Finding A Home:

After experiencing living in a nomadic fashion all my life I have come to feel the roots of nesting, settling in at my tender advanced age. My sweet woman has come to love our home to be; soon. And my thoughts of the changes I have in mind to make, tease me into implementing old ideas held in reserve since I was a young man. Set aside areas of one's abode designed for quiet contemplation and solitude from the cacophony of modern living. It is not hard work that kills the spirit then the body proper, it's stress. Stress, in a modern society such as ours, is a built-in feature.

Observing things as a home buyer, I am riding the perfect storm of situation and opportunity, where a stressed housing market has made homes affordable again, relatively speaking, and interest rates are are historically low. And the storm arrived on the wings of skulduggery and unabridged greed, from those that will be handling our home loans, finances, investments and retirement funds. I am not feeling all that fuzzy warm over that thought. I couldn't help but think about how far I would go in using the current weight of it being a buyer's market, where distressed owners are in the straights of having to seel their homes. . . as leverage to work the asking price over like a crazed boxer in the tenth round. Get that deal.

We offered the asking price. The owners signed within three hours. Karma won. And I take close note of the feel of the energy that pervades the process, and me. Something of the order of 'paying it forward', or just plain Karma for us that think in such terms. The Law of Attraction which governs the character of our intentions and the outcome of our decisions. Socially, we've spent thirty years shaping our society through valueless rewards and unrealistic expectations. It was enticing and we fell into its charismatic spell. It induced a crazed race for materialistic dominance for trinkets and toys. Eventually, we all feel the depressing reality that we're not happy, nor content. Just stuffed from the gorging and overburdened with debt. And feeling empty.

What gives me hope for a new paradigm to take form and branch out to touch each individual through the process of social interaction, is the same function of Perfect Storm conditions. When global corporations began gobbling up smaller ones and eventually dominating entire industries such as agri-businesses, the traditional family owned business, family owned farm all but disappeared. Everyone worked for the Company. The downside to that is the same with that of the old multi-player units of my youth, where one unit held a radio, 33rpm record player and sometimes a built-in reel to reel tape recorder. When one unit failed, nothing worked. Which is why component technology came to be. When one component failed, the others worked and the component could be replaced separately. So goes the practice of agriculture, where agri-business grow 25% or more of any given crop for all the U.S. Or the case of Iowa, the corn capital of this country, growing pretty much seeding all of it's arable land for feed corn, to be sent to Kansas to feed the millions of beef cattle for slaughter. If there was say. . . a draught in California in the San Joakuin Valley which grows much of the country's vegetables. . . or corporate beef sales died and Iowa couldn't sell all that feed corn. . . corporate trucks aren't able to carry food to market. . . there's going to be a rather huge problem, and damn little to do about it.

Which is where the perfect storm of situation and condition come together to realize a different means of doing business, and perceiving something larger than immediate material gain for the social body. As was posited thirty years ago by Alvin Tofler in his writings on The Electric Cottage, we have it within our means to take control of our lives by utilizing the connection we all have at our disposal. The computer and the internet. As I am doing now. I have a photography business that is directly connected to the internet, with a web-site as well as doing web-mercials for small businesses to put on their web-sites. With the stunning losses of jobs over the past years, and with much more to come, it is becoming more and more evident that the era of corporate domination of business may be closing, and rising is the growing sense of many of us that we don't need global business jobs to live, we just need an income. If we have a talent or expertise that can be sold to a corporation for a job position, we have that same talent to sell our expertise to the public at large. And depending on our service or product, there are half a billion computers with people sitting at them strolling the internet for things they want or need.

The change is us. The new paradigm is merely changing our routines and automatic lives, to live in the moment and know what we are doing. Changing a habit is not possible, until one wants to change the habitual behavior, and that usually always demands replacing the habit, or habitual behavior with something else. An alternative. Another behavior, a replacement for the habit. And that takes volition on our part. After we've come to realize we want the change in the first place. Cognition first, volition thereafter. After being on autopilot for a lifetime cognitive self-realization is not the simple act it would seem. It tends to piss Ego off like nothing else. Usurping power over self.

So the house we will shape into home brings with it a good energy that wraps itself around the entire deal. And our lives for some time to come. I'm still working on the new paradigm.