I first read Naomi Wolf in college, when The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women came out. This book helped me so much—I can’t say it got me over all my body/appearance-related issues, but it at least gave me a more objective way to look at them.

Reading The Beauty Myth, I felt both validated and liberated. It was obvious that Wolf really understood the psychological and historical forces at play every time I, and every other woman about my age, looked into the mirror. I appreciated both the clarity of her thought and the passion of her writing.

I feel the same after reading her latest book, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, in which she turns her rigorous intellect and her fiery opinions to the subject of democracy itself. The result is both a blistering critique of where our country is, and an inspiring vision for how to get it to where we know it can and should be.

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The other day, Rich and I took advantage of a sunny day in Brooklyn (rare in the last few weeks!) to go see the cherry blossoms at Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. It was breathtaking—dozens of trees in full flower, so pink they practically glowed. The ground was covered with a thick layer of petals, and every time the wind blew, a delicate pink rain came drifting down. I could have stayed there on the ground looking up through the branches all day.

Cherry blossoms are prized in Japanese culture as a symbol of the beautiful transience of life. To me, they are also a reminder of the kind of culture we must build—one in which everything we do as humans, from sleeping to eating to chasing our dreams—contributes positively to the biosphere. Nature’s economy is based on each organism giving fully of itself, freely, without expectation of reciprocation, and this is reflected in the way cherry trees burst into life in the spring. They don’t need to know what the price of cherries are to motivate themselves to produce. Nor do they need to be admired for their beauty. They simply create as much as they can and contribute all of it to all of us, providing homes for birds, delicious fruit, and the incredible gorgeousness you can see in this short video.

How can we change ourselves and change our world so that we operate in the same way? That’s the question we’re tackling here on The Sunny Way, and we’re so grateful that you are part of the inquiry.

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Happy Friday everyone! Sarah, Rich, and I are gearing up to attend the 350 conference at Columbia tomorrow—I’m particularly excited to hear from James Hansen and Majora Carter. And of course we’ll tell you all about it.

In the meantime, here’s what happened this week on The Sunny Way ...

• Monday, I expounded on Uli’s pieces on the Economy of Consciousness from last week. It’s really thrilling to think about how much we can grow from within!
• Tuesday, we featured a project from one of our readers, Amy, on toddler and baby literacy. Fill out the survey and tell us about something you’re working on!
• Wednesday, Uli gathered together some of the month’s best news into a Good News Newsreel.
• Thursday, Stella shared the supercute projects she’s been working on to turn stuff from around the house into new stuff she and her family will actually use.

Today I want to share a video that Ali Cotteril, producer/director extraordinaire, put together for Current.com about the Carrotmob event we threw in Brooklyn last December. She did a great job capturing the day!

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Happy Friday! It’s spectacular in Pittsburgh today—blue sky and fresh breezes and tweeting birds as far as the eye can see. What a fun week—last night was my grandma’s 86th birthday celebration and later today I’m off to the woods to celebrate one whole year with my sweet and brilliant boyfriend, who my brother says is now officially my “old man.” Spring is in full gear and all the possibilities I envision and dream of seem perfectly reasonable and doable. Hope you are enjoying yourself wherever you are, too.

Here’s what happened this week on The Sunny Way ...

• Monday I shared some thoughts on a few TV shows I’ve been watching lately—Dollhouse and Six Feet Under—all about conditioning, particularly for women, and why it’s so important for us to get over these old patterns of behavior so we can create something new.
• Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Victoria wrote about Ahalani, a gorgeous, solar-powered, energy-efficient home in Long Island, designed and built by its owners Campbell Dalglish and Catherine Oberg. I loved reading all about this! Do listen to the mp3s if you get a chance, too—there’s so much great inspiration and information in the interview.

Today I’d like to share with you a very sweet blast from the past: the Muppet-ladies of Sesame Street reminding us of everything we women can be. This is a topic I intend to revisit in the next few weeks, because it’s desperately important to our being able to fully participate in creating a better future. The world needs us to take a bigger view of life!

Enjoy, and have a great weekend.

image by one2c900d

Lately I’ve been watching a couple of TV shows that explore identity and humanness. What are we? How do our lives and memories shape us? And what does it all mean in terms of changing the world by changing ourselves?

Dollhouse (the new show by my man Joss Whedon) looks into the idea that human consciousness as a computer that can be wiped and programmed at will. In this show, “actives” (the dolls) are wiped clean of personality and memory, then imprinted with new personalities and memories that make them into new people who can fulfill the precise requirements of big-spending clients.

When the actives are on assignment, they seem like whole people with capabilities and life stories and ways of speaking and being that are uniquely their own. But when they are in between jobs, they wander around the Dollhouse like blank slates, not remembering anything about what they’ve done or where they’ve come from, saying nothing more meaningful than “I like pancakes.”

Of course, memory is a tricky thing that no one fully understands yet, not even the puppetmasters who run the Dollhouse, so as the series progresses, I’m sure we’ll see bits of the actives’ old selves in the blank slates which their minds and bodies have become. I’m fascinated by the questions this show raises—are our minds simply computers that have been programmed by the life experiences we’ve had? If so, when you strip away our memories and our conditioning, what’s left?

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Happy spring and happy holidays, for those of you who celebrate them. I’m in Pittsburgh now to spend Easter with my family. I’m excited for bunny cake on Sunday and for my grandma’s 86th birthday next Thursday! Here’s your recap of what went on here at The Sunny Way this week:

• Monday, I wrote about orienting ourselves with the messy but ultimately positive nature of evolution, and the responsibility that’s laid on our shoulders once we realize how this all works.
• Tuesday, we learned about Esther’s project to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian women in our latest installment of 11 Questions. Esther says she has some exciting updates for us, which we’ll get to you very soon.
• Wednesday, Sarah wrote about understanding and changing our appetites as a means to change the world. We’re really hungry for progress, she says, not fossil fuels, and it’s important to decouple the two.
• Thursday, Stella wrote from the inside of the messy evolutionary process we discussed on Monday, sharing what she’s learned from making positive changes in her life and showing us how to sidestep perfectionism in our efforts to achieve progress.

Today’s video comes courtesy of TED and tells us how to use readily available household plants to radically improve our indoor air quality. Kamal Meattle’s experiments in his office park in New Dehli have resulted in dramatic reductions in sickness and huge improvements in productivity, all from adding about 1,200 plants to support the oxygen needs of 300 workers. Meattle says that with the right plants, you could live in a corked bottle with no harmful effects!

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Recently in my favorite thrift store, I saw the entire set of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books on sale for $4, and snapped them up. Over the next month I flew through the 9 books in the series, which through Laura’s eyes documents the Ingalls family’s journey from the Big Woods in Wisconsin to Indian Country in Kansas and finally to Dakota Country, where they were among the first settlers of the town of De Smet.

There are many things to treasure in these books. Laura’s writing is lovely, and develops over time from the simple diction of a 4-year-old to the full, descriptive, sharp prose she writes as a young woman. It’s fun to see her grow in responsibility and character as the years unfold and the world around her begins to change.

These stories take place in the late 19th century, a time of huge change in America. Looking through the lens of Spiral Dynamics, this was a time of transition for many Americans from traditional to modern values. Of course, there’s no clear line that can be drawn, and it’s interesting to see how Laura’s Pa is willing to embrace some technological advances but not others, and how his choices differ from those made by others in the town.

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Springtime is here in New York. Tulips and daffodils are poking up through last year’s dead leaves in my backyard, and the birds are back! It snowed a bit this morning, but the sun will be out tomorrow. Hooray!

Here’s what we talked about this week on The Sunny Way:

• Monday, Uli wrote about the collective fitness agreement that she started with her friend Brad. Victoria and I joined a few weeks ago and it’s really been motivating to get me off my arse. I don’t want to have to give up $50, but more importantly, I don’t want to have to write to my friends and tell them I failed! Powerful stuff!
• Tuesday, we featured an 11 Questions response by Chris Neidl from I Heart PV (a project of Solar One). Can NYC be the East Coast capital of solar power? Why the heck not?
• Wednesday, Victoria shared her method for testing last year’s seeds to see if they will grow this year.
• And finally on Thursday, I wrapped up our Pronoia book club by diving into what my future self wants to say to my present self. Which was pretty fun.

Today, in honor of the bluebirds and cardinals and sparrows in my backyard, I’d like to share this video that Victoria sent me, about the wild parrots in Brooklyn, and how important it is for urban folk to connect with the wildlife that’s all around. “They’re tough, scrappy, little birds and they’re very, very intelligent and they bring huge amounts of joy to people,” says filmmaker Judy Irving. “They are also a way in to the rest of the natural world and a way in to native species of birds that may not be quite as colorful as parrots ... Once you get into the parrots, then maybe you start looking around a little bit more, and you see the house sparrows and the finches and you see the bluebirds and you see, you start to see the migrating birds, you see the hawks… There’s a tremendous amount of life, natural life in the city that the parrots awaken people to.”

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Happy Friday, sunbeams! Here’s a recap of what went down on The Sunny Way this week:

• On Monday, I wrote about Martin Seligman’s TED talk and how we may be able to make ourselves ridiculously happy while also changing the world.
• Tuesday and Wednesday, Sarah wrote about her experience at last week’s Capitol Climate Protest—I so wish I could have been there!
• Yesterday, I was irritated by what I read in Pronoia, but in a good way.

Today’s video tells the story of Kogepan, a jam bun who is disgruntled with life because he got burnt when he was baked in the oven. Now other, more perfectly baked buns point and laugh at him wherever he goes. “If only that time I didn’t get burnt,” he dreams. “What an ideal life.” Sure, there are some morals about life in here—and they’re not so subtle that they need to be pointed out—but mostly it’s just fun to see a jam bun be disgruntled and surly.

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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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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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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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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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Tomorrow, January 31, there will be a combo celebration/education event promoting sunny solar power!! The Brooklyn Green Team will celebrate, “One year of Action” at Bar Reis in Brooklyn.  Other environmental organizations will be present including Solar One which will be set up to educate guests on why NYC is a prime candidate for building a solar power system with Photovoltaics (PV).  They will be explaining their legislative initiative to make NY the region’s solar capital and will be set up for you to write letters to your legislators straightaway.

Last week, I attended an event about Solar Power organized by the Metro NYC Environmental Meetup group.  It was held at Solar One where Chris Neidl presented a thorough investigation of the reasons why NYC is a prime location for generating solar power.  NYC uses more energy than some developed countries.  We also use energy intensely and creatively for all kinds of artistic, innovative endeavors.  So, we need a better type of electricity to power our urban culture.  There are so many characteristics that make NYC a good candidate for going solar.  Here’s a list of a few of them:

• New York is 65% sunnier than Germany; currently the # 1 producer of solar power from PVs. If they can do it so can we.
• NYC has an abundance of flat surfaces— roofs! for installing PV panels
• Generating our own energy within the city limits could greatly reduce our drain on the regional energy grid during times of peak use-the summer, and so decrease blackouts.
• We use the greatest amount of energy (in summer) when the sun is shining brightest.  By installing PV panels on our rooftops we could be generating power right when we need it most—creating synergistic events!
• The price of PV technology continues to decrease with increased acceptance.  Part of the price includes labor costs and this decreases as installers become more efficient and knowledgeable with each installation.
• PV technology would displace building generators (kick in during times of peak energy demand) which create lots of particulate matter, contributing to smog, which exacerbates asthma.  Going solar would clean up our air and our children’s health.

In this video, a group of tenants share their story of how they went about putting solar panels on their Manhattan apartment building.  It’s a great example of a group working with NY State legislators to expand government incentives for solar power to a greater section of the population.  For more information on the New York Solar Initiative, click here.

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