The Purple Elephant with the Little Mouse Presents Our Guest Blog: 6 Simple Ways to Live a Sustainable Lifestyle!

Here is the thing…the Purple Elephant with the little mouse hiding behind his ears as usual went to the market to buy some potatoes, corn and ochro (okra) for this soup the owner of the production house was making as all the monkeys had fallen ill with flu. While walking in the market the little mouse squealed and hid perfectly out of sight behind the Purple Elephant’s ear and then he whispered look down there. At that point the Purple Elephant felt a paw crawling up his knee and looked down to see a brown shiny coat dog. It’s just a dog he said to the little mouse…and then the little mouse peeped out from behind his ear again…

“Ooh...that’s nice…for a second I thought it was a giant rat and you know how rats like to bully us mice and I really wasn’t in the mood for such an altercation!” said the little mouse.

“Oh India and Thailand…these mouse and rat games…sometimes I think they are more bothersome than cat and mouse ones!" said the Purple Elephant as he scooped up the tiny brown dog with his long purple trunk! It was then he noticed the dog have a pendant around his chain and wait...lo and behold it wasn't a pendant really but a USB drive and the dog kept licking it...sometimes lapping it entirely into his mouth!

The Purple Elephant whisked the USB drive from the dog and threw it up to the little mouse who immediatley pushed the drive into his notebook to see on it was a blog...this blog from the good people at no other site but...THE DOG ATE MY BLOG (blog no longer exists)! The little mouse read it and felt it would have a home here at the Meady's Musings Production House and so he called up the owner when she gave it a yes well the Purple Elephant waved his giant purple trunk and here it is for you to read! Enjoy it!:)


6 Simple Ways to Live a Sustainable Lifestyle

Joy Paley is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog (blog no longer exists) and a writer on the Guide to Online Schools (blog no longer exists).

These days, everywhere you look someone is giving tips to live a “greener” lifestyle. While it makes sense to keep the earth in mind, a lot of these tips aren’t that easily implemented by people who are on a budget or lack certain skills. Sure, I’d love to install solar panels on my roof or a low-flow plumbing system, but right now what I really need are sustainable tips that help the earth and my pocketbook. So I did some research to bring you these six tips that you can put into practice at home—without expert skills or a lot of money.

Start a Home Compost
Home composts aren’t just for tree huggers and eccentrics anymore. They’re a simple way to considerably green up your home, by reducing the amount of waste you send to the landfill. Instead of putting those food scraps in the garbage, just throw them into a small outdoor bin. Composting takes little effort: Sprinkle some water on your bin of old food, stir it up, and nature will take its course, turning your waste into free yard fertilizer. And, you’ll be saving money by reducing your garbage bill. Here’s a quick guide to getting started.

Collect Rainwater
Why waste money paying for water when you can get it for free? Just set a barrel or old garbage bin under your gutters when you’re expecting a rain shower, and you’ll be doing mother nature a favor. Instead of leaving your sprinklers on all throughout the year, you’ll be able to water your yard with the barrels you collect. This water is a lot easier on the earth because unlike tap water, it’s not being diverted away from streams and natural reservoirs to get your house.

Join a CSA
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, a type of organization that lets the local community support nearby growers who practice sustainable farming. When you join a CSA you’re essentially buying into a farmer’s harvest—helping fund the costs of getting the crop into the ground and tending it. In return, you get a share of their harvest in the form of a weekly produce delivery to your home or a distribution point near you. Use this page to find a list of CSAs in your region.

Use DIY Home Cleaners
Many home cleaners contain noxious chemicals that are harmful to manufacture and pollute our water supplies when they run down the drain. For most daily cleaning jobs you don’t even need those harsh chemicals; you can actually make cheap, nontoxic solutions from ingredients you already have at home. Vinegar, baking soda, and lemons are some examples. National Geographic has a roundup of the essential DIY household cleaners.

Eat Less Meat
Did you know that if you cut out one meal of chicken every week for a year and replaced it with vegetarian food, it would be equivalent to taking half a million cars off the road? Even if you can’t imagine yourself going vegetarian, removing just one meal of meat a week can drastically cut down the greenhouse gases that result from raising livestock. These simple veggie recipes can get you started.

Buy a Power Strip
Some electronics are real energy suckers—they keep drawing energy from the wall, even whey are turned completely off! Plugging all your electronics into a handy power strip is a simple way to ensure that they’re cut off from the power source and won’t be wasting energy when you’re not using them. It’s a handy way to be frugal and save energy.

Tumultuous Thursdays: Kundalini Yoga, the Shiv and Shakti and Shiv as Potential Energy

UCP/Meady's Musings Production does not own the rights for this image.

A friend came over to the Meady's Musings Production House and the Purple Elephant quickly threw his long purple trunk forward to open the door. The friend entered and said hello and then quickly went over to the guys at the UCP desk and asked them if they were interested in a course in kundalini yoga. It was quite an interesting course but seeing as the owner of the Production House hardly ever pays the guys at the UCP desk a single penny even...no one unfortunately could afford the fees! :( But it got the guys at the UCP desk who are currently writing about this Festival of Shiv 2011 to thinking and they went over to the guys who write the Tumultuous Thursdays blog posts on Meady's Musings and well...this joint blog that is both about religion and metaphysics was born and today appears on both UCP's Festival of Shiv and Meady's Musings' Tumultuous Thursdays! :)

Now kundalini yoga and yoga as a whole is often associated with Baba Shiv as he is seen as the mahayogi and in the image at the start of the post you can see where Shiv's iconography itself can be used to describe the elements of Kundalini yoga and as a whole the key body/energy points in yoga. And this website titled Kundalini Awakening appears to be a very good research source for anyone wanting to know more about the theories behind kundalini yoga.

However the rest of the blog post will delve more into the shiv/shakti relationship that comes out of the study of kundalini yoga and more so the concept that shiv is potential energy and shakti kinetic energy.

Let's define the two terms in Physics as defined by the Free Dictionary:

POTENTIAL ENERGY: (noun)The energy of a particle or system of particles derived from position, or condition, rather than motion. A raised weight, coiled spring, or charged battery has potential energy.

KINETIC ENERGY:(noun)The energy possessed by a body because of its motion, equal to one half the mass of the body times the square of its speed.

Now in Hinduism it is not only seen that Shiv is like potential energy and Shakti like kinetic energy...it is also seen that both Shiv and Shakti are one...so really it is one being that is at one point potential energy and then at another point kinetic energy.

So let's see it as if Shiv is sitting there in meditative post and then while in meditation he thinks up Shakti as this moving dancing female being...then after she manifests from his thoughts as dancing kinetic energy before him he eventually is also aroused and starts to dance with her...his potential energy is converted to kinetic energy!

Seen in the dance of Shiv and Shakti it would look something like this:


Seen in the metaphysical sense as it's impact on the creation and/or destruction it would be something like this:


Think about it is all the potential energy is eventually converted to kinetic energy ...it you have a coil of string and it has this potential energy in it as it is all coiled up but then begins to unravel as its potential energy converts to kinetic energy...what happens when all the string is unraveled? Well you no longer have a ball of string?

Hey but this is no doom's day blogpost or anything...after all this is a joint blogpost on Tumultuous Thrusdays and UCP i.e. Universal Collective Prayer...but we are just analysing some of the aspects of Shiv here and realising more so now how he might be seen as the God of destruction and how his cosmic dance of destruction...or the Nataraj dance has become so world famous...as he gets up from his coiled potential energy position and dances uncoiling as kinetic energy flows! But remember that energy is neither created nor destroyed so the kinetic energy again can become potential as another ball of string or the cosmos is reformed....Jai Bholenath! :)

Slumbering Saturdays....ahmm...Studious Saturdays: Here We Write!

OK so today is the day that Slumbering Saturdays was suppose to have become Studious Saturdays...but it didn't go as well as planned and after a hard week of full time work and a late Friday night...well most of Saturday was spent Slumbering and then Erranding...but as we get to the end of what was suppose to be a Studious Saturday...we are filled with little reproach!

You see we still plan to fill the last hours of the night with some writing and continue to have a strong visualization for next Saturday...us getting up in the wee hours of the morning...sitting at our writing desk...writing away...a few thousand words even before the sun comes up! :)

But for tonight we still did a little bit write...so we will call it a truce and say it is still the launch of Studious Saturdays if you like!

Look forward to blogs on other days of the week as normally themed i.e. Maniac Mondays, Tumultuous Thursdays and even Funtastic Fridays if we might!

And on our sister blog UCP we shall be launching this year's festival of Shiv! So look for that this Monday!

So until then...to all a good night!

And hope you all enjoyed the cartoon above and the associated movie clip below! :)