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'Wealth Creation' and the new Salish
Universe first moved Patrick into my life when he had just turned 19. This was mere months before he began his expedition north along the coastline of British Columbia, Canada. This, our first meeting, was nearly a year before he built his tree habitat some 20 meters (60+ feet) up in an old growth cedar just at the edge of high bank rocky shoreline a few days travel by kayak north of Vancouver Island.
Now in his mid thirties, Patrick is a good representative of a new Salish person. I use the term Salish as it has come to be applied by anthropologists, which is to say as a label for those 'indigenous peoples inhabiting the coastal areas from northern Oregon to the southern most range of the Tinglit peoples of southern Alaska'. Furhter, in my personal definition, the 'new Salish' are those people out creating wealth and their futures in the spirit of 'harmony with earth' that is so characteristic of the original Salish peoples.
The term Salish is actually applied to a large, and mostly inter-related group of peoples centered in the coastal areas of Puget Sound and the off sound islands. The term Salish covers a number of different tribes loosely bound by a more or less common Salishan Language Family . The Salish, as tribal societies, also had a common ethos based on 'living within earth spirit'. This guiding ethos is built around a perception of reality in which 'all beings and things are spirit'. Some of the manifestations of reality such as rocks and the stuff of the planet are just really really dense extracts of spirit, whereas creatures such as raven and salmon, both exhibiting grace-on-the-earth, are less dense, lighter and more fluid expressions of spirit-dancing-here-on-earth. Creatures such as humans, who can exhibit grace, but rarely do so these days, are between rocks and ravens in spirit vibrations. From the view point of the Salish, vibrations closer to spirit were better to be-in.
From our view point here at HPH, vibrations closer to spirits' native state, or orginal being, as the Toaists label it, are better to be-in, and it is demonstrably favored by universe. An exceptionally bright human of the last century, Buckminster Fuller, also independently arrived at the conclusion that 'universe favors those who are in harmony with it'. Buckminster Fuller also ascertained that by the use of 'life experiments', that universe provides a positive feedback loop for those beings in harmony with its principles and direction. Basically, 'things in life' go better, easier, when one is in an appropriate 'groove' or channel of activities that harmonize with universal principles.
Bucky Fuller was a Salish person, though doubtful he thought of himself so. Patrick, on the other hand, even though the son of eastern Maritime province fisherman, and his american wife, does think of himself as Salish. He even speaks a little of the languge, now that its revival as a cultural imperative is speading through the Salish tribes along the coast. But his linguistic skills aside, he is perfect example of Salish grace-upon-the-earth, and Bucky Fuller's positive feedback principle for universal harrmony.
Universe moved Patrick into my life as we were both intrigued by skin-on-frame boats (kayaks and umiaks) and had joined several of the same boat
building discussion groups online. Patrick built a skin-on-frame kayak, using George Dyson's adaptation of the baidarka, and eventually used it to take himself, and nearly a half ton of supplies and tools up the coast of British Columbia until he found that 'spot that universe selected' for him.
It was at that spot selected by universe on the stark rocky coast of the outside arm of a protected bay that Patrick started to build his wealth in life. He began by gleaning a living from the ocean, and the near by hills (berries and roots, oh my!). Later he would build a tree habitat high up in the old growth cedars that dominate the remote inlet. Later, after having married and discovered that pregnant women do not like either the climb up 60 feet into the tree house, or the shaking and swaying of the trees in the winter storms, Patrick hewed a house of drift logs and winter kill trees, cleared small areas for planting, and taught himself the intricacies of big boat building (once again, pregnant women and 45 km trips in baidarkas just don't mix well).
To support his wife and their growing family, Patrick began creating wealth in the form of smaller (30 foot more or less) junk style sail boats that he could build over the winters, and sail down for selling into the more moneyed markets of Vancouver and Victoria, BC. Over the years he elevated his craft and built wealth creating wooden boats for the ex-pat Chinese populace of BC.
Wealth creation for Patrick and the other of the new Salish people, begins and ends with creation of objects of continuing utility with the materials provided by universe. This may mean using a drifting old growth cedar as the main beam and most of the joists for the roof of the house *after learning about, and building your own sawmill. It may mean using products from local plywood mills, and windfall lumber to create boats of beauty and utility by framing a hole in universe only you can see and setting it upon the water. It may mean teaching your daughters to glean berries from local islands for sale for college fund money, always sharing respectfully with the bears, and other creatures of the coastal biosphere. It may mean learning, with your wife, to weave cedar strips from the discard pile into baskets in the old Salish fashion (now for sale at cruising tourist and fishing party anchorages). Wealth creation does mean, always, finding your personal positive feedback loop from universe, and harmonizing with it.
For Patrick and the other new Salish, wealth creation is not to be found in a cube farm staring at computer screens while helping to create yet more abstractions around concepts already many layers removed from real things. In the lives of the new Salish peoples, the creation of wealth is easily discerned as being the product of hard work and willing acceptance of the hardships imposed. Wealth is not the result of theft, nor coercion, nor trickery for the Salish, but is always based first and last on respect. Respect for universe, earth, ocean, cedar, air, and beings condensed from the fog of spirit. This is the path of the new Salish.
This is also the path to which the rest of the Americans will return in short order. Argueably, the dollar, and the paper debt instruments/abstractions of the central bank regime currently in power across this earth are built on an infrastructure of death, misery and exploitation of life in all its forms. This is not a harmonious path, and as is always the case, universe has provided for its destruction. We are now living in the days of that destruction and as this next year (November 2009 through November 2010) progresses, the nature of the rot and corruption and deadly exploitation covered by the veneers of abstractions will be revealed as the death of the dollar and the empire of the Bilderbergers comes to its end.
Once the abstractions of 'wealth' in the form of 'paper debt' and 'borrowing' crash to nothing over Fall and Winter of 2009, and into 2010, the American peoples will still need to eat, still need to exist here on earth. To do this they will need to work. They will still seek to create wealth. Only at this juncture of time, the options will be very very limited. Earth itself is saying that it can't take yet another paper debt abstraction scheme focused on only near term results and the willingness to exploit others for narrowly defined material satisfaction of the power elite. The earth itself, as nearby proxy for universe, is saying enough is enough.
The American populace of the 21st century has much in kinship with the defeated peoples of Germany and Japan at the end of WW2; destroyed manufacturing base, destroyed and neglected national infrastruture, destroyed currencies, corrupt leadership, and no where to go but up.
The American populace of the 21st century has to face the karmic debt of over a century of military hegemony in support *entirely* of the power elite and their dollar and the evils that this has brought. The American populace of the 21st century will face horrific times that will test us all as the destruction phase of the cycle of the USofA dollar (as global reserve currency) comes to its end. The American populace of the 21st century, like Patrick and the other new Salish, will have to learn to build wealth the really really old fashioned way, through respect for universe, hard work, suffering and hardship. The American populace of the 21st century has to return to personal growth not from a 'self help industry', but rather from personal change in the face of adverse circumstances.
The American populace of the 21st century will soon begin to learn that harmony matters for all of us living within earth spirit, trapped somewhere between rock and raven.
