This week on The Sunny Way, we’ve talked a lot about emotions and the motivations they can bring to our actions.

• Monday I wrote about meditation, and how it helps calm internal storms so that I can act out of intention rather than habit.
• Tuesday, Uli shared with us the fears and assumptions she is facing as Obama’s promises of hope and change become reality, but in not quite the exact way she had hoped.
• Wednesday, Victoria wrote about the amazing book My Side of the Mountain (which I have loved since I was a kid!), and how its main character Sam Gribley created a new life from discovery and invited others to share it with him.
• Yesterday, Sarah dove into anger and how it can powerfully motivate action but also become an obstacle if we allow ourselves to identify with it.

Today we’d like to share this video from Alice Waters, whose passion for beautiful food has sparked an entirely new way of eating in thousands and perhaps millions of people around the world. In this video, she shares how her actions were motivated not from anger or dissatisfaction, but from a simple desire to share something she loves. Her story inspires me to look into my actions and examine where they are coming from. Am I tearing down the old, or am I building the new? I contemplate this question often. Here’s what Waters has to say about it.

Read more...

image by CharlesThompson

A few Sundays ago, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President Bush. He threw them hard and fast. President Bush dodged expertly. Afterward, the President reacted jovially, even citing the incident as proof of Mission Accomplished: “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves.”

While the thrown shoes did little to shame President Bush, they did a lot to counteract the spin the Bush administration has put on the U.S. occupation of Iraq. They contradict the notion of American soldiers as liberators, identifying them, instead, as butchers of children and widow-makers.

In a world in which language spins enchanting webs around realities, making bad situations seem good or, at least, necessary, the anger of those who see the truth may be best expressed in action instead of words.

For activists to call others to fight for justice can seem, today, as empty as the Army calling Americans to fight for freedom. Weary with gibberish, the public glazes over at these verbal arguments. But when a shoe is thrown, the message comes through loud and clear.

Read more...

I had the pleasure of reading My Side of the Mountain this past fall for an introductory science education class, and I fell in love with the world that Sam creates in the Catskill Mountains.

Sam Gribley, the thirteen year old hero, decides to run away from his cramped home in New York where he lives with eight siblings. He runs away to live a different life on land that his Great Grandfather Gribley owned in the Catskill Mountains 100 years prior.  Sam’s tenacity to make a life in the wilderness despite snickers and jests from adults is what is so attractive. Sam doesn’t let any bit of doubt or cynicism from others stop him. He figures out how to live off the land from prior knowledge, library research, from carefully observing animals and plants, and from friends along the way. 

Read more...

image by Untitled blue

I just knew it – it had to happen sooner or later. My hero, B.O., just appointed Tom Vilsack—an outspoken proponent of big agro business and bio-engineering—to Secretary for Agriculture. Help! The lobbying in Washington to prevent him from getting into office is already under way, and 20,000 signatures have been sent directly to the transition team. Yet, in the midst of it all I can just recognize, in the more lucid neurons of my liberal environmentalist brain, the ‘us and them’ mentality we were all lamenting so much before and during the election creeping in again—the divided America.

And there is more. Another e-mail alarm reached my inbox: “The road-building lobby is trying to convince the incoming administration that building roads should be part of the stimulus package that gets the economy back on track”… So those guys are at it again as well……

Reading all this I feel like I am breathing again the acidic atmosphere of righteous activism versus the corrupt establishment while at the same time knowing perfectly well that there really are forces and powers out there whose only interest is to maintain just that, power.

Read more...

We started The Sunny Way to ask questions about creating the future. What does it mean? What is possible? And, probably most importantly, how can it be done? We’ve covered a lot of ground in our exploration and what we’ve found—what I’ve found—is that our actions, our own growth and development, are the seeds from which larger creations spring. If we want change, we must change ourselves.

According to integral theorist Ken Wilber, one of the most powerful ways to prompt development within ourselves is meditation, and my experience over the past year has borne this out. Practicing meditation has caused me to grow in many ways, all in the direction of increasing confidence and strength.

Several people have asked me about my experiences with meditation—what it means, why I do it, and how it works—so today I’ll answer those questions to the best of my ability. I’m also writing for my own benefit—in 2009 my commitment is to meditate every single day, so all the good stuff I’m about to say about meditation is meant to remind me as much as anything else!

Read more...