We all know that clean coal doesn’t exist. Now Oscar-winning and all-around awesome filmmakers The Coen Brothers have made this short commercial on behalf of the coal industry to explain what they are doing: harnessing the power of the word “clean.”

Today marks the beginning of Power Shift 09, a climate change lobbying and education event aiming to bring more than 10,000 young people to DC. Monday, the conference turns into civil disobedience when participants will congregate at the Capitol Power Plant in DC, which is coal-fired.

Sarah Moon is covering this event for The Sunny Way and we can’t wait to hear her news. Good luck!

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We’ll get back to our regular Pronoia discussion next week. This week, I wanted to share with you a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, which can be found on page 151 as part of the Pronoia News Network:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

I’ve been pondering this since I read it. What does this mean in the context of all the problems we face now, and the future that will be created out of the solutions?

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image by yogasanft

The Brooklyn Green Team celebrated their 1-year anniversary last month.  They threw a party with prizes and speeches read from a Blackberry (so as not to squander paper!), and unveiled their new Superheroes video. Here’s what else happened:

The “Yes We Can” volunteer challenge was unleashed!
Participants commit to donating 3 hours of your time in three months to an organization of your choice. I signed myself up, not knowing exactly where I would fill my three hours, but a few days later, a neighbor called me to help her plan her vegetable beds at a nearby neighborhood garden/bird sanctuary.  So that’s where I’ll be.  I have been a home gardener for years, but have not really shared what I know and my overall interest with other active gardeners.  I hope to contribute my gardening skills, learn new tricks, and meet new people at this community vegetable garden, where all the food grown is donated to a nearby soup kitchen.

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image by Roberto Garcia-S

Inspiring news from across the fronts…

Medicine first…
The United States is just beginning to move ahead on stem-cell research while other countries, like India, are far ahead. A couple of winters ago I met Amanda, in Aspen, CO,  a passionate skier who had been a paraplegic for 15 years due to an accident on the mountain. She refused to be victimized by her disability and founded a charity that helps others with disabilities enjoy mountain-sports. For the past year and a half, she has been traveling to India to receive stem-cell treatments. The results are extraordinary – she is able to feel her legs again, can control her bladder and she began to walk assisted by braces and a walker. Here is a video of her tackling the streets of New Delhi.

While there are still a lot of open questions about stem-cell research and its safety, especially in the long term, it is hard not to marvel at the miracle of this technology…and Amanda’s guts to be a pioneer.

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My favorite! Image by allie pasquier

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that one of my goals for the new year was to develop my physical strength, and to that end I would be following Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s Eat to Live plan for 6 weeks. Eat to Live is based on nutrient-dense food—the goal is to get almost all of the day’s calories from highly nutritious foods like green vegetables, fruits, beans and nuts.

Going into the 6 weeks, losing weight was one of my goals. But I also wanted to see how life would change in other ways—what else could come out of giving my body tons and tons of good stuff?

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This video is taken from a performance called, “Flying Free: Music without Limits.” It features improvised and semi-improvised piano duets with the women I teach at Riverbrook Residence in Stockbridge, MA. Riverbrook is home to twenty-three women.

Under the direction of Joan Burkhard, a committed staff is creating the optimum conditions for women with developmental disabilities to be supported in every dimension of life. This is the environment I entered as a piano teacher in Fall, 2007. In my work with the women, I became disarmed by the result. As you’ll see, these women confirm that beauty arises from the deepest level of being, unfettered by any limitation. They demonstrate why music is, arguably, our most powerful and universal means of human expression and is present in us all!

For the next few Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

As the season of Lent begins, I wonder how many Christians will be participating simply out of habit. How many will give up chocolate until Easter more for the practical goal of losing weight than for getting closer to a higher power?

The truth is many traditional religious rituals like Lent have become empty for recent generations or, even worse, negative in spirit. Many of us look at Christmas, see materialism run rampant and lose our taste for the whole affair. Yet ritual, in essence, remains a powerful human experience with the ability to cleanse, revive and humble us. In Pronoia, Robert Brezsny demonstrates that anyone can make up his or her own ritual: a special dance to welcome the rising sun; a chant for all things that grow on the Spring Equinox; saying your own version of grace before you eat a meal.

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image by abraaten

We had another house meeting here in Stockbridge, MA last week. This one was organized by Obama’s administration to help people familiarize themselves with the economic stimulus package. Twenty people came. We watched a brief video by Governor Tim Kaine answering some questions submitted by e-mails about the plan and then went through a brief overview of the main parts/ largest items on it, which was a lot more informative.

I have to say, I was a bit cynical at first about what the purpose of this meeting could be and what difference it would make. But the experience taught me a lot about the power of community organizing. There was a strong sense of empowerment as people who otherwise do not know much about each other took the responsibility to inform themselves, to decipher what this Economic Recovery plan means, and how we can educate and stimulate ourselves to participate in a new order of community and business development.

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Talking Their Way Into Science

Why do the leaves change color? How did the moon begin? Why are blood veins different colors? Will we ever be able to live on another planet?

These are some of the questions that Karen Gallas, the author of Talking Their Way into Science, asks her first and second grade classes as an integral part of their science curriculum.  This book was required reading for one of my education classes last fall and a jumping off point to conduct a science talk with some neighborhood children.

As part of a class assignment, I asked three neighborhood kids to participate in four science talks, using questions from the book as examples.  Three students, 5th grader Helen, 4th grader John, and 4th grader Solomon, my next door neighbor, wanted to participate (I’ve changed the names for privacy).  Helen and John are siblings and attend Catholic school; Solomon attends public school.

What are Science talks?  Science talks are discussions, formally scheduled, where students inquire into general, open-ended questions together.  Ideally the focus of the talks is on how children respond to a question, not on answering correctly, or being right or certain.  The point is for children to co-construct their ideas, to take risks expressing themselves, to disagree and to learn how to respectfully listen to their peers.  Science talks are about acquiring a discourse.  A discourse is an ongoing conversation. Acquiring means to possess through one’s own efforts. Questions are often created by the children themselves.

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This week was a busy one, and I’m looking forward to the 3-day weekend! Here’s a recap of what we covered on The Sunny Way:

• Monday I posted on the way our expectations can alter the way we experience reality, and some techniques for laying down what we think we know so that we can see what is.
• Tuesday and Wednesday Sarah shared her inauguration story, from sunrise to sunset.
• Thursday we looked into what Pronoia has to say about evil.

Today I’d like to share some thoughts by Robert Anton Wilson, an author and exploratory thinker whose terrain includes physics and subjective reality, and who Rob Brezsny quotes extensively in Pronoia. “Maybe things are going to turn out okay,” Wilson says, “in which case pessimists are killing themselves and being miserable for no good reason.”

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For the next several Thursdays, we will be discussing Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. Click here to read all the Pronoia posts.

So, if pronoia is about willfully choosing to focus on the positive, functional, glorious aspects of life, then where does negative, dysfunctional, ugly stuff go? Brezsny addresses this in the articles we’ll discuss today: “Apocalypse vs. Apocalypse” (page 99), “Pronoia’s Villains” (page 103), and “Shadow School” (page 113).

In “Apocalypse vs. Apocalypse,” Brezsny says that he suffers from a most unusual form of chauvinism—he thinks that “those of us alive today are on the cusp of a radical turning point in the evolution of humanity. Or so I like to imagine.”

I tend to agree with him—and, like Brezsny, I wonder what that radical turning point will look like. Are the fundamentalist Christians right to wait for Jesus to ride a pony down through the sky? Will we be blasted by an asteroid? Killed by superbugs resistant to antibiotics? Vaporized in the blink of an eye by an errant nuke?

Or will our transformation be more personal, more interior, and as much about growth as destruction? As RB puts it, “Why are Things Falling Apart thought to be inherently more gripping than Things Being Reborn?”

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image by brunosan

This is the second half of Sarah’s experiences at the Inauguration. Click here to read the first half.

At the first buzz of the microphone that would announce the parade, I swelled – the time had come at last. But as the parade announcer’s voice came over the loudspeakers, I was thrown off. What was this? He spoke like a character from a contemporary film about the sinister banality of the 1950’s. Grease and tanning beds oozing faux-zeal from his person. I decided to ignore him. It was an easy and familiar a stance after eight years under President Bush.

First came small clusters of servicepeople, huddled strong and upright around American flags. Police motorcycles with their lights on escorted them. There was a long gap before the next group—the various corps of service musicians. The third corps down were dressed like Revolutionary soldiers with white ponytail wigs, whether they were women or men. Lex and I laughed like rude adolescents at the small-looking women who could not seem to fill out their uniforms or wigs. Another long gap. It seemed torturous. We had been waiting for four hours and now that the parade had started, it still felt like nothing was really happening. Then the announcer got excited and told us, “Ladies and Gentlemen, behind those police cars up ahead…is…the moment you’ve alllll been waiting for…” I hated that his game show host baiting worked on me, but my heart started to beat faster. Soon, finally, soon, we would come the moment this whole day had been building toward. We would see the new President of the United States, Barack Obama.

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image by brunosan

There is something in me that wants to complicate the manufactured common reality that is so hard to escape in our instant, media-rich culture. It is one thing to have many stories coalesce into one as years pass and history books demand the “official” story. But when it comes to telling the news, there’s an essential need for alternative reports. Alternative reports, reports that have not been manufactured to perpetuate existing values nor to react to them, allow for a deeper understanding, often a more authentic reflection of what happened.

There is an official story of Barack Obama’s inauguration that tells of the sobriety and firmness of his speech, the thrill of the large crowds braving freezing temperatures, the bungled swearing in and the overall “historic” quality of the event. My individual story does not omit these aspects of the day, but it puts them in a very particular context. Inspired by C.G. Jung, I decided I wanted to write a completely personal version of the day’s events.

Jung wrote, “The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.” I think Obama, quoting Alice Walker in his speeches—“We are the ones we have been waiting for”—would agree.

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image by wit

Human beings are, among other things, pattern-making machines. We look for commonalities, predict outcomes, and get a lot of satisfaction when things fit together as we expect them to. The world is like a big Easter egg hunt to our brains—and we tend to find what we are looking for.

This capacity to make order out of chaos serves us well in many respects. We’re able to organize systems that keep our world going. And we’re able to use our pasts as reference points for the present moment. If we’ve seen certain behavior or situations before, we can make better decisions on how to react, and better predictions of the consequences of any action. Like the old chestnut says, “Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me.”

But there’s a downside to this pattern-seeking tendency, and that is that we tend to think we know a lot more than we actually do. And when we go through life expecting to see what we’ve seen before, we often miss opportunities for seeing and creating the new.

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This week we focused on coaching and mentoring, two great ways to grow for both the advisor and the advisee.

• Monday, Victoria and I shared our experiences with life coaching—what we are learning, and how it is changing us.
• Tuesday, we interviewed our life coach, Maia Conty, about what coaching is for—to teach us how to create a new experience of life.
• Wednesday, Stella wrote about her experience with mentoring, and how vulnerability can help foster deep connections across age and cultural gaps.
• Thursday was our 2nd Pronoia discussion, all about rising to the challenge of meeting the biggest problems we can find.

Today we’re posting a video by scientist and teacher Sraddhalu Ranade, in which he shares his thoughts on integral education. “The purpose of education is organizing the personality to reflect the soul,” he says. To me this statement underscores the importance of seeing our development in the highest, widest, deepest context. When everything in us is lined up and connected to life itself, then the ability to create the world we want is a natural outcome.

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