Debt traps are worse than mouse traps

Do you know how many years' income you will spend on your home or car loan before it's paid off? How many years of work you'd have saved with a smaller house or car, paid off more quickly? The cost of debt is huge, but we're trained to ignore it.

We're deluged with advertising to increase our outflow into other people's pockets. "Zero money down"? Great, until "down" becomes "out". Big print on credit card offers sound great. But the small print often ends up costing us 20-30% interest - on everything we charge, not just our balance. High school graduates are deluged with credit card offers (or get equally big student loans) so they start out with both feet in the debt trap.

Twenty percent of all family, business, and government expenditures go to the cost of borrowing instead of paying when we buy. That's up to 10 years of our lives spent working off interest payments to the banks! Some borrowing is needed, but a lot is pure laziness and brain-washed thinking. Take Oregon highways for example. The state takes in a certain amount every year from gas taxes, and pays out the same monies for highway maintenance...

Global: Claymont Compost

Many years ago I attended a three-month-long summer course in the Gurdjieff teachings at Claymont Court in West Virginia. One of the classes that first summer was run by two garden ladies, who had been students of Alan Chadwick at the University of California at Santa Cruz. There they learned about Biodynamic methods, the use of the Rudolf Steiner preparations, for garden and compost. At Claymont, the gardeners were applying this Biodynamic methodology.

On that particular July day they gathered about 15 of us students in the compost yard where there were open-fronted stalls that had formerly housed prize beef calves. The manure was old and dry, but we transported it - twenty tons, more or less - by wheelbarrow to build a long, wide pile maybe five feet high and twenty feet long, watering it down as we went.

Next, one of the garden ladies said, "Well, we're going to apply these herbal preparations here, put them in the pile." She was vague [or I was slow on the uptake] about just why we were doing this...something about cosmic forces, harmony of energies, whatever. The packets she had of these preparations, five of them, just filled the palm of her hand...