[Catalyst #13] Large global events / Tackling climate change / Australia's UPLIFT 2012 / Thanksgiving expressions
To build the momentum for our planet's Birth, pledge your commitment to taking part in the "Three Days of Love" (December 20-22), and forward this opportunity to your friends. During these three days, we invite everyone to vow to make every word and action one of kindness, friendship, and generosity—to help prepare the "field" for the new era now being born.
Inspiration for the "Three Days of Love"
Large Global Events Mark the December 21-22 Passage By Byron Belitsos, Managing Editor
Activists throughout the world are preparing for the new era in grand style. In addition to our own Birth 2012 celebrations, now detailed here, the historic passage through December 21, 2012 will witness many other large 2012 festivals. These include not only Synthesis 2012, which we have covered before, and Australia's UPLIFT 2012 (covered in this week's Catalyst), but also major events at Stonehenge, Maui, Thailand, Egypt, Guatamala, and elsewhere. A great summary of these important events, including ours, can be found here in Common Ground magazine. This latter piece is just one example of the expanding press coverage for Birth 2012; see link just below for a listing of the recent media stories.
Our own festivities include several components. Over a period of 33 hours beginning noon on December 21, you and your hub can "tune in" at Birth2012.com and witness an unprecedented feat as our technical team weaves together live feeds from the above-mentioned major global events, plus dozens of smaller ones including those of many Birth 2012 hubs—and much, much more. As we reported before, the anchor location for this webcast is the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles. At this site, live events will take place during a "24-hour Birth 2012 Vigil" that includes synchronized moments of "expansion" every two hours, plus music and inspirations, with much of it webcast. It all culminates in the Birth Day Gala at Agape (details here) on Saturday, Dec. 22 from 11:30-3:30 pm.
We'll soon give you a detailed update about Barbara's very special "Theater of Our Birth" event, which will be staged by UPLIFT 2012 at Byron Bay, Australia on Dec. 20 (which is Dec. 19 in the North American time zone). The article below explains how to get an app so you can follow the Byron Bay events.
Getting into Right Relationship with Indigenous Peoples By Stephen Dinan, founder and CEO of The Shift Network
First, let me share what I love about Thanksgiving: the expression of gratitude for all we are given, which for me includes YOU! I am deeply grateful to have connected with so many beautiful, powerful, radiant, committed souls who are doing their best to shift things on planet earth and create the world we all know is possible. That includes you. Thank you for the many small and large ways that you bring light into areas of darkness, wisdom into places of ignorance, and beauty into sullied corners of our world. We are on a journey of awakening together, in the service of birthing a new era. Thank you for showing up fully and inspiring me (and others) to love more, be more, and express more of the creativity that is our birthright.
On this day of gratitude, I also want to acknowledge the indigenous peoples of the Americas who were not treated with dignity and respect. May we heal that past and open a new spirit of partnership for moving forwards. Earlier this year, we launched a powerful Declaration of Commitment as a way for us to create right relationship again and I encourage you to sign it today and spread to others. Thanksgiving is a mournful holiday for many Native Americans, so let's help shift that by making a profound commitment together.
Also, we'll be in ceremony this weekend with Grandmother Flordemayo and Don Alejandro of Guatemala, plus several other indigenous elders. We hope this circle can help in some way to reweave the threads that were once broken. If you'd like to share in what emerges from this wisdom circle, we'll have a free teleseminar with them on Monday, which you can register for here.
May the ripples of gratitude spread far and wide through each of our hearts today!
One of the most impressive events inspired by the Birth 2012 movement is UPLIFT 2012, the Australian anchor for Birth 2012 that's planned to take place at Byron Bay at the furthest Eastern point of the continent. With Barbara Marx Hubbard as its headliner, the festival will feature a long list of world pioneers, artists, visionaries devoted to igniting positive change. This huge four-day festival will provide a global livestream broadcast from the festival site and will play host to the first in a global series of dawn ceremonies on December 22.
The intention behind UPLIFT 2012 is to provide a venue for world luminaries "to create a future beyond what we now imagine, far more connected and filled with greater peace and awareness," says producer Chris Dekker, who was interviewed in an earlier Catalyst. And the folks at UPLIFT have just announced an "app" that lets users access a live video feed of the event, and access many useful services prior to the festival including videos, social media, and updates.
Byron Bay will be the site of the world premiere of Barbara's life project, Theater of Our Birth, which Barbara describes as "a theater work that is the story of creation, from the big bang to this current turning point in history, with stunning performance, video, dancers and more. For me, the invitation to offer Theater of our Birth telling our new story from the origin of creation to the present and beyond is a . . . [read more]
Birth 2012 Gaining National Press Coverage
Press coverage for Birth 2012 has risen steadily since May when we first introduced Barbara's book, Birth 2012 and Beyond,
which quickly received many reviews and excerpts and continues to sell well as a paperback and an eBook. Thanks to our national publicist Jill Mangino, the press is now covering the movement itself, notably in nationally circulated print magazines like Light of Consciousness and Origin Magazine, which also listed Stephen Dinan "one of three leaders shifting the planet" in its current issue. You can peruse all of our press coverage here at this new link. And now, in the build up for the grand events of December 20-22, Shift Network has hired four additional publicity professionals, Nicole Nassar (national publicity), Lora O'Connor (alliance building), Dawna Shuman (LA event marketing and PR) and Hilary White (social media).
We all know that Hurricane Sandy wreaked unprecedented havoc on large parts of the East coast. With the scientific data now in hand, we can be virtually certain that more frequent megastorms on the scale of Sandy are in our near future. In fact, the scientists who for years have predicted this kind of climate chaos have issued a stark warning: if we stay on our current path of carbon emissions, our children and their children could live on a super-heated and largely uninhabitable planet.
The Birth 2012 movement is of course just one expression of concern about this dire predicament. The initiative by renowned journalist Bill McKibben [pictured here, photo by Tim Porter] known as 350.org—which just entered a new and more aggressive phase of activism this month—is another crucial expression. His solutions? Stop the onslaught of propaganda, often funded by the fossil fuel industry, that casts doubt on climate change science, and implement a steep carbon tax. Such a tax would make polluters pay for the damage they do and encourage all of us to convert to non-polluting sources of energy.
"All pollution is a subsidy," writes Birth 2012 Welcoming Committee member Rinaldo Brutoco in a recent piece in Truthout. "By tolerating pollution, we've made a policy decision to let corporations foist some of their costs onto the public. We need to undo this transfer and put the 'off-balance sheet' health and environmental costs of corporations' carbon pollution back where they belong—with the companies that make a business decision to profit from dirty energy."
A key leader in this crucial work of challenging polluters is . . . [read more]
"By doing one learns; with study one refines; through dreaming one creates; in loving one fulfills—such is the secret art of tending to the sacred garden of our soul."
—Don Oscar Miro-Quesada
Many such fine epigrams could be cited in our profile of beloved Welcoming Committee member Don Oscar Miro-Quesada—and many can be found in his stirring manifesto, "A Shamanic Re-Membering of Universal Humanity," that appeared in Barbara's book Birth 2012 and Beyond. In it, he inspires us with fervent advocacy for the global and "cross-cultural" import of our many traditions of shamanism and ancient healing arts, having himself been trained extensively in Peruvian shamanism. In his person Oscar represents a vital synthesis of Earth-based spiritual traditions with modern science and humanities, for in addition to advanced shamanic training, he is also educated in the Western liberal arts with a specialty in transpersonal clinical psychology. His activist commitment is reflected in his involvement in initiatives at the United Nations on behalf of indigenous peoples and "inter-spiritual" dialogue and his founding of the Heart of the Healer Foundation, which Oscar calls a "catalyst for the emergence of a planetary family living in sacred relationship with our Earth Mother."
"Never before has there been a greater need than now for a resonant field of soul-restorative shamanic consciousness in service to the emergence of a spiritually adept planetary culture," writes Oscar. "We are naturally endowed with imaginative and physical resources for catalyzing the evolutionary ascension of a universal humanity. This is the living dream of our re-Membering, the long-anticipated coming together after the separation."
[read more]
Activists throughout the world are preparing for the new era in grand style. In addition to our own Birth 2012 celebrations, now detailed 
First, let me share what I love about Thanksgiving: the expression of gratitude for all we are given, which for me includes YOU! I am deeply grateful to have connected with so many beautiful, powerful, radiant, committed souls who are doing their best to shift things on planet earth and create the world we all know is possible. That includes you. Thank you for the many small and large ways that you bring light into areas of darkness, wisdom into places of ignorance, and beauty into sullied corners of our world. We are on a journey of awakening together, in the service of birthing a new era. Thank you for showing up fully and inspiring me (and others) to love more, be more, and express more of the creativity that is our birthright.
One of the most impressive events inspired by the Birth 2012 movement is 
The Birth 2012 movement is of course just one expression of concern about this dire predicament. The initiative by renowned journalist Bill McKibben [pictured here, photo by Tim Porter] known as 
