image courtesy of ironchefbalara

Last week I had dinner with one of my best friends, who holds a leadership position at a local organization which does amazing work. Like many workplaces, hers is also plagued by drama: mammoth egos battling for power, nonsensical rules for all but the top people, and hidden agendas lurking beneath every innocuous-seeming conversation.

So when I asked her how work was going, I was expecting to hear the usual entertaining yet horrifying tales of woe. Instead, she told me that she has a new policy where she doesn’t talk about work outside of work because, what is the point of getting worked up over it? Since making this decision, she told me, she’s noticed that not only does her mood stays sunny, but she’s also able to focus on the big picture and do her job—which she loves and whole-heartedly believes in—with more vision and focus and creativity.

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image courtesy of Smath.

Like most people, my mind meanders much of the time. I find myself starting a task with great aplomb but soon I lose focus and end up daydreaming, dicking around on the internet, and otherwise wasting time. This is especially pronounced in my job-free life, where it is up to me to structure my own time and pursue my own goals. I haven’t done terribly at this, but I also haven’t done as much as I know I’m capable of, or even as much as I want to do.

I successfully changed several of my bad habits a few years ago, but, over time, I found myself retreating back into those old patterns. I learned once again that inertia is powerful, the ruts in our brains are deep, and gains, if not protected, can soon be lost. In the last few months, even my physical well-being has suffered from the lazy choices I was making. I felt low-grade fatigue and nausea many days, and dragging myself through even the bare minimum tasks required took what seemed like an inordinate amount of effort. Was I depressed? No, I don’t think so. I was just feeling lost, lacking even a compelling reason or the energy to get found.

So I signed up for a spiritual retreat in the Rocky Mountains hoping to jump those entrenched tracks, get my head straight, and make some space for something new to emerge. The annual Being and Becoming Retreat takes place in two parts: being is all about practicing what it’s like to take a liberated position to life, and becoming is about operating from that position in conjunction with others. I decided that I needed to start at the beginning, and so signed up for the Being half.

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“We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game by taking sides .... No one who has read a page by a good critic or a speculative scientist can ever again think that this barren choice of yes or no is all that the mind offers.”

—Jacob Bronowski, host and author of The Ascent of Man, physicist/philosopher, and all around smart guy

I came across this quote in the book “Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food,” written by an organic farmer and a genetic engineer who are married to each other and who wonder how their disciplines might be married for the good of both humankind and nature.

Both the question they are asking in their book and the content of this quote are fascinating. How often do we settle for the barren choice of yes or no, even when reality itself teems with untold possibilities? And how often do we make that barren choice unconsciously?

The answer: Pretty much all the time. From politics to the economy to the environment, we generally turn the content of our discussions into a horse race in which the most important thing is whether or not “our” horse wins.

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As soon as I moved back to Pittsburgh in February, we got an enormous amount of snow that ground the city to a halt, and I was stuck at home for a few weeks. This was OK, cause I had a lot of painting and unpacking and rearranging to do. That was all done within a month, around the time the snow started to melt. Then I went to Colorado for a week to attend the (very awesome) Integral Incubator at Boulder Integral. I came back with my sails full of wind, ready to start my new blog and activist project, Bright Green Burgh, dedicated to creating a future for Pittsburgh that is both bright and green.

My first BGB act was to speak at a really fun event last weekend, put on by dear friend/professional bellydancer/community-builder extraordinaire Amethyst Azhar, where local artists created bellydance costumes out of recycled stuff. I was excited to talk to a bunch of environmentalist-leaning folks in such a merry atmosphere, hoping to connect with some and start to build a team. And I worked hard on what I would say—practiced it and clocked it and edited it and practiced some more.

By the time I got to the event, I felt ready. But I was in the middle of a conversation with a fellow speaker when heard my name being called, and I hurried to the mike. And then, as my demure friend Matt likes to say, I shit the bed.

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image courtesy of Victor Bezrukov

Over the weekend, I finally got around to reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver’s book about her family’s quest to eat locally, growing most of their own food and eating with the seasons.

What a great read—I tell you, that woman can really write about a vegetable! I loved reading about the joys and pains of gardening, the hard work of preserving food, and the satisfaction of seeing dozens of mason jars sparkling like jewels in the pantry at the end of autumn. I’m more excited than ever to work on my own little garden here in the ‘hood in Pittsburgh.

Kingsolver also spends a good portion of her book describing what is wrong with the food system in America. These ills have been well covered in the last several years—see Food Inc., Fast Food Nation, and most of Michael Pollan’s work. Our agricultural system is rather insane, and we have a lot of work to do to make it rational and sustainable.

But in Kingsolver’s work, and in that of many other writers and activists, there is something that bothers me: a confusion between technology and how it is used. She spends a good amount of time cataloging the evils of genetically engineered food, specifically going after Monsanto and showing how their practices limit choices and profits for small farmers, driving many of them out of business.

I wonder, though—is genetic engineering inherently such a terrible thing? Or is the problem that Monsanto is an unethical and short-sighted company?

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Most of the time, for most of us, life seems pretty consistent. Work, family, and home life may vary from day to day, but for the most part, things chug along remarkable steadiness. Then something happens—a job loss, an illness, a new opportunity—and we realize how tenuous our security really is. No one ever really knows what our lives will look like in a year, but we think we do.

Since I lost my job, I’ve seen how strong this self-delusion of security can be. In reality, there’s no less certainty in my life than there was a few months ago, but it feels like there is. The challenge is the same as it always has been—to be OK with uncertainty, to connect with the possibility inherent in it and not freak out.

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In this short talk, Derrick Jensen imagines what Star Wars would look like if written by environmentalists—would they file lawsuits against the Empire ... sell free-trade coffee to its citizens ... sign petitions against Darth Vader?

Now, it is a bit simplistic to characterize the messy real world of 2010 as the evil Galactic Empire. And of course I believe more in redemption/building on what is than revolution/blowing shit up. But he is right about one thing: most of us who want to change the world are thinking far too small.

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image courtesy of petter palander

When you walk into a room, how do you position yourself?

I tend to evaluate who’s there and take one of two stances: superior or inferior. Either I’m better/smarter/cooler or I’m dumber/lamer/less experienced. And once I assume one of these positions, it’s damn near impossible to snap out of it.

If I perceive myself as better, then it becomes all about making sure everyone knows that I’m better—that my point of view is more comprehensive and impressive than theirs. If I put myself in a position of being less than, then I clam up like a shy little kid, barely even giving myself permission to speak for fear of looking like a nimrod.

I can see that this behavior is arrogant and immature, that it reflects an inaccurate understanding of reality. Is it true, or at all important, that I am smart or dumb, more than or less than? Isn’t it far more important that I show up in every situation ready to contribute something positive no matter who else is around?

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image courtesy of zoonabar

A few weeks ago, I found out that I’m being downsized from the company I work for. I haven’t written since then, because I haven’t been sure what to say.

It’s been 15 years since I graduated from college, and for most of those years I’ve been working in a narrow niche of software development for the printing and publishing industries. What I’ve learned in that time is immense. From a childhood of chaos and poverty, this career enabled me to create a stable financial life. I’ve learned how to complete complicated projects, hang tough in challenging situations, and work with a wide variety of people.

At the same time, coming out of a meeting last week, I realized that I had just spent an hour going into minute details about things that mean absolutely nothing in the big picture. I’m not one to linger on regrets ... but I do feel some sadness that I’ve devoted so much of my life to work that I don’t particularly care about.

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image courtesy of billolen

I spent a few hours at the American Museum of Natural History yesterday, and between marveling at the gemstones and beautifully illustrative dioramas, I visited the exhibit on evolution. I saw models of wee furry people, skulls of multiple sizes, and a clear and detailed explanation of heredity. And in one of the videos, I heard a sentence that got me thinking:

Without evolution, biology would simply be little more than a kind of natural history stamp collecting.

I’d never really considered this before, but it struck me as both true and perfectly obvious once I’d heard it. Without a bigger story to infuse bits of knowledge and experience with a plot, there is no meaning to anything we do. There may be enjoyment in the moment, but if there’s no framework, there’s no sense of filling out a picture or advancing a cause. There’s just collection and consumption.

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Have you ever had an epiphany, decided to make a change, and then forgot about it within a matter of days? We’ve all gone through this process, and it makes sense because it’s largely how development happens. You make a breakthrough, and suddenly you’re in a new world. Or, more accurately, you have developed the ability to see things anew.

But the old way of seeing is still what you are used to, and gradually or suddenly your eyes lose their newfangled focus, and the world is old again, and you wonder whether your epiphany meant anything at all.

What happened is this: something new did emerge in you, but it wasn’t stable. This is how development occurs—in fits and starts, a messy progression of two steps forward and one step back. We go through 4 major stages in the learning process:

• Unconscious incompetence, where we don’t even know what we don’t know.
• Conscious incompetence, where we are starting to see the extent of what we don’t know. This part can be very painful!
• Conscious competence, where we’re starting to get it but it requires a lot of effort.
• Unconscious competence, where we’re so good at our new skill that we can sink into performing it, without having to think about it.

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image courtesy of Mi Gi

If you’re reading this site, it’s probably because you care about the state of the world. You also recognize that the problems we have to solve are fairly intractable from the level we are at right now, and so you want to push yourself to be smarter, more comprehensive in your thinking, and more powerful in your actions.

If you’re anything like me, though, sometimes this cognitive recognition that we need to keep developing slips away a bit. After a long tiring day at work, the couch sings its siren song, and the laziness to which our culture says we are entitled takes over more hours than we’d like to admit. In the midst of everything most of us have to get done in a day, how can we stay motivated to make choices that keep us growing?

Put another way, if we are basically wired to do what we feel like doing, how can we make ourselves feel like doing the right thing?

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This is a very silly video from Improv Everywhere, a group that does, well, improv everywhere. Though this piece isn’t exactly improvised ... Basically these people set up some cameras in a grocery store produce section in Queens, wrote a goofy song about fruit and peace, and performed it in the middle of the day for lots of confused and bemused customers.

What I love about this is how it breaks up normal expected everyday reality. Stuff like this puts a grin on our faces and interrupts our regularly scheduled programs. It causes, as author Jonathan Fields said in a recent post, “a momentary awakening to the utter lunacy of the patterns we’ve adopted. And, though it’s taken years to wear those patterns into existence, in a heartbeat, we become unusually open to the notion that we can choose to respond differently. To create a new pattern.”

Have a wonderful weekend! And if you decide to burst into song at the farmers’ market, let us know what happens ...

image courtesy of Cara_VSAngel

On his blog about American philosophy and evolution, Jeff Carreira recently wrote about humanity’s evolutionary crisis—our inability to adapt to the rate of change we have created—and the two primary shifts we have to make to adjust our ideas about reality to reality.

The first shift concerns unity, so that we go from seeing the universe as a bunch of different things interacting with each other to understanding it as a single whole comprised of many parts. The second involves recognizing the ever-changing nature of reality. Things are not as stable and static as we think they are. In fact, every part of this whole is constantly moving around, bumping up against other parts, and both changing and being changed by the friction generated.

Understanding these ideas cognitively is one thing—and it is a big thing. And yet there is much more to it than that. What does it mean to live as part of one comprehensive, ever-evolving process?

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image courtesy of Caveman 92223

Holding a bright green perspective in a largely cynical world is difficult for me. I’m not used to thinking positively about the future or seeing my own decisions as an integral part of what is being created. It’s not what I was raised or trained to do.

Rather, I tend to see myself as separate from everything else, and I’m used to feeling bad about where “the world” is heading. Sometimes I feel like a kook when I try to reach for a more positive and participatory of view. Sometimes it even feels fraudulent. How can I talk about becoming new people and bearing new gifts when so much what I do and feel is old and dingy and dark?

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