(image by Howard N2GOT)
We’re taking next week off to enjoy the last of 2008 with our loved ones and to get ready for 2009. See you then!
A friend, John Steiner, recently sent an email that included a quote from the philosopher, physician, theologian, and musician, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. “…Just as the rivers we see are minor compared to underground streams,” Schweitzer said, “So, too, the idealism that is visible is minor compared to what people carry in their hearts unreleased or scarcely released.”
I’ve taught music for almost three decades to students of all ages, cultures, levels of experience and most recently to women with developmental disabilities who are blind, autistic or have Down’s syndrome. (A video of a recent performance will be posted soon.) What I am witnessing confirms that the beauty we carry in our hearts, often unreleased, is far greater than what is apparent.
Schweitzer, who won the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize, went on to say that, “Humankind is waiting and longing for those who can accomplish the task of untying what is knotted, and bringing these underground waters to the surface.” At this holiday season, I believe that if we look closely, if we have faith in the beauty that’s there, hidden below the surface, we will help bring it to light.
For inspiration, here’s a track from my first CD, Pachelbel’s Canon in D
Happy Holidays!
image by Fovea Centralis
Last Sunday in Brooklyn was windy and sunny, a lovely winter day for running holiday errands. We held our Carrotmob event at Tarzian Hardware, arriving a little before noon with high hopes for a busy day.
Our Carrotmob ended up being more of a Carrotstream—our efforts seemed to bring some shoppers to the store, but we didn’t have the huge line-around-the-block turnout we were hoping for. It was also difficult to gauge who was there because of Carrotmob vs. who would have been there anyway. But, either way, lots of positive things came out of the day:
image by ladybugbkt
On the weekend of Sunday, December 14, the Obama transition team initiated over 4000 meetings all over the country for people to come together and think about how best to channel and direct the energy and intention generated during the campaign. In the preparatory phone call, the organizers had told us that according to the surveys filled out by volunteers and election campaign staff, 2/3 of the people involved want to keep volunteering—an impressive number. And they suggested that, instead of waiting for the inauguration, we should already commit to organizing a social service event locally on or before Martin Luther King Day to set a signal in our communities that change is indeed coming.
“There’s children throwing snowballs instead of throwing heads!” Always a good thing the weekend before Christmas. Enjoy!
In preparation for the next phase of The Sunny Way, I’ve been doing some research on activist resources currently available and have found some great stuff I wanted to share with you.
On Razoo, you can create actions and sign on to participate in actions others have created. You can also converse with other like-minded folks and see what people are up to around the world. I particularly like reading users’ answers to the question “How I would change the world.”
Causecast has a very slick interface that bundles video in with the typical social networking features. You can easily get into the meat of any issue you’re concerned about by clicking around the menus at the top of the page.
Social Actions has some very cool widgets that can be plugged into any website, to show Related Actions, Related Classroom Projects, and more. They even have an API (application programming interface) that makes it possible for people to program more widgets at any time based on the social action database they have begun to create.
We’ve posted about Wiser Earth before, But my recent research shows that they are tackling lots of new ways to serve their community of activist organizations, as well as asking users for feedback on what functionality would be most useful to them. Recently they have added Solutions to their database, allowing users to share what’s worked for them.
Lastly, this is a blog post by Dave Pollard describing his recipe for saving the world. He’s really thought this through—enjoy!
Carol Ray
What is activism? It’s going deeper than we’ve ever gone before. I can’t wait to see the video of this concert! -ed.
A multi-media/musical event called “Flying Free: Music without Limits,” which I created and directed, was staged last Sunday at a small concert hall in Pittsfield, MA. I performed on a wonderful Steinway grand piano with women I teach from the Riverbrook Residence in Stockbridge. These women have disabilities that range from blindness to autism and Down’s syndrome (I’ve written about this in previous posts.) As they played, their words—in which they describe their experience of music—were projected on a screen for the audience.
The women and I performed improvised and semi-improvised duets. Some of them are only just beginning to play the piano; one woman who is blind is quite adept. Regardless of the level of experience, each woman played with disarming authenticity, creativity and naturalness. The 60-70 people who attended witnessed something of revelatory beauty that went far beyond my own expectations and theirs. What occurred, I believe, had the hallmarks of a new kind of art and aesthetics.
This is the last installment of our book club examining Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.
Will’s month in Pala passes peacefully. He spends time with Vijaya’s family and sees a Mutual Adoption Club in action. He spends time at the school and watches how the Palanese educate their children in how to live in both the internal and external worlds they inhabit. And, finally, he witnesses the death of Lakshmi, the wife of Doctor Robert, who is losing her long battle with cancer.
Lakshmi isn’t pumped full of opiates or encouraged to go to sleep. While young nurse Radha sits in meditation to set the tone, Susila encourages Lakshmi to stay awake, to witness her own dying the same way she has witnessed every moment in her life:
“Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply ... I was so preposterously serious is those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi ... Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic ... Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly ... On tiptoes ... Completely unencumbered.”
Yesterday, after the Carrotmob event (more on this soon), several people who’d been at the store came over to my place for a few beers. We started talking about cynicism, and why so many seem so attached to their cynical points of view, and what that worldview does to a person.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I came down firmly on the side of remaining optimistic and taking positive action. One of the people here played a little devil’s advocate with me, trying to convince me of the validity of a pessimistic viewpoint: “Cynical people would say that the reason they don’t do anything is because action is useless anyway. Nothing we do is going to really change anything, so why bother?”
But when you look at this statement logically, it doesn’t make sense. Our actions may or may not have a huge impact in the world, but when we take concrete steps to improve things around us, we are at least rolling the dice and participating in the game. A project may have a large impact or may have a small one, but will always have more effect than doing nothing.
Last night I met up with a friend who was lucky enough to attend the Global Climate Summit hosted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in California last month. He told me about conversations he had with governors from Indonesia and Brazil, and how incredible it was to hear diverse ideas from around the world on solving climate change, ushering the old out and the new in.
One of the most exciting parts, he said, was when Schwarzenegger started the conference by showing this video from President-Elect Obama, recorded specially for this event, where he pledges new leadership in the fight against climate change. According to my friend, many in this audience of people who have been engaged with these issues for years wept openly to hear Obama’s plans to engage America in the pursuit of solutions to our environmental problems.
“I promise you this,” he says. “When I am president, any governor who is willing to promote green energy will have a partner in the White House. Any company that’s willing to invest in clean energy will have an ally in Washington. And any nation that is willing to join the cause of combatting climate change will have an ally in the United States of America.”
Carrotmob is happening this Sunday! Consequently all of us on the team are busy getting the word out, coordinating with the Materials for the Arts (who will be accepting donations), and planning the energy audit of the hardware store by NYSERDA.
People seem to like the doing-it-ourselves ethic of Carrotmobbing, and we’re expecting a big crowd, though there’s really no way of telling how many people will show up. Half of me finds this exciting—we could end up with a line around the block!—and the other half is a little scared that there will be 10 of us standing around looking at each other. But either way Tarzian Hardware will get some funds to use to improve their facility and some guidance on how to spend it.
For my part, it’s been a great experience planning the event. I’ve learned a lot about how to work with people to get things done, how important it is to have a plan, and how willing we need to be to throw the plan out the window as things change. It’s been nice gettting to know the members of our team and some new people in my neighborhood, too, and in the community of folks who are also working on sustainabilty issues in New York.
image from bobster1985
The other night I was at a discussion group for a challenging philosophy book, and the leaders suggested that we start out by getting clear on what the terms we were throwing around—words like “philosophy” and “materialism”—really mean, in a deep and concrete sense.
Doing this ended up providing most of the fodder for our discussion for the rest of the evening. In trying to fully define the words we were using, we ended up exploring and coming to a far more profound understanding of them.
Afterward, it occurred to me that “activism” is one of those seemingly simple terms that has a lot more meaning in it than what we usually think, and that we might gain a lot from looking at it more closely.
About a year and a half ago when I first had the idea for this site, I went to the bookstore on my lunch break hoping to find a book to read that would inspire me to keep going. Lucky for me, Paul Hawken had just released his latest, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World.
The book starts out with a history of the environmental movement, from John Muir and his campaign to protect natural places to Rachel Carlson sounding the alarm in Silent Spring to the present day. At this point, he says, there are more than one million groups on the planet working for environmental and social justice.
image by wildxplorer
The Climate Change exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is currently on display and I encourage everyone who can make the trip to see it to do so. A few weeks ago, I went to learn as much as I could about it. It was very informative, with plenty of interactive exhibits and two short movies.
The exhibit is straight forward and scientific. It clearly presents the evidence supporting the existence of climate change, going into great depth on how the rate at which we are burning fossil fuels has thrown off the balance of the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is pretty amazing, a checks and balance system between several reservoirs of carbon: the atmosphere, the land (plants and soil), sedimentary rock, the ocean and fossil fuel reserves. Through burning fossil fuels (essentially, burning history) we are releasing a greater proportion of CO2 into the atmosphere that has to be absorbed by the other reservoirs. The perspective represented in the exhibit doesn’t place blame on humans, but does put the pressure on us to figure out clean ways to generate energy.
“I believe that any individual who has spiritually awakened in our time, to the degree that he or she finds a higher and deeper motive for living, is going to be driven to fight the good fight in one way or another. Whether it is through engaging with the struggle to evolve consciousness or fighting to save our world from climate change or nuclear war, the spiritual impulse cannot be separated from the moral compulsion to make the world a better place. And in order to fight the good fight, we have to engage, we have to get into the ring, not just stand outside it and be philosophers.
It takes guts and integrity of motive to fight the good fight. It takes a passionate interest in life itself. It’s easy to stand on the sidelines, shaking your head and commenting on how tragic things are. But if you really care, you are going to be in the ring, trying to make the world a better place. And only from that position will your words and your thoughts and your insights have weight. When you live an engaged life, your sense of self gains depth and power and authority, and your philosophy is no longer abstract. You become a person who can really make a difference, because you are actively participating, you are digging deep, and you are pushing up against the edge of your own potential.”
