Ethos

While you are on this website, the most important gift you can give is your kind compassion.

Let’s look at that more closely. This is a community for the chronically ill, their caregivers, and those who care about you and them and the one life that we share. It is also a community that is obliged to consider hard truths. Our species—largely ignorantly and inadvertently, but nonetheless blindly, selfishly, and irresponsibly—is pursuing an ecocide-suicide program that fouls our precious nest and threatens to extinguish us. What is worse is that almost all of us, since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, have been watching it happen and, as John Mayer put it, “waiting on the world to change.” In other words, everyone alive today is culpable.

For many visitors to this website, who may already be deep into the Kubler-Ross stages of grieving, this at first may be too much to bear with grace and equanimity. And yet, there may be no other place to go for comfort. You can help by taking denial, avoidance, rage, blame, guilt, and shame offline. If you need help, our UEM education program, especially level four, can help you offline through hard copy books and/or online through courses. When you are ready to contribute to a community geared toward leaving behind catastrophizing and complaining and engaging in wise corrective action through emerging care and cure, you will become expert in aiding our species in restoring and tending its Eden.

So, while you are on this website, kindly observe its spirit…

… Recognize that the sick and grieving may need your kind mentoring. While remembering that online communications may be non-secure and anonymous, you are not, and you have the opportunity to be care through kind assistance and to be cure by disengaging and if need be, to request that the web admin remove potential trolls.
… In dialogue, listen deeply, pause, and bear witness to what may be a suffering person’s truth. If you have experience with ministry, you can affirm that you have listened and express support. Resist the tendency to correct, lecture, or preach on the one hand, or to be diverted from your own meaning and purpose on the other. Take the “yes and” rather than either/or approach.
… In communities, if you see someone with avatars that are unsuited for participation, direct the participant to a suitable place. For example, if you see a chipmunk and fertility profile in a UEM Level 4 discussion or professional community, that user is lost—knowingly or not—and may be able to make use of your guidance.
… In a disagreement, seek the light of productive dissent rather than the harmful heat of discord or disruption
… Disengage from modernist discourse, human exceptionalism, speciesism, histrionics, top-down notions of adaptation, illusions of power and control, passivity, force, ideology, dogmatism, love of death or destruction, focus on consumption, neglect of the big picture, fatalism, self-pity, reduction to functions, analysis paralysis, data over wisdom. All of these are obsolete and to focus on them is to perpetuate them.
… Seek polarity and paradox as clues to the unknown, unseen, and incomprehensible
…While online, the community comes first and any individual last. If you need to be the center of the universe at any given moment, take it offline.
…Seek to deepen your knowledge and grasp of medicine, theology, and habitat restoration, and so become a resource and a leader
… If you suspect that a participant is not okay, as them to seek help offline immediately
… Stretch yourself, when you are about to do what you usually do, pause, think, and choose another action
… Make friends with the mystery, the puzzle, the unknown, the unseen, the untried. That is where the solutions are.
… Find participants who can help you become your best self

Most importantly…

Learn…Love…Enjoy…Grow…Develop…Become…

and Enrich life from your core!