This holiday season, buy a gift that will not only make a friend or family member happy, but will also benefit Tapestry Institute. We will be adding gifts as the season progresses. Currently, we have examples of wonderful artwork by Carol Francisco that she is now offering for sale at her Earth Mosaics Store at Zazzle.com. Come visit the Tapestry Institute Store today to learn more. And send the links to your friends, colleagues, and family members!

As the wildfires continue to burn in California, Tapestry Institute has posted Wildfire Support pages on our website. Please feel free to email, post and tell people about these webpages. We know what it's like to experience a wildfire and to live with the aftermath. Our prayers and thoughts go out to everyone in California right now. We hope that our pages will help you now and in the coming days and months.

As you may know, Tapestry Institute has been doing groundbreaking research into the different ways we know, learn about, and respond to the horse-human relationship. You can learn about some of the exciting issues we have been exploring by reading “Ancient Roots of Relationship,” a free, online article written by Dawn Adams, Ph.D. and myself that has just been posted at the new website Equesse.net. Equesse is a new website and magazine devoted to the special relationship between women and horses. To read the article, simply go to http://www.equesse.net and register (registration is free). Log in to the site and go to the “Life” section, where you will find the article.

Please feel free to repost this entry or send it as an email to people who you think may be interested in the article. To learn more about the work that we do, please visit our website at http://www.tapestryinstitute.org .

Greetings from Tapestry Institute!

I know that you care about Tapestry's mission and work of reconnecting people with the earth. I am making this post because we need your help. As you may know, the last two years have been quite tumultuous for Tapestry. The catastrophic wildfire, coupled with the loss of our ranch in Nebraska and relocation to New Mexico, could easily have spelled the end of our organization. Instead, it provided a powerful impetus for our work.

Since relocating to New Mexico, we have been working on the following projects:
-- A book about wildfire, written from within Indigenous worldview, that both shares our experience in Nebraska and provides individuals with important information about wildfire;
-- The Digital Library of Indigenous Science Resources (www.dlisr.org) has begun to get a site redesign, and we are seeking partners and supporters to expand the database of resources;
-- The Voice of the Horse Project is moving forward as we have begun to analyze the results of the horse-human relationship survey and to finish our research for the book, which will include information from the Voice of the Horse Conference (held in summer 2007). In addition, Dawn Adams, Ph.D., and Joanne L. Belasco, Esq., have written several articles for publication in major equine magazines concerning our research into the horse-human relationship;
-- Carol L. Francisco, Ph.D., has begun exciting research on the different ways we know about and experience spirituality;
-- Carol has been photographing nature in New Mexico and using the photographs to create complex digital collages; and
-- We have redesigned our website (www.tapestryinstitute.org), making it easier for first-time visitors to navigate, while retaining vital information on such topics as ways of knowing, Indigenous worldview, Indigenous science, and tornadoes.

While all of this work is very exciting, we have encountered two unexpected - and unrelated - hurdles that we cannot get over without your help:
-- We must move to a new location in New Mexico by August 31; and
-- One of our computers and our external hard drive have both crashed. We already replaced one computer earlier this year and need to have the other one up and running so that we can submit grant applications to support our work.

To overcome these hurdles, all we need to raise is $7000. We know these are difficult financial times, and we would not ask for donations now if we did not absolutely need them to keep our work alive. We have not put out a call for donations since our relocation, but now we are pressed to the mat and must ask for help. All we need are 70 people who make a $100.00 donation; or 100 people who make a $70.00 donation; or 1000 people who make a $7.00 donation. Can you help us with a donation? Any amount that you can send to us will help us reach our goal by August 31. Can you ask your colleagues, friends, and family to help? Ask 10 of them for $10 each, and you have $100 right there! All donations are tax-deductible. Because of the urgency of our need, we are asking people to make donations via Paypal, if they are able. Just go to www.paypal.com and enter the email address jo@tapestryinstitute.org as the recipient. You will receive a receipt within a day of your donation. If you'd like to send a check or money order, please make it out to "Tapestry Institute," and send it to Tapestry Institute, Hc 34 Box 2c, Sapello, NM 87745. Please feel free to send this email to anyone whom you think might be able to help us out right now.

Thank you for any amount of money that you can donate to us, and thank you for spreading the word of our need. We would not be able to weather the storms that have buffeted us lately if it were not for the wonderful support of people like you!

The mix of politics and science has been troubled throughout the Bush Administration tenure, and groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists have worked with courage and diligence to prevent misappropriation, misrepresentation, censorship, and outright hijacking of scientific works by people determined to bend scientific data to their own political agendas. So it was with real anger that I read the guest editorial in the April 25 issue of the journal Science I got in the mail today.

Dr. Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State and the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, is a plant geneticist who specializes in genetic engineering. She writes, in an editorial designed to introduce a special issue of Science on plant genomics, about the existence of "perfect storm" conditions in the work of feeding the world's hungry. In this editorial, she writes: "Last December, the New York Times quoted a top United Nations food and agriculture official as saying that 'in an unforeseen and unprecedented shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels.' Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, was quoted as saying: 'We're concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world's hungry.' She said that poor people were being 'priced out of the food market.' In the months since, there have been food riots in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Central and South America."

In the lead paragraph to this editorial, Fedoroff had said that "More people, rising affluence, and expanding biofuels programs are rapidly pushing up the prices of grain and edible oil." Yet, when she finishes telling us about the honestly terrifying increase in food shortages and the food riots already breaking out as a result, she asks, "How did this happen?" and takes off in an entirely different direction: "Genetically modified (GM) cotton and corn with built-in protection from boring insects, and herbicide-resistant soybeans, have been adopted very rapidly in some countries, particularly the United States and Canada, increasing yields and decreasing the use of pesticides and herbicides. But despite a quarter-century's experience and a billion acres of GM crops grown worldwide, there are many nations that remain adamantly opposed to food from plants modified by molecular techniques. Others hesitate to adopt them for fear of losing markets in nations that reject GM technology."

I got to this point in the editorial and had to shake my head and double-check my new tri-focals. Had she said what I thought she said? Had this scientist who's in a position as science advisor to The U.S. Secretary of State actually blamed the world's hungry for their own problem? Had she said their problem was that they were afraid of genetically engineered foods (and non-foods like cotton?), so they were not making use of the foods (and fibers?) that had been so beautifully prepared for them by U.S. geneticists? And had she really implied that "despite" all the evidence, these apparently foolish souls were starving themselves because of their own ignorance?

Yeah, I think so. I really, with horror, think that's exactly what she did.

( Continued. )

Lately I've been watching videos of a great kobudo master named Shihan Mikio Nishiuchi. As I watch him do truly impressive lunges and blocks with the Okinawa-style fighting stick called a bo, my muscles tense in ways that mirror his movement even if I'm sitting in a chair at the time. This kind of thing happens fairly commonly: you watch a baseball game on TV and so feel like shagging balls with your kid, or you imagine throwing a discus and then do it exactly the way you imagined it. The link between physical activity as it is seen in the real world (witnessed) or in the mind's eye (imagination) has been established by researchers in everything from neurophysiology to sports psychology. But as I twitched and flinched while watching Shihan Nishiuchi last month, my mind turned to a research study I'd just read about in the journal Science.

Three scientists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands reported in "Preparing and Motivating Behavior Outside of Awareness" that they were able to demonstrate the presence of subliminal influence of even just the idea of physical activity on the speed and force of muscles. Notice both the words I italicized.
• It isn't just that someone watched a basketball game and it made them go play basketball, too. In that case, they would at least know that they'd seen people playing ball and it had made them think maybe they'd like to as well. But in this case, someone's body -- in fact, the bodies of 42 test subject someones -- responded to a cue of which they were not consciously aware. It was as if they went to a noisy bar where a basketball game was being played on a television that was not visible from their bar stool and not audible in the hum of conversation and clanking glassware -- and then, without realizing they'd heard a basketball game, decided, "Hey, I think I'll go shoot some hoops."
• More amazing, in this case it's as if what was on the bar's TV wasn't even a game, but merely a couple of commentators talking about jump shots and free throws, so that only the idea or concept of basketball, as words, was floating around in the person's subconscious to stimulate the going-out-and-playing of basketball.

( Learn more about how the study affects you. )

NOTE: This letter was written in response to someone’s despair over the coming oil crisis, the possible collapse of society because of that, and the affect all of it will have on the person’s children and their future.

I understand where you live at the moment. I want to be sure you know that what I am about to say to you is not offered from a position of ignorance or denial. I know exactly what you’re talking about and what you see when you talk about the impending oil crisis and possible collapse of western culture because of it.

The hope you seek does not lie in “solutions.” The idea that one should or can “find” “solutions” to “problems” is a deep expression of the worldview that one might call western or modern or just contemporary. The thing is, that’s the worldview that got us into this mess to begin with. You can’t get out of it by staying in it. Hope does not reside there. It resides elsewhere.

In other words, it’s not about giving up oil. It’s about giving up a worldview.

It’s not about running out of oil. It’s about running out of road. This road is the path that constitutes this “western” worldview: a way of thinking about and responding to the natural world that doesn’t go any farther. Just like oil doesn’t.

So what does goes farther? What road will lead your children into a future of hope and even joy? Be patient, as I try to explain it. Words don’t fit it as well as they fit things that lie on the “western” road, so you will have to reach out and feel for it between the lines, with your heart and your soul. But please try, for your childrens’ sake as well as your own. And please try not to jump to conclusions as you read what I say, of “Oh yes. I know exactly what you mean. I have been there and done that.” I know how easy it is for people to see the similarities in the two things and so stay exactly on the road that doesn’t go anywhere.

The road that leads to hope and joy is one of being instead of doing, of receiving instead of reaching, of relationship instead of removal. ( There is hope. )