solidarity”. Ask people what they want to fix about the suburb … build that into our change agenda … and in the process, draw them into our family.
| Roots Natty Congo – Sister Carol |
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| Junglist – Congo Natty |
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| No man kill another man – Jambo |
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Long Live the Beauty Platform! |
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Author
gaze at tomorrow with eyes free of doubt
the white bell that quietly overlooks us
as long as it’s beautiful, it’s fine
Author
because even if I try to run far away from pain
look, the chill wind is shaking my hair
where should I search for the answer?
Author
Summer evening
Humidity is gone, and
the heat’s gone too.
Resolving to Family is the key–we must treat each other as family–when we do that our energy needs will be dramatically reduced since we will share rather than each have to have our own bit of property, e.g. driving alone during our commute and living the unconnected suburban lifestyle.
The changing line refers, I think, to many people who have not acted on the implications of Peak Oil and yet know of it as reality–as you can see for the incredibly “lite” coverage it has in the press compared to the concern about it by people in the energy business.
People in the know work for a living and saying certain things will get them in trouble with their superiors so they endure–that’s the only way. When the balance of power shifts, as we all hope, I think people will begin to talk about issues realistically in the real world (as opposed to the blogosphere where you can remain anonymous–or relatively so).