image by whateva87

I’ve never felt more certain that love is the answer than I did standing in the crowds outside the capitol power plant last Monday in the largest demonstration against global warming in U.S. history. As our elders Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry spoke from the podium, the next generation of environmental activists cheered out and waved banners and signs that read “Power Past Coal” and “Climate Justice.”

Just three months prior, Berry and McKibben had sent out a mass letter asking for people to gather in DC on March 2nd for an act of civil disobedience. “We don’t come to such a step lightly,” they wrote in the invite letter. “We have written and testified and organized politically to make this point for many years, and while in recent months there has been real progress against new coal-fired power plants, the daily business of providing half our electricity from coal continues unabated.” For thirty-some years, our elders had kept a flame alive. We were ready to pick it up en masse and let it shine for the world to see. 

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image by ♥Phoebe Finds Beauty

I spent yesterday afternoon watching a bunch of TED talks and knitting a pair of fingerless gloves. Knitting and listening is a good combination, I find—the knitting occupies my hands and the chatty part of my mind so that the rest of me can relax and listen. I watched a bunch of talks, and they were all really great, but the one that stuck with me most was Martin Seligman’s talk on Positive Psychology.

Seligman’s mission is to expand psychology’s historical role—working with dysfunction, helping miserable people not feel so bad—into the positive realm. While treating the mentally ill is an important function, it’s not the only one. He says that psychology must also concern itself with helping normal people live even more fulfilling lives, to be happier.

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I recently discovered through a musician friend, Judy Gerratt, this amazing Venezuelan man, named Jose Abreu. He has developed a system of teaching music to young children and created youth orchestras throughout his country. In this video on the TED site, he describes why and how music is having a transformational effect on Venezuelan children.

Here is a quote from near the end of his speech:

“The huge spiritual world that music produces, which also lies within itself, is the end of overcoming material poverty. The minute a child plays, he is no longer poor. The historian, Arnold Toynbee, said that the world is suffering a huge spiritual crisis…I believe that to confront such crisis, only art and religion can give proper answers to humanity, to mankind’s deepest aspirations and the historic demands of our time.”

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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.

Yesterday, I had a bit of a rough day. An unfortunate confluence of hormones and a difficult conversation left me feeling both enraged and powerless. Angry tears formed a volcano in my chest as my heart pounded righteously. I was hankering for the gym, a hard sweat, something heavy to pick up and put down several times to take my mind off it, but there wasn’t time just then. I had to soldier on with my day.

As time went by and I calmed down, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed in myself that something as small as a tactical disagreement could impact me so deeply and so physically. One part of me felt pushed around and victimized, but another part of me realized that I had colluded in creating this drama, and that I could pop out of it by shifting my perspective.

How would I see this situation if I was a master of pronoia?

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image by David Paul Ohmer

Last Friday, Sarah, Rich, and I went to hear a talk by Kona Goulet, Director of Development for EnlightenNext, entitled “Keeping the Faith: Holding to our highest ideals in challenging times.” The talk was held at the beautiful and noisy Rubin Museum of Art, and Kona started by quoting Gloria Steinem: “We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”

She then said that she sees our current economic crisis as primarily a crisis of ethics, and I couldn’t agree more. Many people end up in dire financial straits because they don’t have any choice—American health care system, I’m lookin’ at you!—but this crisis isn’t about them. From the individuals blithely living far beyond their means to the credit-lending agencies that egged them on to the banks that leveraged each dollar far beyond reason, this crisis is all about ethics. Our economic problems are systemic, and they also reflect the morality of all of us who participate in them. How often do we put our money where our mouths are?

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image by the San Jose Library

11 Questions is an ongoing feature where you, the reader, tell us all about a project you are working on to create a more functional, just, and beautiful future. Then we share your project on The Sunny Way. To tell us about your project, either fill out the survey, or copy the questions below and email your answers to us. We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

What are you creating with this project? What are your goals?
I want to create a network of people interested in reading to under-privileged children, especially from the ages of birth to 5 years for the project Stories for Brain Development, the goal being to create a more literate, integrated, and emotionally stable child.

Research shows vocabulary size not only aids in brain development in early childhood but creates a child more patient, more self-controlled, and more communicative. It also shows that the vocabulary of a child from a poor home is very often under half that of a child from a middle or upper income family.

How did you get started?
Babysitting the children of friends and reading to them, I noticed how excited they would get over particular sounding words, how they would repeat over and over new or favorite words and how attentive they would become. Often they would ask me to bring the same book back, again and again.

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image by Daquella manera

I woke up this morning with an email from climate crisis author and organizer Bill McKibben, urging us to stand together with the protesters at the Capitol Hill Power Plant in Washington, DC. Nothing could be more important today than supporting this, so I want to share the letter and the call to action with you. Please consider signing on to support the folks who are there to help push us past coal.

*****
Dear Friends,
There are moments in a nation’s—and a planet’s—history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction.

Today is one of those days.

In a few hours, the first big protest of the Obama era—and the largest-ever civil disobedience against global warming in this country—will take place against the not-very-scenic backdrop of the coal-fired Capitol Hill Power Plant in Washington DC.

Myself and people of every stripe will be risking arrest today, and I’m asking you to stand with me as it unfolds. 

Please stand with the thousands gathering today in DC, and show the world that people everywhere are uniting behind a future free of coal—a future safe from the ravages of climate change.

Click here to stand in solidarity with this action: http://www.350.org/Coal-Free/

Here’s the statement you’ll be signing onto:

I share your vision of a coal-free future and a safe climate, not only in Washington DC—but all over the world. I stand in solidarity with the coalition of citizens working for a clean energy future for the entire planet.

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